This chapter approaches emporia as settlements organized to afford new forms of interactions in the context of their landscapes. Such an approach reveals how their spatial patterns were manifested through social norms and institutions, which in turn governed communities and their ability to handle interactions between strangers. I show how communities in emporia used simple, effective devices such as road networks and plot systems to define social rights and obligations in ways that were both similar to and different from our concept of urban places. The physical structure of housing plots or ‘yards’ served to premediate and resolve disputes. I argue that this feature reflects legal provisions for strangers as much as it does practical concerns for space. The chapter also demonstrates the limitations of a focus on the dense waterfront neighbourhoods. Defying a traditional ‘strongbox’ concept model of urbanism, the physical structure and activities of the emporia were in fact dispersed over a much wider landscape. The arguments draw upon insights from settlement and landscape archaeology, together with theories of agency and structuration.

The perambulatory boundary clause form entered the English imaginary as a tool of colonization, when the West Saxons began writing charters that claimed British land using the textual forms of the Celtic British people. This relationally oriented landscape description—“from Ida’s creek to the long ridge, and from the long ridge to the wolf pit”—became standard in early medieval English land charters. The landmarks are not in themselves unique, but together, when “walked” by the reader or literally perambulated, combine to produce a unique spatial and legal entity. They were also in flux; over time, landmarks like “Ida’s creek” would have shifted and changed, requiring local, lived experience to navigate the physical, social, and chronological features of the described landscape. As a result, a form designed to stabilize legal boundaries also became a textual and epistemological model for navigating unstable relational identity in the centuries of English literature that followed. Understanding the development of this form in the Old English boundary clauses allows us to see how and why it is operating in Old English literature.

At the end of his life, the titular hero of Beowulf asks his young kinsman Wiglaf to build a mounment, hoping that his presence in the landscape will defend and preserve the memory of the people he leaves behind. Put another way, Beowulf seeks to remain a conceptual landmark by becoming a literal landmark. But in his desire to be reiterated, Beowulf is not alone. Navigating Landmarks of Identity shows that, across early medieval English literature, relational reiteration stabilizes relational identity when a subject’s relationships are uncertain or under threat—whether that be in riddles, catalogue poems, elegies, or charter boundary clauses. Such textual reiteration takes place not only when a boundary is transgressed, or a person is exiled, but throughout Old English literature when an author is confronted with the problem of “who” or “what” something is.

At least ninety symphonies were written by English composers between c. 1920 and 1945. Given the number of compositions and composers, this chapter provides a broad overview of the range of symphonies, including general influences and trends. It is divided into three sections representing predominant approaches to the symphony and focuses on three case studies: choral symphonies (Gustav Holst’s First Choral Symphony), symphonies inspired by landscape (Granville Bantock’s Pagan Symphony) and ‘traditional’ symphonies (Arthur Bliss’s A Colour Symphony). All English symphonies composed during this time embrace experimentation and exploration, whether it be playing with late romanticism or exploiting new techniques and approaches. Some composers sought to create an English symphonic tradition, whereas others simply wanted to make their own mark on the genre. It is argued that given the number of symphonies composed during this time, coupled with the breadth of approaches, English symphonic writing not only endured but actively flourished during this period; furthermore, this body of work deserves to be more rigorously and carefully considered in scholarship.

Written over a period of five decades (1973–2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in his output. Having established a reputation in the 1960s as the ‘enfant terrible’ of British music, chiefly as a result of a number of radical music-theatre works, the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade surprised critics. Yet Davies was long attracted to the abstract qualities of the genre – an interest deepened by his move to Hoy, Orkney, in the early 1970s. This chapter considers how landscape, place and the natural world, issues of form and genre, the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler, and architecture – especially the works of Brunelleschi and Borromini – shaped these symphonies. It argues that acknowledging and appreciating the symphonies from these multiple musical and extra-musical perspectives can illuminate the richness of the composer’s symphonic imagination.

Based on Appadurai’s concept of locality and neighbourhood, this concluding chapter situates the contributions of this volume as well as the author’s own research in Italy in a multidisciplinary and multiculturally long-term comparative perspective. Introducing the concept of ‘qualities of locality’, it discusses landscape properties, settlement (dis)continuity, culture contact and cult as basic elements in the shaping of neighbourhood and the production of locality in Indigenous Mediterranean Iron Age contexts. At times, it also reveals the fragility of the production of locality as a social achievement, as mentioned by Appadurai.

We introduce the Ising model and spin glass theory. The fundamental concepts of replicas and the landscape of the replica symmetry breaking transition are reviewed. Paradigmatic models such as the Edwards–Anderson and Sherrington–Kirkpatrick Hamiltonians are analyzed. The Parisi ansatz and its consequences (in terms of the phase diagram) are discussed.

We introduce the simplest photonic spin glass by leveraging the so-called random energy model (REM), which allows one to derive a phase diagram with reasonable mathematical complexity. We introduce some concepts of nonequilibrium thermodynamic phases in a multimode photonic system.

This chapter considers sacred space and the battles surrounding its possession, uses and understandings of the sacred more generally, including the wider significance of the landscape itself as a sacred space. Irish Catholic approaches were nuanced, such as the distinctions drawn between newly-built Protestant churches and older buildings that could be ‘re-catholicised’. The numerous rites and practices that this entailed are explored, showing that while notions of the holy and control of space were important to Irish Catholics, there was, nonetheless, great variety in how that was expressed. Spaces such as churches and churchyards are also examined as locations where both sacrality and ethnic tensions overlapped, with disputes surrounding burial showcasing Irish Catholic hostility to Protestants and Protestantism as heresy but also as foreign bodies contaminating Irish soil. The politics of church possession is another theme, which is shown to have explosive potential for intra-confessional conflict, as Irish Catholics debated and fought over the control of churches as a central demand of their cause, leading to conflict among themselves.

Roman land division systems or centuriations are a widespread phenomenon and as such a particularly interesting lens through which to assess Rome’s lasting impact on rural landscapes. This chapter discusses three case studies (the Pontine plain, central Italy; the Po plain; and the coast of northern Hispania Tarraconensis) and shows although they show some degree of standardization in form, variability and context-specificity are key to the physical manifestations of centuriations, and thus to understanding their impacts.

Visual popular culture flourished in the nineteenth century. Museums began democratizing to include wider audiences, even to the extent that some hosted exotic objects, live people, and animals. These sensationalist or “dime” museums were best represented by P. T. Barnum’s American Museum (1841–1865) and its dioramas and panoramas, objects, illusions and stunts, and animal and human performances. Popularization of visual culture also occurred in the commercial growth of book and magazine illustrations as well as in wall art print reproductions, all of which admitted the fine arts into middle-class parlors. Photographs and daguerreotypes, especially portraiture and landscapes, became fashionable. Outside the home, an increasingly urbanized environment admitted new visual elements in a landscape of sensory overload. Broadsides, billboards, and wall posters all contributed to democratizing spectatorship, and visual spectatorship itself became an essential component of urban living. New visual culture reshaped both who could see and who was seen.

This paper explores the evolution, transformation, and adaptation of settlement patterns in Roman-period Southwest Asia. By examining three case study areas—the Amuq Plain in southern Turkey, the Balikh River Valley, and the Upper Khabur Basin in northeastern Syria—it investigates subsistence strategies and modes of landscape exploration. Through a detailed analysis of archaeological and historical data, this chapter aims to shed light on how local communities adapted to changing socio-economic and ecological condition in this extended borderland.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).