Making a Christian Landscape: How Christianity Shaped the Countryside in Early-Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex - Hardcover

Sam Turner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0859897745 ISBN 13: 9780859897747

Publisher: University of Exeter Press, 2006

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

Review:

This welcome addition to the literature on south-western Britain in the early middle ages. Readable, scholarly and insightful. --British Archaeology. November/December, 2006

In this important new study, Sam Turner argues that the changing pattern of settlements and estates in early medieval south-west Britain owed a great deal to a new Christian ideology of landscape. ...the book serves as a readable, well-illustrated, affordable but also scholarly introduction to the key debates about the early medieval church in the region as well as a new landscape study. --Southern History, Vol. 28, 2006

Synopsis:

This book presents a new interpretation of the development of early medieval landscapes. It stresses the importance of political and religious ideology in both the 'Celtic' west (especially Cornwall) and the 'Anglo-Saxon' east (especially the Wessex counties of Devon, Somerset and Wiltshire). Using innovative new research methods, and making expert use of archaeology, placename evidence, historical sources and land-use patterns, it challenges previous work on the subject by suggesting that the two regions have much in common. Its central argument is that Christian ideology played a key role in the formation of the early medieval landscape in south-west Britain and western Europe generally. This took the form of a reorientation away from a dispersed pattern of ritual sites in favour of important religious centres in lowland locations, which became the principal focuses of a range of economic and social as well as religious activities.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0859897745
• ISBN 13: 9780859897747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 252