Architecture of the Sacred

Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium

Bonna D. Wescoat, Robert G. Ousterhout

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107429000
• eBook ISBN:
  9781139227674
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.

Table of contents

• Cover
• ARCHITECTURE OF THE SACRED
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE: MATERIAL CULTURE AND RITUAL: STATE OF THE QUESTION
• CHAPTER TWO: MONUMENTAL STEPS AND THE SHAPING OF CEREMONY
• CHAPTER THREE: COMING AND GOING IN THE SANCTUARY OF THE GREAT GODS, SAMOTHRACE
• CHAPTER FOUR: ENTERING DEMETER’S GATEWAY: THE ROMAN PROPYLON IN THE CITY ELEUSINION
• CHAPTER FIVE: ARCHITECTURE AND RITUAL IN ILION, ATHENS, AND ROME
• CHAPTER SIX: THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT: THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER OPTIMUS MAXIMUS THROUGH TIME
• CHAPTER SEVEN: MAPPING SACRIFICE ON BODIES AND SPACES IN LATE ANTIQUE JUDAISM AND EARLY CHRISTIANITY
• CHAPTER EIGHT: THE “FOUNDATION DEPOSIT” FROM THE DURA EUROPOS SYNAGOGUE RECONSIDERED
• CHAPTER NINE: SIGHT LINES OF SANCTITY AT LATE ANTIQUE MARTYRIA
• CHAPTER TEN: THE SANCTITY OF PLACE AND THE SANCTITY OF BUILDINGS: JERUSALEM VERSUS CONSTANTINOPLE
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: DIVINE LIGHT: CONSTRUCTING THE IMMATERIAL IN BYZANTINE ART AND ARCHITECTURE
• CHAPTER TWELVE: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, RITUAL, AND THE BYZANTINE CHURCH
• AFTERWORD
• INDEX