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Front Cover
Back Cover
Urbanism and Religious Landscape in Medieval South Asia
Author:
Vincent Lefevre
Series:
Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:
Paperback
FORTHCOMING
About the Book
Urbanism and Religious Landscape in Medieval South Asia
reconsiders an important but comparatively neglected dimension of South Asian history: the place of cities in the early medieval period and the role of religious institutions in shaping them. Conventional accounts have often treated the centuries between the decline of earlier urban centres and the rise of Islamic polities as a largely non-urban phase, while scholarship on the period has concentrated more heavily on temples, monasteries, sculpture, and religious imagery. Vincent Lefèvre brings these histories together by asking how urban development and the religious landscape were connected.At the centre of the book is the relationship between towns and cities and the temples and monasteries that occupied, bordered, and sometimes helped generate them. Were religious institutions situated within particular quarters or social environments? How were monuments inside cities connected with religious centres on their peripheries? Could temples become nuclei around which new settlements developed, giving rise to the phenomenon of the “temple-city”? And how did cities themselves acquire importance as places of pilgrimage and sacred geography?Combining archaeological and art-historical evidence with inscriptions, literary sources, normative treatises, and the still underused corpus of Mahatmyas and Sthala Puranas, the book approaches the city not simply as a political or economic formation but as a religiously constituted space. In doing so, it opens a new perspective on early medieval South Asian urbanism, showing how sacred institutions, communities, settlement patterns, pilgrimage networks, and changing conceptions of place participated in the making of the medieval city.
About the Author
Vincent Lefevre
Vincent Lefèvre is Professor of Archaeology and the History of Art of South and Southeast Asia at Sorbonne University. Trained as an archivist-palaeographer and heritage curator, he received his doctorate in Oriental Languages, Civilisations and Societies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2004 and his habilitation in 2007. Before joining Sorbonne University in 2024, he pursued a distinguished twenty-five-year career as a museum curator and heritage administrator, serving at the Musée Cernuschi, the Musée national des arts asiatiques–Guimet, Agence France-Muséums for the Louvre Abu Dhabi project, and the French Ministry of Culture. A specialist in the arts and archaeology of the Indian and Indianised world, his research focuses on South India, ancient Bengal, Sanskrit treatises on ritual and architecture, and portraiture in South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013, he has directed the French archaeological cooperation mission in Bangladesh, leading excavations at the ancient urban site of Mahasthangarh. He is the author of
Le Génie de l’art indien
(2023),
Portraiture in Early India: Between Transience and Eternity
(2011); and
Commanditaires et artistes en Inde du Sud
(2006).
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