ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of sensory devotional practices in the definition of the London Dutch Stranger community’s relationships to physical and imagined spaces. When their community was first established, the Strangers employed psalm singing and liturgical gestures to define a community in London. Together with the words and sounds of the liturgy, the positioning of singers’ bodies within liturgical space made visible the Strangers’ particular understanding of communal boundaries and articulated each individual’s relation to others in the congregation. Through such devotional practices, the Strangers reveal the ways in which they understood themselves as exiles within the wider world. This chapter thus suggests that attending to the sound of song and the sights of the liturgy might begin to reshape our understanding of exile in the sixteenth century.
