Layered Landscapes: Early Modern Religious Space Across Faiths and Cultures

This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction [Eric Nelson and Jonathan Wright] Section I: Shared and Contested Sacred Landscapes 1. Jerusalem in the Reinvention of the Catholic Tradition, 1500–1700 [Megan C. Armstrong] 2. Sacred Landscape in Early Modern Granada: Muslim Past and Christian Present [A. Katie Harris] 3. Temple to Town Hall: Sacred and Secular in Prague’s Jewish Town [Rachel L. Greenblatt] Section II: Sacred Landscapes, Ritual and Devotion 4. Gods and Goddesses in the Ritual Landscape of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Kāñcipuram [Ute Hüsken] 5. Ritual, Public Space and Indigenous Engagement in Colonial Cuzco [Gabriela Ramos] 6. Layers of Memory and Devotion: Temples, Shrines and Pilgrimage in Early Modern Edo [Barbara R. Ambros] Section III: Sacred Landscapes and Transition 7. Transforming the Orthodox Landscape of Ottoman Istanbul During the Early Modern Period [Hasan Çolak] 8. From Prince-Bishopric to City-State: Nationalizing the Church and Creating a Republic in Reformation Geneva [William G. Naphy] 9. The Layered Theoscape of Philadelphia: The Quaker Experiment as a Religious Crucible [Pink Dandelion] Section IV: Sacred Landscapes and Power 10. Religion Royale in the Sacred Landscape of Paris: The Jesuit Church of Saint Louis and the Resacralization of Kingship in Early Bourbon France (1590–1650) [Eric Nelson] 11. The Basilica of St. John Lateran and the Post-Tridentine Papacy: Refashioning the Sacred Landscape [Ingrid D. Rowland] 12. Two Tales of One City: Herat Under the Early Modern Empires of the Timurids and Safavids [Colin Mitchell] Epilogue: Jamme Masji

About the Author :
Eric Nelson is Professor of History at Missouri State University. Jonathan Wright is Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.