This study shifts its gaze from Edenic wildernesses, to regional monastic houses, to the symbolic language of cities in order to suggest a broadened definition of the locus amoenus tradition in medieval English literature. This expanded definition underlies Catherine A. M. Clarke's argument that the representation of such landscapes both contributes to and helps us to trace the development of “ideological formulations of English space and identity” (2). Clarke acknowledges that certain studies of nationhood align the development of national consciousness with the development of modernity itself, restricting medieval studies’ access to considerations of such ideology formation. In responding to this critical bias, Clarke makes clear that her own study does not seek to “privilege connections with modernity” (3) but, instead, uses the English imagination of the literary landscape to construct definitions of nationhood particular to a medieval context. In articulating this goal, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 reveals its value to an important discourse within medieval studies. Related works such as Thorlac Turville-Petre's England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996) undergird medieval conceptions of nationhood with modern ones. Literary Landscapes, in contrast, imagines early English nationhood on its own terms through the classical figure of locus amoenus and its medieval revisitings.

This revision of locus amoenus traditions informs the book's trajectory. Chapter 1 juxtaposes Bede's Ecclesiastical History with Gildas's Ruin of Britain to read architecture and wilderness as enclosed microcosms and mirrors of the island as a whole. Chapter 2 argues that Old English poetry's use of the locus amoenus reflects the constitution of English national identity through such borrowings from other cultural traditions. Clarke reads The Phoenix and Guthlac A as demonstrating Old English poetry's capacity for representing delightful places. She further suggests that The Wanderer and Seafarer invert the locus amoenus tradition, seeing a “specific politics” (60) of cultural reform and renewal in these literary appropriations and revisions. In chapter 3, monastic literature from Glastonbury, Ely, and Ramsey reveals the role of regional identity in the construction of national identity. Clarke returns to her earlier reading of the Guthlac legend, demonstrating that within the monastic context, the cult “offers Glastonbury … the opportunity to perform the myth of English identity” through its regional landscape (79). Clarke's fourth chapter contrasts the twelfth-century urban encomium as symbolically coherent locus amoenus with the fourteenth-century cityscape as “unstructured cacophony” (91). At the same time, Clarke perceives continuities between these two traditions. In both, writing about cities challenges the physical and ontological boundaries between urban and rural. Literary Landscapes ends by reasserting the multifarious nature of the locus amoenus tradition, encompassing a “symbolic vocabulary” that “make[s] different versions of England according to … different communities” (140).

The book's experimentation with the term locus amoenus is its most provocative and its most vulnerable feature. Clarke's willingness to see texts as revising this tradition leads to useful revelations about literary landscapes. The connections she suggests between Old English poetic imagery and renovatio in Benedictine manuscript art are compelling. She makes the case that English borrowings from Latin traditions do not indicate “weakness” but, rather, assert a “Benedictine representational vocabulary of renewal and revival” (65). Here, and at several other points, the book successfully argues that locus amoenus possessed “a wider range of available cultural associations for a late Anglo-Saxon audience than has previously been recognized” (65).

The readings attempting to redefine the space of locus amoenus, however, do not always convince. For example, Clarke sees a passage in Richard Maidstone's Concordia as transforming the city into “a flower-filled meadow” (118). But the demarcation of place here, “queque platea” ending one line and “platea” ending another, suggests the strict geometry of the city layout more than the meadow Clarke envisions. As is the case in her interpretation of the multifaceted Old English word “wide” as signaling a specifically pastoral expanse (40), Clarke's textual evidence does not always yield readily the spatial elements of landscape she seeks. More generally, her identification of an aesthetic strategy of inversion, in which texts like The Ruin or The Wanderer allude to an encomium or locus amoenus by embodying their opposite, makes the boundaries around those traditions too fluid.

Investigating the concept of locus itself might provide a clearer way of setting new parameters for locus amoenus. Clarke's readings attend to the nuances of delight, as her chapter title “The Delightful City” indicates. But one might also consider how theories of space and place participate in the acts of ideology construction that this study explores. Certain theorists of spatiality—for instance, Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [Boston, 1994]) and Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [Cambridge, 1991])—contextualize their readings of space within analyses of economic, political, and social ideologies. I do not suggest by invoking these authors that Clarke's book should have adopted their Marxist or phenomenological methodologies. On the contrary: Clarke's work is admirable in accounting for the period's perspectives on national identity without resorting to teleological narratives of modernity. At the same time, such theorists’ questions concerning the relationship between physical and conceptual space can usefully inform medievalists’ work on both the aesthetics and the ideology of place. Furthermore, Clarke focuses on place rather than ethnic or social communities of persons, another aspect of national identity. In applying this focus, critical awareness about the meaning of place as opposed to person becomes especially important.

In the Middle Ages, Brian Stock suggests (“Reading, Community, and a Sense of Place,” in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley [New York, 1993]), places experienced visually were understood textually. Literary Landscapes creatively develops this idea, making a commitment to integrating textual and spatial forms. It contributes productively to a discussion about the medieval world's triangulations of place, culture, and representation.