IMC 2014: Sessions

In current scholarship on the later Middle Ages and the early modern era, the church building is no longer a unequivocal space. It is, on the contrary, understood from a wide variety of spatial agents. The interpretation of church architecture in terms of 'a multifaceted liturgy in stone', testifies to the finely meshed assessment of the meaning, usage, overlaps, and operation of space(s) in these buildings in recent scholarship. As a place of ritual, the building expands and duplicates itself into religious processions that take the patron saint's relics outside the actual walls and territory. In the same mimetic vain, the church building is copied in reliquaries. These increasingly take the shape of miniature churches or secluded miniature stages that reenact and establish liturgical operations. In the framework of the mimetic and repetitive operation of liturgy, the evolution of Church architecture seems closely related with one increasingly important element in securing the effectiveness of liturgy: the empirical, visual, and tangible presence with the sacred. Especially reliquaries play an exemplary role in this process and show this link between architecture and liturgy. A church is a place in which sacred is continually re-enacted through the mass and display of holy objects and in which vision and tangibility of the sacred are crucial. Especially the increasingly elaborate miniature stage reliquaries, often caught in a flamboyant architectural setting and depicting people that behold the sacred relics, show to their spectators a space that is being seen.