
Inhabiting the Landscape
Nicola Whyte(Author)
Windgather Press
Published on 16. February 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
200 pages
978-1-905119-24-0 (ISBN)
Description
The discipline of landscape history has recently taken a new turn: away from the analysis of past land use and environments towards an understanding of landscape as a social construct. This book is a significant step along this exciting new road. Focusing on Norfolk in the post-medieval centuries, Nicola Whyte recaptures the essential character of ordinary people's experience of landscape. She shows how perceptions were deeply rooted in the comprehension of material antiquities, the annual round of work, public events and religious ritual, and the complex web of rights and jurisdictions mapped out in the fields. People valued and gave meaning to the landscape for a wide range of reasons, many of them unconnected with the economic potential of the land. Landscape features outside the confines of the church and the graveyard - pilgrimage routes, crosses, wells and springs - played an important part in the ideological shift of the Reformation. Parish boundaries, and in particular the annual ritual of 'beating the bounds' at Rogationtide, reveal much about the shifting pattern of local allegiances and competition over resources. Places of execution and the graves of suicides were 'mneumonic spectacles' defining both geographical and behavioural limits. The local history of enclosure and rights to commons is the story of nascent capitalism in rural England, a clash of values between modern productivity and ancient tradition that involved the reinterpretation and renegotiation of the past. Informed by the latest archaeological theory, this book shows how landscape development was a dynamic, experiential process, in which world-views changed as well as woods, hedges and fields.
Reviews / Votes
Nicola Whyte has written an exciting and groundbreaking book on the post-medieval landscape. It should be compulsory reading for all historians and archaeologists who profess to be interested in the human beings who inhabited that landscape.' -- Landscape History Landscape History "Nicola Whyte has brought fresh air to the crowded field of Reformation studies with a county study that focuses, not on the church and abbey buildings that have monopolized the attention of most historians studying the period, but on the fields and heaths in which they lay, as recorded in contemporary maps and depositions." -- Jeremy Harte Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and CultureMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Macclesfield
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
40 b/w illus
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 185 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-905119-24-0 (9781905119240)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
02/2009
1st Edition
Windgather Press
€18.99
Available for download

E-Book
02/2009
OXBOW BOOKS
€18.99
Available for download
Person
by Nicola Whyte