Disruptions of Sacred Space in Late Medieval England and its European Contexts

This project challenges our understanding of medieval sacred spaces––churches, chapels, shrines, and processions between them––by arguing that they functioned not only as spaces of worship but as arenas of political conflict in England and Europe between ca. 1250 and 1450.

This transformational period follows the fourth Lateran council and the Church’s inauguration of a powerful pastoral programme that sought to control and foster lay participation in the church, and ends with the decline of spiritual authority following the social transformations and calamities of the fourteenth century.

I argue that the ritual symbols and practices that defined sacred spaces were harnessed in tactical and opportunistic acts that challenged the social hierarchies and power relations that sacred spaces reflected and legitimised.

By considering sacred spaces as deeply intertwined with structures of power and authority, this project will transform scholarship that has thus far largely focused on ‘secular’ areas as the main sites of social conflict.

I will integrate a wide variety of sources to examine how class, social status, and gender shaped acts of disruption that contested the social hierarchies and power relations that were expressed and legitimised through sacred spaces, thus refuting the projection of strict modern boundaries between sacred and profane onto the medieval past that is implicit in modern historiography.During the fellowship, I will undertake archival and library research in England, building up a database of cases that I will draw on to produce a chapter for a volume I am co-editing and two long articles.

I will also begin working on a monograph on during the fellowship that considers cases from a wider European context.The project will demonstrate the wider resonance of religious culture and liturgy in political history, and, for a broader academic readership, the political potential of public space, long imbued with the habits of ritual Christianity.