A Communion of Shadows

Abstract

gion which is interdisciplinary but drawn primarily from history, art history, and theology. The book is organized into five sections. The first, “Foundations: Ancient and Modern,” includes a chapter on Roman London and essays which link London, through the Templars and in particular the Temple Church (Hundley and Griffith-Jones), to the foundational sacred city of Jerusalem. Emily Guerry’s account of devotional Gothic art at Westminister Abbey linked to the cult of the Holy Blood and English kingship shows how the interrelationship of sacred imaginaries and political ambitions are woven into London’s historic landscapes. The second section, “Visions of a Holy City,” explores these imaginaries of a sacred city—at once both transcendent but also corrupting, dystopian, and melancholy—through the illustrations of William Blake (Billingsley) and the Catholic Victorian artist John Rogers Herbert (Langham-Hooper), artistic engagements with Dante’s poems (Milbank), and recent documentary films (Hamilton). The third sub-section of the book, “Material Culture,” might be expected to be of most interest for readers of this journal. However, this is an uneven collection of essays which include accounts of the material culture and making of Gothic Victorian Churches (Lepine) and neglected unofficial burial grounds (Ledger-Lomas) alongside meditations on secular tower blocks and the representations of Sikhs in London cartoons. Although entitled simply “Modern Worship Places,” the fourth subsection of the book also takes a material culture approach to the relationship between art, religion and the sacred in London. Architect Shahed Saleem discusses the visual strategies he adopted in the construction of the Shahporan mosque in Whitechapel, choosing to embed his design in a vernacular British religious architecture although referencing the legacies of Islamic landscapes in London, while James Waters offers a reflection on the “post-secular” stained glass window Sacred Desert in the new multifaith center at the London School of Economics. These questions about the role of contemporary religious art in the city form the heart of the final section of the book on “Contemporary art and exhibitions,” which includes chapters on artworks commissioned for St. Paul’s Cathedral (Oakley), exhibitions of sacred objects at the British Museum (Parker) and the sole chapter about Jewish art (Dickson and Glasser). Visualising a Sacred City is an enjoyable read with richly described chapters supplemented with a good range of, albeit black and white, photographs. The collection is thought-provoking, raising questions about the distinctiveness of London as a sacred city and how such sacredness is reframed and remade by a contemporary secular, or certainly often non-Christian, population. Like any edited collection there is unevenness between the chapters, particularly in how they engage this central theme of the visual. More work might have been done in reflecting on what visualizing—as seeing or as representing— both illuminates and obscures. While there is an attempt to pluralize the approach with chapters on gurdwara building, Sikh cartoons, and Jewish art, these are not easily incorporated into a book whose central focus is the legacy of Christianity. For those whose primary focus is material religion the absence of more vernacular forms of religious art might be noted and there was perhaps more scope here for an approach which prioritizes the lived practices of religiosity which bring into being and remake the city as sacred. However, many of the contributors understand these dynamics, and as Alison Millbank reflects in her chapter’s discussion of contemporary artistic renditions of Dante’s visions, “the sacred is partly an act of imagination” (125).