The Safavid period represents an immensely rich chapter in the history of Iranian architecture. In this discussion of Safavid architecture in the context of its political, social and religious milieu, Kishwar Rizvi gives special consideration to the shrine of Shaykh Safi, built in AD 1334, as an important template for an emergent Safavid taste. Of both regal and religious significance, the shrine's direct relationship to imperial power is unique in Islamic architecture and provides valuable information about the methods of architectural benefaction prevalent in early modern Iran. Rizvi examines the ways in which the transition from a devotional aesthetic to an imperial one represented the young dynasty's imperial aspirations, and affected a wide range of public buildings from mosques to palaces during the early Safavid period and beyond.

In Glorious Temples or Babylonic Whores, Anne-Francoise Morel offers an account of the intellectual and cultural history of places of worship in Stuart England. Official documents issued by the Church of England rarely addressed issues regarding the status, function, use, and design of churches; but consecration sermons turn time and again to the conditions and qualities befitting a place of worship in Post-Reformation England. Placing the church building directly in the midst of the heated discussions on the polity and ceremonies of the Church of England, this book recovers a vital lost area of architectural discourse. It demonstrates that the religious principles of church building were enhanced by, and contributed to, scientific developments in fields outside the realm of religion, such as epistemology, the theory of sense perception, aesthetics, rhetoric, antiquarianism, and architecture.

Orkney's Italian Chapel was built by Italian POWs held on the island during the Second World War. In the sixty-five years since it was built it has become an enduring symbol of peace and hope around the world. The story of who built the chapel and how it came into existence and survived against all the odds is both fascinating and inspiring. Author Philip Paris's extensive research into the creation of the Italian Chapel has uncovered many new facts, and this comprehensive new book is the definitive account of the chapel and those who built it. It is a book that has waited to be written for sixty-five years.

In Spiritus Loci Bert Daelemans, who graduated as an architect and a theologian, provides an interdisciplinary method for the theological assessment of church architecture. Rather than a theory, this method is based on case studies of contemporary buildings (1995-2015), which are often criticized for lacking theological depth. In a threefold method, the author brings to light the ways in which architecture can be theology - or theotopy - by focusing on topoi (places) rather than logoi (words). Churches reveal our relationship with God by engaging our body, mind, and community. This method proves relevant not only for the way we perceive these buildings, but also for the way we use them, especially in our prophetic engagement for a better world.

Read the Jewish Idea Daily's review here. In 1789, when George Washington was elected the first president of the United States, laymen from all six Jewish congregations in the new nation sent him congratulatory letters. He replied to all six. Thus, after more than a century of Jewish life in colonial America the small communities of Jews present at the birth of the nation proudly announced their religious institutions to the country and were recognized by its new leader. By this time, the synagogue had become the most significant institution of American Jewish life, a dominance that was not challenged until the twentieth century, when other institutions such as Jewish community centers or Jewish philanthropic organizations claimed to be the hearts of their Jewish communities. Concise yet comprehensive, The Synagogue in America is the first history of this all-important structure, illuminating its changing role within the American Jewish community over the course of three centuries. From Atlanta and Des Moines to Los Angeles and New Orleans, Marc Lee Raphael moves beyond the New York metropolitan area to examine Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstuctionist synagogue life everywhere. Using the records of approximately 125 Jewish congregations, he traces the emergence of the synagogue in the United States from its first instances in the colonial period, when each of the half dozen initial Jewish communities had just one synagogue each, to its proliferation as the nation and the American Jewish community grew and diversified. Encompassing architecture, forms of worship, rabbinic life, fundraising, creative liturgies, and feminism, The Synagogue in America is the go-to history for understanding the synagogue's significance in American Jewish life.

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these ‘traumas of absence’ – the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces – can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues. This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home. By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.

This is the first detailed study of Scottish post-Reformation church interiors for fifty years. This study follows on from Yate's standard work "Buildings, Faith and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600-1900" (OUP 1991, revised edition 2000) and "Liturgical Space" in Western Europe since the Reformation (Ashgate, 2008) to provide the first detailed study of Scottish post-Reformation church interiors for fifty years.In the intervening period many of the buildings described by George Hay have been demolished, converted to non-ecclesiastical use or liturgically reordered. However, this study goes further to include many surviving examples not noted by Hay, and extends his work further into the nineteenth century, with a detailed study of buildings up to 1860, and with a more general consideration of later nineteenth and early twentieth century church architecture in Scotland. The detailed study of developments in Scotland, especially those in the Presbyterian churches, are set in the context of comparative developments in other parts of Britain and Europe, especially those in the Reformed churches of the Netherlands and Switzerland to create a groundbreaking new study by an established author.

Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Samuel Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire. This debate involved many of the major figures of the era, and at its core questioned what it meant for any given place or building to be thought of as specially holy. Many of the signature moments of the Carolingian Renaissance, in church reform, law, and political theory, depended on rival and bitterly controversial definitions of sacred architecture in the material world.

When Seon (Zen) Buddhism was first introduced to Korea around Korea's late Silla and early Goryeo eras, the function of the "beopdang" (Dharma hall) was transfused to the lecture hall found in ancient Buddhist temples, establishing a pivotal area within the temple compound called the "upper monastic area." By exploring the structural formation and dissolution of the upper monastic area, the author shows how Korea established its own distinctive Seon temples, unlike those of China and Japan, in the course of assimilating a newly-introduced foreign culture as its own. To accomplish this, the author analyzed the inscriptions on stone monuments which recorded the lives of eminent monks and also numerous excavated temple ruins. These analyses give us a new perspective on the evolution of the upper monastic area, which had the beopdang as its center, at a time when early Seon temples were being established under very adverse and unstable circumstances. The exploration of the spatial organization and layout of Korean Seon temple architecture has illuminated the continuity between Korean Buddhist temples of both the ancient and medieval eras.

The architecture of the Islamic world is predominantly considered in terms of a dual division between 'tradition' and 'modernity' - a division which, Saeid Khaghani here argues, has shaped and limited the narrative applied to this architecture. Khaghani introduces and reconsiders the mosques of eighth- to fifteenth-century Iran in terms of poststructural theory and developments in historiography in order to develop a brand new dialectical framework. Using the examples of mosques such as the Friday Mosques in Isfahan and Yazd as well as the Imam mosque in Isfahan, Khaghani presents a new way of thinking about and discussing Islamic architecture, making this valuable reading for all interested in the study of the art, architecture and material culture of the Islamic world.

The celebrated Great Mosque of Damascus was built in the early eighth century by the Umayyad caliph al-Wal?d b. 'Abd al-Malik. This book provides a detailed study of this Mosque. Using textual, visual, and archaeological evidence, the author attempts to reconstruct some of the basic formal and decorative features of the Umayyad mosque, to locate it within its broader urban context, and to consider its role within al-Wal?d's unprecedented programme of architectural patronage. The work explores the intracultural and intercultural functions of religious architecture within an official visual discourse intended to project a distinctive Muslim identity in a manner determined by Umayyad political aspirations. It will be of particular interest to those concerned with the relationship between the Umayyad caliphate and Byzantium.

Britain is a treasure trove of medieval architecture. Almost every village and town in the land has a church that was built during the period, whose history is legible - to those who know how to look - in every arch, capital, roof vault, and detail of window tracery. By learning how to identify the stylistic phases that resulted from shifts in architectural fashion, it is possible to date each part of a church to within a decade or two; this book introduces all the key features of each succeeding style, from Anglo-Saxon and Norman through to the three great gothic styles, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. It will be indispensable to anyone who enjoys exploring medieval churches, and who wants to understand and appreciate their beauty more deeply.

Ritual and architecture have provided the abstract and the tangible foundations of group worship from the era of the first Christians to the present-day ceremonial of the Church. Through the centuries the buildings that house liturgical practices have developed their own specific individuality, and the interpretation of the liturgy is reflected in architecture, a reflection in stone of community prayer lives. The early Syrian churches, the Roman basilicas, the Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque styles of the Western churches are symbols of the adaptation of architecture to liturgy—of style to content. Father Bouyer replaces myths and misconceptions about Church liturgy with facts based on archeological findings and, in doing so, gives an entirely new concept of the importance of Church architecture as an implementation of liturgical worship. "Builders of modern churches, says Father Bouyer, "seem to lack that inspired touch.... We try to furnish our churches with features picked at random from old routine styles." To make Church architecture a contemporary witness to the liturgy, it is the author's belief that past practices must be examined to see if they are irrevocably welded to the past or flexible enough to reapply to the present. To discover—or rediscover—the meaning of the liturgy demands an over-all perspective necessary to remodel and structure our churches of today.

This handy, easy-to-carry book provides the reader with a strictly visual approach to reading the architecture of churches. Covering all the ecclesiastical building types of Western Christianity, readers are taken on a journey tracing the development of the church building from the simple stone halls of the Anglo-Saxon period right through to the eclectic designs of the nineteenth century. Another addition to the bestselling 'How to Read...' series, How to Read Churches is a practical guide, showing readers how to search for architectural clues that tell hidden stories expressing the liturgical function and spiritual symbolism of a church building. The perfect companion to How to Read Buildings.

Westminster came into existence in the later Anglo-Saxon period, and by the mid-11th century, when Edward the Confessor's great new abbey was built, it was a major royal centre two miles south-west of the City of London. Within a century or so, it had become the principal seat of government in England, and this series of twenty-eight papers covers new research on the topography, buildings, art-history, architecture and archaeology of Westminster's two great establishments - Abbey and Palace. Part I begins with studies of the topography of the area, an account of its Roman-period finds and an historiographical overview of the archaeology of the Abbey. Edward the Confessor's enigmatic church plan is discussed and the evidence for later Romanesque structures is assembled for the first time. Five papers examine aspects of Henry III's vast new Abbey church and its decoration. A further four cover aspects of the later medieval period, coronation, and Sir George Gilbert Scott's impact as the Abbey's greatest Surveyor of the Fabric. A pair of papers examines the development of the northern precinct of the Abbey, around St Margaret's Church, and the remarkable buildings of Westminster School, created within the remains of the monastery in the 17th and 18th centuries. Part II part deals with the Palace of Westminster and its wider topography between the late 11th century and the devastating fire of 1834 that largely destroyed the medieval palace. William Rufus's enormous hall and its famous roofs are completely reassessed, and comparisons discussed between this structure and the great hall at Caen. Other essays reconsider Henry III's palace, St Stephen's chapel, the king's great chamber (the 'Painted Chamber') and the enigmatic Jewel Tower. The final papers examine the meeting places of Parliament and the living accommodation of the MPs who attended it, the topography of the Palace between the Reformation and the fire of 1834, and the building of the New Palace which is better known today as the Houses of Parliament.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable and enthusiastic increase of interest in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Japan. The legends of these temples and shrines are recorded in many historical manuscripts and these genealogies have such great significance that some of them have been registered as national treasures of Japan. They are indispensable to elucidate the history of these temples and shrines, in addition to the formation process of the ancient Japanese nation. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the genealogies and legends of ancient Japanese clans. It advances the study of ancient Japanese history by utilizing new analytical perspective from not only the well-known historical manuscripts relied upon by previous researchers, but also valuable genealogies and legends that previous researchers largely neglected.