This chapter discusses how East Roman emperors utilized the theology of divine chastisement, particularly the efficacy accorded to repentance, to their advantage. During the earthquakes of 396 and 447, Emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II, respectively, led mass penitential rituals and performed public acts of humility until the quakes ceased. Such public acts of repentance posed a political risk to emperors since they could appear to confirm their responsibility for the disasters. However, imperial supporters like bishop Severian of Gabala and historian Socrates Scholasticus highlighted the quakes’ cessation rather than their cause, and located the power to halt quakes in the humble prayers of the rulers themselves rather than worshippers as a collective. In the aftermath of these earthquakes, authorities framed Roman emperors as “New Davids” – effective spiritual intercessors as well as military protectors – inaugurating a biblical typology for emperors that would continue throughout Byzantine history.

This chapter concerns Constantinople’s liturgical rite for the commemoration of earthquakes in its original, fifth-century form. Celebrated each year on the anniversary of certain quakes, worshippers ritually reenacted local earthquakes, performing a long, penitential procession that retraced the earthquake evacuation route. The rite was structured by biblical readings, hymns, and prayers that framed the people of Constantinople as the sinful, biblical people of God. In ritual performance, worshippers could envision quakes as manifestations of divine wrath against the sins of the city, and their collective repentance as effective in restoring stability to the earth and balance within the human-environment-divine relationship. After discussing the liturgical rite, its performance, and theology, the chapter locates the origins of its theology of divine chastisement in local homilies and ritual responses to earlier quakes, focusing in particular on the archbishop John Chrysostom’s Constantinopolitan homilies on earthquakes from the early fifth century.

This chapter compares the European experience of violence in sacred space. Churches are not normally associated with violence. They were, after all, designed for worship. But because in most communities they were the pre-eminent site for the display of social capital, they were theatres of conflict. Although disorder inside sacred space was frequent in England and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serious incidents such as these were relatively rare. One reason for this was the absence of urban factions. In the European league table of church murders, Italy takes the title, with France in a distant second place. Precise figures are hard to compute, but victims certainly ran into the hundreds in Italy and the dozens in France. The reasons why Italian, and to a lesser extent French, churches were so frequently scenes of violence is investigated. The comparisons and contrasts between different regions and states helps to illuminate and explain the different forms and trajectories taken by enmity. In both France and Italy churches were sites for politicised violence. The chapter considers the role of assassination, patrimonialism and anti-clericalism mainly in the French and Italian contexts, and then broadens to explore sacred space as a theatre for staging social conflict across Europe.

This chapter explores the enduring intersections of popular religion, violence, and ethno-national memory in Belfast. Wider debates on the nexus between religion, violence, and politics are integrated with recent empirical data on the contemporary post-conflict city. The chapter demonstrates how conflicting narratives of nationalism, imperialism, and popular religion materialize in the “sacred spaces,” public rituals, and territorial enclosures of a nominally secular city located historically in the heartlands of Western imperialism.

A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region not only a revered spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews but also a source of a living sacred history that continues to inform present-day realities and religious identities. This book explores the Early Modern Holy Land (1517–1700) as a critical place in which many early modern Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terrae Sanctae), the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian conflict by 1517. This contestation thrusts into relief the Holy Land’s importance both a frontier and sacred center of an embattled Catholic tradition, and in consequence, as a critical site of Catholic renewal and reinvention.

This chapter explores the liturgical world of compunction – the sacred space of the Byzantine liturgy. It focuses on the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, which was the epicentre of worship in Constantinople, and investigates the liturgical significance of Novella 137, the sixth-century edict of Emperor Justinian that betokened the compunctious character of the Byzantine Eucharist. It also examines the liturgical commentaries of Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and Germanos of Constantinople for further evidence of experiencing sacred song in Byzantium, before briefly touching upon affective mysticism and its significance for Byzantine hymnody. Finally, it probes the liturgical and hermeneutical framework for compunction in Byzantium – Great Lent and the Triodion.