Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, C.300-1200, The. Oxford Historical Monographs (Electronic book text)

This book explores the way in which church architecture from the earliest centuries of Christianity has been shaped by holy bones - the physical remains or 'relics' of those whom the Church venerated as saints.; The Church's holy dead continued to exercise an influence on the living from beyond the grave, and their earthly remains provided a focus for prayer. The memoriae, house-churches and crypts of early Christian Rome; the elaborately decorated monuments containing the bodies of the bishops of Merovingian Gaul; the revival of ring crypts in the Carshingian empire; the crypts, 'tomb-shrines', and later high shrines of medieval England, all demonstrate how the presence of a holy body within; a church influenced its very architecture. This is the first complete modern study of this hitherto somewhat neglected aspect of medieval church architecture in western Europe.