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Michele Bacci, Kathryn Blair Moore. The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1725–1726, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy217
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Extract
As the subtitle makes clear, the primary focus of Kathryn Blair Moore’s The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land is not the architectural history of the Holy Land, but rather the multiple and shifting ways in which the buildings enshrining the major pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem came to be perceived, invested with specific meanings, transformed, and reconstructed in Western Europe from late antiquity through the sixteenth century. The basic assumption is that such chronological contexts are marked by significantly different perceptions of the function and meaning of such architectural archetypes, which exerted a strong impact on the ways in which their forms were evoked and reconstructed in the Christian world.
In the aim of providing an answer to why the earliest reconstructions of the Holy Sepulcher appear in Benedictine contexts, part I, “The Symbolization of Holy Land Architecture,” lays emphasis on the role played by the descriptions and plans included in Adamnán of Iona’s late-seventh-century Libellus de locis sanctis, which came to be widely diffused in the Western monastic context. The author indicates that the Anastasis-like chapels in Fulda, St. Gall, and other places were largely indebted to the intermediary of pilgrimage literature, which conveyed the semantic overlap of the holy sites with their monumental frames. Unlike martyria sheltering hallowed bodies, the Holy Land buildings were meant to evoke the paradoxical relationship of absence and presence that lies at the core of Christian incarnational doctrine: their outward architectural form could therefore be taken as establishing a direct yet imperfect and inaccurate connection with the supernatural dimension. They suggested, namely, that the places where Christ had been materially though impermanently present foreshadowed his eternal residence, Jerusalem’s heavenly double, where he existed in his plenitude.
