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Chapter 1

Defining the Holy:the Delineation of Sacred Space

Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer

For any pilgrim who walks along the Via Dolorosa to the church of the HolySepulchre today, as in the medieval and early modern periods, the experiencecombines the sacred with the profane, the public with the personal. On the onehand, pilgrims walk along the route they believed Christ took to the site of hiscrucifixion, on the other they walk along a street lined with shops to the church ofthe Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Calvary, a building made holy not onlythrough being the site of the events central to the Christian faith (a liminal space asthe locus for Christs resurrection), but also through the rite of consecration,1and

through the liturgical rites conducted there on a daily basis. Both en route and onceinside the church the pilgrims may choose to participate in public prayers, that isthose of their tour group, and sometimes, as on Good Friday, the liturgies of theChristian churches, or conduct their own private devotions, or to take part in both.Such pilgrimages, by visiting the places of Christs life, help the participant tocome closer to the heavenly Jerusalem; in his early twelfth-century guide to theHoly Places, Rorgo Fretellus urged his audience to ponder upon the heavenly cityof Jerusalem which is an allegory for us of the heavenly paradise.2Inevitably,however, the secular penetrated into such terrestrial paradises, be they twelfth-century Jerusalem or fourteenth-century Rome, where stall holders selling food and

1Egeria witnessed the feast of the dedication of the Holy Sepulchre on her pilgrimage to theHoly Land 3814 AD: The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M.L. McClure and C.L. Feltoe(London, 1919), pp. 956. The Latin church on the site was consecrated on 15 June 1149, onthe fiftieth anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem: John of Wrzburg, Descriptio TerraeSanctae, ch. xiii, in S. de Sandoli, Itinera Hierosylmitana Crucesignatorum (saec. xiixiii)(3 vols, Jerusalem, 198183), II, p. 290.2P.C. Boeren, Rorgo Fretellus et sa description de la Terre Sainte. Histoire et dition dutexte(Amsterdam, 1980), p. 6: considera sanctam Iherusalem, contemplare et ipsam Syon,que celestem paradysum allegorice nobis figurat; B. Hamilton, The Impact of CrusaderJerusalem on Western Christendom, Catholic Historical Review80 (1994), 699.


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Defining the Holy2

pilgrimage badges, as well as tooth-pullers and cobblers, are recorded as payingrent for pitches on the steps leading up to and in the atrium of St Peters basilicaitself.3The persistence of this Durkheimian juxtaposition between the sacred andthe profane therefore points to some of the issues which confront any historian whowishes to study the nature of sacred space in any period, and in particular theproblems surrounding how sacred space is defined by Christians whose cosmologyregards the whole world as Gods creation.4 To what extent is sacred spaceconstructed or is it innate? How far is sacred space restricted to certain buildingsand locations? Is sacred space defined through opposition to that which is notsacred? To what degree is sacred space defined by public or personal devotion? In

other words, how is sacred space constructed and defined?

Views of Eliades Paradigm from Other Disciplines

The nature and meaning of sacred space was considered by Mircea Eliade overforty years ago, when he constructed his paradigm for the nature of religion in TheSacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion(1959). For Eliade the sacred wasdefined by space, time and cosmology. Although Eliade drew on mileDurkheims identification of the bipolar distinction between the sacred and the

profane as characteristic of all religious beliefs, it is worth noting that bothscholars, in using a distinction derived from the Latin, sacer and profanus, wereusing words which originally had a primarily spatial meaning. 5Sacerdenoted thatwhich was sacred, and could be used of both objects and places. Profanus, on theother hand, referred to the area outside the sacrum, the sacred place, that is thetemple, but came to mean the opposite to sacer, that which was not sacred. Sacershould be distinguished from another concept,fas, designating in Latin acts whichwere sanctioned by religious authorities; the dies fasti were days on which civilactivities were permitted, the dies nefasti those on which such activities wereforbidden. Whilstsaceris associated with both place and authority, the resonances

forprofanusare predominantly spatial. In other words, the concept of sacred spacelies at the heart of sociologists distinction between the sacred and the profane.Moreover, it is worth noting that this verbal dichotomy was in (relatively) common

3D. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change(Woodbridge,1998), pp. 12021.4. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J.W. Swain (London,1915), pp. 3642.5C. Colpe, The Sacred and the Profane, in M. Eliade, ed.,The Encyclopedia of Religion(16 vols, New York, 1987), XII, pp. 51314.


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The Delineation of Sacred Space 3

use by writers from the patristic period onwards, although they commonlyemployed it in its more general sense, to refer to those things which were, and werenot, sacred.6

For Eliade the sacred distinguishes itself from the profane, an act he describedas hierophany, that is the manifestation of the sacred.7 He therefore viewed asacred place as one where the three cosmic levels, earth, heaven and theunderworld, at once come into contact with each other, and are represented. 8Whilst he acknowledged that in many religions the entire living world is sacred, heargued that since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnatedwith the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for

consecrating space.

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At the same time he acknowledged that religious manregarded the entire world as the work of the gods and therefore sacred.10 ForEliade hierophany represented the centre of consecrated space, and at the edges ofthe sacred lurked chaos, the unknown, which he described as the profane.

Scholars from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and archaeology havebeen happy to engage with Marcel Eliades paradigm.11Archaeologists of religion,especially those who study prehistory, have been preoccupied with the question asto how one reconstructs the religious practices of societies, including identificationof their sacred sites, when many of the religious practices which signify sacrednessleave little or no physical trace in the archaeological record. For behaviour, as

modern observers have noted, often constitutes an important marker forrecognizing the sacred.12 Building on material from anthropology, it has beenobserved that many of the sites and areas regarded as significant by living peoplesare not marked by any human construction or other human activity which would be

6A search of the term sacer et profanus in the Patrologia Latina: The Full Text database(http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk) reveals many references; a search of the term sacred andprofane in theEarly English Books On-Line database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com)similarlyprovides copious references to the use of the term. On the influence of early modern polemic

about idolatry on anthropological distinctions between the sacred and the profane, see J.Sheehan, Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics of Distinction,P&P(forthcoming).7Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 11: Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifestsiteself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane.8Ibid., pp. 36 ff.9Ibid., p. 28.10Ibid., p. 64.11See the summary and bibliography in J.P. Brereton, Sacred Space, in The Encyclopediaof Religion,XII, pp. 52535.12J. Hubert, Sacred Beliefs and Beliefs of Sacredness, in D.L. Carmichael, J. Hubert, B.Reeves, and A. Schanche (eds), Sacred Sites, Sacred Places(New York, 1994), pp. 919.


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Defining the Holy4

recognized through archaeological excavations.13For many peoples the mundanelandscape was, and is, interwoven with sacred sites.14Grappling with the problemsof using the physical record to study how sacred spaces were defined, and religionpractised, archaeologists of prehistory have thus pointed to the problems raised byattempts to maintain a distinction between sacred or ritual landscapes, and secularor mundane landscapes.15 In Timothy Insolls words, the same landscape canmean different things to different people, and can be one and the same, and thuslack any arbitrary division.16 Growing awareness of the problems raised byaccepting a simple dichotomy between secular or everyday sites (farms, homes,fields) versus sacred ones (ceremonial sites, tombs) has led archaeologists of

religion recently to argue that their work should not be focused solely on publiclyrecognized sacred sites, but rather on their overall context.17This emphasis on the fluidity between boundaries, such as those between the

sacred and secular, is an issue which is equally alive in social anthropology. Sacredspaces are interpreted as foci for the religious identities of communities, acting as alens, focusing attention on the forms, objects and actions in it.18 In a study ofhow different definitions are attached to two different shrines by the variousreligiously different communities of Palestinians living in the West Bank in the1980s, Glenn Bowman emphasized their fluidity, in particular the porousboundaries between those sites which are officially acknowledged as sacred, and

those which are not so acknowledged, but nevertheless regarded as secret-sacredby both Christian and Moslem communities.19

Scholars from other disciplines have thus considerably refined Eliadesparadigm, emphasizing the importance of behaviour in defining sacred space, the

13P. Ucko, Foreword, in Carmichael et al.(eds), Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, p. xix. Aswell as the contributions to this collection, see those in P. Garwood, D. Jennings, R. Skeatesand J. Toms (eds), Sacred and Profane. Proceedings of a Conference on Archaeology,Ritual and Religion,Oxford 1989(Oxford, 1991), and in A.T. Smith and A. Brookes (eds),Holy Ground: Theoretical Issues Relating to the Landscape and Material Culture of RitualSpace Objects. Papers from a Session held at the Theological Archaeology Group

Conference, Cardiff 1999, BAR, International Series 956 (2001). For an overview ofarchaeological approaches to the history of religion see now T. Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual,Religion(London, 2004).14 O.V. Ovsyannikov and N.M. Terebikhin, Sacred Space in the Culture of the ArcticRegions, in Carmichael et al.(eds), Sacred Sites, Sacred Places,pp. 4481.15B. Bender, S. Hamilton and C. Tilley, Leskernick: Stone Worlds; Alternative Narratives;Nested Landscapes,Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society63 (1997), 149.16Insoll,Archaeology, p. 88.17Ibid., p. 89.18Brereton, Sacred Space, p. 526.19 G. Bowman, Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,Man28 (1993), 43160.


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problems raised by attempts to maintain too strict a dichotomy between the sacredand the profane, the significance of personal as well as public sacred space, and thefluidity of boundaries between the sacred and other space. In contrast to this bodyof work on current behaviour and past physical remains, historians have been slowto attribute the topic of sacred space with importance, and have only recentlybegun to explore in depth the rich textual evidence in order to answer questionsabout how people in this period understood, and defined, sacred space.20 Theselacunae are in part because the subject has been perceived as the preserve ofecclesiologists and antiquarians rather than historians. Furthermore, until recently,historians have tended to accept the rhetoric of the Reformation concerning sacred

space and the post-Enlightenment rationalist approach to sanctity, which was laterencapsulated in Webers concept of the disenchantment of the world.

Sacred and Profane: Defining Sacred Space Through Context

Historians of the medieval and early modern periods have, for the most part, up tonow preferred to study the law, geography and architecture of sacred spaces ratherthan how they were defined. Studies have thus focused not on rites and the practiceof prayer, nor on informal secret-sacred spaces, but rather on ecclesiastical

buildings and shrines.21

In the early Church, saints tombs became the setting forecclesiastical buildings, which in turn acquired sanctity by association. As thesesites became the foci for pilgrimages, the routes to them became sanctified, and thechapels along the route also came to be regarded as sacred.22This paradigm holdsequally true for sites established in the Middle Ages, such as the pilgrimage routesto the shrine of St James at Compostella.23 At the same time recent work hasdemonstrated that medieval ideas about protected space and legal sanctuary werenot so much a consequence of ideas of zones of holiness radiating out from ashrine, although these too played a part, but rather the result of dynamic and

20For references to work on the ancient world and America, see the review of literature inW. Coster and A. Spicer, The Dimensions of Sacred Space in Reformation Europe, inCoster and Spicer (eds), Sacred Space, p.1, n. 1.21Except for B.Z. Kedar and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (eds), Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land.Proceedings of the International Conference in Memory of Joshua Prawer (Basingstoke,1998). See also M. Kaplan (ed.), Le Sacr et son inscription dans lespace Byzance et enOccident(Paris, 2001).22 P.L.R. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity(Chicago, 1981).23 R.B. Tate, Pilgrimages to St James of Compostella from the British Isles during theMiddle Ages(Liverpool, 1990).


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Defining the Holy6

constructive relationships between individual institutions and royal authority,between churchmen and kings.24

Despite the preoccupations of modern historians, the evidence from the twelfthcentury onwards for territorial sanctuaries, like those around Hexham, Beverleyand Durham in the north of England, taken together with the composition ofliturgies for the consecration of both churches and, from the tenth century onwards,for cemeteries suggests that medieval people, both clerical and lay, attached greatimportance to the act of definition when demarcating space.25Nevertheless, whilstbishops believed that it was dedication ceremonies which made churches sacred, itwas not only ritual which helped to mark out places as holy. Both a churchs

external appearance, and its place in the landscape, often helped distinguish it fromthe surrounding buildings and pointed to its status as a sacred site. The woodenchapels of the early period probably differed little in their external appearance fromthe lords halls nearby. It was only in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when therewas, seemingly, an expansion in local church building, and these churches werebuilt or rebuilt in stone, that ecclesiastical buildings began to make an impact onthe landscape, described by Rodulfus Glaber as a white mantle of churchesspreading over the earth.26This central medieval building programme thus helpeddistinguish the church from its surroundings, and to link these different sacredspaces into a truly Christian landscape.27 Such spaces comprised not only the

24 B.H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space. Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity inEarly Medieval Europe(Manchester, 1999): on the ban, see pp. 13, 15683. See also W.Davies, Protected Space in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages, in B.E. Crawford(ed.), Scotland in Dark Age Britain(Aberdeen, 1996), pp. 119, and her Adding Insult toInjury: Power, Property and Immunities in Early Medieval Wales, in W. Davies and P.Fouracre (eds),Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 13764.25On Beverley, see J.C. Cox, Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Seekers(London, 1911),pp. 12630. On Hexham and Durham, see D. Hall, The Sanctuary of St Cuthbert, in Gerald Bonner,D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (eds), St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200

(Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 42536. On early medieval church consecration rites, see H.Gittos, Sacred Space in Anglo-Saxon England: Liturgy, Architecture and Place (Oxford,forthcoming), ch. 5; on the evolution of cemetery consecration rites, see her Creating theSacred: Anglo-Saxon Rites for Consecrating Cemeteries, in S. Lucy and A. Reynolds (eds),Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales(London, 2002), pp. 195208.26Rodulfus Glaber,Historiarum Libri Quinque,ed. and trans. J. France (Oxford, 1989), III,iv and vi, pp. 11417, 12627. William of Malmesbury observed a similar pattern in earlytwelfth-century England: Gesta regum anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs (2 vols, Rolls Series 90,London, 1888), II, p. 306.27On this point see J. Howe, Creating Symbolic Landscapes: Medieval Development ofSacred Space, in J. Howe and M. Wolfe (eds), Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses ofPlace in Western Europe (Gainesville, FL, 2002), p. 215; T. Pestell, Landscapes of


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churches, but from the tenth century onwards bounded cemeteries also were builtaround them, and, by the twelfth century, formal, marked sanctuaries stretching upto a mile around the church, as at Hexham, or a mile and a half at Beverley, hadbeen established at certain sites. Protection was granted to fugitives who enteredthe sanctuary, and graded penalties for violation of this sanctuary were imposedwhich increased the nearer the violation occurred to the church. In both churchesthere were thus six boundaries: the first zone began a mile, or a mile and a half,away from the shrine, and was marked by four crosses; the second was inside thetown; the third was inside the walls of the church precincts (described as the wallsof the atrium, or porch, by Richard of Hexham); the fourth in the nave of the

church; the fifth at the entrance to the choir; the sixth in the chancel.

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Churches, and the sacred spaces around them, were not only distinguished fromthe surrounding physical landscape, but also by more sensory distinctions. Theringing of church bells echoed across the landscape, calling the faithful to prayer,not just to the Mass but, at least in the medieval period, to the canonical hours eighttimes a day.29Although intended to regulate the time of prayer, such bells could beintrusive, denoting the lordship and domination of a particular house over itsterritory.30 The Carolingian monk Walahfrid Strabo compared the bells whichcalled the faithful to prayer to the bronze and silver trumpets of the OldTestament: because the prophet orders that the voice of teaching can be lifted up

like a trumpet, we properly use these vessels to call the faithful together.31

Othersensory distinctions also emerged during the Middle Ages between churches andthe secular world, which came increasingly across the period to be associated withthe celebration of the Mass. The burning of incense, for example, set the divineapart from the smells of the world. According to St Thomas Aquinas, incense wasused out of reverence for the sacrament [the Holy Eucharist], in order that anydisagreeable smell (arising from the number of persons gathered together) in thebuilding, that could cause annoyance, might be dispelled by its fragrancy.Secondly, to symbolize the effect of grace, of which Christ was full, as of a good

Monastic Foundation: the Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c.6501200(Woodbridge, 2004); R. Morris, Churches in the Landscape(London, 1989), p. 147.28On Beverley, see Cox, Sanctuaries,pp. 12630. On Hexham, see Hall, The Sanctuary ofSt Cuthbert, pp. 4267. On the dating of evidence for cemetery boundaries see Gittos,Creating the Sacred, pp. 2024.29 Walahfrid Strabos Libellus de exordiis et sacramentis quarundam in observationibusecclesiasticis rerum, trans. with commentary by A.L. Harting-Correa (Leiden, 1996), ch. 5,pp. 623: Bells ring the hours for celebrating the liturgy in the house of God.30M. Brand Honneur, La Motte et le clocher: laffrontement des symboles?, Cahiers decivilisation mdivale43 (2000), 331.31Walahfrid Strabos Libellus,ch. 5, pp. 623.


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Defining the Holy8

odour. Incense was also viewed as a sacrificial offering, a means of driving awayevil spirits as well as the setting apart of objects for holy use.32Church bells werepopularly regarded as having the power to banish evil spirits and subdue storms,but they also served to define the sacred audibly. They announced particularmoments of sanctity; the ringing of the sanctusbell defined the start of the canonas well as being rung again at the holiest part of the Mass, the elevation of the host.Lights served similar purposes.33 The placing of candles on the altar signified asaints feast day; the custom of lighting a candle at the Sanctus, and leaving it lituntil after Communion, originated in the later medieval period, and helped markout a sacred point in the Mass.34 Light also played an important role in the

medieval church dedication rite. At the beginning, according to one of the earliestdetailed accounts, that in the mid-tenth-century Romano-German pontifical fromMainz, twelve candles were lit to illuminate the episcopal procession around theoutside of the church, before the bishop entered the building to dedicate the churchand consecrate the altar. These candles were interpreted as representing the lightbrought by Christs teaching to the world.35

To a degree these sensory definitions of the sacred were rejected during theReformation as part of a reaction against the material culture of holiness withwhich late medieval Catholicism and its rituals were embued. The priest no longermade Christ metaphysically present through transubstantiation, and the cult of

saints was rejected by the Reformers. Incense, lights and bells as signals of thesacred became redundant. Nonetheless Protestant places of worship evoked theirown sensory definition of the sacred which signalled their particular place in thelandscape. The sound of psalm-singing marked Huguenot temples from the

32E.G.C.F. Atchley,A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Worship(London, 1909), pp.117, 128, 1323, 2045. Unfortunately we were not able to consult the more recent work ofC. Gauthier, LEncens dans le haut Moyen Age occidental. Son utilisation dans la liturgie(Brussels, 2001).33 D.R. Dendy, The Use of Lights in Christian Worship (Alcuin Club Collections 41,

London, 1959). On the burning of lights in Merovingian and Carolingian churchesthroughout the night, and the origins of this practice in Old Testament precepts, see P.Fouracre, Eternal Light and Earthly Needs: Practical Aspects of the Development ofFrankish Immunities, in Davies and Fouracre (eds),Property and Power, pp. 689.34 F.L. Cross and E. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church(Oxford, 1997), p. 1452. For altar candles on a saints feast, see Dendy, Use of Lights, pp.10819, and S. Bossuyt, pp 200201 below. The cathedral church at Le Mans in the mid-ninth century burnt thirty lamps and five candles on ordinary Sundays, but ninety lamps andten candles on feast days: Fouracre, Eternal Light, p. 72, fn. 57.35 XXXIII: Ordo romanus ad dedicandam ecclesiam, 3b, and XXXV: Quid significentduodecim candelae, in Le Pontifical romano-germanique du dixime sicle, ed. C. Vogeland R. Elze (3 vols, Studi e Testi 226, 227, 269, Vatican City, 196372), I, pp. 82, 90121.


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Catholic churches, for example.36 Bells continued to sound out across thelandscape to call Protestants to worship just as they did for their Catholiccounterparts.37For the Calvinists and Zwinglians in particular the luminosity andpure white light that resulted from the clear glass windows and whitewashed wallswas regarded as making a place of worship visually distinctive.38

Churches were however more than distinctive buildings in the landscape, theystood as beacons of order against the chaos of the world through determininghuman relations between the sacred and the profane.39 In practical terms, thiscosmic order was achieved through the regulation of daily life by the measuringand ordering of time.40Time-keeping instruments, that is sundials, and, from the

late thirteenth century, mechanical clocks broadcast the passing of sacred time bothwithin and outside the church. Anglo-Saxon sundials are usually found above thesouth door, as at Great Edstone in North Yorkshire, where the sundial was markedout to distinguish the five (canonical) hours of the day: Prime, Terce, Sex, None,Vespers.41An inscription described it as a wayfarers clock, perhaps suggesting itwas also intended for use by travellers passing by the church, or for all Christianspassing through the world.42Mechanical clocks were similarly concerned to markliturgical time; early clocks like that at Wells cathedral lacked faces, striking thehours, sounding the trumpets throughout the church. Such timepieces, once secularclocks were introduced, helped ensure that the sacred time of the church was

36 The disturbance caused by psalm-singing could be sufficient grounds to justify thedemolition of a temple: A. Spicer, Qui est de Dieu oit la parole de Dieu: the Huguenotsand their Temples, in R.A. Mentzer and A. Spicer (eds), Society and Culture in theHuguenot World, 15591685(Cambridge, 2002), p. 190.37 R.A. Mentzer, The Reformed Churches of France and the Visual Arts, in P. CorbyFinney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word. Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (GrandRapids, 1999), pp. 21819; M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early ModernScotland(New Haven, 2002), pp. 2830.38L.P. Wandel, Revelation and Nature: Light in Reformed Churches, unpublished paperdelivered at LArchitecture des temples rforms (XVIeXVIIe sicles) en Europe etnotamment en France, Facult de thologie protestante de Montpellier, May 2003. Compare

with Lateran IV (1215), c.19: We command also that the aforesaid churches, vessels,corporals and vestments be kept clean and bright. For it is absurd to tolerate in sacred thingsa filthiness that is unbecoming even in profane things,Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils,ed. N.P. Tanner (2 vols, London, 1990), I, p. 244.39Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 5865.40 R.W. Scribner, Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-IndustrialGerman Society, in hisPopular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany(London, 1987), pp. 116.41J. Wall, Anglo-Saxon Sundials in Ryedale, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal69 (1997),93117, at 96, 100, 105; A.R. Green, Sundials, Incised Dials or Mass-Clocks (London,1926).42+ORLOGIVM VIATORVM: Wall, Anglo-Saxon Sundials, 1045.


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distinguished from that of world.43The measurement of time, not only daily, butyearly, was a matter of concern to churchmen, anxious to calculate accurately thedate of Easter. Thus, in the early modern period, some cathedrals in fact becameobservatories for studying the heavens and in particular the solar cycle. Theconstruction of meridiana turned the cathedrals into camera obscura, plotting thecourse of the noon-day sun as it moved along a line marked on the floor. From themid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, four Catholic churches were theprincipal solar observatories in Europe.44

It was very difficult for Reformed Protestants to break this close associationbetween a place of worship and time. The New England Puritans rejected the

liturgical calendar, regarding no time as more sacred than another, and ensured thatChristmas Day was treated as a normal working day. But the retention of Sundayas an obligatory day of worship and the necessity of assembling in a meeting housefor communal worship on that day were problems which caused a degree of angstfor a community which rejected ideas of sacred space and time.45

Church buildings thus encapsulated sacred time, literally, whilst the liturgytranslated them into a metaphor for the heavenly Jerusalem. But how was sacredspace defined, and differentiated, within the church building itself? For themundane often permeated these sacred spaces, both in terms of decorative schemaand physical activities, and in doing so helped to articulate their holiness. Atria, in

particular, acquired importance as intermediary spaces between the church and thestreet: Caesarius of Arles complained about them being used for public business asearly as the sixth century and by the fourteenth century that in St Peters, Rome,had seemingly become the site of a market.46Ecclesiastical courts were often heldin, or at the entrance to, great churches; Fulbert of Chartres, writing in the earlyeleventh century, described episcopal courts as atria, petitioning the bishop of

43J. LeGoff, Au Moyen Age: temps de lglise et temps du marchand, in hisPour un autreMoyen Age. Temps, travail et culture en occident (Paris, 1978), pp. 4665. See the

corrective to LeGoffs views provided by C. Humphrey, Time and Urban Culture in LateMedieval England, in C. Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World(York, 2001), pp. 10517.44See H. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church. Cathedrals as Solar Observatories(Cambridge,MA, 1999).45J.P. Walsh, Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England, American Quarterly32 (1980), 7995. See also M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early ModernScotland (New Haven, 2002), pp. 34152; E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge, 1997), p. 77.46 Nancy Gauthier, Atria et portiques dans les glises de Gaule daprs les sourcestextuelles, in Christian Sapin (ed.), Avant-nefs et espaces daccueil dans lglise entre leIVe et le XIIe sicle(Paris, 2002), pp. 3036; Birch,Pilgrimage to Rome, pp. 12021.

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Defining the Holy Ch1