BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES: The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World: Studies and Sources

Jennifer Mara DeSilva's complex introductory essay, which proceeds from an analysis of the strategies employed by a contemporary art museum to manipulate space within its galleries, both to display its objects and to affect the way the audience conceives of the objects as well as the ambient areas, is methodologically promising, goes far beyond the typical introduction for such an edited anthology, and establishes well the overall goal of the volume. Taken as a whole, the essays consider an eclectic set of sacred spaces and geographic areas, including chapels in Italian churches; staged dramas in Belgium that commemorated the canonization of Jesuit saints; the wilderness of Catalonia, sanctified through the establishment of outdoor Marian shrines; neighborhoods in Rome that accommodated ritualized protests; cemeteries in Padua, over whose use parishioners and clerics fought; churchyards in Stuart England which, when used for festive dance, could become sites of conflict and litigation; a French basilica that experienced iconoclasm and subsequent rebuilding projects; and Jesuit missions in South America, evaluated with a more macro-historical concentration on international diplomacy. [...]Abel Alves's essay on the use of Marian shrines to sanctify the Catalonian landscape not only shows how Christian sacred space could be situated within the natural world, which is in itself an interesting topic, but it also reevaluates the ways early moderns conceived of human culture in relation to the natural world, utilizes gender theory and anthropology to analyze Mary's ability to sanctify nature in ways that transcended the male domination of nature through agriculture, and expands our understanding of how sacred space was created by highlighting the role that animals could play in this process.