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Trees were of fundamental importance in Anglo-Saxon material culture, but they were also a powerful presence in Anglo-Saxon religion before and after the introduction of Christianity. This book shows that they remained prominent in early English Christianity, and indeed that they may have played a crucial role in mediating the transition between ancient beliefs and the new faith. It argues that certain characteristics of sacred trees in England can be determined from insular contexts alone, independent of comparative evidence from culturally related peoples. This nevertheless suggests the existence of traditions comparable to those found in Scandinavia and Germany. Tree symbolism helped early English Christians to understand how the beliefs of their ancestors about trees, posts, and pillars paralleled the appearance of similar objects in the Old Testament. In this way, the religious symbols of their forebears were aligned with precursors to the cross in Scripture. Literary evidence from England and Scandinavia similarly indicates a shared tradition of associations between the bodies of humans, trees, and other plant-life. Though potentially ancient, these ideas flourished amongst the abundance of vegetative symbolism found in the Christian tradition

This article begins by considering the re-presentation of the Biblical landscape of the Binding of Isaac in the Old English text Genesis A. With reference to place-names, landscapes, and other texts, it demonstrates how this setting was presented as a place of cremation on a hilltop border. The poem may, for audiences living in the generations following the cessation of cremation burial, have served as a means of understanding earlier religious praxis. The article then considers a similar moment of cultural transition written into the conversion-era cemeteries at Apple Down in Sussex, similarly sited in a border region and on top of a hill. Here, a mixed-rite cremation and inhumation cemetery was succeeded by an inhumation cemetery set out in a novel fashion, likely reflecting changes in contemporary religious culture. Both the poem and the cemeteries at Apple Down, in marking these changes, can be understood within Material Engagement Theory, a theory of the Extended Mind, as 'exograms': material memory records external to the embodied human brain. The article considers both the poem and cemeteries in this light, and shows how exograms of various kinds might be used to assemble an exogrammar, here defined as a set of ideas distributed across one or more exograms. A framework of this kind, assembling evidence across a diverse range of material and textual sources, is presented as an adaptable method of investigation across disciplines in which various forms of evidence can be understood as residual components of embodied human minds.

"This book is a comprehensive introduction to the landscapes of the Middle Ages within and beyond Europe, paying close attention to the relationship between 'real' and imagined landscapes and the ways that medieval people made and inhabited their world. Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in medieval studies and history, offering interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational insights into this period of immense change and innovation"--