A Place to Believe in

Medievalists have much to gain from a thoroughgoing contemplation of place. If landscapes are windows onto human activity, they connect us with medieval people, enabling us to ask questions about their senses of space and place. In "A Place to Believe In", Clare Lees and Gillian Overing bring together scholars of medieval literature, archaeology, history, religion, art history, and environmental studies to explore the idea of place in medieval religious culture. The essays in "A Place to Believe In" reveal places real and imagined, ancient and modern: Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (home of Whitby and Bede's monastery of Jarrow), Cistercian monasteries of late medieval Britain, pilgrimages of mind and soul in Margery Kempe, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1940, and representations of the sacred landscape in today's Pacific Northwest. A strength of the collection is its awareness of the fact that medieval and modern viewpoints converge in an experience of place and frame a newly created space where the literary, the historical, and the cultural are in ongoing negotiation with the geographical, the personal, and the material. Featuring a distinguished array of scholars, "A Place to Believe In" will be of great interest to scholars across medieval fields interested in the interplay between medieval and modern ideas of place. Contributors are Kenneth Addison, Sarah Beckwith, Stephanie Hollis, Stacy S. Klein, Fred Orton, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Diane Watt, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, Ulrike Wiethaus, and Ian Wood.

ISBN 0271028602   Pages 288 ISBN13 9780271028606 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press   Weight (grammes) 472 Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press   Published in Pennsylvania Format Paperback   Height (mm) 235 Publication date 15 May 2006   Width (mm) 156 Library of Congress 2005030178   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 909.07   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Anglo-Saxon horizons : places of the mind in the Northumbrian landscape by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing		1
1		At the Bewcastle Monument, in place by Fred Orton		29
2		Bede's Jarrow by Ian Wood		67
3		Living on the Ecg : the mutable boundaries of land and water in Anglo-Saxon contexts by Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley		85
4		Gender and the nature of exile in Old English elegies by Stacy S. Klein		113
5		Spatial metaphors, textual production, and spirituality in the works of Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301/2) by Ulrike Wiethaus		132
6		Strategies of emplacement and displacement : St. Edith and the Wilton community in Goscelin's Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorins by Stephanie Hollis		150
7		Faith in the landscape : overseas pilgrimages in The book of Margery Kempe by Diane Watt		170
8		Preserving, conserving, deserving the past : a meditation on ruin as relic in postwar Britain in five fragments by Sarah Beckwith		191
9		Changing places : the Cistercian settlement and rapid climate change in Britain by Kenneth Addison		211
10		Visible and invisible landscapes : medieval monasticism as a cultural resource in the Pacific Northwest by Ann Marie Rasmussen		239

"This stimulating and provocative essay collection picks up the recent interest of medieval scholars in the political, social, and religious meanings of place and space, but it goes far beyond the work so far done in the field. What makes it unique is that it is so wide ranging across disciplinary and temporal boundaries. The book could make a wonderful addition to courses in Anglo-Saxon or later medieval texts that focus on female spirituality or monasticism." - Karma Lochrie, Indiana University"

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