Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 (review)

Buildings deemed as sacred in the Middle Ages were never exclusively such, as Dawn Marie Hayes so engagingly shows in her Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389. Whereas space, both sacred and secular, became increasingly compartmentalized and differentiated in the early modern period, there existed in the Middle Ages an ambiguity between sacred and profane that, according to Hayes, reflected the similarly nuanced medieval human body. The body, in fact, served as a didactic tool, inasmuch as the medieval Christian's understanding of the spatial arrangement and proper use of churches was based upon the medieval conception of the arrangement and proper use of the body.

Hayes uses the murder of Thomas Becket to illustrate her church=body metaphor. The attack upon Becket in 1170 occurred at the altar, the area of the church regarded as the "head" of the cruciform building, and it was Becket's head, the "locus of archiepiscopal consecration," that received the fatal blows. Yet, Becket's murder, although a profane act carried out in a sacred space, caused Canterbury to "became more powerful as it absorbed its violated human self." The relics associated with Becket's body and the hagiographies that focused on his abused head ultimately served to affirm church authority over secular authority. Thus, the body of Becket paralleled the body of the church, both edifice and community.

Chartres cathedral also receives Hayes's refreshing analysis. Chartres was "off the beaten path" and destined to be eclipsed when a clerical advertising campaign of the early thirteenth century that focused on the miracles associated with the shirt worn by Mary at the birth of Christ propelled it to the forefront of pilgrimage sites. The shirt, which had touched the bodies of both Mary and Christ, was Chartres' most famous relic, along with the stones on which Becket's body fell and a phial of Becket's blood brought to Chartres less than ten years after Becket's death. Hayes notes in her detailed examination of the Chartres miracle stories that the vast majority of miracles were directly concerned with bodies, giving substance to her argument that "the currency of Chartres is human flesh."

Hayes's artful pairing of human body and church edifice serves to illustrate the ambiguity of profane and sacred in the medieval period, and underscores the extent to which medieval theology responded to practical needs. Churches were places of worship, certainly, but were also used for storage, lodging, legal proceedings, shopping, and sexual assignations. As Hayes points out, sacred buildings were like bodies, with some parts more sacred than others. Ideally, the entire consecrated edifice should have been considered sacrosanct, but ideal seems to have comfortably accommodated reality in the Middle Ages.

Hayes maintains in this well-written, extensively annotated short book that there were two "façades of Christian worship," the physical space of a church building and the physical body. One could not be understood without the other. Each relied on the other for definition. The church sanctified the corporeal, while the bodies of saints prompted the establishment of churches; the bodies of pilgrims who visited the sacred structures both confirmed the sanctity of the church and challenged it by their profane utilization of its interior and environs. Ironically, the very nature of the human body—its fleeting existence and corruptibility, was, as Hayes explains, "integral to the establishment of medieval sacred place [and] central to its function." Thus, that which was reckoned to be eternal relied upon the transitory body, an assumption upon which medieval Christianity negotiated its place in society.