Alexandra Walsham

This is a thorough and fascinating coverage of the changes which took place between the 16th and the 18th Centuries regarding (initially) the religious treatment of elements of the landscape (shrines, groves, wells, etc.) and (later) the non-religious treatment of sites with a religious history (e.g. the conversion of what had been "holy wells" into spas with medicinal claims made for them, or the secular treatment of abbey ruins as attractive landscape features). This includes sites with a show more pre-Christian past (dolmens and tumuli, principally).

Walsham's coverage is thorough, and the texture of the book is accordingly dense. Her material is thoroughly documented and she has made an extensive survey of the original sources.

There are few major surprises -- such as there are tend to appear in the latter part of the book, regarding invented traditions (she draws explicitly on Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition) -- for example, she is unable to find any evidence for the story of St. Joseph of Arimathea and the Glastonbury thorn prior to the Reformation. (Note that the story of St. Joseph visiting Britain is earlier (it's in some of the Lancelot cycle, IIRC) but the specific link with Glastonbury, and with the Christmas-flowering thorn, is later.) However, her accumulation of details not only fills out the broadly expected narrative but provides evidence of the complexity of detail and local variation within the broadly expected outlines. show less