Alexandra Walsham’s The Reformation of the Landscape presents a thorough, well-written analysis of evolving attitudes towards natural and humanly-created environmental features in early-modern Britain. Walsham demonstrates how natural sites in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales--such as wells, springs, forests and groves, hills, caves, and boulders--have played important sacred roles across waves of religious change. In parallel, she shows how human monuments--for example, churches, shrines, and free-standing crosses in town squares and along roadsides--have been assigned varying significance throughout waxing and waning tides of paganism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. Attitudes towards all of these landscape sites have often morphed and evolved as religious currents have swept across the British Isles. In contrast to assumptions of secularization or stark and immediate change as a result of the Reformation, Walsham asserts that analyzing changing perspectives on, and interactions with, the landscape over the sustained period of the “long Reformation” illuminates the reconfiguration of social memory, theology, and confessional identity during the early-modern period in Britain.
Walsham illustrates how ideas about the physical landscape relate to religious and social landscapes. She does so through in-depth analyses of a few single sites and nearly countless individual examples. (As a side note, this volume is remarkable in its copious annotation and use of broad archival resources.)
According to Walsham, the history of a holy well or spring, for example, could demonstrate major shifts in religion, identity, and memory. For instance, a spring may have been held as a sacred place by local pre-Christian inhabitants and been associated with healing. During the medieval period, a Christian missionary saint may have recommissioned the spring as evidencing the Christian god’s power. Local residents continued to gather and venerate there, and two depressions in the stone at the water’s edge came to be understood as the saint’s footprints. As Roman Catholicism moved in, the spring’s hagiography may have expanded to include a saint from the central Catholic canon alongside its local patron. Depending on the local ecclesiastical and political authorities, Protestant reformers may well have rebuked people for going to the spring as a dismissal of pagan and/or papish superstition. If the spring was blocked and filled in with rocks to prevent Catholics from annually visiting and circumambulating the site, however, Walsham points to the telling irony of Protestants likely visiting the same site and walking around it to celebrate their having purged it of Catholic pageantry. Assuming the spring’s continued existence, resurgent Counter-Reformation Catholicism’s renewed interest in the holy family may have reclaimed the spring, but assigned it as a site of Mary’s miraculous power (instead of that of the original local missionary or previous Vatican-endorsed saint). Protestants continued to disagree with this attribution of healing power, but by the end of the early-modern period, enlightenment interest in science and reason would have seen adherents from both confessional backgrounds sending samples of water to be tested for certain minerals known for their curative powers. These naturally beneficial properties may then have been ecumenically held as evidence of God’s hand, or natural revelation. By tracing this nuanced intellectual history, Walsham argues that the very conflicting, overlapping meanings assigned to features of the landscape demonstrate how central the physical environment has been in mapping and chronicling the British experience of religion.
Overall, The Reformation of the Landscape contributes strongly to the understanding of religion, identity, and memory. While written from the perspective of a historian (Walsham being in Modern History at the University of Cambridge), readers from a variety of disciplinary fields should find the volume useful and interesting. In addition, the level of detail provided in brief stories of chaste virgins hanged on sacred oaks by lecherous priests, hellish caves, fairy glens, and boulders placed by giants keeps the over 600-page book moving along very nicely.
For folklorists, Walsham’s interaction with the field of folkoristics may, however, seem somewhat problematic. In her nevertheless insightful chapter on invented traditions, her description of the study of folklore presents a view of the field frozen in time, as stemming from a Victorian era interested in “cultural fossils” preserved in a “historical vacuum,” such that “The fashionable theory of ‘survivals’ by which the endeavours of these self-styled ethnologists were inspired has exerted tenacious influence. Their instinct to regard the ‘folklore’ they collected as dead artefact rather than an evolving organism has, until quite recently, blinded scholars to the capacity of these sources to illuminate questions that are central to our understanding of the early-modern era itself…. I shall suggest that despite the many methodological pitfalls that surround them, these anthologies still have enormous value to the historian” (474-75). Many folklorists might argue that twenty-first-century approaches to their field provide exactly the illuminating questions that Walsham is seeking through her own work. As such, Reformation of the Landscape provides access to rich primary and secondary source information that may benefit folkloristic investigations of the early-modern period, religion, identity, and social memory.
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[Review length: 815 words • Review posted on September 26, 2012]