Tomas O Carragain – författare

Landscapes across Europe were transformed, both physically and conceptually, during the early medieval period (c AD 400-1200), and these changes were bound up with the conversion to Christianity and the development of ecclesiastical power structures. Whilst Christianity represented a more or less common set of beliefs and ideas, early medieval societies were characterised by vibrant diversity: much can potentially be learned about these societies by comparing and contrasting how they adapted Christianity to suit local circumstances. This is the first book to adopt a comparative landscape approach to this crucial subject. It considers the imprint of early medieval Christianity on landscapes along the continent's western shore from Galicia to Norway, and across the northern islands from Britain and Ireland to Iceland. The construction of new monuments clearly led to some major physical changes, but landscapes are not just affected by tangible, material alterations: they are also shaped by new types of knowledge and changing perceptions.Christianity was associated with many such changes including new ways of seeing the land that directly affected how landscapes were inhabited and managed.By examining how people chose to shape their landscapes, this book provides fresh perspectives on the Christianisation of Atlantic Europe.

Between the fifth century and the ninth, several thousand churches were founded in Ireland, a greater density than most other regions of Europe. This period saw fundamental changes in settlement patterns, agriculture, social organisation, rituals and beliefs, and churches are an important part of that story. The premise of this book is that landscape archaeology is one of the most fruitful ways to study them. By looking at where they were placed in relation to pagan ritual and royal sites, burial grounds, and settlements, and how they fared over the centuries, we can map the shifting strategies of kings, clerics and ordinary people. The result is a fascinating new perspective on this formative period, with wider implications for the study of social power and religious change elsewhere in Europe. The earliest churches, founded at a time of religious diversity (400-550), were often within royal landscapes, showing that some sections of the elite chose to make space for the new religion. These often lost out to new monasteries positioned at a remove from core royal land, making it possible to grant them the great estates on which their wealth was based (550-800). Now, however, founding churches was no longer a prerogative of kings for we see numerous lesser churches outside these estates. In this way middle-ranking people helped transform the landscape and shape religious cultures in which rituals and beliefs of local origin co-existed alongside Christianity. Finally, in the Viking Age (800-1100), some lesser churches were abandoned while community churches began to exert more of a gravitational pull, foreshadowing the later medieval parish system.