La organización del espacio litúrgico hispánico entre los siglos VI y XI

Abstract

The study of the Old Hispanic rite as a means of understanding Late-Antique and Early Medieval Hispanic churches has been very fruitful since the publication in 1965 of a pioneer work by A. Rodriguez G. de Ceballos. However, in most recent years there have arisen some errors of perspective that tend to reduce liturgical arrangement of space to the architectural typology and morphology of church buildings, forgetting that the organisation of ritual space was commited to liturgical furniture as much (and even more) as to architectural forms, whether structural or typological. This paper identifies some recent misinterpretations of important liturgical-architectural matters, such as the hierarchical division of sacred space or the multiplication of altars within a same building, in order to permit a more realistic approach to liturgical space, less biased by the typological abstractions and stylistic assumptions of (non-liturgical) disciplines, such as the old History of Art and the new “archaeology of archi...