ABSTRACT
AT THE CONSECRATION service for a church in the West, the antiphon Locus iste was often sung proclaiming the building ‘an inestimable sacrament.’ 1 It was an outward and visible sign of something more, something greater. For as Abbot Suger, for instance, was to say in the twelfth century, Significata magis significante placent: ‘what is signified is more pleasing than what signifies it.’ 2
