Sanctuary

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What to expect

Sanctuary is an ancient right. But what does it mean today? Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures, Marina Warner's Sanctuary is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in today's world of global turmoil.

Sanctuary is an ancient right– a haven, a place of refuge and freedom from harm. In the classical world, it offered immunity to fugitives from justice; in medieval Europe it extended a reprieve to all who sought sanctuary in a church or holy site. It was a sacrilege to lay hands on a sanctuary-seeker: sanctuary was sacred.

But what are the principles that govern this ancient tradition? Could a revived practice of sanctuary today offer security, a home for those who seek it? What could ‘sanctuary’ offer to those who have been displaced? Or does the idea support excluding those of a certain race or creed?

Increasingly, in keeping with the general growth of nationalism and individualism, the arc of the concept has been bending away from a place of openness and welcome towards a private safe place, a redoubt: home and homeland as sanctuaries to be defended against strangers, migrants, incomers.

In this groundbreaking book, the distinguished cultural historian Marina Warner explores the principles that underpin the tradition of ‘sanctuary’. She ranges broadly across myth and history and explores the concept of hospitality, the cult of relics, shrines and festivals, the imagination of place, and travelling tales. She asks profound questions about political ideas of a right to safety, home, freedom of movement, and peace.

Sanctuary was written alongside work with the project “Stories in Transit” which brings young refugees together with artists, writers and musicians in the UK and in Sicily to invent or reimagine stories and perform them. Marina Warner reflects on the ways stories address the worst experiences of humanity and argues that the act of storytelling offers a salve, a route to a site of mutual interaction and understanding, a new place of belonging and conviviality. The book draws on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures. It is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in a world of global turmoil. Warner’s inquiry could not be more relevant.

Critics Review

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n PRAISE FOR SANCTUARYn

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‘Dazzlingly protean… an ambitious meditation on the ability of narrative to shape our perceptions of one another and our experience of home. Warner sets out to explore and expand what “sanctuary” means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression… an exquisitely attuned reading of the situation'

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n n Guardiann n

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‘Sanctuary is without doubt an imaginative and meticulous work of scholarship, underpinned by context in Warner’s passionately sincere commitment to the issues she raises’

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n n Daily Telegraphn n

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‘Ingenious and meticulous.. Part of the exhilaration of reading any work by Warner is the breadth of reference. It is the opposite of dilletantism, a purposeful, sharp stitching: she will link and pierce from Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Manuscript to Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, Evelyn Waugh, Old King Cole, Seamus Heaney, Orhan Pamuk to Charles III’s coronation gift from the Pope. The idea of the story as a site (a camp-fire, a well, a glade) of exchange and safety and imagined possibility gives a fixed point to Warner’s capacious mind. More importantly, she reminds us why we call the discipline “the humanities”'

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n n The Scotsmann n

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'Fascinating, erudite… a deeply engaging book, learned and sensitive, original, spare and strange. …reading it is like being led into a landscape both ravaged and stubbornly fertile. One of the book’s greatest strengths is Warner’s consistent use of the words of exiles, refugees and migrants. She does not just try to speak for her subjects; she gives them voice too. We can only listen and hope to God that others might be persuaded to listen too, especially in countries where hostility to the idea of sanctuary is being relentlessly fostered'

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n Rowan Williams, Literary Reviewn

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