BOOKS ALEC RYRIE


FROM SACRED SITE TO PICNIC SPOT


The Reformation of the Landscape: religion, identity and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland Alexandra Walsham


OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 608PP, £35 ■Tablet bookshop price £31.50 Tel 01420 592974


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all it the Stonehenge problem. Britain’s Protestant reformers were determined to purge these islands of the physical remnants of super-


stition and idolatry. Why didn’t they demolish Stonehenge, famous as “the most notable antiquity of Great Britain” and widely believed to have been a pagan temple? It is not an idle question. In 1645, a chaplain with the Parliamentary army encamped on Salisbury Plain pressed hard for the henge to be dismantled and scattered. And some great wonders and monuments were destroyed. The “rocking stones” of Cornwall, finely bal- anced boulders that could be moved with one hand, were “unwondred” by Protestants des- perate to stamp out popular superstitions. But this kind of Year Zero iconoclasm was


only ever a fringe view, and beliefs are harder to shift than rock. In this magisterial book, Alexandra Walsham, professor of modern history at Cambridge, leads us through how the religious meaning of the British and Irish landscape changed (and did not change) between the Reformation and the eighteenth century. In the process, she cements her repu - tation as the finest Reformation historian of her generation. This is a long book, because Walsham is a precise historian: she does not like sweeping generalisations or broad-brush narratives of


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progress. Her Reformation is not a steady march of rationality, secularism or disen- chantment of the world; it is an erratic, cyclical process, in which each generation reacts against their predecessors’ shortcomings or excesses. In other words, it is a story which can only be told on the ground, through what happens to specific sites. The fine-grained topological detail is one of this book’s particu - lar pleasures.


She begins with Britain’s early medieval


conversion from paganism, which set the pat- tern for everything that followed. Like the Reformation, that conversion was negotiated; it was never complete nor entirely under the Church’s control. And like the Reformation, it wrote itself on to the landscape; but the landscape is a palimpsest from which older meanings can never be entirely erased. Take the shrine of St Patrick’s Purgatory at


Lough Derg in Donegal, for example: an underground cave where pilgrims would spend 24 hours enclosed in darkness in order to see terrifying visions of Purgatory and hell. It was a popular pilgrimage site for centuries, but its destruction was ordered not by a Tudor monarch, but by Pope Alexander VI, after reports of extortion and exploitation there. It then suffered repeated, systematic assaults in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the cave was completely filled in in 1632. But in 1660 it was restored, bolstered by a fresh papal indulgence. Thousands of pilgrims gathered annually, and they continue to do so today. This is one face of the landscape’s


Reformation: its sheer durability. Priests can be killed, shrines like Thomas à Becket’s can be pulverised, but land cannot be destroyed – and even pulverising takes so much effort, time and expense that it rarely happens. And post-Reformation Catholics discovered that the shells of monasteries, and other buildings which had endured what Walsham calls “architectural martyrdom”, had only gained spiritual power in the process. Anyway, not all Protestants were in the pulverising business. It was partly a matter of those most English of traits, legalism and


Stonehenge, Wiltshire: ‘meanings came and went; the stones carried on standing’


inertia: demolish holy wells if you like, but not on my land. Protestants valued the landscape and its mem- ories too. They remembered how early reformers (and later dissidents) had been forced to gather for prayer in the open air, and treasured the sites. Even Quakers swiftly found that their meeting places had special


meaning for them. Open-air preaching per- haps started as a brute necessity, but came to be valued in its own right: worshipping in the midst of Creation, under the immediate hand of Providence.


Add in the rising tide of Protestant anti- quarianism, classicism and ceremonialism, and the iconoclasts begin to look like cranks and philistines. Rather than wiping the land- scape clean, Protestants added their own meanings to it. Holy wells were reborn as spas – and since spas were sites of natural healing directly provided by God as an act of mercy, the rebirth was not a traumatic one. Old sites were given new meanings: the Hurlers, the standing stones of Bodmin Moor, were said to be footballers struck into stone like Lot’s wife for daring to play on a Sunday. And new sites were created. It is possible that the priapic Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset was a seventeenth-century creation, a deliberate squib at Oliver Cromwell. But maybe post-Reformation culture did


something worse to Britain’s holy sites than smashing them: it prettified them. The eighteenth-century English were a nation not of iconoclasts, nor of pilgrims, but of garden- ers. Sacred places became curiosities and antiquities. Their memories were preserved, condescendingly; but they were no longer alive. They have preserved the beautifully tended corpse of sacred Britain for the modern age.


And Stonehenge? No one could ever agree


about it. Demolishing it looked like hard work. Some said that God had preserved it as a terrible warning against idolatry. Inigo Jones thought it was a Roman temple (those bar- baric Britons could never have built it, after all) and took it as an architectural model. Some thought it was a natural structure, a remnant of


the turmoil of the flood.


Meanings came and went; the stones carried on standing. Books don’t last in the same way. But in its own way, Walsham’s book is a monument, and it will still be a landmark of Reformation studies when most other such books published this year have long been swept away.


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