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Peter
Harrison.
Castles
of God: Fortified Religious Buildings of the World.
Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2004.
ISBN
1843830663.
Hardback,
stitch bound.
226x282x21mm.
[viii],304pp
inc. 41 monochrome illustrations, plus 16 pages of colour plates.
English.
Unused
bargain: dustjacket a little grubby.
This item
£17.50
Publisher's
price £30.00/$60.00
1.4kg.
How to order this book
Throughout
history, great faiths have been subjected to persecution and attack
from beyond the wall - literally walls, in Peter Harrison's remarkable
book of the great monastery-fortresses, and church-fortresses, of the
world.
The fortified religious buildings of Christendom, Islam and Tibetan
Buddhism are some of the most dramatic buildings of the middle ages.
Though they shared a common purpose in defending the living faith from
the armies of the unbeliever, they are astonishingly different from
each other. Peter Harrison has spent a lifetime in scholarly pursuit of
fortified religious buildings dating from a thousand years ago and
more, in the Old and New Worlds, the Orient, and the Occident, ranging
through New Mexico, North Africa and Tibet, though the majority are to
be found in Europe.
The wild, often hostile, terrain in which these fortresses were built
speaks of a militant faith, and Peter Harrison's purpose is to show how
and why religious establishments incorporated military architecture. He
considers this unstudied subject from a uniquely wide point of view,
historical, military, and architectural. Every form of religious
building that received fortifications is illustrated, from the humble
parish churches of the Anglo-Scottish Borders to the Potala Palace of
the Dalai Lama and the Vatican.
Particular features of this book are the author's photographs, taken in
some of the wildest and most inaccessible parts of the world, and his
own very detailed plans and illustrations of many of the buildings
described.
See
the "book
descriptions" page for explanations of the criteria used in this
listing.
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