How do we understand religious spaces? What is their role or function within specific religious traditions or with respect to religious experience? This handbook brings together thirty-three essays addressing these questions using a range of methods and approaches to examine specific spaces or types of spaces around the world and across time. The authors here represent and draw upon many disciplines: religious studies and religion, anthropology, archaeology, architectural history and architecture, cultural and religious history, sociology, geography, gender and women's studies and others. Their essays are snapshots, each offering a specific way to think about the religious space(s) under consideration: Roman shrines, Jewish synagogues, Christian churches, Muslim and Catholic shrines, indigenous spaces in Central America and East Africa, cemeteries, memorials, and more. Some overarching principles emerge from these snapshots. The authors demonstrate that religious spaces are simultaneously individual and collective, personal and social; that they are influenced by culture, tradition, and immediate circumstances; and that they participate in various relationships of power. These essays demonstrate that religious spaces do not simply provide a convenient background for religious action but are also constituent of religious meaning and religious experience; they play an active role in creating, expressing, broadcasting, maintaining, and transforming religious meanings and religious experiences. By learning how religious spaces function, readers of this collection will gain a deeper understanding of religious life and religions themselves.

The ancient Greeks attributed great importance to the sacred during war and campaigning, as demonstrated from their earliest texts. Among the first four lines of the Iliad, for example, is a declaration that Apollo began the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon and sent a plague upon the Greek army because its leader, Agamemnon, had mistreated Apollo's priest. In this first in-depth study of the attitude of military commanders towards holy ground, Sonya Nevin addresses the customs and conduct of these leaders in relation to sanctuaries, precincts, shrines, temples and sacral objects. Focusing on a variety of Greek kings and captains, the author shows how military leaders were expected to react to the sacred sites of their foes. She further explores how they were likely to respond, and how their responses shaped the way such generals were viewed by their communities, by their troops, by their enemies and also by those like Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon who were writing their lives. This is a groundbreaking study of the significance of the sacred in warfare and the wider culture of antiquity.

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'Somerville is one of our finest gazetteers of the British countryside. He brings his formidable knowledge to bear on his personal quest to explore the cathedrals in this entrancing book' The Spectator Christopher Somerville, author of the acclaimed The January Man, pictured cathedrals as great unmoving bastions of tradition. But as he journeys among Britian's favourites, old and new, he discovers buildings and communities that have been in constant upheaval for a thousand years. Here are stories of the monarchs and bishops who ordered the construction of these buildings, the masons whose genius brought them into being, and the peasants who worked and died on the scaffolding. We learn of rogue saints exploited by holy sinners, the pomp and prosperity that followed these ships of stone, the towns that grew up in their shadows. Meeting believers and non-believers, architects and archaeologists, the cleaner who dusts the monuments and the mason who judges stone by its taste, we delve deep into the private lives and the uncertain future of these ever-voyaging Ships of Heaven. 'Somerville paints word pictures of exquisite quality' Church Times

Standing in the nave of a cathedral, it is hard not to wonder how ordinary human beings could have created sky-scraping, dizzyingly high buildings on which even the top-most parts were delicately decorated, in an age before even the simplest of power tools. Stone on Stone presents the full story of the men who built the cathedrals of the medieval era: who they were, how they lived and how with the simplest of hand tools they created the astonishing buildings that hundreds of years later still stand as monuments to their ingenuity and skill. Topics covered include the context for building such huge places of worship; the men who built: who they were, and the challenges they had to face; finding the materials; construction techniques; building control and finally, who paid for it all.

It is fascinating to think that many hundreds of generations of Londoners lie beneath the city without us knowing. Over many centuries burial grounds have been developed, built over and then forgotten, often beneath playgrounds, gardens or car parks. When modern development takes place, remains are disturbed and we are reminded of a London that has long since disappeared, particularly with recent archaeological discoveries across the city. In London's Hidden Burial Grounds, authors Robert Bard and Adrian Miles seek to uncover many of the capital's lost graveyards, often in the unlikeliest of places.