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

by Hamilton,Sarah; Spicer,Andrew

• ISBN13: 9780754651949
• ISBN10: 0754651940
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Holy sites, both public - churches, monasteries, shrines - and more private - domestic chapels, oratories - populated the landscape of medieval and early modern Europe, providing contemporaries with access to the divine. These sacred spaces thus defined religious experience, and were fundamental to both the geography and social history of Europe over the course of 1,000 years. But how were these sacred spaces, both public and private, defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time, and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions from the point of view of archaeology, architectural and art history, liturgy, and history to consider the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane. Exploring the establishment of sacred space within both the public and domestic spheres, as well as the role of the secular within the sacred sphere, each chapter provides fascinating insights into how these concepts helped shape, and were shaped by, wider society. By highlighting these issues on a European basis from the medieval period through the age of the reformations, these essays demonstrate the significance of continuity as much as change in definitions of sacred space, and thus identify long term trends which have hitherto been absent in more limited studies. As such this volume provides essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ecclesiastical development of western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Table of Contents

Defining the holy : the delineation of sacred space	p. 1
Domestic space and devotion in the Middle Ages	p. 27
The domesticity of sacred space in the fifteenth-century Netherlands	p. 49
Private rooms in the monastic architecture of Habsburg Spain	p. 81
Forbidden sacred spaces in Reformation England	p. 95
Designing for Protestant worship : the private chapels of the Cecil family	p. 115
A northern Jerusalem : transforming the spatial geography of the convent of Wienhausen	p. 139
Using material culture to define holy space : the Bromholm project	p. 161
The liturgical use of space in thirteenth-century Flanders	p. 187
'God will have a house' : defining sacred space and rites of consecration in early seventeenth-century England	p. 207
'Pure and white' : reformed space for worship in early seventeenth-century Hungary	p. 231
Rubens's Raising of the cross in context : the 'early Christian' past and the evocation of the sacred in post-Tridentine Antwerp	p. 251
The consecration of the civic realm	p. 277
The priest, the Quakers and the Second Conventicle Act : the battle for Gracechurch Street Meeting House, 1670	p. 301
La Ville Sonnant : the politics of sacred space in Avignon on the eve of the French revolution	p. 319
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.