Enmity and Sacred Space

Abstract

This chapter compares the European experience of violence in sacred space. Churches are not normally associated with violence. They were, after all, designed for worship. But because in most communities they were the pre-eminent site for the display of social capital, they were theatres of conflict. Although disorder inside sacred space was frequent in England and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serious incidents such as these were relatively rare. One reason for this was the absence of urban factions. In the European league table of church murders, Italy takes the title, with France in a distant second place. Precise figures are hard to compute, but victims certainly ran into the hundreds in Italy and the dozens in France. The reasons why Italian, and to a lesser extent French, churches were so frequently scenes of violence is investigated. The comparisons and contrasts between different regions and states helps to illuminate and explain the different forms and trajectories taken by enmity. In both France and Italy churches were sites for politicised violence. The chapter considers the role of assassination, patrimonialism and anti-clericalism mainly in the French and Italian contexts, and then broadens to explore sacred space as a theatre for staging social conflict across Europe.