ALEXANDRA WALSHAM. The Reformation of the Landscape

Most reasonably informed readers would come to the topic of this book with a fair notion of the tale it was going to tell. Aware that the medieval Catholic Church had invested places with particular spiritual meanings (for example, the sites of miracles, martyrdoms, and relics that became the endpoint of pilgrimages), but also that Protestantism had stressed the transcendence of God beyond the material universe, they would expect the British and Irish reformations to have destroyed an older mental world. By most accounts, the Reformation desacralized the landscape in a way that mirrored its (better studied) stripping of the altars within churches. Protestants would have denied that particular places had special spiritual significance, and would have attacked the ceremonies and traditions associated with that set of beliefs. Alexandra Walsham's book certainly shows that this happened, and does so with the author's usual breathtaking ability to catalogue a huge range of fascinating examples, and with a truly impressive command of Welsh, Scots, and Irish material as well as English evidence. Yet this work does much more. It also demonstrates the ways in which the Reformation was not a simple exercise in destruction, and was not that destruction's sole agent. For example, as Walsham charts attitudes to the landscape before 1500, she shows that trends in late medieval Catholicism prefigured later Protestant doubt about the special spirituality of particular locations. Not only Lollard heretics but also perfectly orthodox humanists had worried about an overly sacralized landscape decades before Martin Luther or Henry VIII were born.

Aesthetics · Art · English Reformation · Humanism · Identity (music) · Irish · Literature · Protestantism · Scots · Theology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies