Defining the Holy

Holy sites - churches, monasteries, shrines - 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 defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change of the course of time,...
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Holy sites - churches, monasteries, shrines - 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 defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change of 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, by considering the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane. Exploring the establishment of sacred space within the public sphere, and public space within the sacred sphere, each chapter provides a fascinating insight into how these concepts helped shape, and were shaped by, wider society. By highlighting these issues on a European basis from the medieval period, though the age of reformations, broader conclusions can be drawn and long term trends identified, which have hitherto been absent in more limited studies. As such this volume will prove essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ecclesiastical development of western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.