Since the publication of Henri Lefebvre's La production de l'espace (1974), scholars of religion increasingly have begun to consider the effects of space on the experience of the sacred. Entering this vibrant field of investigation is Professor Leonie Hicks, whose Religious Life in Normandy, 1050–1300 examines the daily practices of Norman clergy and laity in the years 1050–1300. Hicks argues that, during these years, as church reformers sought to demarcate and define exclusively sacred space, clergy and laity worked both in cooperation and disputation to create contested, “lived” spaces in various putatively sacred arenas such as churches, monasteries, leper houses, and hospitals.

Hicks organizes her investigation of sacred space into four analytical categories: display, reception and intrusion, enclosure, and family. The first chapter, on monastic display, is dependent on the work of Penelope Johnson, Barbara Hanawalt, and Roberta Gilchrist and maintains that religious communities in Normandy used various mediums of display, such as clothing and architecture, to articulate their collective identity. Clothing, Hicks argues, was one of the most visible and portable means of display, capable in some instances of controlling access to the wider world, like when a wimple acts as a “portable cloister.” On a more communal level, the chapter house displayed penitential punishments that reaffirmed obedience to the rule and heightened a sense of the ecclesiastical power to punish. This chapter, much like the remaining three that follow, serves as a detailed catalog of examples, though regrettably the author neglects to analyze the cataloged material in any conclusive sense. For example, in a section on public penance as a form of display, the author, rather than drawing more general conclusions from her observation that the visitation records of Archbishop Eudes of Rouen only imposed severe public penances on men, notes simply that “a fuller study of the gendered implications of penance is needed” (46). It would seem that this particular study of “space, gender and social pressure” in Norman religious life, as the subtitle reads, would be just such an opportunity to offer new arguments about the gender dynamics at work in Eudes's use of public space to exert social pressure by disciplining male bodies.

In a chapter on “reception and intrusion,” Hicks investigates the uncomfortable tension arising from the fact that sacred space required at once the removal of the offending presence of the laity and at the same time their “reception,” which sustained donations. As the author notes, “there was a continuing conflict between the duties to provide hospitality, the financial needs of communities, and the need to maintain enclosure as sacred space set aside for the worship of God” (60). The third chapter then takes up the subject of enclosure, which raises a similar set of tensions. One difficulty involves the relationship between monks and nuns and their interaction with the outside world—that claustration required the maintenance of sacred space while at the same time it depended on enough public visibility to guarantee donations. Another tension deals with monks' relationship to one another. Monastic communities consisted of people who cloistered themselves in order to remain separate from society, living apart from the world and yet, in the bonds of communal living, opportunities for isolation were scarce. Enclosure, the author concludes, was not limited to physical space but also extended to psychic space evidenced by monastic dress, custody of the body, mental observance of the monastic rule, and the laity's respect for it. In the final chapter, on family, Hicks observes that families consist of “the first point of contact between religious and secular spheres,” thus addressing the themes she has already investigated—display, reception and intrusion, and enclosure—and, like them, introducing tension into the community. Family ties affected monastic space by the physical fact of their intrusion into the community and by interfering in the lives of members by recalling them from the cloister. At the same time, family ties could never be severed entirely because communities depended on them for endowments. Although Hicks does not directly address the mental and contemplative space occupied by family in the daily round of prayers for the deceased, she does account for the practice of family burials on monastic ground and the presence of tombs in the sacred space of the cloister. Like the priest's wife (a subject she tackles in chapter 2), family members' ties to their professed loved ones created ambiguity, blurring the boundaries between laity and clergy in their ongoing obligations to one another.

Hicks's source material for this study includes chronicles, statutes, miracula, and, by far the most frequently cited sources, the visitation records of Archbishop Eudes of Rouen and Abbot Stephen of Lexington. It should be noted that the vast majority of her research deals with monastic life and not with broader “religious life” as experienced in the sacred space of cathedrals, hospitals, parish churches, and leper houses. Hicks believes that her choice of sources will take this study beyond the lifeless boundaries of an institutional history of the Church in Normandy to the “lived” activities of medieval Christians. In this effort, she is successful, illustrating through extensive textual examples that sacred space was indeed contested, co-owned, and lived in by both the clergy and laity. Her overall argument is that sacred space was dynamic, that spatial practice was “fluid and allowed for an interaction of different groups in society” (161). The reader, however, expects something a bit more incisive than this argument, particularly with regard to “religious life,” or how the experience of religion in Normandy was heightened or hampered by such fluidity. In a similar manner, Hicks introduces the reader, straightaway on page 2, to her theoretical underpinnings, all big names of the spatial turn in the humanities such as Bourdieu and Lefebvre. But then these theoreticians of space vanish when Hicks proceeds to the body of the book; we never see her integrate her source material into the theoretical underpinnings that she has professed as crucial to her interpretation. It seems that a deeper consideration of, for example, the habitus that emerged from the daily occupation of a particular Norman religious space might yield greater insight into the “religious” life of medieval Normandy, and of how its various spaces served to create and deepen one's religious experiences. Religious Life in Normandy is thus illustrative of the codependence of laity and clergy in sacred space, though it is much more of a reporting on, a glimpse into, the life of the religious, rather than an analysis of religious life. That is, it does not investigate the practices of sacred space and how they contributed to religious experience; it is rather more of a record of various social interactions among clergy and laity as they took place in sacred spaces.