A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes

by Clare A. Lees (Editor), Gillian R. Overing (Editor)

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 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.

Genres: Medieval

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2006

About the author

Clare Lees (MA, PhD) is professor of Medieval Literature and History of the Language at the Department of English, King's College (London, UK).

Reviews

[Bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting! Sarah Beckwith's chapter on the blitz ruins of medieval churches not as relevant to my Macaulay research as hoped, but some excellent work in this book. May prove relevant to doctoral topic? Excellent to see chapter penned by a former professor of mine, who taught me my Middle En. glish vowels and remember fondly for heavily intimating homoerotic subtext in Le Morte d'Arthur and Gawaine and the Green Knight.