Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe edited by John Howe and Michael Wolfe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS??? The book includes some truly beautiful color illustrations and a good index. Each article is followed by its own bibliography. It should be suitable for upper-level undergraduates and above, and will lend itselfvery well to courses on gender. The sensitive ways in which the articles deal with the construction and interpretation of masculinity in the early modern period would provide an excellent foil for more female-centered studies of the same period. Those scholars who have found themselves wondering about the elusive stage between child and adult will also appreciate this book. BELLE S. TUTEN Juniata College john Howe and Michael wolfe, eds., Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Phce in Western Europe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. ix, 237. isbn: 0-8130-2479-x. $59.95. The impressive range of essays in this volume combats two fundamental misconceptions that scholars of the Middle Ages may not even realize they hold. The first view is that, as in the Arthurian romances that so many of us teach, the Middle Ages were a time when the boundaries between nature and culture were firm and in which the forest or wasteland always remained a looming presence, populated by uncanny Others and undifferentiated by quotidian human experience. The second view dispelled in this volume involves the deeper and, in my opinion, more widespread notion that premodern peoples had little impact on their environments. The volume opens with two essays which immediately complicate the notion that the medieval landscape was necessarily a primeval landscape. Oliver Rackham's excellent essay, "The Medieval Countryside of England,' builds upon his already seminal work in landscape studies. He focuses here with illuminating detail on medieval practices of woodland management. His enumeration of the various methods by which medieval Europeans harvested trees—coppicing, stooling, pasturing, etc.—reveals a peasantry surprisingly skilled in forest management and a gentry class well aware of its reliance on woodland consumption. Rackham thus effectively overturns the idea that phenomena such as forestry and environmental awareness are exclusively modern categories. Likewise, John Cummins's 'Veneurs s'en vont en ParadL·,' reveals how the 'timeless' English countryside is largely the byproduct ofhuman use. His informative examination ofaristocratic hunting practices deftly illustrates his point that all landscapes, both medieval and modern, constitute the 'accumulation ofhistorical, social, literary, and artistic factors' (34). Scholars ofmedieval literature will find that the essays later in the volume speak even more directly to their interests. Nicholas Howe, for instance, provides a thorough overview of Anglo-Saxon poetic attitudes toward the environment; he notes in particular how the the seascape—perceived by the Anglo-Saxons as empty and untouched by human will—serves as a useful trope for the exploration of existential crises in such poems as The Wandererand The Seafarer. In addition, John 102ARTHURIANA Howe's discussion ofthe creation ofChristian sacred space is also useful, cataloguing the underlying topoi that structure hagiographies and pilgrim itineraries alike. I found the studies by Lisa Bitel and Laura Howes to offer the most fruitful syntheses ofliterary and landscape analyses, for each highlights the extent to which imagined landscapes can structure literary texts. Scrutinizing the invasions described in the Old Irish Lebor Gabdh, Bitel shows how a succession of mythical peoples created the cultural and historical terrain ofmedieval Ireland. She demonstrates, moreover, the considerable importance relegated to gender throughout the various invasions: the migrations dominated by women fail, while the successful migrations strike an uneasy balance between the masculine forces of culture and the often feminized landscape. Laura Howes's 'NarrativeTime and LiteraryLandscapes in Middle English Poetry' takes as its point ofdeparture the idea that most medieval travel experience was slow and on foot. With this in mind, she explicates the more uncanny moments in such romances as Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, showing how narrative space in these cases undergoes a transformation foreign to human experience. Several essays mayprove ofgreater immediate interest to historians than to literary scholars, but are nonetheless an absorbing read for those of us who have rarely considered the human impact on the medieval landscape. Petra van Dam's study of English and Flemish rabbit farming, for example, not only explains the explosion of rabbit...