Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.(Book review) From: Church History | Date: March 1, 2008| Author: Wandel, Lee Palmer | COPYRIGHT 2008 American Society of Church History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. xviii + 349 pp. $99.95 cloth.

What makes a space sacred? These essays have as their collective point of departure the division Mircea Eliade posited in 1959 between "the sacred" and "the profane," a division that Eliade himself held to be "a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world" (The Sacred and the Pro...