Sacred Ritual Profane Space

The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual, Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through ritual enactment in early Christian communities.

The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual, Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through ritual enactment in early Christian communities.

Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.

Israelite festival calendar texts (Exod 23; 34; Lev 23; Num 28–29; Deut 16; and Ezek 45) share many features; however, there are also differences. Some of the most-often-cited differences are the following: festival dates, festival locations, date of the New Year, festival timing, and festival names. Scholars have explored these distinctions, and many have concluded that different sources (authors/redactors) wrote the various calendars at different times in Israelite history. Scholars use these dissimilarities to argue that Lev 23 was written in the exilic or postexilic era. Babcock offers a new translation and analysis of a second-millennium B.C. multimonth ritual calendar text from Emar (Emar 446) to challenge the late dating of Lev 23. Babcock argues that Lev 23 preserves an early (2nd-millennium) West Semitic ritual tradition. Building on the recent work of Klingbeil and Sparks, this book presents a new comparative methodology for exploring potential textual relationships. Babcock investigates the attributes of sacred ritual through the lens of sacred time, sacred space and movement, sacred objects, ritual participants, and ritual sound. The author begins with a study of ancient Near Eastern festival texts from the 3rd millennium through the 1st millennium. This analysis focuses on festival cycles, common festival attributes, and the role of time and space in ritual. Babcock then moves on to an intertextual study of biblical festival texts before completing a thorough investigation of both Lev 23 and Emar 446. The result is a compelling argument that Lev 23 preserves an early West Semitic festival tradition and does not date to the exilic era—refuting the scholarly consensus. This illuminating reading stands as a model for future research in the field of ritual and comparative textual studies.

Holy sites - churches, monasteries, shrines - defined religious experience and were fundamental to the geography and social history of medieval and early modern Europe. How were these sacred spaces defined? How were they created, used, recognized and tran

This book explores how public space in Republican Rome was an unstable category marked, experienced, and defined by multiple actors and audiences.

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.

This book investigates the role of architecture in the construction of sacred experience in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Byzantine cultures.