This book makes a convincing argument for emphasizing “the necessity of integrating religion into the heart of landscape history” (565). Its impressive detail and documentation make clear that this often overlooked aspect of landscape is central to its evolving social and political development and physical character, particularly in the period between 1500 and 1750.

At one point, we are told, the discussion is “predicated on the post-modern tenet that the landscapes of the past do not exist outside the texts in which they are represented” (476). The volume is largely based upon the evidence of quotations from a plethora of texts, written in the language of their time, which gives a lively and literary, but also anecdotal, character to the book. The author becomes so engaged in these textual landscapes that it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish the text of the author from that of those quoted. An important textual source is the rich British tradition of local history, which goes back to the topographies and chorographies of the early modern period and before. The richness of local history is often tempered, however, by its literal and figurative parochialism. The book represents, in fact, a kind of wedding of British local history and British ecclesiastical history, which can also be parochial, and the result is a very British book that tends to exclude readers who do not share the texts of this British academic fold. Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995), by contrast, takes an instructive, interdisciplinary, international, and cosmopolitan approach that makes the book both broadly accessible and an intellectual milestone.

The most coherent focus of this book is the religious and social perceptions of springs and wells from pagan times to the era of nineteenth-century spas. This material could well stand as an independent book, and hopefully it will not be overlooked due to its submersion within a less-clearly-defined landscape theme. The broader treatment of landscape is less focused because this study, unlike Schama’s book, does not draw substantively upon recent landscape scholarship, particularly as it elucidates the political and social meanings of landscape, which therefore tend to get overlooked. The book thus includes a treatment of the practice of “beating the bounds,” noting that another work on the subject: “broadly conforms with the picture presented here,” though this other author “focuses more on the social and cultural than the religious significance of rogation rituals” (252). Why should the social and the cultural, not to mention the substantive legal and political, elements of such acts of governance, be largely sidestepped in a book on landscape and identity? The -scape in landscape, as most dictionaries state, is cognate with the -ship in, for example, township: one wonders, for example, what the link might be between the religious convictions of the English Protestant immigrants to New England, and their preservation of the English political and cultural landscape in their townships, with their governing meetings held in the meeting-house basement.

Though landscape figures prominently in the title of the book, it is hard to grasp what the author means by the term. In the conclusion it is implied that landscape is variously a “surface,” “scenery” (564), “physical environments,” “spaces and places,” and a “spatial dimension” (565), but the logic linking these diverse concepts is not explained. The book seeks, we are told, to bridge the “divide” between the disciplines of “Geography and History,” and quotes the 1663 words of the Dutch cartographer Johan Blaeu that “Geography [is] the eye and light of history” (565). Though the significance of the divergences in the evolving meaning of landscape as polity and place, contra scenic space, has been critically analyzed in contemporary geography, relatively few post–early modern geographers have been seriously brought to bear. Nevertheless, by bringing to light the importance of integrating religion into landscape history, this book provides rich material for such integrative, bridge-building, work.