This lavishly illustrated, broad-reaching, and exceptionally learned volume is a treasure. Moore's aim is to present new ways of thinking about a much-studied set of architectural monuments that will challenge her readers to view them as dynamic entities instead of static edifices. Far more than a descriptive history of some famous structures or even their influence on later building types, Moore attends to their symbolic power and both their concrete and imagined recreation across time and space. In her own words she describes her project as “not conceived as a traditional history of the lives of buildings” but rather a consideration of “how this group of buildings first entered the European imagination, especially by means of the generative capacity of language, and how symbolic actions of appropriation, re-creation, and destruction came to impinge on the physical reality of these buildings in the Holy Land” (xv). To successfully achieve this end, Moore draws upon an enormous range of visual art, written texts, epigraphy, archeological reports, topographical studies, and architectural drawings and covers a vast range of themes, places, and historical eras.

A short review cannot hope to describe all that this illuminating volume surveys and, as the author herself acknowledges, the vast corpus of literature on the architecture of the Holy Land could easily overwhelm a neophyte. Fortunately, Moore does not try to tackle questions about what motivated the initial identification of various sites, engage in arguments about the precise construction of first buildings, or delve into complicated questions about earlier Christian attitudes toward sacred space. These issues are well-rehearsed elsewhere. She is more interested in exploring the varied ways these buildings were described, perceived, represented, and recreated over the centuries. However, more than simply summarizing these developments, Moore's project is to ask why they came about and what that tells us about the ways memory, intention, and imagination collectively made meaning out of them.

One of Moore's guiding hypotheses is that this architecture's distinctive quality is largely due to its association with the lives and the absent bodies of Christ and the Virgin Mary. She argues that these buildings function as symbolic presences of those holy persons, insofar as they give “shape to the sites of past bodily presence” and as such are a special type of relic. Moreover, these physical monuments also contribute to the work of biblical interpretation and constructive theology. In contrast to earlier studies, Moore explains that this also means that replication of a structure like the Holy Sepulcher elsewhere did not aim at making an exact copy but rather to recreate the image or experience of a place and to replicate its spiritual significance.

In addition to monumental buildings, Moore attends to other kinds of architectural reproductions, in particular verbal descriptions or visual illuminations from book culture from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Reformation eras. She incorporates the diaries of pilgrims, the drawings and diagrams of illustrators and architects, bread stamps, souvenir ampullae, and miniature models that were used as reliquaries. She looks at all these as signifiers that carry both religious and political significance and carefully critiques the traditional interpretation of these recreations simply as approximate reproductions in contrast to later ideas of fidelity to prototypes.

This book follows a basic chronological approach. Its first section begins with a brief discussion of the origins of Holy Land architecture and the Constantinian building program in Jerusalem and then moves rather quickly to the ways these structures were transported in a variety of symbolic forms to other parts of the world, from Rome to Constantinople to the Carolingian West. The second section turns to the monastic recreations of the Holy Sepulcher in Europe in more detail. Moore gives significant attention to the changing fortunes of architecture during the Crusades and then, in part 3, to the Franciscans as custodians and promoters of the Holy Land (as well as an alternative or proxy Holy Land) as a destination for Christian pilgrims. The final section of the book considers the pilgrimage accounts and book culture of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations into the early modern era. Finally, a brief epilogue takes the reader through the last two centuries and into the present and offers perspective on the ways the Holy Land was reexamined and reimagined by American Protestants, missionaries to Jews in Jerusalem, contemporary residents, users of digital media, and even developers of theme parks based on the Holy Land.

It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive, scholarly, and thoughtful analysis of this topic, or to find a flaw worth mentioning. The press should be congratulated for allowing the author to have so many illustrations, including many full-page and in color. Both endnotes and bibliography are extensive and are a huge contribution in themselves. This book will inform and delight all kinds of readers, from interested non-professionals to experts in a wide range of scholarly disciplines. In short, this is a book for anyone who yearns for “lasting traces of a rich and contested history of imagining and longing for a real Jerusalem” (298).