The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture by Laura Varnam (review)

When Chaucer's pilgrims eventually arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, the Host together with the Pardoner and the Miller stand, far from speechless, wondering at the architecture and stained glass, and arguing over the symbolism of the iconography. 'Pese!' quod the Hoost of Southwork. 'Let stond the wyndow glased. Goth up and doth yeur offerynge. Ye semeth half amased.' (The Canterbury Interlude in John M. Bowers, ed., The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth Century Continuations and Additions). These, the lewdest of the pilgrims, engage and react with what they see, even though they cannot agree on its significance. And, if these really are the lewdest, how does the more refined and less offensive medieval mind respond?

The Church as Sacred Space is a study of how churches in late medieval England were constructed and read by those living at the time, and, in particular, how the sanctity of these places was manifested and understood. "It is an attempt to stand in the church, as the Canterbury pilgrims did, and by bringing together textual, visual, and material culture, to show how the laity were not only taught to view the church as a sacred space but to contribute to the production of that sanctity" (2). Thanks to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 the church building became reinvigorated as a space of learning. Glass, painting, sculpture, stone, and wood were brought together in something like a multimedia project. Preachers and writers underscored the spiritual meaning of the place. Liturgy ensured that these buildings were perceived first and foremost as God's house on earth, a house wherein communities were built up, social problems debated, and theological issues aired.

Laura Varnam, Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford, sensibly brings together art history, social history, and literary studies in a multidisciplinary approach as she examines the ways in which medieval communities perceived, expressed, and lived out their religious lives within these sacred spaces. Varnam begins by describing the customary manner in which the Canterbury pilgrims interpret what they see – looking purposefully ('pyred' and 'poured'), discovering what the image represents ('diskyveryng fast the peyntour'), meditating the story ('mournyng'), interpreting the meaning ('aryng'), and debating their conclusions – and explains that this is mirrored by the writer of Dives and Pauper. She also notices the behaviour of the pilgrims at the shrine, where they pray 'hertlich', devoutly, a theme that she is to pick up in chapters three and four, when she explores pastoral care in the parish and the centrality of the people in sacred spaces.

Before those chapters, however, Varnam looks at the church consecration ceremony and the construction and restoration of sacred space. The ceremony "established … the foundation for all subsequent encounters with sacred space" (33). Basing her chapter on William of Durandus's Rationale officiorum divinorum and fleshing this out with sermons in Jaobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea, John Mirk's Festial, and the Speculum Sacerdotale, Varnam draws out the practices that shaped the medieval understanding of sacred space and then examines in some detail The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew's Church. This church, dedicated to St Bartholomew, is the one founded in Smithfield, just outside the walls of the city of London in 1123. Midway through The Book we read the words "For trewly God is yn this place," words spoken aloud during the consecration ceremony, bringing reader and audience closely together.

Moving outside the church, Varnam explores how, on the one hand, the parishioners maintained and safeguarded the sanctity of the space through virtuous behaviour under the watchful eye of the parish priest, and, on the other, these same parishioners supported the church spiritually and financially. The priest had for his use, inter alia, Mirk's Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests. The medieval laywoman had at her disposal How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter which begins by establishing the centrality of the church in her life...