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Kathryn Blair Moore, The ish Mandate” by “stabilizing an image of the architecture
Architecture of the Christian
Holy Land. Reception from
Late Antiquity through the
Renaissance. In English
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017
Cloth. Pp. xviii, 420; 223
black-and-white figures and
32 color plates; bibliography;
index; list of abbreviations;
ISBN 9781316488362
Kathryn Blair Moore is an expert of Medieval and
Renaissance art and architecture and teaches at Texas State
University, San Marcos. In her groundbreaking book, The
Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, Moore examines the
reception of the architecture of the Holy Land within broad
religious and political contexts. By complementing excep-
tionally rich textual, visual, archeological, and architectural
material about the Holy Land with extensive and impec-
cable research on this topic, which she conducted in the
Mediterranean, Western Asia, North Africa, Europe, and
the United States, Moore reveals how actual as well as spir-
itual, intellectual, and virtual pilgrimages to the Holy Land
constitute critical mechanisms in the continual contestation,
recreation, and restoration of the Christian Holy Land.
Moore masterfully demonstrates her major hypoth-
esis that since the fourth century, in the absence of the
palpable bodies of Christ and Mary as major figures of
Christian belief, monumental buildings came to shape the
sacred topography of the Holy Land and Christian land-
scape that expanded well beyond the physical confines of
the seminal sites associated with the life of Christ, Mary,
and the first Christians. The singular importance of the
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or the Church of the Nativity
in Bethlehem cannot be overstated. Yet, instead of writ-
ing a traditional, linear history of the lives of these and
other Christian buildings of the Holy Land,1 Moore sets
these buildings in a religiously and politically charged dy-
namic space. She defines this dynamic space by what she
calls “the generative capacity of language,” (p. xv) imagery,
and actions of appropriation, recreation, and destruction,
which characterize the relationships among Judaism, Ro-
man paganism, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, and
various factions of Islam. At the same time, Moore argues
that such a dynamic framework impacts both the physical
reality and reception of the actual buildings and sites in
the Holy Land (p. xv). This innovative approach is bold
and highly sophisticated as it follows the significance
and meaning of the architecture in the Holy Land within
changing religious and political dynamics.
In her engaging book, Moore successfully elaborates
and shakes the dominant Anglo-Saxon scholarship on the
architecture of the Holy Land as pioneered by Richard
Krautheimer, whose “rehabilitation of the image of Chris-
tian Jerusalem [was] undertaken in the years of the Brit-
1 See, for example, invaluable books such as Denys Pringle, The
Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus [New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009) or Martin Biddle, The Tomb
of Christ (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2000 (1999)].
of the Holy Sepulcher as a pure expression of medieval
Christianity” (p. 296). As accurately presented by Moore,
Krautheimer’s seminal essay of 1942 on the “iconography
of medieval architecture”2 set several immensely impor-
tant precedents for how we continue to study architecture
of the Holy Land. Krautheimer conceived architectural
iconography as a combination of images and texts in the
studies of architecture and its meaning, and opened a
prolific trend in medieval architectural history in which
forms of buildings may be related to their content, or sym-
bolic meanings. Yet, by insisting on exacting mechanical
reproduction and visual qualities of architecture, rather
than including also spiritual, experiential, and intellectu-
ally active re-creation of religiously significant structures,
Krautheimer’s concept of an architectural copy, also set
subsequent studies of medieval architecture, in particular,
in a somewhat negative framework. Krautheimer focused
on the imprecision, inattentiveness to detail, and general
inaccuracy of medieval “copies” of the Holy Sepulchre, ul-
timately advocating that the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
was a very vague model, no more of one than any other
medieval building, for important European churches and
baptisteries, hence reducing its significance to the level
of a common idea. This critical assessment widely cited
and used as a methodological tool for studying medi-
eval architecture ultimately implied that there was a lack
of architects and “true” architecture in the medieval pe-
riod, which Krautheimer sharply contrasted with the per-
ceived fidelity and accuracy of Renaissance and modern
architectural practices. Moore starts from Krautheimer’s
macro-context of medieval Christianity and expands into
detailed and sophisticatedly contextualized case studies,
elaborating upon the potentials of architectural iconogra-
phy. In contrast to Krautheimer, however, she highlights
the role of relics, theology, and affective piety in medieval
perception and reception of the architecture in the Holy
Land as the embodiment of the active divine presence,
often abstracted from phenomenal experience and enter-
ing into cultural memory. Architecture and its material-
ity were vital in such an experience and reception of the
Holy Land. She also sees the ongoing antagonisms be-
tween Christianity and Islam as well as between opposing
Protestant and Catholic understandings of the religious
significance and political meanings of the Holy Sepulchre
and related buildings in the Holy Land, including their re-
creations elsewhere, as a sign of continuity and cohesion
from the past to present, rather than discontinuity and
incoherency. Moreover, actual architectural accomplish-
ments and their reception studied across numerous exam-
ples, geographies, and time spans, reveal that the definite
and discrete divisions between late antique and medieval
from renaissance and modern periods are rather academ-
ic constructs, further reinforcing the divide by specializa-
tions within the studies of architecture of the Holy Land.
The expansive chronological and geographical ho-
rizons and her expert command of numerous textual and
visual sources allow Moore to point to pivotal moments
in the European reception of the architecture of the Holy
Land. She starts with the architectural articulation of the
Holy Land under Emperor Constantine in the fourth cen-
2 Richard Krautheimer, Introduction to an Iconography of
Medieval Architecture, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
5 (1942) 1–33. 233
 ЗОГРАФ 41 (2017) [227–248]
tury and then studies in great detail the consequences of
the First Crusade, the emergence of the Franciscan Cus-
tody of the Holy Land, and the anti-Islamic crusade move-
ments of the Renaissance. Following the introduction (pp.
1–19), these critical periods constitute four major parts of
the book: “The Symbolization of Holy Land Architecture”
(pp. 21–62); “Triumphal Restoration and Re-Creation in
the Crusades” (pp. 63–116); “The Franciscan Custody of
the Holy Land” (pp. 117–167); and “Imagined Pilgrimages
and Crusades in the Renaissance” (pp. 169–284). Each sec-
tion of the book is internally subdivided into four shorter
thematic chapters, with brief introductions and conclu-
sions. Such an organization of the material allows the read-
er either to read the book chronologically or to contemplate
each part individually and in an order that follows personal
interests within this huge topic of Holy Land architecture.
Along with an impressive bibliography, the rich and dili-
gently analyzed material in each chapter constitutes a treas-
ure trove of information for further studies.
Even if only highlighted in the epilogue (pp. 285–
298), the Protestant Reformation and related, more re-
cent events in the last two centuries are especially impor-
tant for the historiography and scholarship on the topic.
Moore juxtaposes the Jesuit missions in the Americas and
Protestant activities that persistently question the verac-
ity, historicity, and sacred status of the sites in the Holy
Land. By refocusing interest from specific buildings and
embodied experience of the faithful to the broader and
less palpable natural landscape of the Holy Land exam-
ined through presumably objective scientific geography,
as well as exacting textual and linguistic analysis of se-
lected references from either the Bible or ancient history,
the scholarship within the Protestant idioms customarily
dismisses medieval sources as implausible and simulta-
neously implies objective realism of the Renaissance and
modern representations of the religious architecture in the
Holy Land. Moore explains that paintings, prints, photo-
graphs, or architectural recreations of the architecture of
the Holy Land “often depended on previous representa-
234
tions that staged the Holy Land as a Christian posses-
sion” (p. 297). She successfully presents equally important
verbal descriptions, pilgrimage guides, and other textual
and culturally defined media that recurrently preceded an
actual pilgrimage and experience of the Holy Land. The
most recent developments in the digital humanities seem-
ingly follow the same mechanisms and tensions between
the imaginary and real. Hence, in the virtual realms of
cyberspace, Franciscans continue their tradition of re-cre-
ating an imagined experience of the Holy Land through
virtual tours crafted to embody the experience of moving
through the Christian buildings and sites, memorializing
the movement of Christ and his followers, while at the
same time mediating these experiences through believ-
ably reconstructed buildings that “together construct an
apparently continuous Catholic territory” (p. 297). On the
extreme opposite, as Moore successfully demonstrates,
evangelical Christian virtual reconstructions often appro-
priate the Jewish past and eradicate the Islamic present,
while the conceptualization of cyberspace as egalitarian
and homogenous, free of any embodied information and
perception, paradoxically adheres to the Protestant long-
ing for an empirically verifiable Holy Land.
Brilliantly researched and intelligently presented,
elegantly written and generously illustrated with many
photographs done by the author herself, The Architec-
ture of the Christian Holy Land is a superb contribution
to the growing studies of sacred space and religious ar-
chitecture. Moore’s book examines sacred architecture
in the Holy Land not only from a historical perspective
but also ingeniously points to the opposing but pervasive
mechanisms of their reception that continue up to pre-
sent. Highly recommended for advanced students and in-
terdisciplinary scholars of sacred architecture, this excel-
lent book should also command the attention of anyone
interested in “the potential for architecture to shape the
experience of divine presence” (p. 284).
Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University