For God Is My Stronghold: A Spatial Study of Medieval Fortified Churches

Liam Downs-Tepper, University of Vienna

Fortified churches are a constructed contradiction. A church should be welcoming, a fortress foreboding. A church is meant to be open for the community, a fortress closed against outsiders. These buildings are the physical embodiment of conflicting ideals: inclusion and exclusion, peace and war, prosperity and fear. These structures appear in borderlands areas; on the periphery of “civilization”. They also tend to be built by minority groups, sent to the edge of the world as a first buffer against threats found further East. As structures that are both religious and militaristic, it should come as no surprise that they are deeply intertwined with modern nationalist narratives in the region. This work challenges modern narratives of Western dominance by focusing on the actions of minorities on the boundaries, as well as pushing back against the monolithic depiction of Europe vs. the East by drilling into local internal tensions. This paper presents progress on a doctoral thesis exploring the meeting point of these overlapping and sometimes opposing purposes in medieval fortified churches throughout Europe, focusing on structures from approximately 1200 through 1500. Through spatial analysis and intensive case studies, this research aims to determine how topography interacts with other motivators in the placement of fortified churches. The core methodology combines spatial history with local contextualization, utilizing georeferencing, viewshed analysis, intervisibility network analysis, and terrain analysis to test existing theories about fortified church placement and assess their veracity. By doing so, this paper offers insight into not only the historical placement and use of these buildings, but also offers a lens for reassessing the historiography of the field.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 197. Mapping Perceptions of Space