From the liminal to the lateral: urban religion in English cathedrals

Abstract

ABSTRACTUsing data derived from a qualitative and quantitative study of four English cathedrals (Canterbury, Durham, Westminster, and York), I argue that these buildings combine high cultural capital with considerable liturgical flexibility, and that the latter has helped cathedrals become highly popular parts of the church and heritage landscape. In examining the ritual forms made available to visitors, including regular services, informal acts of piety such as the lighting of candles, and varieties of pilgrimage, I argue the need for a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary than is currently in play in order to describe the ways in which informants engage with liturgy. Drawing on both ritual theory and urban sociology, I juxtapose a more conventional depiction of ritual as involving entry into set-apart and liminal frames of action with the observation that many visitors engage in more ‘lateral’ forms of participation, where sacred and secular, official and non-official, blend in complex ways. Such ‘laterality’ emerges not only from contemporary responses to ritual engagement, but also out of characteristic ways in which urban publics engage with variegated city space. My broader argument is that the notion of ritual ‘laterality’ is a highly productive means of characterizing encounters between contemporary visitors and heritage sites of religious significance. Use of this category avoids a clear separation or hierarchy of value between sacred and profane realms of action, or between religious believers and tourists. An investigation of lateral interactions between visitors and such sites also assumes that informal, ambiguously articulated, and less public behaviors may be as sociologically significant as formal and easily visible ones. I conclude that ritual behavior in cathedrals points to wider trends in the encounters between diverse urban publics and ostensibly sacred spaces.