ABSTRACT
The streets accommodated the sounds, smells, sights and touch of religion during this public celebration of Prague’s turn towards Catholicism under Habsburg rule. It is the interaction of the idealised display of the sacred staged by authorities, and the messy reality of bodily and sensory experience that produced a distinctive type of religion to be found in streets. This chapter brings relationship between religion and the street into sharper focus. It examines how the street was both idealised and practised in a religious sense. The chapter examines religion in the street as part of an ideal, imagined and planned place. It examines how practices shaped the experience of religion in the street in ways that were different to religious experience in the home or the church. Religious persecution in the period across Europe similarly shaped the city’s physical spaces. Protestant Huguenots escaping from France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries congregated in the neighbourhoods of Spitalfields and Soho in London.
