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Sensation, Sacred Landscapes, and the Sense of the Past in Britain and Ireland, 1689-1760

Authors
  • Hendry, Jacob
Publication Date
Aug 11, 2023
Source
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository
Keywords
Language
English
License
Unknown
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Abstract

This thesis explores how sensation could be central to the articulation of the sacrality of the landscape for British Protestants in the first half of the eighteenth century. It examines the relationship between attitudes to the visible past and the history of emotions, the senses, and experience to reveal the religious inflections of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. With this in mind, I work to nuance recent histories that have shown that the British landscape was held to be sacred in many senses well into the eighteenth century by showing that feeling and sensation played a central role in the ways people conceived and perceived the sacrality of the landscape. Religiously inflected sensations such as pleasure and delight, rapture and ecstasy, horror and dread, were elicited in encounters with the landscape across the first half of the eighteenth century, whether this was while beholding or painting landscape pictures; seeking solitude and retreat in poetry and gardens; listening to thunderous echoes in mountainous and subterranean landscapes; or observing the supposed druidic visible past that littered the British landscape. Whilst these landscapes and sensations were certainly to be enjoyed, they were also the source of deep anxiety. The British landscape contained the remains of Britain’s religious past from the supposed temples and groves of the druids to the ruins of medieval abbeys. These were places at which religiously inflected sensations were thought to have been felt before in idolatrous worship. Moreover, with the Act of Toleration in 1689, Anglicanism was increasingly coming under threat by dissenting sects which, now legal, were often defined by their perceived (over) use of religious sensation in their worship and piety. These ambivalences defined the shifting and changing experience and articulation of sacred landscapes through sensation in pre-Romantic Britain. / Dr Lightfoot Studentship

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