Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Material culture and ritual : state of the question / Jas Elsner -- Monumental steps and the shaping of ceremony / Mary B. Hollinshead -- Coming and going in the sanctuary of the great gods, Samothrace / Bonna D. Wescoat -- Entering Demeter's gateway : the Roman propylon and in the city Eleusinion / Margaret M. Miles -- Architecture and ritual in Ilion, Athens, and Rome / C. Brian Rose -- The same, but different : the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus through time / Ellen Perry -- Mapping sacrifice on bodies and spaces in late-antique Judaism and early Christianity / Joan Branham -- The 'foundation deposit' from the Dura Europos Synagogue reconsidered / Jodi Magness -- Sight lines of sanctity at Late Antique Martyria / Ann Marie Yasin -- The sanctity of place and the sanctity of buildings : Jerusalem vs. Constantinople / Robert G. Ousterhout -- Divine light : constructing the immaterial in Byzantine art and architecture / Slobodan Ćurčić -- Structure, agency, ritual, and the Byzantine church / Vasileios Marinis -- Afterword / Bonna D. Wescoat and Robert G. Ousterhout

In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.