Journal of Folklore Research: JFR Review for The Reformation of the L... http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?

id=1369

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland

By Alexandra Walsham. 2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 608 pages. ISBN: 9780199243556 (hard
cover).

Reviewed by Deborah Justice, Indiana University

[Review length: 815 words • Review posted on September 26, 2012]

Alexandra Walsham’s The Reformation of the Landscape presents a thorough, well-written analysis of
evolving attitudes towards natural and humanly-created environmental features in early-modern Britain.
Walsham demonstrates how natural sites in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales--such as wells, springs,
forests and groves, hills, caves, and boulders--have played important sacred roles across waves of religious
change. In parallel, she shows how human monuments--for example, churches, shrines, and free-standing
crosses in town squares and along roadsides--have been assigned varying significance throughout waxing and
waning tides of paganism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. Attitudes towards all of these landscape sites have
often morphed and evolved as religious currents have swept across the British Isles. In contrast to
assumptions of secularization or stark and immediate change as a result of the Reformation, Walsham asserts
that analyzing changing perspectives on, and interactions with, the landscape over the sustained period of the
“long Reformation” illuminates the reconfiguration of social memory, theology, and confessional identity
during the early-modern period in Britain.

Walsham illustrates how ideas about the physical landscape relate to religious and social landscapes. She
does so through in-depth analyses of a few single sites and nearly countless individual examples. (As a side
note, this volume is remarkable in its copious annotation and use of broad archival resources.)

According to Walsham, the history of a holy well or spring, for example, could demonstrate major shifts in
religion, identity, and memory. For instance, a spring may have been held as a sacred place by local
pre-Christian inhabitants and been associated with healing. During the medieval period, a Christian
missionary saint may have recommissioned the spring as evidencing the Christian god’s power. Local
residents continued to gather and venerate there, and two depressions in the stone at the water’s edge came to
be understood as the saint’s footprints. As Roman Catholicism moved in, the spring’s hagiography may have
expanded to include a saint from the central Catholic canon alongside its local patron. Depending on the local
ecclesiastical and political authorities, Protestant reformers may well have rebuked people for going to the
spring as a dismissal of pagan and/or papish superstition. If the spring was blocked and filled in with rocks to
prevent Catholics from annually visiting and circumambulating the site, however, Walsham points to the
telling irony of Protestants likely visiting the same site and walking around it to celebrate their having purged
it of Catholic pageantry. Assuming the spring’s continued existence, resurgent Counter-Reformation
Catholicism’s renewed interest in the holy family may have reclaimed the spring, but assigned it as a site of
Mary’s miraculous power (instead of that of the original local missionary or previous Vatican-endorsed saint).
Protestants continued to disagree with this attribution of healing power, but by the end of the early-modern
period, enlightenment interest in science and reason would have seen adherents from both confessional
backgrounds sending samples of water to be tested for certain minerals known for their curative powers.
These naturally beneficial properties may then have been ecumenically held as evidence of God’s hand, or

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natural revelation. By tracing this nuanced intellectual history, Walsham argues that the very conflicting,
overlapping meanings assigned to features of the landscape demonstrate how central the physical
environment has been in mapping and chronicling the British experience of religion.

Overall, The Reformation of the Landscape contributes strongly to the understanding of religion, identity, and
memory. While written from the perspective of a historian (Walsham being in Modern History at the
University of Cambridge), readers from a variety of disciplinary fields should find the volume useful and
interesting. In addition, the level of detail provided in brief stories of chaste virgins hanged on sacred oaks by
lecherous priests, hellish caves, fairy glens, and boulders placed by giants keeps the over 600-page book
moving along very nicely.

For folklorists, Walsham’s interaction with the field of folkoristics may, however, seem somewhat
problematic. In her nevertheless insightful chapter on invented traditions, her description of the study of
folklore presents a view of the field frozen in time, as stemming from a Victorian era interested in “cultural
fossils” preserved in a “historical vacuum,” such that “The fashionable theory of ‘survivals’ by which the
endeavours of these self-styled ethnologists were inspired has exerted tenacious influence. Their instinct to
regard the ‘folklore’ they collected as dead artefact rather than an evolving organism has, until quite recently,
blinded scholars to the capacity of these sources to illuminate questions that are central to our understanding
of the early-modern era itself…. I shall suggest that despite the many methodological pitfalls that surround
them, these anthologies still have enormous value to the historian” (474-75). Many folklorists might argue
that twenty-first-century approaches to their field provide exactly the illuminating questions that Walsham is
seeking through her own work. As such, Reformation of the Landscape provides access to rich primary and
secondary source information that may benefit folkloristic investigations of the early-modern period, religion,
identity, and social memory.

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