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This chapter examines the programmes of church building and restoration in Ireland between 1770 and 1850, including the evidence of surviving church interiors from this period. It concludes that this programme was one of the most ambitious and extensive in Europe. Particular attention is paid to the restoration of Church of Ireland and building of new Roman Catholic cathedrals.

The 18th-century Church of England has had a bad press. It has been condemned as corrupt and lethargic, its churches as dilapidated and unsightly, its liturgy as slovenly and tedious. The orthodox modern church-building generation can form but little notion of the carelessness, the irreverence and ignorance which prevailed in regard to matters ecclesiastical half a century ago. The evidence from episcopal records and archidiaconal visitation records, in particular, suggests that the Church of England in the 18th century was a generally efficient organisation, that abuses were a cause of concern, and that when it was found impossible to rectify them this was nearly always either the result of some situation of long standing. Problems over the maintenance of church buildings were not new in the period after 1660: churches were out of repair and carelessly kept at all periods, especially during the immediate pre-Reformation period, in both town and countryside.

This chapter presents a prehistoric study of Iceland including its conversion to Christianity, the early Bishops, the early priests, and early church building. In the year 999 or 1000, the Icelanders decided at their annual assembly called Alping, to become Christian. The early priest in the country was faced with the task of baptizing the whole population in compliance with the decision to convert. Meanwhile, no churches have been excavated which can be dated to the earliest phase of Christianity in Iceland.

The tensions and conflicts between ambitious individuals and communities raises questions about the social changes of the period and their effects on morality and economic ideas. Urban and rural communities attempted to regulate their inhabitants, with imperfect results. Religious life had both an individualist and collective dimension, but church building suggests that the community was dominant in its ability to collect money in pursuit of common goals. Heritage epitomises the ambiguity of the period, as he was a supporter of his local chapel and subscribed to conventional moralistic codes, while at the same time helping to dispossess peasants. He encroached on common pastures with the connivance of villagers.

The chapter starts with a brief account of Albanian anti‐Serbian activities (attacks on Serbian sacred places and monuments, said to be fuelled by religious hatred) in Kosovo in the 1980s. It then goes on to discuss shrines as a powerful symbolic energizer to the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s, with accounts of the building of the new cathedral in Belgrade, and notes on the construction of Serbian churches in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Next an account is given of the Milošević era, including his initial pacification of Kosovo (which enabled more restoration and building of Serbian sacred sites, and a program of pilgrimages, jubilees, etc.) and his pilgrimage to the thirteenth‐century Hilandar monastery at the holy mountain of Athos in Greece, which paved the way for a new role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Serbian nationalist movement.

By the early seventeenth century, the different churches in Hungary and Transylvania had become more polarized, with traditional patterns of confessional co-existence increasingly challenged by the force of denominational loyalty. Calvinists, Unitarians, Lutherans, and Catholics drew further apart from one another into confrontation, each developing their own centres of education and institutional hierarchies. This chapter examines Reformed church-building in Hungary and Transylvania and the nature of co-operation between the clergy, princes, magnates, and gentry who supported the Calvinist cause. Reformed ministers worked to win over princes and nobles not only to accept Reformed confessions of faith, but also to adopt high standards of personal morality and to sponsor the imposition of social and moral discipline. This chapter assesses the performance of Reformed princes and nobles in assisting the reform of popular religion and behaviour and charts tensions between the clergy and noble patrons in directing parish life across the region.

This chapter examines the debate over the relationship between the church building and its community in orthodox and Lollard texts. The chapter begins with the allegorical reading of church architecture in William of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum and the Middle English What the Church Betokeneth, in which every member of the community has a designated place in the church. The chapter then discusses Lollard attempts to divorce the building from the people by critiquing costly material churches and their decorations in The Lanterne of Liȝt, Lollard sermons, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. The chapter concludes by examining Dives and Pauper in the context of fifteenth-century investment in the church, both financial and spiritual, and argues that in practice church buildings were at the devotional heart of their communities.

This chapter explores the wealth of Shenoute's monastery, its origins, and how he claimed it was spent. Shenoute's writings and life are striking for their consistent emphasis on the miraculous wealth of his monastery, spent both on the care of the poor and on a magnificent church building. The contrast between the utter poverty of his monks and the seemingly endless wealth spent by the monastery could only be explained through miracles, that is, economic “blessings” from God. This discourse was a novelty in fifth-century Christianity. Its emergence is related to the dramatic growth of the monastic economy. Monasteries were becoming centers for the redistribution of wealth, a wealth that they received, above all, in the form of pious donations.

This chapter examines the church building and reconstruction boom in postmillennial Europe, and especially in France and Italy: what Rodulfus Glaber calls a “white mantle of churches.” The new churches proclaimed Romanitas (Romanness) by their construction in stone, Rome's premier building material. They “copied” specific ancient churches, especially Constantine's St. Peter's basilica in Rome and Constantine's Anastasis rotunda above the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This chapter begins with an overview of the role played by the Ottonian architecture in the transition from Carolingian to Romanesque, along with the Ottonian influence on major churches of the Continent. It then turns to “pre-Romanesque” or “proto-Romanesque” architecture that was evolving in the Mediterranean south before discussing the emergence of the Romanesque architecture in central France. It also considers Glaber's statement that church reconstruction was being undertaken even though the existing churches were for the most part “properly built and not in the least unworthy”.

Focusing on a century when the gentry’s contribution to church life is less easy to identify than in some other periods, this chapter argues that, if the gentry were perhaps less extensively involved in building than before, they were nonetheless active as founders and supporters of the many chapels of ease which peppered the countryside. It is also suggested that, in response to the new emphasis placed by the Church on liturgical magnificence, they were involved in helping to construct and furnish bigger chancels and in meeting some of the cost of the wall paintings that are a feature of the period.

This chapter examines the connection between the rise of the West and the revival and reform of the Latin Church. At the end of the eleventh century, descendants of the demoralized Latin Christians who in the tenth century had to endure attacks by non-Christian invaders would fight their way through Greek, Turkish, and Arab empires to raise the Latin cross over Jerusalem. The success of the Crusaders was more than a military achievement. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the military, political, and ecclesiastical history of the tenth-century Latin West, with particular emphasis on “encastellation” (the development of extensive internal fortifications) as a form of military security in early medieval Western Europe. It then considers how barbarian invasions and the wreckage they caused reshaped the political order and resulted in the fragmentation of Europe into smaller polities. It also discusses the efforts of the kings and ruling elites of the new order to rebuild the Church and carry out ecclesiastical reform via church building.

Edith Wharton benefited in her early career from the intellectual cosmopolitanism and encouraging support of the Harvard art professor Charles Eliot Norton. His emphasis on the imagination as a powerful force for social change drew from his close association with the aesthetic principles of John Ruskin and the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and it found expression in a key art-historical publication, Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages. The moral and spiritual concepts underpinning this text, along with Norton’s writings about Italy, including Notes of Study and Travel in Italy, and his life itself, are read in this chapter alongside Wharton’s short stories and her first novel, set in late-eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision. Wharton’s fiction owes much in its focus on the artistic imagination, moral choices, and community transformation to Norton’s lessons in virtuous service, sympathy, and aesthetic sensibility.