Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England

Church rituals were a familiar feature of life throughout much of the Anglo-Saxon period. In this innovative study, Helen Gittos examines ceremonies for the consecration of churches and cemeteries, processional feasts like Candlemas, Palm Sunday, and Rogationtide, as well as personal rituals such as baptisms and funerals. Drawing on little-known surviving liturgical sources as well as other written evidence, archaeology, and architecture, she considers thearchitectural context in which such rites were performed. The research in this book has implications for a wide range of topics, such as: how liturgy was written and disseminated in the early Middle Ages, when Christian cemeteries first began to be consecrated, how the form of Anglo-Saxon monasteries changed over time and how they were used, the centrality and nature of processions in early medieval religious life, the evidence church buildings reveal about changes in how they functioned, beliefs about relics, and the attitudes of differentarchbishops to the liturgy. Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England will be of particular interest to architectural specialists wanting to know more about liturgy, and church historians keen to learn more about architecture, as well as those with a more general interest in the earlyMiddle Ages and in church buildings.

a deeply thoughtful and important volume that brings together divergent and disparate sources, and combines them into a persuasive and well-argued whole it is certainly a masterful introduction to the subject, adding an important new perspective to the Anglo-Saxon sacred place. It is of great value to historians and archaeologists alike., excellent and timely ... a learned book, with gratifyingly wide references ... beautifully written by someone with a gift for communication. This is a book we have needed for years., a serious attempt to establish an understandinig of how sacred places were used and experienced ... a welcome addition to our understanding of many aspects of the relationship between buildings and the celebration of the worship of God., a wide-ranging work of considerable erudition, examining the architectural context of a variety of religious rites: consecration of churches and cemeteries; processions; relics and shrines., this exciting research sheds new light on the Anglo-Saxon Church and offers a new way of understanding church buildings and liturgy more generally.

Helen Gittos is an historian who specializes in the social and cultural history of the early Middle Ages. She studied English Literature at Newcastle University before starting her postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history at Oxford University. Having held temporary teaching jobs at the universities of Cardiff, Southampton, Leeds, and Aberystwyth, she is now Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Kent. She is currently working on a study of the use ofvernacular languages in the liturgy throughout the medieval period.