This volume offers a multidisciplinary exploration of how ritual practices shape aesthetic experience as a sensory, symbolic, and cultural phenomenon. Bringing together perspectives from art history, biblical studies, architecture, gender studies, Islamic studies, literary studies, and archaeometry, it examines rituality not as passive tradition but as a dynamic process through which perception, embodiment, memory, and cultural meaning are negotiated. Through case studies ranging from biblical iconography and Islamic minority practices to theatrical performance, sacred architecture, literature, and the sensory worlds of ancient cultures, the contributors explore how rituals are represented, transformed, and reinterpreted across different historical and cultural contexts. Structured around the interconnected themes of visual culture, architecture, and material and literary practices, the volume demonstrates how aesthetic experience mediates the relationships between the body, the senses, belief, power, and collective identity, inviting readers to rethink ritual as a dynamic language of human creativity and cultural memory.

Cristina Expósito de Vicente is Professor of Art History at the University of Valencia, Spain.

Belén Cuenca Abellán is Collaborating Researcher at the University of Alicante, Spain.