ABSTRACT
For any pilgrim who walks along the Via Dolorosa to the church of the Holy Sepulchre today, as in the medieval and early modern periods, the experience combines the sacred with the profane, the public with the personal. On the one hand, pilgrims walk along the route they believed Christ took to the site of his crucifixion, on the other they walk along a street lined with shops to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Calvary, a building made holy not only through being the site of the events central to the Christian faith (a liminal space as the locus for Christ’s resurrection), but also through the rite of consecration,1 and through the liturgical rites conducted there on a daily basis. Both en route and once inside the church the pilgrims may choose to participate in public prayers, that is those of their tour group, and sometimes, as on Good Friday, the liturgies of the Christian churches, or conduct their own private devotions, or to take part in both. Such pilgrimages, by visiting the places of Christ’s life, help the participant to come closer to the heavenly Jerusalem; in his early twelfth-century guide to the Holy Places, Rorgo Fretellus urged his audience to ‘ponder upon the heavenly city of Jerusalem … which is an allegory for us of the heavenly paradise’.2 Inevitably, however, the secular penetrated into such terrestrial paradises, be they twelfthcentury Jerusalem or fourteenth-century Rome, where stall holders selling food and
1 Egeria witnessed the feast of the dedication of the Holy Sepulchre on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land 381-4 AD: The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M.L. McClure and C.L. Feltoe (London, 1919), pp. 95-6. The Latin church on the site was consecrated on 15 June 1149, on the fiftieth anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem: John of Würzburg, Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, ch. xiii, in S. de Sandoli, Itinera Hierosylmitana Crucesignatorum (saec. xii-xiii) (3 vols, Jerusalem, 1981-83), II, p. 290. 2 P.C. Boeren, Rorgo Fretellus et sa description de la Terre Sainte. Histoire et édition du texte (Amsterdam, 1980), p. 6: ‘considera sanctam Iherusalem, contemplare et ipsam Syon,
pilgrimage badges, as well as tooth-pullers and cobblers, are recorded as paying rent for pitches on the steps leading up to and in the atrium of St Peter’s basilica itself.3 The persistence of this Durkheimian juxtaposition between the sacred and the profane therefore points to some of the issues which confront any historian who wishes to study the nature of sacred space in any period, and in particular the problems surrounding how sacred space is defined by Christians whose cosmology regards the whole world as God’s creation.4 To what extent is sacred space constructed or is it innate? How far is sacred space restricted to certain buildings and locations? Is sacred space defined through opposition to that which is not sacred? To what degree is sacred space defined by public or personal devotion? In other words, how is sacred space constructed and defined?
