Robert G. Ousterhout

Bonna D. Wescoat

This book investigates the role of architecture in the construction of sacred experience in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Byzantine cultures.

Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium

Architecture of the Sacred

Malcolm Campbell

Steven Brooke

John L. Varriano

Views of Rome

In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.

Bonna D. Wescoat

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