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The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World: Studies and Sources, ed. Jennifer Mara DeSilva

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 132; Issue: 555 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cex003

1477-4534

Wietse de Boer,

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies

Religious practice is critically informed by its spatial settings and the meanings attached to them. This is the vital insight that for more than a decade, in the wake of the broader ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, has produced a wealth of research in Reformation studies. Approaches have varied. The category of space has served to interpret Protestant transformations of churches and monasteries; to dissect sharing arrangements in bi-confessional communities; to investigate sites of conversion; to understand symbolic markings of the landscape; and to probe the inner geographies of spiritual practice. The present collection of essays, largely focused on Catholic Europe, seeks to show how sacred or sacralised spaces served, or were intended, to enhance pious behaviour. At times, however, competing uses or different agendas led to resistance or alternative claims on these spaces. The three essays that open the volume explore this theme in different early sixteenth-century contexts. The volume editor, Jennifer Mara DeSilva, studies the chaplaincy instituted by Paride de’ Grassi, the famous papal master of ceremonies, in a chapel in the Roman church of Sts Celso and Giuliano. In a broad-ranging, not entirely convincing, analysis, she reads the chaplaincy’s punctilious founding document (the text of which is reproduced in an appendix) as evidence of a spirit of reform akin to the Devotio moderna. Rebecca Constabel focuses her contribution on the symbolic messages contained in French funeral monuments. The tombs of the Dukes of Orléans, of Renée D’Orléans-Longueville, and of Raoul de Lannoy and Jehanne de Poix serve as examples to show how noble families used sacred spaces to display dynastic power and legitimacy, political connections, as well as religious tropes and aspirations. Pamela A.V. Stewart devotes an excellent, attentive study to Bernardino Luini’s Passion Cycle in the Corpus Christi chapel at San Giorgio al Palazzo in Milan, suggesting how spatial design, images and inscriptions, ceremonies and devotional texts may have induced and guided a meditational practice focused on the body of Christ.