Review: Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium, by Bissera V. Pentcheva

Abstract

Bissera V. Pentcheva Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, 304 pp., 50 color and 42 b/w illus. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271077253; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 9780271077260 Over the past decades, art and architectural historians have shown ever-increasing interest in how users of monuments and cities have historically experienced these spaces sensually. Especially for premodern contexts, this is a challenging endeavor: first-person accounts are virtually absent, and scholars are often limited to textual sources that need to be mined and read against the grain. Many sensory studies in architectural history focus on sound, eschewing other sensory modalities and ways in which sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste interlink. This focus can be explained by the availability of technological aids such as acoustic modeling software for reconstructing historical soundscapes and geographic information systems for creating sound maps that visualize auditory relationships. Within this literature, Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti's Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice , which examines music in Counter-Reformation churches, is by now a classic, while Niall Atkinson's The Noisy Renaissance , investigating how Florence's residents experienced their city's acoustic topography, provides a more recent example.1 To this literature, Bissera V. Pentcheva's Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium brings a welcome addition that considers how sonic, visual, and, to a more limited extent, olfactory phenomena worked together to convey a dense web of meanings. The book integrates five different areas of exploration: Hagia Sophia's material fabric, the liturgy's written stage directions, the musical design of chants performed there, conceptual imagery found in Psalter marginalia, and a digital reconstruction of the church's acoustics (9). Using a broad array of sources (Paul the Silentiary's famous ekphrasis, the hymnody, Anacreontic poetry) and methodologies (textual and musicological analysis, participant-sensation, acoustic modeling), Pentcheva explicates “how the experience of the Hagia Sophia allowed the Byzantine participants in the liturgical ritual to be filled with the spirit of …