Abstract
At the end of the eighth century Charlemagne granted the venerable monastery of St. Martin at Tours to Alcuin of York, trusted advisor and exegete whose reputation in the Frankish kingdoms was then at its welldeserved height.1 The monastery at Tours was not, however, an obvious prize. The community of St. Martin, “neither monks nor canons,” to paraphrase the dismissive phrasing of an imperial letter, enjoyed a shabby reputation in the Carolingian world, a reputation based, or so it was said, on a taste for disorder and a deep-set resistance to authority.2 The hope was that Alcuin, with his widely acknowledged skills as a teacher and reformer, could improve the life and behavior of the community.
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Notes
There is a growing literature on the ambivalence over the idea of holy places in the first four Christian centuries. Those that stand out are Sabine MacCormack, “Loca sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topography in Late Antiquity,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. R. Ousterhout (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 7–40.
R. A. Markus, “How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71, and his The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), c. 10.
Colin Morris, “Introduction” and “Memorials of the Holy Places and Blessings from the East: Devotion to Jerusalem before the Crusades,” in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. R. N. Swanson (Studies in Church History 36, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), xvii–xxiii, 90–109.
The relation of Jesus and the earliest Christians to Second Temple purity requirements have provoked a surprisingly lively controversy; see the survey of this material by James D. G. Dunn, “Jesus and Purity: An Ongoing Debate,” New Testament Studies 48 (2002): 449–67.
Aeschylus, Eumenides, esp. lines 566–777, 916–1047. See also Laura Salh Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 110–16.
David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and his “‘Outside the Places, Within the Truth’: Athanasius of Alexandria and the Localization of the Holy,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, David Frankfurter (Religion in the Greco-Roman World 134, Leiden: Brill, 1998), 445–81.
This was the conclusion of P. W. L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Eusebius’s most fully developed reading of Christian holy places (in a mode approximating that of Livy’s Camillus), is his encomium on the consecration of the new church at Tyre, Ecclesiastical History 10.
Richard Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
R. L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);
J. E. Taylor, Christians and the Holy Places: the Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins (Oxford, 1993). In opposition to this top-down model of the spread of the idea of sacred Christian places, Ann Marie Yasin emphasized a more bottom-up model whereby churches might came to be sacralised by what happened in them, the celebration of the liturgy, prayer, and burial. See her Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 26–45.
Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,” in Michael Keith and Steven Pile, eds. Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routeledge, 1993): 67–83, and the Introduction to
Wil Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds. Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 1–16.
On Leopold von Ranke and his historical aims, see Peter Novik, That Noble Dream: the “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): esp. 26–33.
Chris Wickham, Community and Clientele in Twelfth-Century Tuscany: the Origins of the Rural Commune in the Plain of Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Eileen Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942);
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip IIv, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972–73).
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976).
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Relgion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), and The Sacred and Profane (London: Harcourt, 1957).
Martin Heidegger, “An Ontological Consideration of Place,” in The Question of Being, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne, 1956), with the commentary of Edward S. Casey, “How to get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Yi-Fi Tuan (ed.), The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 13–52.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Maureen C. Miller, The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) and also his “The Linguistic Cartography of Property and Power in Late Medieval Marseille,” in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Medieval Cultures 23, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 37–63.
Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980).
Above all: Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Frans Theuws (The Transformation of the Roman World 6, Leiden: Brill, 2001). People and space in the Middle Ages, 300–1300, ed. Wendy Davies, Guy Halsall and Andrew Reynolds (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 15, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). Michael Tavinor, “Sacred Space and the Built Environment,” in Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, ed. Philip North and John North (London: Continuum, 2007): 21–41.
Lisa Bitel’s Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) used a careful deployment of spatial therory to structure her discussion of the Christianization of Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.
Carol Heitz, Recherches sur les rapports entre architecture et liturgie à l’époque carolingienne (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963). For the state of research on the Carolingian Westwerk, with much of Heitz’s conclusions modified,
see Charles McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe AD 600–900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005): 188–94.
For the critical response to Heitz and his work, see McClendon, Origins, 186–87, and Sible de Blaauw, “Architecture and Liturgy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Traditions and Trends in Modern Scholarship,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 33 (1991): 1–34.
Susan Rabe, Faith, Art, and Politics at Saint-Riquier: The Symbolic Vision of Angilbert (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
Sible de Blaauw, Cultus et decor. Liturgia e architettura nella Roma tardoantica e medievale. Basilica salvatoris, Sanctae Mariae, Sancti Petri (Studi e testi 335–36, Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana , 1994).
On the textual basis of sacred space in the Early Middle Ages, see Thomas Pickles, “Anglo-Saxon Monasteries as Places of Power: Topography, Exegesis, and Vocation,” in Sacred Text, Sacred Space: Architectural, Spiritual, and Literary Convergences in England and Wales, ed. Joseph Sterrett and Peter Thomas (Studies in Religion and the Arts 4, Leiden: Brill, 2011): 35–56.
Dick Harrison, “The Invisible Wall of St. John: On Mental Centrality in Early Medieval Italy,” Scandia 58 (1992): 177–203, and “Invisible Boundaries and Places of Power: Notions of Liminality and Centrality in the Early Middle Ages,” in The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, ed. Walter Pohl, Ian Wood, and Helmut Reimitz (The Transformation of the Roman World 10, Leiden: Brill, 2001): 83–94. Julia M. H. Smith, “Aedificatio sancti loci: The Making of a Ninth-Century Holy Place,” in Topographies, ed. de Jong, 361–98.
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© 2012 Samuel W. Collins
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Collins, S.W. (2012). Introduction. In: The Carolingian Debate over Sacred Space. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295057_1
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