Life In Medieval Landscapes

This title presents new studies on key themes in the economic and social history of the Middle Ages. Covering the nature of landscape regions in Britain and Ireland and studies of labour and lordship, it focusses on medieval England and understanding the lives of peasants and labourers.

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.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the landscapes of the Middle Ages within and beyond Europe, paying close attention to the relationship between ‘real’ and imagined landscapes and the ways that medieval people made and inhabited their world. Rather than studying 'nature' in the Middle Ages, the book instead examines the spaces that people constructed through soil, stone, and song; water and wasteland; plants and animals; and timber, textiles, and texts, which in turn made up the medieval world. Likewise, the text emphasises a definition of environment that focuses on ‘living with’, inviting readers to think about the more-than-human worlds that medieval people depended on, cared for, constructed, and damaged. Bringing together a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, the book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of this period and considers the role that these medieval worlds have played in shaping the modern, both physically and culturally. Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in medieval studies and history, offering interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational insights into this period of immense change and innovation.

This is a book which puts the environment back where it belongs - at the centre of the historical stage. It is essential reading for all those interested in the history of the English landscape, social and economic history, and the way that life was lived in the medieval countryside.

First published in 1982, The English Medieval Landscape was written to recreate and analyse the development of the major elements of the medieval landscape. Illustrated with maps and photographs, the book explores the nature of the English landscape between 1066 and 1485, from farms and chases to castles, monastic settlements, villages, roads, and more. The English Medieval Landscape will appeal to those with an interest in medieval history and British social history.

This paperback edition of a book first published in hardback in 2002 is a fascinating and provocative study which looks at castles in a new light, using the theories and methods of landscape studies.

The eleven essays in this volume offer diverse approaches to very different landscapes. Yet they agree in viewing medieval western European landscape as artifact, as territiry constructed by medieval people on several interrelated levels. By helping to articulate how places came to be managed, created, and imagined, they offer their readers a much better apprecitaion of what might be called a "deep ecology" of the Middle Ages. --introd.