Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (review)

Think of sacred space, write the editors in their introductory essay to this very suggestive volume, “as a meeting place between popular religion and the attempt to reorder that religion” (3). Following the geographer W. T. Mitchell, Simon Ditchfield in his essay on Rome invites readers to approach space “as a verb rather than a noun, ‘a process by which social and subjective identities are formed, … how it works as a cultural practice’” (191). The subject thus involves perceptions and worldviews that invite debate, contestation, and power; change and adaptation; attitudes toward nature; rural vs. urban perspectives; distinctions between public and private; patronage rights; dimensions of time, sound, and artistic representation. This is not your grandfather’s distinction between sacred and profane.

Sacred space is explored quite naturally through microstudies. Locations represented here include an individual parish church (Chester, England), a pilgrimage site (Holywell, Wales), cities (Rome, Geneva, Augsburg, Orange), territories (Brittany, Moldavia), and specific locations within a city (the Cathedral and the Charles Bridge in Prague). Those essays that take up a theme on a more national scale (Germany, Spain, England, Scotland) do so by using very specific illustrations to consider a larger topic: the question of the use of imagery in Lutheran churches, the sacralization of natural space, the changing soundscape of worship, and the challenge to an increasingly formal liturgy, respectively.

In some cases location is only the context for the investigation of a topic. Beat Kümin, for example, challenges the rather common scholarly demarcation between sacred and profane by reassessing the relationship between church and tavern, two classic symbols of the two spheres of activity and allegiance, and he shows that there was considerable interaction in the common life of an early modern community. Despite the frequent tensions between the interests of ecclesiastical reform and longstanding folk practices or between pastors and publicans, the fact is that festivals, pilgrimages, and celebration of rites of passage often required the involvement of both institutions. Church and tavern, then, were two parts (a third was politics) of what Kümin calls a holistic communal experience in much of early modern Europe. The essay using the parish church in Chester as a resource, by Will Coster, addresses the use of space, particularly with respect to seating arrangements and burial patterns; on the first, one sees how status, office, wealth, and gender determined allocation of pews and on the second, how families, social status, and cause of death would determine whether one was to be buried within the church or in the churchyard, in either case representing a piece of continuing communal identity. Maria Craciun’s essay on Orthodox burial practices in Moldavia studies the emergence of funerary rooms within the sacred space of the churches, particularly focusing on the issue of location (proximity to the altar was preferable) and the dual significance of patronage and dynastic considerations.

In other cases the location is the topic. Take Holywell, for instance, studied here by Alexandra Walsham. Pilgrims have come since the Middle Ages to bathe in its waters in the hope of being cured of a particular illness. The English Reformation challenged the assumptions involved in this practice, but distance from centers of power together with the support of local Catholic families perhaps spared the site from desecration. Although use of the chapel for secular and political purposes in the seventeenth century eroded some of its religious significance, a strategic effort at Catholic renewal fostered by secular and religious order priests who established hostels in Holywell, together with a publishing effort to recover the life, martyrdom, and miracles of St. Winefride as well as the site’s continuing miraculous powers, allied with popular piety to make the location a symbol of resistance to Protestant dominance. Many Protestants, too, came to acknowledge the site as a sacred place. Ditchfield’s essay, “Reading Rome as a Sacred Landscape,” shows how the research of Cesare Baronio on ancient Christian martyrs, published in 1586, and...