This chapter examines Jewish sacred spaces in medieval and Early Modern Europe by looking at case studies. As its point of departure, it affirms that sacred spaces are socially constructed, dynamic, and often multifunctional products of human creation that respond to the changing needs of the communities they serve. These ideas are addressed through the examination not only of spatial arrangements or ornamental programs of Jewish sacred space, but also of the ways in which it created, claimed, or negotiated sacred loci within the built environment. In this way, this chapter presents a complex and historically grounded picture of Jewish life and religious practice from the onset of the European Middle Ages, when Jews lost the opportunity for citizenship, to the beginning of their emancipation from these restrictions in the early nineteenth century.
This study aims to interpret the visual qualities of the Assumption Chapel, located in the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria La Real de Las Huelgas, Burgos. Rejecting the “mudejar” paradigm often used to explain the chapel’s connections to Andalusi architecture, the article instead considers its relationships to a group of twelfth- and thirteenth-century domed churches in Iberia and the French Pyrenees, as well as to Las Huelgas’s adjacent, late-Romanesque cloister. In so doing, it situates the Assumption Chapel in a broader context of monuments related to penitence and crusade in the Holy Land and Iberia. It also considers the chapel’s form and function in the light of Las Huelgas’s ritual topography. Most broadly, this study shows how seemingly incongruent visual languages—in this case Romanesque and Andalusi—can comprise a coherent program of imagery.
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