This book, a revision of my doctoral dissertation (NYU, 1998), explores the dynamic exchanges between human bodies and church buildings in the central Middle Ages (ca. 1100-1389), arguing that Christian bodies and churches were inextricably joined to the extent that rarely could one exist without the other. Together body and church constitute the two facades of medieval sacred space.

Part I: Incorporating Conceptions of Medieval Sacred Places
Part I focuses on idealized perceptions of medieval churches, drawing on documents of theory written by educated clergy.

I. Learned Conceptions of Sacred Place: Building and Body as Two Facades of Christian Worship in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
This chapter posits that clergy cultivated two facades of Christian sacred place - church and body - and analyzes specifically Bishop Ivo of Chartres' "Sermo IV", a twelfth-century sermon in which this bishop of Chartres Cathedral compares the rite of church consecration to the sacrament of baptism, to lay bare this connection.

II. History Incarnate: Human Bodies and Ideal Sacred Place in The Miracles of Our Lady of Chartres
Chapter 2 argues that as a vehicle for pious propaganda to raise money for rebuilding after a devastating fire in 1194, the Miracles of Notre-Dame de Chartres offers a glimpse at one community's conception of ideal sacred place as bishop and canons showcased their cathedral. This late-twelfth-to-early-thirteenth-century miracle collection maintains that Chartres Cathedral contained residual sanctity from the holiest bodies in Christian history that enabled it to restore the damaged and dead bodies of the faithful.

Part II: Mundane and Profane Uses of Medieval Sacred Places
Part II focuses on non-liturgical uses of medieval sacred places, drawing on documents of practice from a wide variety of genres in an effort to balance idealized perceptions against actual use.

III. Earthly Uses of Heavenly Spaces: Non-Liturgical Activities in Sacred Place
This chapter, which avails itself of a wide variety of sources, explores the mundane use of churches and reveals the ambiguity of the body=church relationship as bodies challenged the idealized perceptions of churches discussed in Part I. The non-liturgical use of churches at times betrays an intellectual divide between clergy and laity, but it also reveals a world that was less concerned, I think, with compartmentalizing space and restricting activity than in the centuries that followed.

IV. Body as Champion of Church Authority and Sacred Place: The Murder of Thomas Becket
Chapter 4 turns to the outright desecration of church space. It examines closely the five eyewitness accounts of the murder of the twelfth-century archbishop slain in his cathedral and argues that long after his spirit departed Thomas' corpse continued to champion ecclesiastical authority and the church space that his assassins had sacrilegiously violated.

V. Conclusion: Division and Decomposition
The conclusion places the evidence in its broader historical context and observes, based on the work done by cultural historians of the early modern period, that the symbiotic church/body relationship comes undone, a process that begins in the late Middle Ages as church space becomes increasingly subdivided and perceptions of the human body fragment. The disintegration of this socially and religiously integrating metaphor in the face of challenges posed by events such as the Protestant Reformation, heliocentrism, print culture and the rise of anatomical science and dissection reveals the passing of a particularly medieval world view, lending support to anthropologist Mary Douglas' theory that the main difference between pre-modern and modern societies is the extent to which the lives of their members are differentiated.

VI. Epilogue: Body and Sacred Place in the Wake of September 11: Resurrecting Medieval Metaphors in the Modern World
The epilogue observes that current debates over the former World Trade Center site offer us an opportunity to think carefully about modern perceptions of the relationship between human bodies and sacred places, suggesting that New Yorkers may be able to draw inspiration and comfort from an unlikely source: the Middle Ages.

 ©Copyright 2003 Dawn Marie Hayes
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