A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes

Church History, Sept, 2007 by Jon Pahl

A Place to Believe in: Locating Medieval Landscapes. Edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. x 274 pp. $65.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

One of the benefits of studying places in history is the opportunity to travel to the places being studied. One of the dangers of studying places in history is the opportunity to travel to the places being studied. Clare Lees (professor of Medieval Literature and History at King's College, London) and Gillian R. Overing (professor of English at Wake Forest University) gathered this collection of essays that cover, primarily, Anglo-Saxon places, from a conference held at Whitby, Northumbria in 2003. The volume reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the scholar-as-pilgrim, or scholar-as-tourist, possibilities. There are insights to be gleaned, especially by Anglo-Saxon or medieval church specialists. At the same time, the studies range widely across disciplines (English, German studies, history, art history, religious studies, even environmental science) and chronologies (one essay discusses the role of a medieval sense of place in the U.S. Pacific Northwest). Interdisciplinarity can be a virtue; here it lends the collection an even more widely divergent character than is typical of such volumes.

The essays are organized into three sections. The first, "Place Matters," emphasizes the "stubborn materiality" of places. Most useful to church historians might be Ian Wood's "Bede's Jarrow," which literally puts Bede in place by describing the physical geography of his environment. Kelly M. Wickham-Crowley's "Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts" attends briefly to Saints Cuthbert and Guthlac--and speculates at one point about the baptismal significance of her topic.

Part 2, "Textual Locations," contains four essays in which church historians will find their most helpful guides. Stacy S. Klein's "Gender and the Nature of Exile in Old English Elegies" is an elegant meditation on exile as loss of relation, and a critique of the locative (heroic) enclosure of women. By reading primarily The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, Klein concludes: "Female-voiced elegies ... urge a reconsideration of social imperatives for female enclosure" (131). Less elegant but still insightful is Ulrike Wiethaus's "Spatial Metaphors, Textual Production, and Spirituality in the Works of Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301/2)." According to Wiethaus, Gertrud "filled the literal spaces" of her life with "the promise of spiritual encounters with the divine" (136). Stephanie Hollis's essay on Goscelin's Legend of Edith, based on her own recently published translation, is rich with theological and historical significance, but largely undertheorized. Finally, Diane Watt's "Faith in the Landscape: Overseas Pilgrimages in The Book of Margery Kempe" is an invigorating and brilliant argument about how Kempe's indifference to physical landscapes, when overlaid with spiritual, scriptural, hagiographic, and visionary topographies, was a way to ground her authority. Such theoretical insight could, perhaps should, have been extended throughout the whole volume.

Part 3, "Landscapes in Time," is interesting enough but quite eccentric--with three essays on, respectively, ruins as relics in Post-World War II Britain, climate change and its impact on Cistercian settlement, and images of medieval monasticism as a cultural resource for environmentalism across the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.

The work begins with an occasionally insightful introduction by Lees and Overing under the title "Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape." The title suggests a key tension in the work between the "stubborn materiality of place" and its "metaphorical, spiritual, and poetic" possibilities (4). With a nod to theorists such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, the authors suggest that "places, like their inhabitants, are redolent with contradiction and with the multivalence of the past" (16). This is no doubt accurate, but such a generality does not quite deliver what one might have hoped for from such an introduction--a contribution to understanding places that draws out the implications of medieval belief systems and practices in a way that illumines patterns of contingencies between particular languages, practices, and communities. The authors make no reference to other religious theorists of space and place--notably Mircea Eliade or Jonathan Z. Smith--and apparently did not have access to any of the massive theological-historical literature on Scripture and place (for example, Walter Brueggeman) and practice and place (for example, Caroline Walker Bynum). The result is a work that is largely trees, no forest. We can be grateful for the details individual authors collected in their disparate essays, and for the editors in urging consideration of this topic. But it will be up to future historians to draw out the broader implications for understanding "medieval landscapes," for understanding what it meant for people to "believe" in them, and for understanding why it is important for us to study them--beyond the (no doubt delightful) prospect of a pilgrimage to Northumbria.