Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern ... - Newberry Library

Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7this affiliation with Jerusalem may also have been inspired by Clonmacnoise’s location at the centerof Ireland. In his description of Jerusalem in the seventh-century De Locis Sanctis, Adomnánproclaims that the city is the central point of the earth, a belief reflected in later medieval mappamundi. 28 This cosmological schema, or to use Henri Lefebvre’s terminology, “representation ofspace,” may also have informed the phenomena of asceticism and the built environment ofecclesiastical communities more generally. 29Jerusalem was the center point of the world in terms of both geography and sanctity. The site ofJesus’s death and resurrection, it was the epicenter from which Christianity was to spreadthroughout the world. This representation of space goes some way to explaining the symbolic valueof Atlantic islands for medieval ascetics—what is more peripheral than the islands on the extremeperiphery of an island on the extreme periphery of the world? Even if this cosmological schema wasto some extent exclusive or esoteric knowledge, I would argue that the idea of orientation was stillfundamental to eremetic monasticism: ascetic retreat is necessarily retreat from something.In this case, the essential boundedness of islands, their demarcation from the surroundingterrestrial world by an expanse of water requiring specialized knowledge and favorable conditions totraverse, may also partially account for their allure. Boundaries were in fact a defining component ofecclesiastical sites. The early eighth-century law tract, Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, prescribes thefollowing:There ought to be two or three termini (enclosures) around a holy place: the first inwhich we allow no one at all to enter except priests, because laymen do not comenear it, nor women unless they are clerics; the second, into the streets the crowds ofcommon people, not much given to wickedness, we allow to enter; the third, inwhich men who have been guilty of homicide, adulterers and prostitutes, withpermission according to custom, we do not prevent from going within. Whence theyare called, the first sanctissimus, the second sanctior, the third sanctus, bearing honouraccording to their differences. 30The hierarchy of sanctity apparent here, usually attributed to a combination of indigenous andbiblical precedents, might also be seen as a micro-scale reiteration of the cosmological scheme of themappa mundi with the holy of holiest Jerusalem at the center. The material reiteration of thiscosmological notion of hierarchic sanctity in the built environment of medieval ecclesiasticalcommunities made them both orientated and orientating spaces. To again adopt Lefebvre’s terminology,as reifications of dominant cosmological schemas (“representations of space”) they functioned as“representational spaces,” the perception of which worked to naturalize a culturally specific and28 Ó Carragáin, Churches, 85. D. Meehan, ed, and trans., Adomnán’s De Loci Sanctis, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, III.(Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958), 56-7.29 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974, 1991), 33.30 Doherty, “Monastic Town,” 59.27