Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Abstract

A product of the conference held at Exeter University in 2003, this lucky dip assortment of papers covers so wide a range of topics and periods it is unlikely that many will read it from cover to cover, though it contains rich pickings. The fourteen contributions cover six centuries and as many regions, five of the chapters relating to England. The editors’ introduction on ‘Defining the Holy: the delineation of sacred space’, gives an overview of the topic, starting with Mircea Eliade and looking at the application of the concept, with copious bibliographical references. Several contributors approach the topic through specific locations. Stijn Bussuyt argues that the ‘most self-evident function’ of the thirteenth-century liturgy of two collegiate churches in Saint-Omer and Lille was to reassert and confirm the sanctity of sacred space. June Mecham traces the use of devotion to the Stations of the Cross to show how the processional route of the Cistercian nuns of Wienhausen transformed the ‘spatial geography’ of their house into an equivalent of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem. Tim Pestell describes how field-walking the site of Bromholm Priory produced finds of different kinds that might help to distinguish between the ‘holy’ or ‘profane’ areas within ‘a holy space like a monastic precinct’. Religious rivalry in Lyon, resulting in the seventeenth-century building of a new Hôtel de Ville on the site of the Huguenot ‘Temple de Lyon’, is deftly used by Judi Loach to demonstrate the aim of refounding the city as a second Rome, effectively consecrating the civic realm. The city of Avignon in the eighteenth century is Eric Johnson's model of how a city's ‘sacred spaces’ (the cathedral, church of Saint Agricol, and Celestine monastery) were affected by and manipulated to reflect political change. Simon Dixon's account of the battle for Gracechurch Street Meeting House in 1670 is a nicely focused study of Quaker views of the holy and places of worship, considering the question of whether ‘sacred space’ can be applied in any sense to Quaker meeting houses.