The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church - Hardcover

Visser, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865476187 ISBN 13: 9780865476189

Publisher: North Point Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Explores an ancient Christian church designated to St. Agnes lying outside Rome, focusing on the stories, symbolism, and rituals that make up the church, and providing details about mythology, history, and theology.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Visser was born in South Africa, studied at the Sorbonne, and received her doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto. She is the author of three previous books: Much Depends on Dinner; Rituals of Dinner, which won the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award; and The Way We Are. She divides her time among Toronto, Barcelona, and southwestern France.

Reviews

Visser, described as "an anthropologist of everyday life," has written an enthralling, absorbing and exquisitely researched study of what she calls an "ordinary church." For her subject matter she chose a small but ancient Christian church dedicated to St. Agnes that sits half-buried outside the walls of Rome. Tired of endless tours through world churches in which guides provide lists of facts about dates and architects, Visser aims to bring one small church alive by exploring the stories, meanings and rituals built into each piece of the building. Using the physical layout of the church as the structure for her book, the author takes each staircase, window, fresco, catacomb and chapel as an entryway to fascinating details of mythology, history, early Christian theology, Roman culture and contemporary practice. Visser brings an obvious love and respect for her subject matter and demonstrates remarkable depth in her knowledge of the church's milieu from details on the origins of the halo in religious art, to the techniques of mosaic building, to the historical development of virgin-hero myths. In some ways the author is an archeologist as much as an anthropologist: she digs through layers of history to reveal the depth and breadth of one small building, and peels back layers of meaning in the words and images that adorn it. For the reader, this is rich and thoughtful armchair traveling of the best kind.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The church on which Visser trains her curious, shrewd, and affectionate attention is Sant'Agnese Fuori le Mura, which stands outside the walls of Rome. Dedicated to St. Agnes, who was martyred in 305 A.D., at the age of twelve, and built over a shrine containing her bones, the building has been in constant use for more than thirteen hundred years. Theology, etymology, mythology, art history, and necrology are just a few of the subjects the author addresses. Reading the church building itself as a text, she renders its language of marble and mosaic into a splendid narrative whose subject is how an architectural space "can both express and recall epiphany."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Spiritual traveler and author Visser (Rituals of Dinner) takes readers on an extended interior conversation as she explores Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, a smallish Roman church dedicated to the fourth-century martyr Saint Agnes. Sort of an anthropology of the commonplace, the work spans art and architecture, medieval theology, myth and symbolism, history, and Catholic doctrine, as the author travels from the threshold of Sant'Agnese through its sanctuary and below to the crypt and tomb of the saint. Not so much about the church itself, Visser's insights are intended to evoke internal discovery within each reader, "like finding one's way to the center of a labyrinth." The result is a sort of well-researched guidebook for "reading" symbolic places. Visser's thoughtful perspective gives license to those who find transcendence and majestyDsecular or religiousDin spiritual architecture. Recommended for general religion and art history collections.DSandra Collins, Duquesne Univ. Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865476187
• ISBN 13: 9780865476189
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322