Layered Landscapes: Early Modern Religious Space across Faiths and Cultures offers a significant contribution to a growing body of work that examines the religious spaces of a long early modern period. Critically for the field, the volume adopts a much needed global approach to the topic of sacred space, with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and Incan sites, as well as the temples of Japan, providing windows through which to view the effects of human movement and religious change on landscape, ritual, and architecture. Editors Eric Nelson and Jonathan Wright observe that layering “sits at the intersection between space and place, where use and reuse acquire meanings” (2). In this respect, many of the essays collected here reflect a palimpsest, a useful metaphor for envisioning how sacred spaces and landscapes may have been layered, erased, or buried in response to human migration or colonization (1). Others reveal a highly complex coexistence of past and present in transition as one faith community comes to dominate and integrate, rather than displace, another. Still others expose the exploitation over time of religious symbolism and space at the hands of religious and political authorities.
In a volume of such far-ranging geographical distribution, Layered Landscapes helpfully arranges authors’ contributions thematically. “Shared and Contested Sacred Landscapes” shows the religious effects of contestation in three compelling studies. Megan C. Armstrong examines the Franciscan creation of a sacred narrative portraying a highly contested, layered Jerusalem, tapped to support the cause of Roman Catholicism in Reformation Europe. A. Katie Harris studies the conversion of Granada, post-1492, and the limitations of memory through layers of the city’s Islamic past. Rachel L. Greenblatt explores Prague’s Jewish Town, the small metropolis a kehillah kedosha, a sacred community reflective of the land of Israel.
Focusing more narrowly on the exclusion or inclusion of ritual practices set against backdrops of conquest, colonization, and political change, three compelling essays comprise “Shared Landscapes, Ritual and Devotion.” Ute Hüsken traces the accretion of performative memory following the flight of the festival images of Kāñcipuram ahead of the invasion of Mughal forces in 1688 (63). Gabriela Ramos studies the Incan ritual spaces of Cuzco, which were marginalized in favor of urban religious architecture asserted under Spanish colonization and Christianization. Barbara R. Ambros examines the religious topography and ritual of early modern Edo where, by contrast, the symbolic capital of the ritual past was leveraged by the Tokugawa regime.
The volume turns to three persuasive studies focused on the complexities of transitional spaces in “Sacred Landscapes and Transition.” Hasan Çolak describes a post-conquest Istanbul, where homogenization of neighborhoods amid interfaith tensions was gradual, with minority Greek Orthodox and majority Muslim populations increasingly concentrated near respective religious centers. Pink Dandelion outlines a similarly gradual transition in William Penn’s Philadelphia, where a theologically inclusive Quaker utopia was gradually eclipsed by the influx of other religious groups. In a departure from the incremental changes to religious spaces seen in Istanbul and Philadelphia, William G. Naphy shows that, in Reformation Geneva, change was immediate and dramatic, a result of the political impetus to build a nationalized, Protestant republic layered over old Catholic practices and spaces.
The consolidation of power by way of the religious landscape runs thematically throughout Layered Landscapes. With “Sacred Landscapes and Power,” three insightful studies focus more narrowly on religious space in the service of authority. Eric Nelson examines Henry IV’s promotion of France’s religion royale and the cult of St. Louis in the years following his seizure of power. Similarly, Ingrid D. Rowland emphasizes the role of the basilica of St. John Lateran in supporting the papacy, set against a backdrop of confessional tensions and war. In the Islamic East, hybrid religious architectural spaces benefited the Timurid and Safavid empires in Colin Mitchell’s study of early modern Herat.
Closely interwoven thematically, the studies published in this highly successfully volume share much in common, as they tackle the complexities of the layering of space over time. As Andrew Spicer eloquently illustrates in the multi-confessional history underlying London’s Jamme Masjid mosque, sacred landscapes are not static but are rather products of evolution, competition, and the “accretions of past generations” (229). The global perspective, through which Layered Landscapes has addressed the many complexities associated with layering, underscores the volume’s significant strengths.
