The other day someone asked me when the Oxford Handbook to Oxford Handbooks would be published. I can hardly mock. I have, after all, contributed to at least two of them – and I have used very many others for my research. But the proliferation of volumes in the series is a remarkable fact in modern publishing history. Volumes issued in the second half of 2022 included The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical, The Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics, The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, and parts of The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space.
All Oxford Handbooks are intended, in the publisher’s words, to offer ‘an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research. Specially commissioned essays from leading international figures in the discipline give critical examination of the progress and direction of debates, providing scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives.’ Yet each Handbook approaches this task in different ways. Some attempt to be encyclopaedic, producing textbook-like syntheses of the relevant literature. Others choose instead to offer a succession of more narrowly focused, research-based essays.
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space does both. Its 33 chapters vary in length and depth. They also – and this is something I have never come across before – differ in referencing systems, with at least three conflicting forms of critical apparatus employed. The approaches taken range from panoramic views of the field, to brief and highly individual accounts of visits to one particular site or other. A dazzling array of differing theoretical texts are cited and even the organizing theme of the book is not always foregrounded. A few contributors focus rather more on liturgy, Church history, or architectural style than on sacred space itself. One or two even suggest that sacred space is an unhelpful category of analysis.
Read cover to cover, the effect is rather like attending a large academic conference made up of a series of parallel sessions. Indeed, it very precisely feels like the annual convention of an American learned society. Three quarters of the contributors are based in North America – and, indeed, more of them have academic posts in North Carolina than in Africa, Asia, and South America combined. Sure enough, the whole project grew out of gatherings convened by the American Academy of Religion.
Just like any conference, some parts work better than others. But, overall, this volume will be of real value to many different sorts of readers. Truly global in its coverage and seeking to tell a story that begins in the Neolithic and ends in the present day, The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space is impressive in both its ambition and its scope. It is divided into three unequal sections. First is a collection of seven chapters on theory and methods. Last are three chapters dealing, successively, with memorials, shrines and cemeteries. In between comes more than a score of chapters with a precise regional focus. Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the African diaspora, Europe and the Mediterranean, and the Americas are all – a little unequally – dealt with. The editor also provides a helpful introductory essay on ‘thinking about religious space’.
The best of these pieces manage to do exactly what an Oxford Handbook claims to do and precisely what you might hope from a high-quality conference paper: providing a higher-level introduction to key themes while also sharing original research work. In the first section, Andrea Longhi’s contribution on the decommissioning and reuse of sacred space provides a dense but consistently stimulating analysis: ‘A church’, she argues, ‘is not merely a shell, but a clock of concurrent worship cycles’ (p. 89). In the final section, Brett Henderson provides a fascinating account of a miracle-working shrine in New Mexico. At the heart of the Santuario de Chimayó is the pocito, or little well, that produces holy dirt which believers believe has healing properties. Again, the author shows that this is a sort of spatial palimpsest in which successive layers of history can be found.
Within the substantial section of regional studies there are also some quite strikingly interesting pieces. Wei-Cheng Lin is insightful on the religious spaces of pre-modern China. Marilyn J. Chiat provides an exemplary survey of material on the form and function of the ancient Synagogue. David Simonowitz uses a case study of a Jordanian State Mosque to raise bigger questions about Islamic sacred spaces. Daniel Dei is especially interesting on West African religion, creating a typology of spaces: landscapes, ‘time-dependent’, and ‘socially sacralised’, as well as more familiar buildings. There is a fascinating study of Spiritual Baptists in the West Indies by Brendan Jamal Thornton and another, equally intriguing, account of a Sufi shrine in Pennsylvania by Merin Shobhana Xavier.
Less successful are those chapters – and there are several – that focus narrowly on the author’s own work without providing much context or sense of its place within the field as a whole. It is also a shame that a book on space should have so few images – and those so poorly presented. The lack of attention paid to Anglican and Episcopalian themes is worth noting, too. The index makes one reference to ‘Episcopalians, Anglo-Catholic’, and that is to a single sentence; but otherwise the main subject of this journal is subsumed within the broader category of Protestantism. I suspect that readers of this journal might disagree.
It would be wrong, however, to finish on a negative note. Even the less immediately appealing chapters are often worth reading and the whole enterprise can only elicit admiration. Were this indeed a regular conference, I would certainly attend again next year.
