Della Hooke – författare

It is being increasingly recognised that cultural and biological diversity are deeply linked and that conservation programmes should take into account the ethical, cultural and spiritual values of nature. With contributions from a range of scholars, practitioners and spiritual leaders from around the world, this book provides new insights into biocultural diversity conservation. It explores sacred landscapes, sites, plants and animals from around the world to demonstrate the links between nature conservation and spiritual beliefs and traditions. Key conceptual topics are connected to case studies, as well as modern and ancient spiritual insights, guiding the reader through the various issues from fundamental theory and beliefs to practical applications. It looks forward to the biocultural agenda, providing guidelines for future research and practice and offering suggestions for improved integration of these values into policy, planning and management.

The landscape of pre-Conquest England can often be reconstructed in minute detail. Yet this is one of the first attempts at such a project. Here the evidence is examined for the West Midlands – the counties of Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, much of which formed the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce.Della Hooke reveals the intimate local landscape through the medium of place names, contemporary documents and archaeological evidence. Her detailed picture brings the Anglo-Saxon countryside very much to life. The patterns which emerge in this period go far to explain the nature of later medieval patterns of settlement and field systems, and provide the key to understanding territorial organisation in the region.

This book examines recent views on the emerging settlement patterns of early medieval Britain and their relation to land use, drawing on both archaeological and documentary sources. Simon Esmonde Cleary takes the study from the later Romano-British into the post-Roman period; Christopher Holdsworth examines the re-emergence of Christianity in sixth-century England, the location of minsters and their role in the economy. The problematic theme of continuity or dislocation recurs in a number of chapters and is closely investigated by Peter Rose and Ann Preston Jones in their chapter on Cornwall, a region marginal to the main thrust of Anglo-Saxon cultural influence. Ethnicity as a factor for change is challenged and Colleen Batey, looking at Northern Britain, finds that archaeology fails to identify with any degree of certainty the specific Scandinavian house type in the uplands. Della Hooke presents a more general summary of the period across England, noting the evidence for the emerging landscape regions which were characterized by particular settlement types and field systems and, in a case study of the Failand ridge in North Somerset, James Bond sets the evidence within a much broader time scale, revealing the gaps which still caracterize our knowledge of the early medieval period.

Similar in theme and method to the first and second volumes, Water and the Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World, third volume of the series Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World, illuminates how an understanding of the impact of water features on the daily lives of the people and the environment of the Anglo-Saxon world can inform reading and scholarship of the period in significant ways. In discussing fishing, for example, we learn in what ways fish and fishing might have impacted the life of the average person who lived near fishing waters in early medieval England: how fishing affected that person’s diet, livelihood, and religious obligations, as well as how fish and fishing waters influenced social and cultural structures. Similar lines of enquiry in the volume’s chapters shed insight on water imagery in Old English poetry, on place names that delineate types of watery bodies across the early medieval landscape, and on human interactions (poetic and otherwise) with fens and other wetlands, sacred wells and springs, landing spaces, bridges, canals, watermills, and river settlements, as well as a variety of other waterscapes.The volume’s examination of the impact of water features on the daily lives of the people and the environment of the Anglo-Saxon world fosters an understanding, in the end, not only of the archaeological and material circumstances of water and its uses, but also the imaginative waterscapes found in the textual records of the peoples of early medieval England.

Similar in theme and method to the first and second volumes, Water and the Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World, third volume of the series Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World, illuminates how an understanding of the impact of water features on the daily lives of the people and the environment of the Anglo-Saxon world can inform reading and scholarship of the period in significant ways. In discussing fishing, for example, we learn in what ways fish and fishing might have impacted the life of the average person who lived near fishing waters in early medieval England: how fishing affected that person’s diet, livelihood, and religious obligations, as well as how fish and fishing waters influenced social and cultural structures. Similar lines of enquiry in the volume’s chapters shed insight on water imagery in Old English poetry, on place names that delineate types of watery bodies across the early medieval landscape, and on human interactions (poetic and otherwise) with fens and other wetlands, sacred wells and springs, landing spaces, bridges, canals, watermills, and river settlements, as well as a variety of other waterscapes.The volume’s examination of the impact of water features on the daily lives of the people and the environment of the Anglo-Saxon world fosters an understanding, in the end, not only of the archaeological and material circumstances of water and its uses, but also the imaginative waterscapes found in the textual records of the peoples of early medieval England.

A powerful exploration of trees in both the real and the imagined Anglo-Saxon landscape.Trees played a particularly important part in the rural economy of Anglo-Saxon England, both for wood and timber and as a wood-pasture resource, with hunting gaining a growing cultural role. But they are also powerful icons in many pre-Christian religions, with a degree of tree symbolism found in Christian scripture too. This wide-ranging book explores both the "real", historical and archaeological evidence of trees and woodland, and as they are depicted in Anglo-Saxon literature and legend. Place-name and charter references cast light upon the distribution of particular tree species (mapped here in detail for the first time) and also reflect upon regional character in a period that was fundamental for the evolution of the present landscape.Della Hooke is Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.