Landscape and Belief in Anglo-Norman England

Summary

Mention of the word ‘landscape’ floods the mind’s eye with images of the picturesque, with recollections of canvases evoking the natural sublime or bucolic country scenes. And appropriately so: the term ‘landscape’ derives from art. Coined in Dutch and used to talk about painting, it reached England in the seventeenth century and became a means to think about space. It is, then, a concept that was not readily available to medieval men and women. There were, for example, no obvious cognates for the term in the lexicons of medieval Latin writers, though a number of chroniclers, such as Henry of Huntingdon, were keen to ‘emplace’ their narratives and enter into topographical description. Others, notably Gerald of Wales, wrote narratives which were self-consciously perambulatory. Even if they lacked a concept of landscape, they were interested in the kinds of things that we describe using the term as shorthand. So if we think loosely about landscapes as, in Simon Schama’s words, ‘constructs of imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’, we have a subject that can be explored in our period. By concentrating on the inflection given those imaginative constructions by belief, we are, of course, touching on something that was of concern to the chroniclers and hagiographers who will be the principal subjects of this article.

What I propose to do here, then, is to explore inter-relationships between landscape and belief. I will begin by thinking about how certain beliefs and ideological projects gave rise to particular representations of landscape in texts. Then I will move on to examine the reverse influence: how landscape, and landscape change, may have shaped belief. At times this article bursts out of the chronological boundaries that the brief for this journal suggests, but necessarily so, for some of the issues that arise in consideration of landscape and belief bleed inevitably into adjacent periods, especially later periods. A consequence of this broad approach is that what follows is tentative: a preliminary sketch rather than a finished product, it follows some possible lines of argument and ends not so much with conclusions as with conjectures.

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I will begin with a subject that has attracted a fair amount of historiographical attention already: representations in monastic writings of the wilderness.