Consecrated Things and Places: Visitation and Sacralisation in the Jacobean Church

Jacobean visitation articles reveal increasing anxiety about preserving sacred space and material things from profane use. New churches and churchyards were consecrated by novel rites as sacred space was increasingly prioritised and emphasised in visitation. More and more prelates labelled the church building ‘the house of God’. By 1612, the archbishop of Canterbury's metropolitical visitation articles identified ecclesiastical space and furniture, notably the communion table, as ‘consecrated’ to God. English prelates widely adopted this sacralising rhetoric. These innovations originate not in the prescriptions of avant-garde prelates awaiting the advent of Laud but more commonly in those of Reformed conformist bishops.