Journal articles on the topic 'Celtic church – history'

In November of 1935, a uniquely puzzling inscription in Etruscoid characters was discovered among the remains of an Iron Age necropolis west of the church at Castaneda in Canton Grisons (Graubünden, Grigione). The inscription is engraved along the spout of a bronze oinochoe (Schnabelkanne), and apart from a solitary chi inscribed on another find from this necropolis, is the only evidence of alphabetism to have been unearthed from the site. Castaneda is a hamlet strategically perched some 780 meters above sea level along the northern slope of the Calanca Valley (Val Calanca) as it opens onto the Misox Valley (Val Mesolcina), an age-old trade and communication artery that leads northward to the Lesser Saint Bernard Pass. The necropolis is, therefore, situated about 11 kilometers (seven miles) northeast of Bellinzona, which lies just across the cantonal border to Ticino (Tessin); see Map 1 and Nagy (2000a, 2000b) for a site history.

Abstract This article discusses the conversion experiences as recalled by Irish women who converted to Islam during the so-called ‘Celtic-Tiger’ period—the years of Ireland’s dramatic economic boom and major socio-cultural transformations between 1995 and 2007. In this period, the increasing religious diversity of Irish society and the decline of the social authority of the Catholic Church facilitated the exploration of alternative religious and spiritual affiliations. Irish women converts to Islam are an example of the emergence of a post-Catholic subjectivity in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. The women’s agency is illustrated through the choice of Islam as a religion and a cultural space different to Catholicism in order to gain status, power and control within the various religious and ethnic communities. This article is the first major study on conversion to Islam in Ireland during this period.

This article examines the historical mythmaking of the multifaceted Welsh intellectual Edward Williams and his bardo-druidic doctrine known as “Bardism” and developed by him based on the ideas of the main ancient religions (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). Drawing on Barddas, the purpose of this study is to identify and reveal the main “dogmas” of neo-druidism and identify the peculiarities of interpretation of the Celtic past by this historian-polymath. Relying on the methodology of intellectual history, the author not only manages to trace the origins of neo-druidism in the work of Edward Williams but also reveal the very context of the era which the main hoaxer of Wales belonged to. During the study, the author concludes that the doctrine developed by the antiquary was aimed at refuting the image of the Celts as barbarians, which appeared in the Roman historical tradition and entrenched in the perception of the British. This was accomplished by Edward Williams by creating a bardic-druidic doctrine, which demonstrated that the Druids were not bloodthirsty pagan priests at all, but on the contrary, sages who spread monotheism and principles of truth, piety, freedom, and peace. Based on the blending of Druidism and Christianity, Celtic church arose, which was destroyed by the Roman Catholic Church. However, the ancient teaching survived thanks to the poetic tradition of the Bards of Glamorgan, successors of the Druids. Thus, building this line of succession, Iolo Morganwg was able to consolidate the status of the centre of Druidism for his motherland both in ancient times and in modern times, and demonstrate a high degree of development of the Celtic civilization.

PurposeThis paper aims to use the case of early medieval Irish monasticism to highlight the implicit a historicism of the knowledge management (KM) literature and to show how such a historical study can be used to increase the level of discourse and reflection within the contested and increasingly fragmented field of KM.Design/methodology/approachThe author uses secondary source analysis from a diversity of academic fields to examine the relatively sophisticated processes through which the monks gathered, codified, created, interpreted, disseminated and used religious and secular knowledge. The author then draws out a number of insights from this literature to aid current thinking on and debates within the field of KM.FindingsThe paper presents a church metaphor of KM operating at two levels. Internally the metaphor highlights the deliberate but politically contentious nature of knowledge creation, a process of developing both explicit and tacit knowledge among the monks, revolving around ideologies and cults, and primarily concerned with the avoidance, constraining and settling of controversies and debates. Externally, the metaphor highlights the political use of and the mediation of access to knowledge for the purposes of social position and influence.Originality/valueThis paper is original in providing a detailed consideration of KM activities within a specific early medieval historical context and in drawing from the study to contribute to current thinking within the field of KM.

Irenaeus flourished toward the end of the second century as a bishop in Lugdunum (modern Lyons, France). He is important for several reasons, but scholarly interests in Irenaeus have focused chiefly on his place in the history of Christian thought and his churchmanship. Although his mission/evangelistic work is routinely mentioned by church historians, little effort has been made to extract from his apologetical-catechetical writings something of his missiology. As a native of Asia Minor, he engaged in cross-cultural work among the pagan Celtic peoples of southern Gaul. Two aspects of his missiology are probed: cultural adjustment in linguistics and his motivation for the task. Missiologically, he stands as a thoughtful combination of missionary-theologian-churchman.

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

Throughout Christianity, its activities are in one way or another connected to the historical reality of its time. Usually, for different epochs, the strength of these bonds was different, but during the Middle Ages, they were significantly stronger than before and after. It is here that perhaps the most important moment was the rise of Christianity, which spread over a relatively short period of time almost throughout Europe. It was then - and never again in all its history - that the Church was able to participate in the formation of all aspects of its contemporary life (including the social), in accordance with its spirit. When solving this task, it inevitably came in close contact with the "world" and the various forms in which it was represented (ie with culture, state, etc.).

Attempting to present eight centuries of Breton history in one article is of course a daunting task and my aim here is simply to provide an outline highlighting the major trends and events that will enable the reader seeking a historical introduction to better understand Breton history and culture. Covering such a long span of time necessarily implies selecting only the most salient historical events and aspects of Brittany’s cultural development. Until the Revolution of 1789, there were nine Catholic dioceses in Brittany and Breton history inscribed itself within the administrative framework of the Church. In three of these Breton dioceses (Léon, Trégor, Cornouaille) Breton was by far the dominant language; in the dioceses of Saint-Brieuc and Vannes people spoke Breton and French or Gallo (a romance language with Latin roots), while in those of Nantes and Dol, Gallo or French were spoken, with Breton used in an enclave situated in the area around Guérande. The diocese of Dol was particular in that its possessions were disseminated throughout Brittany and as far as the Norman border. This reflects the donations it had received from the Breton aristocracy. The use of the Breton language varied through the centuries, with the Breton-speaking areas receding westwards as time went by. The impact that this had on Breton history should not be underestimated: Brittany shares this linguistic plurality with other regions or states like Belgium, Switzerland or Canada and the Celtic countries. The linguistic status of Breton is considerably different though since it is not officially recognised by the French government. This should be kept in mind when considering the nature of Breton cultural and political identities until the present day.

As commonly used in its moral sense I will, for the purposes of this paper, take the concept of “conscience” to be the inherent ability of every healthy human being to perceive what is right and what is wrong and, on the strength of this perception, to control, monitor, evaluate and execute their actions. Such values as right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust, and fair or unfair have existed throughout human history and are also shaped by an individual’s cultural, political and economic environment. The medieval penitential literature offers just one such historical snapshot. These manuals or guides for confessors, including prayers, lists of questions to be asked by the confessor, and penances to be assigned for various sins were an integral part of the practice of private penance which began in the Celtic Church and later spread through Europe with the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon missions. Penitential books for use by confessors in private penance appeared in the sixth through ninth centuries. These texts were not as a rule decreed by episcopal synods. Their authority generally rested on the reputation of their compiler or editor. Public penances were assigned for public sins that caused scandal for the church. Private penances were assigned for private sins or matters of conscience. The Penitentials were generally more flexible than the churches’ ancient canonical penitential system which they largely replaced. While later European Penitentials tended to provide more complete guidance for the confessor instead of mere lists of rules and penalties; such instruction is not entirely absent from the earlier Irish texts and ancillary documents. Thus, the goal of penance in the early middle ages was not only sacramental but also didactic. It would have been an occasion to inculcate Christian beliefs, an opportunity to model proper Christian behaviour and by extension a key part of the formation of conscience. As was the case with later expressions of casuistry (Etym. Latin casus, case, or problem to be solved) the purpose of the penitential literature was thus to adapt and apply the unchangeable norms of Christian morality to the changing and variable circumstances of human life albeit in somewhat rudimentary fashion. As such this literary genre and the pastoral practices stemming from it are a valid and worthy object of any historical study and theological analysis concerning the ‘formation of conscience.’

Abstract The British-Latin writer Gildas (493‐570) is an enduring presence in Celtic tradition. So this monograph is welcome. Its author, thanks to his command of Latin, places Gildas firmly within the context of classical, patristic, and early medieval learning, identifying him as one who contributed much to understanding of “political and ecclesiastical authority in the early medieval West” (11). The volume, consisting of six chapters, starts off with the relation of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae to other sources for the early Middle Ages (St. Patrick’s Confession, Bede, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum), all of them problematic, especially for fifth- and sixth-century dates. (Yet the difficulties are less than imagined.) In chapter two we encounter images of Gildas, who (53) devised “a providential history of Britain” to underpin his own “authority on Church law.” Chapter three has as subject the monastic features of De Excidio, with useful statements on Gildas as a cleric “directed by God to edify a fallen kingship and priesthood” (77). The remaining three chapters provide explorations of Gildas’s influence on St. Columbanus (d. 615), Hiberno-Latin canon law, and Bede (d. 737). There follow a conclusion and some ancillary matter.

El monoteísmo y el universalismo cristianos llevan implícita su difusión por todas partes. Se convierten las personas y sus prácticas, pero también el orden del tiempo y las percepciones del espacio. En el artículo se estudian los procedimientos seguidos para construir el paisaje cristiano de Galicia. La metodología empleada es una combinación de arqueología del paisaje, arqueoastronomía e historia de las religiones. Se aprecia una reutilización coherente de los paisajes paganos preexistentes, sobre todo de la Edad del Hierro celta, sin que ello suponga una subordinación de la Iglesia sino, por el contrario, un reaprovechamiento del pasado desde una posición dominante. The making of the galician christian landscape: towards the definition of a model of transformation - Monotheism and Christian universalism aim to be spread everywhere. People and practices become Christian, but also the order of time and the perceptions of space. In our work we study the procedures implemented to build up the Christian landscape of Galicia. The methodology is a combination of landscape archeology, archaeoastronomy and history of religions. We can detect a coherent reuse of pre-existing pagan landscapes, especially those of the Celtic Iron Age, but this does not imply the subordination of the Church but, o the opposite, a reading of previous landscapes from a dominant position.

Wales has a significant number of islands that have supported monastic life at some time in their histories. These monastic islands do not command quite the same international attention as those from other Celtic nations, for example Skellig Michael (Ireland) or Iona (Scotland), but islands such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey) and Caldey Island (Ynys Bŷr) have sustained recognition as 'holy islands' in Welsh tradition. Those seeking assessments of the phenomenon of island monasticism in Wales will also find only a modest literature, now requiring some careful recalibration in the light of changing interpretations of Welsh church history. This discussion is an attempt to establish the data and models for a holistic reassessment. This is not necessarily just an academic desideratum. Welsh islands have recently, for example, been identified as assets for the emerging trend of 'faith tourism', with potential economic as well as environmental impact.<br/> In this study I will approach the archaeology of the Welsh islands initially by way of their historical context. There are a number of reasons for this choice of approach. It is arguable that only a multi-disciplinary approach here offers a sustainable body of data for analysis. Island sites are characteristically materially poor and the eremitical ethos of much island monasticism converges with that tendency. The 'island monastery' is also prone to rather singular conception as an 'early Christian' artefact, whereas much of what we think we know concerning the Welsh islands speaks most definitely of later medieval use—and only uncertainly of the early medieval. So a strongly diachronic approach is essential. For one or two of the islands, moreover, there is a requirement simply to resolve their historical identities. Finally, there is a pressing need to uncouple these islands from dated historical models of evangelism via the seaways and other models in which monasticism is conflated with secular Christianity—assumptions that can influence interpretation of archaeological evidence for settlement.

Pilgrimage tourism is a growing phenomenon in Britain. Across the last few decades it has inspired the construction of pilgrimage trails—frequently named after saints—in the region identified as “Celtic Britain”. Many of these trails link together well-documented artefacts, such as landscape monuments and church buildings, which act as waypoints or stations, along routes inspired by narrative models of pilgrimage. There is considerable interest in studying the reception of such data through their use in trails. Questions of historicity arise from claims made for the nature of early medieval Christianity. Although deconstructing these claims could seem to be mainly an academic priority, it may also contribute to diversifying the visitor experience over the longer term. The use of scholarly data in pilgrimage trails can also serve as a measure of the impact of religious history research upon economic and parochial life.

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisement. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisements for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. Hardiman, Nodlaig P., and Máire Kennedy. A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 Compiled from the Most Authentic of Sources. Dublin: Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000. Huetz de Lemps, Alain. “Colonial Beverages and Consumption of Sugar.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 383–93. Kennedy, Máire. “Dublin Coffee Houses.” Ask About Ireland, 2011. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/pages-in-history/dublin-coffee-houses›. ----- “‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” Dublin Historical Record LVIII.1 (2005): 76–85. Liddy, Pat. Temple Bar—Dublin: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

The numismatic collection of the Banat Museum in Timişoara includes two rare bronze medals dedicated to members of the well known Weifert family from Pančevo (Serbia). One is a medal dedicated to Ignaz Weifert on his 64th anniversary by his son Georg Weifert, crafted by the Austrian engraver Anton Schar (1845 – 1903). The second one is dedicated to Georg Weifert on his 44th anniversary, created by the Austrian engraver Franz Xaver Pawlik (1865 – 1906). They were purchased in 1907 by the Banat Museum from Fejér József, antiquarian in Budapest, for the sum of 22 crowns. The medals were given inventory numbers 731 and 732 in the old register of the collections. The medal dedicated to Ignaz Weifert (1826 – 1911) is made of bronze, patinated (55.5 mm; inventory no 136; Pl. I.1 – 2). It is generally but wrongly dated in 1870. Given the marked date (MDCCCLXX), one considers that it had been realized on the occasion of Ignaz Weifert’s 20th year of industrial activity. Actually, one thousand eight hundred seventy represents the year of establishment for the Weifert brewery in Belgrade. There are several arguments in favor of a correct dating of the coin (i.e. 1890): the age of Ignaz Weifert, marked on the obverse of the medal (LXIV), as he fulfilled 64 in the year 1890. Secondly, the medal is mentioned among the works of the engraver Anton Schar from 1890 (in the same year Schar had also realized a plaque, 136 mm in diameter, with the portrait of Ignaz Weifert). More so, Felix Milleker affirmed in his study on the Weifert family that in December 1890 Georg Weifert dedicated a medal to his father Ignaz, crafted by the Austrian engraver Anton Schar (Milleker 1925, 11).The second medal, dedicated to Georg Weifert (1850 – 1937) on his 44th anniversary is made of bronze, has 52.2 mm in diameter (inventory no 84; Pl. III.1 – 2) and was created by Franz Xaver Pawlik in 1894. The same engraver had molded a medal dedicated to Ignaz and Georg Weifert in 1903, in two variants: 25 mm and 140 mm in diameter. We know about the existence of a 25 mm medal as part of a private collection in Timişoara. Originally from north Austria, the Weiferts settled in Banat during the first half of the 18th century, initially in Vršac, where from a certain Georg Weifert (1798 – 1887) moved to Pančevo. Here he became one of the prominent local merchants and, from 1841, the owner of the brewery (established in 1722). In 1849 the elder son of Georg, Ignaz Weifert (Ignjat Vajfert in Serbian) assumed the control of the brewery, after previously following a course of beer making in Munich (Bavaria). After expansion and modernization, the family business thrived and the Weifert brewery in Pančevo became one of the most important enterprises of the kind from Banat (Pl. II.1). In 1870 Ignaz expanded the business by building a new brewery in Belgrade, first in Serbia in time, on the Smutekovac Hill (nowadays Topčider). His son, Georg Weifert (Đorđe Vajfert in Serbian) took over its control in 1872. The Weifert brewery from Pančevo remained in care of Ignaz and his son Hugo. The one to become General Governor of the National Bank of Serbia, mighty industrialist and pioneer of modern mining in Serbia, Georg Weifert (Pl. IV) was born on June 15, 1850 in Pančevo. After elementary and secondary studies in Pančevo, he studied at the Commercial School in Budapest. Between 1869 and 1872 he followed the technology courses in brew at the Agricultural School in Weihenstephan, near Munich. He was 22 when he took his father’s brewery from Belgrade, which he modernized and turn into one of the most largest and modern of its kind from the Balkans (Pl. II.2). The Weifert beer became the most sought beer in Serbia. As one of the most rich and inuential person in Serbia, he is remembered as a great philanthropist, Maecenas for numerous institutions, cultural and charitable societies. He was awarded the highest Serbian and also French, Romanian or other orders. For decades he held the most important positions in the Serbian and Yugoslav Masonic lodges. He was married to Marie Gassner but had no ospring. In 1923, on the occasion of celebrating 50 years of marriage, he financed the building of St. Ana Church in Pančevo, in memory of his mother Anna. In the same year he was elected honorary citizen of his home city. He died aged 87 on January 12, 1937, at his villa on Vojvode Putnika Street. He was buried on January 16 in the Catholic cemetery in Pančevo, left of the portal built in 1924 on his expenses. The name Weifert is also associated with the well-known numismatic collection owned by this family, of which three members were passionate collectors: Ignaz and his sons, Hugo and Georg. The one who settle the collection (around 1878) was Hugo (1852 – 1885). After his early death in 1885, aged only 33, the collection passed to his father Ignaz, who continued to gather coins. In 1911, after the death of Ignaz, the numismatic collection passed to Georg Weifert. All three of them had been members of the Numismatic Society in Vienna: Hugo from 1879, Ignaz from 1885 and Georg from 1889. Although the members of Weifert family collected all kind of Greek and Roman coins, it seems that Hugo was the one passionate for medals concerning Belgrade, Ignaz paid special attention to Viminacium issued coins while Georg was interested in 4th century AD Roman coins. The numismatic collection held antique coins: Greek, Celtic and Roman, Byzantine coins, medieval Serbian ones, taler from Central Europe, medals concerning Belgrade etc. The Republican and Imperial Roman coins dated to 1st – 5th c. AD compose the largest part of the collection, including numerous rarities. There are also Roman colonial coins issued by the cities in the Balkans, especially Viminacium and from Asia Minor. Today we hold no longer information on the ending place of these coins, except for the golden Late Roman solidi found in the spring of 1879 near Borča, that are to be considered among the most valuable pieces of the collection. The PMS COL VIM type coins, issued between 239 and 255 AD in Viminacium (today Stari Kostolac, Serbia) are also important, although the collection does not comprise the complete series and all the variants. One can notice the interest of the Weiferts in collecting this monetary type and the existence of a special relation of the Weifert family with the area of the antique Viminacium (Kostolac). The first coins that entered the Weifert collection came from this area, where Georg held a coal mine and locals often brought him coins for his collection. In two cases, both on the medal dedicated to Georg Weifert in 1894 and on the one dedicated to Ignaz and Georg Weifert in 1903 (the 25 mm variant), realized by Pawlik, there are representations of reverse type of the Roman coins of PMS COL VIM type. The Weifert numismatic collection had been aected by the turmoil of WW I. The rare golden coins held in Belgrade were saved by Georg and taken to France. The rest of the numismatic collection, held in Pančevo, was taken to Vienna by his nephew Adolf Gramberg, where from it came back in 1925, completely disorganized. Unfortunately, the collection of medieval Serbian coins and medals concerning Belgrade that could not be saved disappeared during the war. Georg Weifert donated this valuable collection holding over 14,000 antique coins to the University of Belgrade on September 9, 1923. It had been taken over only in 1929 by Professors Miloje M. Vasić and Nikola Vulić, as representatives of the University, following its arranging by Balduin Saria, custodian of the National Museum in Belgrade and Georg Elmer, a nephew of Hugo Weifert, custodian of the Numismatic Cabinet of Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. After World War II, the Weifert numismatic collection had been handed over to the National Museum in Belgrade, where is kept today.This donation made by Georg Weifert was not a singular act. Ignaz Weifert had donated over time numerous coins, antiquities and maps to the High Gymnasium in Pančevo and the Museum in Vršac. Georg had also donated in 1931 his collection of historic documents (photographs, lithographs, plans and maps) to the City Museum of Belgrade. The medals from the collection of the Banat Museum in Timişoara dedicated to the Weiferts are a testimony for a family that played an important role in the economical history of Banat and Serbia. Its name remains associated with a beer brand especially appreciated over time and for the numismatists with one of the most important collections from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.