Topographies of remembrance

Andy Wood

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139034739.006

4 - Topographies of remembrance

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Andy Wood

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Andy Wood: Affiliation:
University of Durham

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Summary

Ways of seeing: dreams of landscape and the seigneurial gaze

Popular memory in Tudor, Stuart and early Georgian England was embedded in localized senses of place and landscape. Increasingly, these senses came into conflict with elite visions of landscape which both reproduced and sustained wider, epochal shifts in production, exploitation, belief and social relations. Elite contemporaries were well aware of how deeply custom was grafted onto the environment: as Edward Coke put it in 1641, ‘Custom lies upon the land.’ In seeking to refashion the material environment in its own interest, powerful interests also tried to rework readings of both custom and landscape.

In making the argument that senses of landscape lay at the core of early modern popular memory, I should be clear about my use of three key terms: environment, landscape and place. By environment, I refer to the material fact of topography, settlement, cultivation and so on. Landscape is a cultural construction, the sum of our perception of the material world. By place, I refer to the construction of a social collectivity upon the landscape: the creation of mutual, affective ties within a distinct locality. Thus, on an elementary level, whereas environment comprises the material world (contours, structures, organic life), ‘Landscape is a signifying system through which the social is reproduced and transformed, explored and structured … Landscape, above all, represents a means of conceptual ordering that stresses relations.’ It is therefore a product of human agency. Landscape is, above all, a social construction, a collective way of seeing, into which are built collective ways of remembering.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Memory of the People
Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England
, pp. 188 - 246

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139034739.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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