Defining the Holy

Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Sarah Hamilton, Andrew Spicer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754651949
• eBook ISBN: 9781351945615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Chapter 1
Defining the Holy: the Delineation of Sacred Space

Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer

For any pilgrim who walks along the Via Dolorosa to the church of the Holy Sepulchre today, as in the medieval and early modern periods, the experience combines the sacred with the profane, the public with the personal. On the one hand, pilgrims walk along the route they believed Christ took to the site of his crucifixion, on the other they walk along a street lined with shops to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Calvary, a building made holy not only through being the site of the events central to the Christian faith (a liminal space as the locus for Christ’s resurrection), but also through the rite of consecration,¹ and through the liturgical rites conducted there on a daily basis. Both en route and once inside the church the pilgrims may choose to participate in public prayers, that is those of their tour group, and sometimes, as on Good Friday, the liturgies of the Christian churches, or conduct their own private devotions, or to take part in both. Such pilgrimages, by visiting the places of Christ’s life, help the participant to come closer to the heavenly Jerusalem; in his early twelfth-century guide to the Holy Places, Rorgo Fretellus urged his audience to ‘ponder upon the heavenly city of Jerusalem … which is an allegory for us of the heavenly paradise’.² Inevitably, however, the secular penetrated into such terrestrial paradises, be they twelfth-century Jerusalem or fourteenth-century Rome, where stall holders selling food and pilgrimage badges, as well as tooth-pullers and cobblers, are recorded as paying rent for pitches on the steps leading up to and in the atrium of St Peter’s basilica itself.³ The persistence of this Durkheimian juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane therefore points to some of the issues which confront any historian who wishes to study the nature of sacred space in any period, and in particular the problems surrounding how sacred space is defined by Christians whose cosmology regards the whole world as God’s creation.⁴ To what extent is sacred space constructed or is it innate? How far is sacred space restricted to certain buildings and locations? Is sacred space defined through opposition to that which is not sacred? To what degree is sacred space defined by public or personal devotion? In other words, how is sacred space constructed and defined?

Views of Eliade’s Paradigm from Other Disciplines

The nature and meaning of sacred space was considered by Mircea Eliade over forty years ago, when he constructed his paradigm for the nature of religion in The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (1959). For Eliade the sacred was defined by space, time and cosmology. Although Eliade drew on Émile Durkheim’s identification of the bipolar distinction between the sacred and the profane as characteristic of all religious beliefs, it is worth noting that both scholars, in using a distinction derived from the Latin, sacer and profanus, were using words which originally had a primarily spatial meaning.⁵ Sacer denoted that which was sacred, and could be used of both objects and places. Profanus, on the other hand, referred to the area outside the sacrum, the sacred place, that is the temple, but came to mean the opposite to sacer, that which was not sacred. Sacer should be distinguished from another concept, fas, designating in Latin acts which were sanctioned by religious authorities; the dies fasti were days on which civil activities were permitted, the dies nefasti those on which such activities were forbidden. Whilst sacer is associated with both place and authority, the resonances for profanus are predominantly spatial. In other words, the concept of sacred space lies at the heart of sociologists’ distinction between the sacred and the profane. Moreover, it is worth noting that this verbal dichotomy was in (relatively) common use by writers from the patristic period onwards, although they commonly employed it in its more general sense, to refer to those things which were, and were not, sacred.⁶

For Eliade the sacred distinguishes itself from the profane, an act he described as hierophany, that is the manifestation of the sacred.⁷ He therefore viewed a sacred place as one where the three cosmic levels, earth, heaven and the underworld, at once come into contact with each other, and are represented.⁸ Whilst he acknowledged that in many religions the entire living world is sacred, he argued that ‘since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space’.⁹ At the same time he acknowledged that religious man regarded the entire world as ‘the work of the gods’ and therefore sacred.¹⁰ For Eliade hierophany represented the centre of consecrated space, and at the edges of the sacred lurked chaos, the unknown, which he described as the profane.

Scholars from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and archaeology have been happy to engage with Marcel Eliade’s paradigm.¹¹ Archaeologists of religion, especially those who study prehistory, have been preoccupied with the question as to how one reconstructs the religious practices of societies, including identification of their sacred sites, when many of the religious practices which signify sacredness leave little or no physical trace in the archaeological record. For behaviour, as modern observers have noted, often constitutes an important marker for recognizing the sacred.¹² Building on material from anthropology, it has been observed that ‘many of the sites and areas regarded as significant by living peoples are not marked by any human construction or other human activity which would be recognized through archaeological excavations’.¹³ For many peoples the mundane landscape was, and is, interwoven with sacred sites.¹⁴ Grappling with the problems of using the physical record to study how sacred spaces were defined, and religion practised, archaeologists of prehistory have thus pointed to the problems raised by attempts ‘to maintain a distinction between sacred or ritual landscapes, and secular or mundane landscapes’.¹⁵ In Timothy Insoll’s words, ‘the same landscape can mean different things to different people, and can be one and the same, and thus lack any arbitrary division’.¹⁶ Growing awareness of the problems raised by accepting a simple dichotomy between secular or everyday sites (farms, homes, fields) versus sacred ones (ceremonial sites, tombs) has led archaeologists of religion recently to argue that their work should not be focused solely on publicly recognized sacred sites, but rather on their overall context.¹⁷

This emphasis on the fluidity between boundaries, such as those between the sacred and secular, is an issue which is equally alive in social anthropology. Sacred spaces are interpreted as foci for the religious identities of communities, acting as a ‘lens’, focusing ‘attention on the forms, objects and actions’ in it.¹⁸ In a study of how different definitions are attached to two different shrines by the various religiously different communities of Palestinians living in the West Bank in the 1980s, Glenn Bowman emphasized their fluidity, in particular the porous boundaries between those sites which are officially acknowledged as sacred, and those which are not so acknowledged, but nevertheless regarded as ‘secret-sacred’ by both Christian and Moslem communities.¹⁹

Scholars from other disciplines have thus considerably refined Eliade’s paradigm, emphasizing the importance of behaviour in defining sacred space, the problems raised by attempts to maintain too strict a dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the significance of personal as well as public sacred space, and the fluidity of boundaries between the sacred and other space. In contrast to this body of work on current behaviour and past physical remains, historians have been slow to attribute the topic of sacred space with importance, and have only recently begun to explore in depth the rich textual evidence in order to answer questions about how people in this period understood, and defined, sacred space.²⁰ These lacunae are in part because the subject has been perceived as the preserve of ecclesiologists and antiquarians rather than historians. Furthermore, until recently, historians have tended to accept the rhetoric of the Reformation concerning sacred space and the post-Enlightenment rationalist approach to sanctity, which was later encapsulated in Weber’s concept of the ‘disenchantment of the world’.

Sacred and Profane: Defining Sacred Space Through Context

Historians of the medieval and early modern periods have, for the most part, up to now preferred to study the law, geography and architecture of sacred spaces rather than how they were defined. Studies have thus focused not on rites and the practice of prayer, nor on informal ‘secret-sacred’ spaces, but rather on ecclesiastical buildings and shrines.²¹ In the early Church, saints’ tombs became the setting for ecclesiastical buildings, which in turn acquired sanctity by association. As these sites became the foci for pilgrimages, the routes to them became sanctified, and the chapels along the route also came to be regarded as sacred.²² This paradigm holds equally true for sites established in the Middle Ages, such as the pilgrimage routes to the shrine of St James at Compostella.²³ At the same time recent work has demonstrated that medieval ideas about protected space and legal sanctuary were not so much a consequence of ideas of zones of holiness radiating out from a shrine, although these too played a part, but rather the result of dynamic and constructive relationships between individual institutions and royal authority, between churchmen and kings.²⁴

Despite the preoccupations of modern historians, the evidence from the twelfth century onwards for territorial sanctuaries, like those around Hexham, Beverley and Durham in the north of England, taken together with the composition of liturgies for the consecration of both churches and, from the tenth century onwards, for cemeteries suggests that medieval people, both clerical and lay, attached great importance to the act of definition when demarcating space.²⁵ Nevertheless, whilst bishops believed that it was dedication ceremonies which made churches sacred, it was not only ritual which helped to mark out places as holy. Both a church’s external appearance, and its place in the landscape, often helped distinguish it from the surrounding buildings and pointed to its status as a sacred site. The wooden chapels of the early period probably differed little in their external appearance from the lords’ halls n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Defining the Holy: the Delineation of Sacred Space
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Index