Sacred Space: The Reconfiguring of Cognitive Ecologies in the Parish Church

Abstract

Spatial environments constitute a key component of our cognitive ecologies, helping to configure the form of religious worship, directing the attention of worshipers and providing physical shape to the construction and transmission of religious forms. This chapter applies Extended Mind theory to aspects of early modern English religion within the context of the parish church in order to deepen our current understanding of how people experienced worship in this period. The parish church was the heart of established religion in England, regulating the rhythm of worship. Psychologically as well as physically close to the center of their parishes, churches were focal points of communal activity which extended far beyond worship (Marsh 1998; French et al. 1997). It was within the spatial confines of the local parish church that religious change enacted at a national level was most acutely felt. Exploring the configuration, decoration, and forms of human interaction within these churches, in particular the construction and use of sacred space as external scaffolding to the cognitive experience, highlights ways in which worship was partially shaped and affected by the physical and material environment in which it was conducted. We focus especially on the sermon, arguably the most significant transformed element of worship in the newly configured Protestant ecology, around which debates about memory and attention were center-stage and the boundaries between cognition, social systems and material culture contentiously redrawn.