Alexandra Walsham, 'The Reformation of the Landscape' (OUP 2011)

I am late coming to this book - I should have bought it long ago, but only discovered it in September in the bookshop at Salisbury Theological College. This is very neglectful, because it covers so beautifully the ground I have an especial interest in, not least holy wells.

The book grew out of an earlier essay Dr Walsham produced for a book on religious change in the 16th century, 'Reforming The Waters', which examined what exactly happened to holy wells during the Reformation upheavals, and whether it was true that many were transformed into spas and medicinal waters as writers of the old school claimed. The exercise demonstrated how what was true of holy wells was true of other categories of site, and eventually this volume emerged.

It's an enormous, stunning work of industry, a vast compilation of material chased down through the highways and byways of Reformation polemic and local history, and building into a portrait of the ways the numinous sites of the landscape, not just wells but churches, stones, trees and caves, among others, were contested between people of differing ideologies, reading those ideologies into what they saw around them and enforcing them on the elements of their topographical inheritance that did not fit them. Ultra-Protestants so wanted to eradicate the idea that divine power could be mediated in special places that they called for every church to be demolished; Catholics protected and rebuilt them and generated new holy sites. I find that the Holy Well of Battle Abbey, so fascinating in its revelation of these processes, has not passed without scholarly notice hitherto as I thought back in July - it's here, on p.220. Politely, nobody on the Wells and Spas Mailing List pointed this out to me when I made a fuss about the well at the time!

The massive scope and intensive detail mean that this survey could never result in a single, uncomplicated, unidirectional account. Dr Walsham points out the ambiguities and contradictions in the story of British Christians and their landscape, which led Puritans to preserve ruins and Catholics to be sceptical of miracles. That complexity, combined with the detail, is part of what makes the book quite tough going. The final paragraph finishes

Encrusted with signposts to the tangled religious histories of the nations that comprised it, the landscape helped early modern people to understand who they were and where they came from - to comprehend the past that shaped them, to come to terms with the challenges of the present, and to find a compass and anchor as they sailed into an uncertain future.

- and if that seems inconclusive, it's because it has to be. There is no one story. The most satisfying parts of the book are the accounts of individual sites over time, such as Glastonbury's Holy Thorn (and allied features) and Ffynnon Gwyddfaen in Carmarthenshire, where you can get some idea of the contradictory multilayering of history and conflict in each place; but the nature of the evidence being what it is, the locations which make such accounts possible are very few.  Yet although The Reformation of the Landscape may have the feel of an enormous Cabinet of Curiosities full of tiny tales bewildering in their number, they are stories of wonder and the ruination of wonder, and that can never fail to fascinate and spellbind.