Peasant Perceptions of Landscape

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape PDF Author: Stephen Mileson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape PDF Author: Stephen Mileson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape PDF Author: Susan Kilby
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781912260218
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. For too long, the principal intellectual approach has been to consider both subject and evidence from a modern, rationalist perspective and to afford greater importance to the social elite. New perspectives are needed. By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages--Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire, and Elton in Huntingdonshire--between c. 1086 and c. 1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. In so doing she draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, and historical geography. This highly interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers' understanding of the ways in which different groups 'read' their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as the means by which locally important history, folklore, and legends were embedded within the landscape itself. Among many valuable insights, this study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought. In addition to enhancing academic understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants' economic experiences, and the construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby's groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities PDF Author: Jessica Joyce Christie
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607324695
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Toxey, Alexei Vranich

Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World

Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World PDF Author: Michael D. J. Bintley
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199680795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon society. Anglo-Saxons dwelt in timber houses, relied on woodland as an economic resource, and created a material culture of wood which was at least as meaningfully-imbued, and vastly more prevalent, than the sculpture and metalwork with which we associate them today. Trees held a central place in Anglo-Saxon belief systems, which carried into the Christian period, not least in the figure of the cross itself. Despite this, the transience of trees and timber in comparison to metal and stone has meant that the subject has received comparatively little attention from scholars. Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World> constitutes the very first collection of essays written about the role of trees in early medieval England, bringing together established specialists and new voices to present an interdisciplinary insight into the complex relationship between the early English and their woodlands. The woodlands of England were not only deeply rooted in every aspect of Anglo-Saxon material culture, as a source of heat and light, food and drink, wood and timber for the construction of tools, weapons, and materials, but also in their spiritual life, symbolic vocabulary, and sense of connection to their beliefs and heritage. These essays do not merely focus on practicalities, such as carpentry techniques and the extent of woodland coverage, but rather explore the place of trees and timber in the intellectual lives of the early medieval inhabitants of England, using evidence from archaeology, place-names, landscapes, and written sources.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts PDF Author: Elaine Treharne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192843818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.

Rural Landscapes of the Punic World

Rural Landscapes of the Punic World PDF Author: Peter Alexander René van Dommelen
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Phoenician and Punic archaeology have long been overlooked by Mediterranean archaeologists, who focused their attention on Greek and Roman cultures. Although the Punic cities and their rural landscapes are to be found along the southern shores and on the islands of the western Mediterranean basin, comprehensive studies of these archaeological remains are virtually non-existent. This book investigates Punic rural settlement in the western Mediterranean by bringing together and comparing the currently dispersed existing evidence for rural Punic settlement. The core of the volume is accordingly made up by a detailed discussion of the archaeological evidence for Punic rural settlement from Sardinia, Sicily, Ibiza, mainland Spain and North Africa. Because agriculture and agrarian produce have always been assumed to have played a critical role in the Carthaginian colonial expansion, the connections between the various colonial contexts and the local characteristics of rural organisation are explored in detail in order to enhance our understanding of these colonial contexts. This in turn provides better insight into Carthaginian colonialism and local Punic rural settlement and their role in the wider Mediterranean context. By publishing this evidence and these interpretations in English, the authors hope to draw attention to Punic archaeology in general and to these rural studies in particular, and to situate them in the wider Mediterranean context of both classical Antiquity and Mediterranean archaeology.

Thinking the Contemporary Landscape

Thinking the Contemporary Landscape PDF Author: Christophe Girot
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1616895594
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the heels of our groundbreaking books in landscape architecture, James Corner's Recovering Landscape and Charles Waldheim's Landscape Urbanism Reader, comes another essential reader, . Examining our shifting perceptions of nature and place in the context of environmental challenges and how these affect urbanism and architecture, the seventeen essayists in argue for an all-encompassing view of landscape that integrates the scientific, intellectual, aesthetic, and mythic into a new multidisciplinary understanding of the contemporary landscape. A must-read for anyone concerned about the changing nature of our landscape in a time of climate crisis.

The Alps

The Alps PDF Author: Jon Mathieu
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509527745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stretching 1,200 kilometres across six countries, the colossal mountains of the Alps dominate Europe, geographically and historically. Enlightenment thinkers felt the sublime and magisterial peaks were the very embodiment of nature, Romantic poets looked to them for divine inspiration, and Victorian explorers tested their ingenuity and courage against them. Located at the crossroads between powerful states, the Alps have played a crucial role in the formation of European history, a place of intense cultural fusion as well as fierce conflict between warring nations. A diverse range of flora and fauna have made themselves at home in this harsh environment, which today welcomes over 100 million tourists a year. Leading Alpine scholar Jon Mathieu tells the story of the people who have lived in and been inspired by these mountains and valleys, from the ancient peasants of the Neolithic to the cyclists of the Tour de France. Far from being a remote and backward corner of Europe, the Alps are shown by Mathieu to have been a crucible of new ideas and technologies at the heart of the European story.

Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming

Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming PDF Author: Debby Banham
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199207941
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century, while trade and manufacturing were insignificant by modern standards. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, the authors employ a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest. The first part of the volume draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, using a series of landscape studies - place-names, maps, and the landscape itself, the authors explore how these techniques might have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, but infinitely adaptable to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

Peasants Making History

Peasants Making History PDF Author: Christopher Dyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198847211
Category : Peasants
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived. Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.