A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes

by Lees, Clare A.; Overing, Gillian R.

• ISBN13: 9780271028606
• ISBN10: 0271028602
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-31
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix
Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape	1	(26)
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing
PART I: PLACE MATTERS	27	(84)
1 At the Bewcastle Monument, in Place	29	(38)
Fred Orton
2 Bede's Jarrow	67	(18)
Ian Wood
3 Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts	85	(28)
Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley
PART 2: TEXTUAL LOCATIONS	111	(78)
4 Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies	113	(19)
Stacy S. Klein
5 Spatial Metaphors, Textual Production, and Spirituality in the Works of Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301/2)	132	(18)
Ulrike Wiethaus
6 Strategies of Emplacement and Displacement: St. Edith and the Wilton Community in Goscelin's Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius	150	(20)
Stephanie Hollis
7 Faith in the Landscape: Overseas Pilgrimages in The Book of Margery Kempe	170	(21)
Diane Watt
PART 3: LANDSCAPES IN TIME	189	(72)
8 Preserving, Conserving, Deserving the Past: A Meditation on Ruin as Relic in Postwar Britain in Five Fragments	191	(20)
Sarah Beckwith
9 Changing Places: The Cistercian Settlement and Rapid Climate Change in Britain	211	(28)
Kenneth Addison
10 Visible and Invisible Landscapes: Medieval Monasticism as a Cultural Resource in the Pacific Northwest	239	(22)
Ann Marie Rasmussen
Contributors	261	(4)
Index	265