This book is, in the author's own encapsulation, “an extended essay on the form, function, and meaning of Christian worship spaces, how they have changed over time, and what we can learn about Christianity by looking at the places in which it has been practiced” (10). Following an introductory methodological rumination, six chapters treat the subject chronologically, though always through two controlling motifs: how power is made visible spatially (often articulated as a clergy–lay antithesis) and a dichotomy expressed as “formalism and non- or antiformalism”—which is the title of chapter 6.
That chapter concerns buildings constructed mostly after 1700 and provides a number of striking insights, mainly when churches in North America are adduced. It is refreshing to have buildings such as the Arch Street Friends Meeting House in Philadelphia and the Shaker Meeting House in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, analyzed as examples of worship space, and juxtaposed with the likes of the splendid Broadway Tabernacle (1859; now destroyed) in New York and the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. The final chapter, “Historicism, Modernism, and Space,” is based on buildings ranging from the more-or-less Gothic Revival Trinity on the Green (1816) in New Haven, Connecticut, to a mega-church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, built in 1990. Though there are nods to notable modernist buildings in Europe (Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp), the most instructive examples are taken from churches of several denominational traditions in the American Midwest.
Unfortunately, it is only with the final two chapters that one reaches original material and insightful analysis. The earlier chapters, attempting to cover in about 120 pages the subject from the second through the sixteenth century, are marked by over-generalization, inaccuracy, and a pervasive superficiality. These are serious criticisms, offered here reluctantly but with the reviewer's imperative to honest appraisal uppermost in mind. The book's credibility is seriously weakened by such sweeping, and largely meaningless, statements as (of the first two centuries of the Common Era) “This was not a period of strong individuals” (32); “through humanism, the laity gained unprecedented access to the divine” (80); “The use of medieval styles waned over the course of the fourteenth century” (94; Ely? Milan? York?); and “the sheltering arms of Bernini's colonnade [at St. Peter's, Rome] . . . reiterated the importance of the laity, circumscribing a space that invites the multitude to join and participate in worship” (108). Exclamation points seem superfluous.
The reader's confidence is further shaken by the use of tituli as a singular noun (21, 205); the information that monks lived in “individual cells [which] doubled as meditation spaces and sleeping quarters” (63; the vast majority lived in dormitories); that choir seats were “called misericords because of their uncomfortable character” (72; exactly backwards); that a “distancing effect” is caused by “the placement of the high altar in the western apse” (79; read eastern); that Luther supposedly nailed the Theses “to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral” (112; rather, to that of the Castle Church: it is important that Wittenberg was not a see city); or that Bath Abbey became a Church of England cathedral after the Reformation (128; it lost out to Wells).
The most distressing instance of superficiality is the chapter on the Middle Ages. It is based almost entirely on six buildings: Mont St-Michel, Chartres, Saint-Denis (not then a cathedral, as the caption to illustration 4-3 states), the Sainte-Chapelle, San Clemente in Rome, and a Stave church in Norway. No mention of, inter multa alia, Albi, Amiens, Caen, or Cluny; Bamberg or Cologne; Canterbury, Durham, Lincoln, Salisbury, or Wells. Josef Jungmann's great work on the history of the Mass liturgy is cited in its abridged English version (213) but in the two-volume, full translation on the next page. Occasionally (for example, 215 n. 1) undergraduate textbooks are cited as though they were scholarly references, and light or semi-popular works as though they were authoritative. The most obvious deficiency is in the handling of sources, a secondary reference being commonly offered even when the primary source is easily accessible; for example, a quotation from Palladio's Four Books of Architecture (1570) is given in an English translation of 1738 taken from a modern (1986) survey of Baroque architecture (216), whereas a Dover paperback translation is widely available.
These serious flaws undermine what is valuable in the book: as indicated above, the fresh insights into (largely) American church architecture of the past two centuries. Much is taken from the author's monograph When Church became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Whether the present work is intended as an extension in time and space of the approach implied by that title or as a theological/ sociological treatment of a vast (and vastly important) aspect of the Christian story is unclear; in either case, it cannot be said to have succeeded.
