This project has examined how sacred space functioned as an arena for social action and political protest (broadly understood) in England 1250-1450 with comparative outlooks to the European continent.
During the project, I have collated the results of my research into a searchable database, to be used for a future monograph and to be presented with Open Access as my publications appear. These results have underpinned two research articles to be published in leading outlets, and as a contribution to a volume I am currently co-editing.
Historians have often inadvertently projected modern boundaries between sacred and secular onto the medieval past by not considering sacred spaces as political arenas in their own right. Sacred spaces, although nominally separate from mundane ones, were deeply embedded in structures of power (think for instance of coronation rituals) and therefore also an important arena for social conflict. Various kinds of sacred spaces, such as churches, chapels, shrines, and liturgical processions (e.g. in honour of a patron saint, the Virgin Mary, or Corpus Christi) were not only expressions of a Christian view of the world, but also of local ecclesiastical privilege and civic forms of religion that sought not only to promote local communal identity, but also to legitimise the exercise of secular authority. Those rituals that defined sacred spaces sought to establish communal identities and promote cohesion in a stratified society riddled with social tensions. When such tensions came to the fore, they could do so in a way that used sacred space and its rituals to voice discontent.
Disruption can take diverse forms: physical attacks on clergy during Mass or processions; interrupted homilies; shouting or singing; subversive uses of sacred symbols; attacks on sacred images and objects (in particular by heretics); or the movement of lay people––particularly women––through areas in the church that had been determined as masculine or exclusively clerical, such as the choir (i.e. the clerical space around the altar). Perhaps the most extreme case is when a group of women protested a newly established monastery in their village by defecating on the monastic grounds and dancing half naked in front of the monks while they performed their Palm Sunday procession!
The parish laity did not always undertake these direct actions on their own, however, but often together with their local clergy who often had more in common with their parishioners than with their bishop.
The project challenges common stereotypes about medieval religious culture, as consisting of a monolithic and submissive laity under the strict control of the hierarchical Church. Rather, what emerges from the examples I have gathered is a history of dynamic, independent, and assertive men and women who carefully and inventively sought to define and negotiate their position in society and to protest what they saw as illegitimate power and authority.
Although we now live far from the Middle Ages, we still live in a world in which sacrality, power, and space intersect with and reinforce each other, but are not necessarily accepted. Perhaps the most obvious example would be how the punk band Pussy Riot protested the close ties between Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church by playing their music and dancing in Moscow Cathedral. But sacrality and sacred space can also operate in a secular context, as something that is hallowed and ‘set aside’; think for instance of cemeteries, memorials, or the grand monuments of modern states. In 2019, a group of undocumented labourers, the Gilets Noirs, occupied the Pantheon in Paris—a sanctuary to the secular French republic and the immortals of the Enlightenment. Here, too, space, sacrality, and power intersected and was challenged in a highly symbolical act. The history of protest in the Middle Ages can serve as a useful tool to think with in order to understand the dynamics underpinning much of modern life.
