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Sacred Spaces in City Streets: The Medieval Procession and Transitory Spatiality

‘Sacred space’ is often connected to a specific site; however, the medieval understanding of space was not necessarily static. Current scholarship has not adequately addressed the role of medieval religious processions in creating movable spaces wherein the secular streets of a city become temporarily sanctified space. In this paper, I contend that processions ignite their paths and surrounding topography with a sense of the sacred that lacks the fixity of spatial permanence.

My presentation focuses on the specific case of religious processions at Le Puy-en-Velay (France). Through investigating the liturgical ordinals of the cathedral and primary accounts of these events, this paper seeks to explore how the urban secular environment of the medieval town combined with the performative and transformative power of processions to create moveable spaces that could ignite these mobile spaces with sacral qualities or conversely, could violate these spaces with acts of violence.

I conclude that medieval religious processions thus go beyond what Victor Turner has described as the “liminal” spaces of ritual and are connected Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopic space. Finally, I contend that the understanding of the ‘sacred space’ of processions are manipulated from their medieval origins through the cultivation of national heritage and collective memory. This discussion will serve as a coda to the question of transitory spatiality and seeks to challenge notions of the immobility of space when considering sacred sites.