The organisation of Hispanic liturgical space between the 6th and 11th centuries

© 2015 Brepols Publishers. All right reserved. The study of the Old Hispanic rite as a means of understanding Late-Antique and Early Medieval Hispanic churches has been very fruitful since the publication in 1965 of a pioneer work by A. Rodríguez G. de Ceballos. However, in most recent years there have arisen some errors of perspective that tend to reduce liturgical arrangement of space to the architectural typology and morphology of church buildings, forgetting that the organisation of ritual space was commited to liturgical furniture as much (and even more) as to architectural forms, whether structural or typological. This paper identifies some recent misinterpretations of important liturgical-architectural matters, such as the hierarchical division of sacred space or the multiplication of altars within a same building, in order to permit a more realistic approach to liturgical space, less biased by the typological abstractions and stylistic assumptions of (non-liturgical) disciplines, such as the old History of Art and the new “archaeology of architecture”. From this point of view, it can be said that, in terms of liturgical space, Iberian architecture from the 6th to 11th centuries is in essence identical to the rest of Western architecture of the same period.