Andrew Spicer is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Sarah Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Exeter, UK.

Contents: Preface; Defining the holy: the delineation of sacred space, Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer. Part I: Domestic space and devotion in the Middle Ages, Diana Webb; The domesticity of sacred space in the 15th-century Netherlands, Jeanne Nuechterlein; Private rooms in the monastic architecture of Habsburg Spain, Lisa A. Banner; Forbidden sacred spaces in Reformation England, Richard L. Williams; Designing for Protestant worship: the private chapels of the Cecil family, Annabel Ricketts with Claire Gapper and Caroline Knight. Part II: A northern Jerusalem: transforming the spatial geography of the convent of Wienhausen, June L. Mecham; Using material culture to define holy space: the Bromholm project, Tim Pestell; The liturgical use of space in 13th-century Flanders, Stijn Bossuyt; 'God will have a house': sacred space and rites of consecration in early 17th-century England, Andrew Spicer; 'Pure and white': reformed space for worship in early 17th-century Hungary, Graeme Murdock; Rubens's Raising of the Cross in context: the 'early Christian' past and the evocation of the sacred in post-tridentine Antwerp, Cynthia Lawrence; The consecration of the civic realm, Judi Loach; The priest, the Quakers and the Second Conventicle Act: the battle for Gracechurch Street Meeting House, 1670, Simon Dixon; La Ville Sonnant: the politics of sacred space in Avignon on the eve of the French Revolution, Eric Johnson. Index.

Holy sites - churches, monasteries, shrines - defined religious experience and were fundamental to the geography and social history of medieval and early modern Europe. How were these sacred spaces defined? How were they created, used, recognized and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions, by considering the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane.