ABSTRACT
The debate among art historians over Jerusalem's impact on medieval Christianity has often emphasized the role played by the celebrated buildings marking the most worshipped loca sancta as architectural models. In many cases, the architectural mise-en-scène contributed toward overemphasizing this tension between monumental frame and holy site. Some of the countries neighboring Palestine could aspire to being considered "extensions" of the Holy Land's holiness, predominantly Egypt, whose soil had admittedly been trod on by Christ's feet. The pilgrims' experiences of the places associated with a saint's birth, martyrdom, and burial corresponded to a meditation exercise, not unlike the one that, in the Palestinian holy sites, was expressed by means of a mental and emotionally charged evocation of the main Gospel events and especially of the passion. As anthropologists have pointed out, one specificity of pilgrimage sites is their "liminality", that is, their perception as thresholds between the earthly and the divine dimensions.
