A Sacred City: Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-Century Italy (review)

Somewhere in the vast scholarship on eleventh-century church reform, the central issue of consecration has gone seemingly unnoticed. The irony here, as Louis Hamilton’s new book on late-eleventh- and early-twelfth-century Italy contends, is that “so much of the controversy surrounding the late eleventh century reforms revolved around the liturgy, in fact a liturgy of consecration” (p. 26). In evaluating this neglected dimension of social, political, religious, and moral reform, the author illustrates how church consecrations were integral to shaping individuals and communities. The powerful symbolism of the dedication liturgy, it is argued, came to reflect “the sacrality and centrality of the Church of Rome and its leadership” (p. 8). Thanks to a handful of influential reformers, church dedications “became an argument for a clear, Rome-centred ecclesiology” (p. 8). To grasp the full development and meaning of this phenomenon, Hamilton delves well beyond the dedication liturgy itself to its broader sociohistorical and contemporary relevance.

The formative power and meaning of the liturgy is central to its interpretation here. Its impact is evinced most clearly through “the experience of the contemporary observer” (p. 56), which demonstrates the liturgy’s attraction to a wide spectrum of Italian society, both urban and rural. On the Italian peninsula as elsewhere, the elaborate rites of consecration give witness to the gathering of high clergy and lay lords, the public assertion of sacerdotal power, and the symbolic and physical creation of a “sacred city” (that is, the church) within the wider religious community. The civic and religious expectations surrounding church consecrations were understandably imbued with moral and spiritual significance, the meaning of which varied from place to place, church to church, and individual to individual. But it is precisely the expectations among the community, as Hamilton shows—experiences formed through personal interpretations of the miraculous, aesthetics, and eschatology—which accredit the dedication liturgy with its contemporary value. In other words, the sacrality of a church building was more than just an ephemeral experience; the liturgical rites of consecration were shaped by a communal identity whose understanding, behavior, and experience provided meaning and context to a momentous event.

The significance of church dedications was not lost on political opportunists. Extant legal traditions and exegetical commentaries show how deliberate efforts were taken to shape religious communities in Italy while heavily promoting the issue of papal (that is, Roman) primacy and authority. St. Peter Damian, for example, used his dedication sermon on the feast of St. Mark (at Venice) to promote his concept of church renewal (renovatio); St. Anselm of Lucca harnessed this political allegory into a legal tradition that explicitly favored apostolic control over church dedications. These altogether “Gregorian” ideals played out under Pope Urban II, whose pontificate “inherited a growing tradition of papal dedications” (p. 135). But the “high point of the use of the dedication rite,” as Hamilton argues, “in both its practice and its interpretation” (p. 162), came in the late-eleventh century with St. Bruno of Segni, whose extensive commentary on dedication (De laudibus ecclesiae) “repeatedly asserted in an innovative manner a coherent and reforming ecclesiology that included personal reform, scriptural exegesis and liturgical meaning” (p. 185).

With this study, the liturgy’s expansive meaning in church dedications is fully realized; its rightful place in the history of a turbulent period is consequently guaranteed. Drawing especially from the works of Damian, Anselm, Bruno, Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino, and Popes Urban II and Paschal II (chapters 3–5), this book manifests consecrations as a cogent mechanism of church control. The result is a fresh perspective on a stale historiographical tradition, a vivid portrait that evokes the true power of consecrations in reforming Italian society in the late-eleventh and early-twelfth centuries.