The Reformation of the Landscape

The Reformation of the Landscape is a richly detailed and original study of the relationship between the landscape of Britain and Ireland and the tumultuous religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It explores how the profound theological and liturgical transformations that marked the era between 1500 and 1750 both shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the places and spaces within the physical environment in which they occurred. Moving beyond churches, cathedrals, and monasteries, it investigates how the Protestant and Catholic Reformations affected perceptions and practices associated with trees, woods, springs, rocks, mountain peaks, prehistoric monuments, and other distinctive topographical features of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive research and embracing insights from a range of disciplines, Alexandra Walsham examines the origins, immediate consequences, and later repercussions of these movements of religious renewal, together with the complex but decisive modifications of belief and behaviour to which they gave rise. It demonstrates how ecclesiastical developments intersected with other intellectual and cultural trends, including the growth of antiquarianism and the spread of the artistic and architectural Renaissance, the emergence of empirical science and shifting fashions within the spheres of medicine and healing. Set within a chronological framework that stretches backwards towards the early Middle Ages and forwards into the nineteenth century, the book assesses the critical part played by the landscape in forging confessional identities and in reconfiguring collective and social memory. It illuminates the ways in which the visible world was understood and employed by the diverse religious communities that occupied the British Isles, and shows how it became a battleground in which bitter struggles about the significance of the Christian and pagan past were waged.

ISBN 0199654387   Pages 656 ISBN13 9780199654383 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 1000 Publisher Oxford University Press   Published in Oxford Imprint Oxford University Press   Height (mm) 234 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 156 Publication date 16 Feb 2012   Spine width (mm) 34 DEWEY 274.206   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC23

Introduction; 1. Loca Sacra: Religion and the Landscape before the Reformation; 2. Idols in the Landscape: The Impact of Protestant Reform; 3. Britannia Sancta: Catholicism, Counter Reformation, and the Landscape; 4. The Religious Regeneration of the Landscape: Ritual, Rehabilitation, and Renewal; 5. God's Great Book in Folio: Providence, Science, and the Natural Environment; 6. Therapeutic Waters: Religion, Medicine, and the Landscape; 7. Invented Traditions: Legend, Custom, and Memory; Conclusion; Bibliography

One ends this impressive book wanting more and we can hope that a flotilla of new studies buy other scholars will appear in its wake. Kenneth Fincham, History Today a fascinating account of the religious and cultural changes in Early Modern attitudes to shrines, stones, rocks, springs and much else besides ... a work of deep historical imagination. Richard Sennett, Times Literary Supplement ... subtle and important. Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement Recommended as a Book of the Year 2011 Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement

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