The Framing Of Sacred Space

Revised and expanded version of the author's thesis (doctoral--Princeton University, 2008) under the title: Canopies: the framing of sacred space in the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition.

This book reveals how 'marginal' aspects of Graeco-Roman art play a fundamental role in shaping and interrogating ancient and modern visual culture.

Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium seeks to reveal Christian understanding of the body and sacred space in the medieval Mediterranean. Case studies examine encounters with the holy through the perspective of the human body and sensory dimensions of sacred space, and discuss the dynamics of perception when experiencing what was constructed, represented, and understood as sacred. The comparative analysis investigates viewers’ recognitions of the sacred in specific locations or segments of space with an emphasis on the experiential and conceptual relationships between sacred spaces and human bodies. This volume thus reassesses the empowering aspects of space, time, and human agency in religious contexts. By focusing on investigations of human endeavors towards experiential and visual expressions that shape perceptions of holiness, this study ultimately aims to present a better understanding of the corporeality of sacred art and architecture. The research points to how early Christians and Byzantines teleologically viewed the divine source of the sacred in terms of its ability to bring together – but never fully dissolve – the distinctions between the human and divine realms. The revealed mechanisms of iconic perception and noetic contemplation have the potential to shape knowledge of the meanings of the sacred as well as to improve our understanding of the liminality of the profane and the sacred.

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.

Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land - a collection of articles that deal with Holy Places from Antiquity to the present; from the lands of the Fertile Crescent to Europe, India, Japan and Mexico; from mountains and seas to temples, cities and countries; from the construction, perception and functioning of sacred sites to the psychotic breakdowns they bring on some visitors.

This volume presents a series of papers delivered at a two-day session of the Theban Workshop held at the British Museum in September 2003. Due to its political and religious prominence throughout much of pharaonic history, the region of ancient Thebes offers scholars a wealth of monuments whose physical remains and extant iconography may be combined with textual sources and archaeological finds in ways that elucidate the function of sacred space as initially conceived, and which also reveal adaptations to human need or shifts in cultural perception. The contributions herein address issues such as the architectural framing of religious ceremony, the implicit performative responses of officiants, the diachronic study of specific rites, the adaptation of sacred space to different uses through physical, representational, or textual alteration, and the development of ritual landscapes in ancient Thebes.

Religion, Culture, and Sacred Spaces is a comparative exploration into the nature of the human relationship to physical space advancing the startling thesis that the human capacity for narrative and identity imbues landscapes with meaning and sacredness.