A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (review)

A collection of ten essays, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, is an extension of a conference, "A Place to Believe in: Medieval Monasticism in the Landscape," which brought together the contributors in Whitby (now North Ridding) in the summer of 2003 "in order to think about place while in place (p. 24)."

The volume offers an insight into the workings of complementary fragmentation in medieval historiography. Due to greater division of labor and the bringing together of diverse subdisciplines, every one of which presents different political or ideological motivations as well as different attitudes toward an archive and evidence, such a historiographic strategy presents a reader with a nuanced understanding of the distinction between space and place. Gesturing toward Michel Foucault's analysis of spatial power relations, Michel de Certeau's spatial practices, Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and the most recent work in the field of "human/spatial geography," the editors give us an excellent introduction which describes the scope of the volume, drawing attention to the multiple readings of the concept of place—that is, as a place that "gathers" objects/things, which are both engendered by it and engender it; as a site of and for cultural memory; as a place that identifies a community on the geo-political map; as a locus of material structures; as a place that allows for the construction of the relationship between these structures and the bodies moving within it; as a place that reveals material and immaterial, real and imaginary, royal and ecclesiastical power relations; and finally, as a place that charts geographies of desire, abjection, and devotion in Anglo-Saxon England.

A Place to Believe In is divided into three parts. Part One, "Place Matters," a clear reference to Butlerian "mattering of bodies," consists of essays which deal with Anglo-Saxon monuments, monasteries, and mutable boundaries. Fred Orton is concerned with the Bewcastle Monument, familiar to many art historians, and how a Heideggerian notion of a built thing could "matter" the monument anew. Focusing on Bede's silence on the geography around him in Ecclesiastical History, Ian Wood puts forth a suggestion that this silence "un-mattered" the attention to Jarrow and thus created the impression of a region much more marginalized than it really was. Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley's essay considers human marks on the landscape modified by Anglo-Saxon colonizers. Part Two, "Textual Location," focuses on the textuality of place in medieval writing. Stacy S. Klein treats place "as a profoundly social entity" (p. 113), which exerted an impact on the textual locality of the narrators of the female-voiced elegies. Ulrike Withaus reveals how Gertude of Hefta's distinct spatial and geographic vocabulary of ecstasies and visions translated an ordinary courtyard with a fishpond into a locus of a spiritual conversion for the nuns. Stephanie Hollis's discussion of strategies of emplacement and displacement enriches her argument concerning how the built environment gains significance from the lives lived within it—in her case, the life of St. Edith as commemorated by Goscelin. Diane Watt assesses the impact of the environment on Margery Kempe's piety and religious certainty. And, finally, Part Three, "Landscapes in Time," moves the reader from medieval past to a contemporary contemplation of the landscape of war and its impact on preserving, conserving, and meditation on the past as seen by Rose Macaulay (England) and Daniel Libeskind (Berlin) (Sarah Beckwith); to the assessment of the Cistercians' strategy of occupying places in the landscape while the climate changed the environmental rules under which they operated (Kenneth Addison); and to locating the views on medieval monasticism in the modern American imagination of popular and contemporary eco-culture in Oregon, in general, and in a project directed by the ecologist and community activist Richard Hart, a former member of the Institute of Christian Brothers, in particular (Ann Marie Rasmussen).

The scope of the...