Landscapes, we are assured by the organisers of the Royal Historical Society symposium, Putting History in its Place, ‘are not merely canvasses on which human action is played out, but constitute active social and cultural agents in producing change’. During the course of our discussions, we witnessed just how that might work out across a range of landscapes and a broad swathe of periods and places. Of course, as a modernist, there is always a fear that my subject is simply not as exotic or as exciting as those that went before – and the fact that my paper came last of all only enhanced that fear. But let me start with a modern – a twentieth-century – example of the power of place, nonetheless: one every bit as odd as anything from the early modern or medieval eras, and one that raises – I believe – an important range of issues for historians of all periods.

I want to begin with a story taken from an autobiography published in 1994: the memoirs of Sir Kenneth Dover, a classicist, a rationalist and a man, as one biographer notes, almost painfully determined to expose his own experiences ‘to critical scrutiny’.Footnote ¹ Recalling his time in the Royal Artillery regiment as it swept through Italy in the latter part of the Second World War, Dover remarks on a somewhat surprising event which occurred in the mountains of Campagna, just a few miles south of the commune of Mignano Monte Luca. ‘It was’, writes Dover,

What, though, is the appropriate response of the historian to this rather unlikely reminiscence? For journalists in the mid-1990s, who headed a report of Dover's disclosure ‘Oxford Don Takes Memoirs in Hand’, this was simply a laughing matter. For the author himself, anxious – in his own words – to avoid the suggestion that his recollections amounted to nothing more than Confessions of a Wanker, and keen, presumably, to distinguish his writings from the shame-faced masturbatory memoirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this physical, sexual response to a landscape could be simply and easily rationalised. ‘The explanation of such events’, Dover concludes, ‘is scientific rather than philosophical.’Footnote ² In other words, he saw this somehow as a natural response: natural in the sense that this was a simple, physiological reaction; and natural, too, in that it reflected some primal, essential, subconscious connection between a man and the natural world.

Clinicians are inclined to agree. Certainly, a recent encyclopaedia of human sexuality notes that it is not untypical for ‘a person so inclined’ to respond erotically to ‘a pleasing landscape or art work’.Footnote ³ But philosophers might well beg to differ. Indeed, for the political philosopher Jane Bennett, considering what she calls ‘the sex appeal of the inorganic’ opens up all sorts of questions about human relationships with – and responsibility for – the environment.Footnote ⁴ And for historians, of course, Dover offers a self-evidently inadequate account. Far from exposing this experience to critical scrutiny, his recourse to the rhetoric of nature and science ducks the important question of what was actually happening on that mountainside in Italy in 1944.

In the first place, as Dover, the author of a pioneering work on Greek Homosexuality, was well aware, sexuality and sexual practice are never just about science.Footnote ⁵ They have a history. And masturbation has a history every bit as rich and interesting as any other aspect of the history of sex (given its apparently perennial popularity, it can hardly not).Footnote ⁶ Secondly, and every bit as importantly, ‘nature’ is a category that cannot – or, at any rate – should not be reduced to the simply or supposedly ‘scientific’. As the huge and ever-expanding field of environmental history continues to demonstrate, nature has a history too.Footnote ⁷ Even Dover's sense that he was witnessing a ‘scene’ – a landscape maybe – reveals his place within history: for both the notion of the scenic and the scene he describes have a history; they offer a glimpse of that most modern category, one defined by Edmund Burke in 1757 – the category of the sublime.Footnote ⁸ Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818) may have been doing nothing more alarming than gazing out into the mountains, but the sensibility depicted here is exactly that with which Dover identifies.Footnote ⁹ And in Friedrich's other paintings of the German alps, we see not just the same sensibility but the same aesthetic.Footnote ¹⁰ Dover's response in that way, too, was particular: shaped not just by science (whatever that means), but by history.

Yet even this conclusion does not go far enough. It is clearly important that we do not simply replace abstract ‘science’ with an equally abstract ‘history’ when trying to explain Dover's experience. Even when contextualised within the history of sexuality and the history of landscape, there remains a question at the heart of his account: the question with which this symposium sought to grapple; the question of agency. Dover's description is intriguing. He sketches in the scene – the ‘blue sky’, the snow-covered mountains – and then observes that this ‘struck directly at my penis’; masturbation, he concludes, ‘seemed the appropriate response’. But who is doing what in this recollection? Should we see Dover as the only active agent here? Or should we take seriously his implication – an implication he does not explore, and perhaps was not even conscious of evoking – that he was somehow responding to something the landscape was in some way doing to him?

These are crucial questions – critically important for anyone trying to put history back into its place, and vital for understanding landscapes and buildings in the past. For one of the most remarkable developments in scholarly life over the last two decades or so has been not just the renewed emphasis on objects and things which might be summed up in the ‘material turn’, but also – associated with, but distinct from this fashion – what appears to be a more profound re-enchantment of the world.Footnote ¹¹ Anthropologists like Tim Ingold have reanimated animist notions of objects and landscapes.Footnote ¹² Art historians like W. J. T. Mitchell have likewise returned to questions of totemism and fetishism and even asked the question ‘what do pictures want?’Footnote ¹³ Archaeologists like Chris Gosden have widened this quest, not only enquiring ‘What do objects want?’, but also ‘emphasizing the manner in which things create people’.Footnote ¹⁴ Philosophers like Jane Bennett have self-consciously sought to articulate what she describes as an ‘enchanted materialism’;Footnote ¹⁵ a ‘childlike sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not’.Footnote ¹⁶

And this re-enchantment of the world has – perhaps perforce – a special purchase on the study of the landscape: one that can be seen in the work of Ingold on perceptions of the environment,Footnote ¹⁷ or Mitchell on landscape and power.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, the landscape has become the site of a particular sort of enchantment: an unlikely mysticism which affects even those who seem to fight shy of the mystical. How else, for instance, to explain the ways in which avowedly post-humanist writers like social and political theorist Diana Coole are now nonetheless willing to approve such gnomic, quasi-mystical comments as those of Cézanne, as quoted by that other great mystic Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ‘The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness’?Footnote ¹⁹

This twenty-first-century re-enchantment of the world is almost – though perhaps not quite – as surprising as Kenneth Dover's decision to drop his trousers atop that Italian hill. After all, the disenchantment of the world was meant to be a characteristic of modernity. Indeed, for Weber, it is the definitive aspect of modernity; ‘the key concept within Weber's account of the distinctiveness and significance of Western culture’, as Ralph Schroder once observed.Footnote ²⁰ Sociologists and historians, at least until recently, embraced disenchantment as an unquestioned fact: tracing the Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century with the saintly Owen Chadwick,Footnote ²¹ or uncovering the vestigial, atrophying remains of Religion in Secular Society with the equally proper but infinitely more sceptical Bryan Wilson.Footnote ²²

The disenchantment of the world also meant the disenchantment of the landscape, of course, and in the distinguished form of Keith Thomas – Dover's successor as president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, by the way – disenchantment found its prophet. Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Man and the Natural World (1983) were both, in a sense, Weberian, and both traced disenchantment – even alienation – from the world. ‘The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Thomas concludes, ‘had seen a fundamental departure from the assumptions of the past.’Footnote ²³ That departure – that disenchantment – was, it is clear, both product and progenitor of modernity. It is thus especially telling that in her brilliant book of 2011, The Reformation of the Landscape, Alexandra Walsham reaches quite the contrary conclusion. Covering a still greater period than Keith Thomas, she finds no disenchantment; rather, Walsham observes that ‘the overall effect of the religious, intellectual, and cultural movements’ she outlines ‘was to redefine rather than remove the presence of the sacred in the material world’.Footnote ²⁴

What accounts for this re-enchantment? How, in the forty years between Religion and the Decline of Magic and The Reformation of the Landscape could scholars have come to differ so much? There are doubtless many explanations – generational, political, methodological. In the short space available to me, I can only gesture towards some of the key themes and most important works. An undeniably important development was what has become known as the material turn: a move or movement which, as we all know, emerged out of a deepening dissatisfaction with the linguistic turn;Footnote ²⁵ a dissatisfaction voiced most forcefully by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito in his ringing declaration that ‘By transforming the thing into a word, language empties of it of reality’;Footnote ²⁶ and a process rather wonderfully illustrated in A. S. Byatt's novel of 2001, The Biographer's Tale, which opens with a postgraduate, poststructuralist student, sitting bored in an English literature class, pondering the ‘fatal family likeness’ of all his seminars. ‘We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lies and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying’, he observes. As his lecturer expatiates on Lacan and Freud once again, he concludes that he has had enough. ‘I thought’, he writes, ‘I must have things.’Footnote ²⁷ That a whole generation of scholars has agreed explains much about scholarship since then.

This search for things has been accompanied – and energised – by a renewed interest in the history of the body and in the history of emotions. Both have redirected our attention towards traditions of thought – especially phenomenology in its various different forms – that seek self-consciously to re-enchant. Heidegger is a continual reference point here; as is Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Without their example, the work of philosophers like Edward Casey or archaeologists like Christopher Tilley would be unimaginable.Footnote ²⁸ Without Tilley or Casey, the history of landscape, in particular, would be very different indeed.Footnote ²⁹ Other theorists, like the French philosopher and historian Michel Serres, have also offered a phenomenologically informed approach which seeks to re-enchant. ‘We consider a landscape, as a whole and in detail’, he writes in his influential tract on The Five Senses, ‘it considers us as a landscape.’Footnote ³⁰

There is, of course, an ethical dimension to all this. The contemporary re-enchantment of the world owes much to anxieties about the environment – especially human-made climate change. In Jane Bennett's words, the project of imputing agency to the world is driven by the ‘hunch…that the image of dead and thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’.Footnote ³¹ There is also a hope that a re-enchanted world will find space for a more progressive politics. Breaking down the boundaries between subject and object, human and non-human, it is argued, will also break down divisions between people. Recognising the entanglement of matter and meaning, humans and the world in which they live, suggests Karen Barad, in a book which draws on quantum physics to make its point, will enable the creation of an ecological, egalitarian, feminist political philosophy. ‘We are of the universe’, she concludes, ‘there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming.’Footnote ³²

All these forces – intellectual, ethical and, doubtless, simply professional – have been given further impetus by wider historical changes. I can only sketch them in for now; but they do need to be acknowledged. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of fundamentalist religion has had a shattering effect on modernisation theory, with its assumption of a secular future for all.Footnote ³³ The relative decline of the West has also led to questions about what was believed to be its normative path to modernity. For whilst modernisation theory – with all its disenchantments – has retained a surprising purchase in precisely those parts of the world that seem to challenge it most, the rise of the rest and slide of the West have had their effects.Footnote ³⁴ Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe is a good example of this – and the fact it concludes with a discussion of magic is emblematic of the ways in which enchantment and re-enchantment have become important parts of a broader challenge to a monolithic notion of modernity.Footnote ³⁵ Similar themes can be found in the work of that great founding father of actor-network theory, Bruno Latour.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, with his bold claim that We Have Never Been Modern and in his most recent book Facing Gaia we encounter the intriguing entanglement of material agency, political idealism, doubts about modernisation theory and a certain amount of mysticism or even enchantment.Footnote ³⁷

So much for the present day. My reason for spending such a long time outlining this context is not just that much writing on the material turn seems to ignore or downplay the process of re-enchantment which has become such an important part of it. It is also – indeed, it is preeminently – because our early twenty-first-century experience is so remarkably reminiscent of an earlier, early nineteenth-century, moment. The eighteenth century was, as numerous scholars have noted, a period of disenchantment. Inheritors of the Cartesian dualism against which so many of our contemporary writers now rail; disciples of the Newtonian worldview with its fixed laws and predictable causality; imbibers of the Kantian notion of matter as essentially inert and passive: the thinkers of the age of the Enlightenment are in all sorts of ways precisely those sorts of people who helped shape the modernisation thesis and who saw the disenchantment of the world as a necessary, desirable end.Footnote ³⁸

To be sure, we now know much more the ways in which this disenchantment proved partial, fragmentary, episodic. We understand that the eighteenth century found room for miracles and Enlightenment; for the alchemy as well as the physics of Newton; for much magical thinking.Footnote ³⁹ It is now pretty uncontroversial to argue, as Paul Kléber Monod does in a recent book, that the period ‘witnessed a remarkable revival of occult thinking’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet even if one acknowledges that the eighteenth-century experience and understanding of the world was more complex and multi-faceted than a simple caricature of Enlightenment ideals might suggest, the truth remains that ‘the modern scopic regime’, as Martin Jay puts it, did apparently ‘triumph’ in this period.Footnote ⁴¹ With this triumph came a celebration of the enlightened individual's subjectivity: a focus on the distance between the viewer and that which was viewed; a disenchantment of a sort precisely because it emphasised the dynamic role of the observer and the passive role of the world around him (and it was almost always him). This was a development which united those who, following Locke, were fundamentally empiricist and those who, following Descartes, preferred to focus on how the mind interpreted sensation. For both occultist and rationalist, too – and for those who were both – the material world was subject to man; not a force in its own right. It was an odd consensus oddly summed up in the aesthetic theorist William Gilpin's disagreements with his neighbour William Lock in 1769. ‘I have had a dispute lately’, he wrote, ‘on an absurd vulgar opinion, which he holds – that we see with our eyes; whereas I assert, that our eyes are only mere glass windows; and we see with our imagination.’Footnote ⁴² Either way, of course, the active agent was the viewer and the recipient of that action was the world beyond.Footnote ⁴³

Just as is the case today, debates about landscape give a good index of what was thought and felt. Landscape, after all, was a relatively new coinage and a relatively new concept. It was also hugely fashionable. Landscape design and landscape painting were of intense interest for a remarkable range of people, ‘those’, as Conal Shields once put it, ‘for whom “nature” was nearly, if not quite, something to be ignored: those for whom it was to be subdued or transformed: those for whom it was to be gazed at and enjoyed’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In all these cases, of course, the landscape was treated as an object of interest rather than a subject – much less an agent – in its own right. By the end of the eighteenth century, it had become controversial to maintain that landscapes had any inherent quality of their own. Instead, many cleaved to the claims of writers like Richard Payne Knight, who argued that the picturesque landscape, for instance, was nothing more than ‘a way of seeing, a subjective aesthetic in the eye of the beholder’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Armed with Burke's dictum that ‘No work of art can be great, but it deceives’;Footnote ⁴⁶ committed to Chambers's argument that ‘Nature is incapable of pleasing without the assistance of art’,Footnote ⁴⁷ designers like Humphry Repton, in the words of one expert, turned landscape design ‘into a species of furnishing’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here was disenchantment indeed.

Attitudes towards architecture echoed this sense of the material world as passive, animated only by human action. This was increasingly true even of sacred architecture, which is conventionally understood as somehow intrinsically different: an embodiment, in the title of one influential text, of Theology in Stone;Footnote ⁴⁹ a space capable of evoking emotion and – in the words of Mary Carruthers – a place which ‘has, as it were, moving parts…an engine of prayer, not simply its edifice’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet, as historians of eighteenth-century America have shown in particular, the construction of churches which simply followed secular fashions,Footnote ⁵¹ and which down-played any sacred function, was in many respects a distinctive feature of the period.Footnote ⁵² Far from being an engine of prayer, much less an active agent of any sort, the late eighteenth-century church was simply a gathering place: a box for preaching in; a vessel which only came alive when it was filled by its congregation.Footnote ⁵³ Little wonder churches remained locked and closed for most of the week: these practical, fashionable spaces were essentially inert. Like the wider landscape of which they were a part, it was human activity and human agency which counted; the material world was always subject to that.

As I have argued elsewhere, the nineteenth century would overturn this conception of sacred space.Footnote ⁵⁴ Churches were reimagined as active agents: capable of shaping belief; able to affect their congregations and even passers-by. For the influential German architect and theorist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for instance, ‘the “genuine” religious building’ was, as John Toews puts it, ‘a place where individuals were guided towards recognition of their inner essence through aesthetic experiences of the divine principle which animated both the universe and themselves’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This new – this re-enchanted – view of architecture would shape buildings throughout the world, as the old notion of the church as an inert vessel gave way and a forest of steeples, a sea of stained-glass, a tide of encaustic tiles and marble fittings swept across cities, towns and villages. These were not merely aesthetic effects; they reflected a belief that buildings – especially religious buildings – did things to people.Footnote ⁵⁶

This transformation was not confined to churches. The belief that buildings shaped behaviour; the sense that – as one Victorian headmaster put it – ‘the almighty wall is, after all, the supreme and final arbiter’, was very influential.Footnote ⁵⁷ Prisons, workhouses, schools, public buildings and private homes were all designed with this in mind.Footnote ⁵⁸ The ‘agency of things’ that Patrick Joyce has uncovered in this period – most recently in his State of Freedom – was a product of this new, and newly re-enchanted view.Footnote ⁵⁹ And, of course, it was not just architecture that was reimagined in light of this thinking. The townscape, the landscape, the natural world – what we might call the environment – were all, in this environmentalist view, seen as consequential, capable of shaping their human inhabitants.

Think of the housing reformer and landscape preserver Octavia Hill, for instance.Footnote ⁶⁰ A woman shaped by widely shared assumptions about the impact of the environment, her life was devoted to redeeming the poor by improving their homes and granting them access to nature. So committed was she to the idea of material agency that she often neglected the capacity of humans to act, treating the recipients of her idealism as objects – ‘never’, in Ruth Livesey's words, ‘full actors’ – whilst emphasising the way in which new houses or gardens or plants could ameliorate both the lives and the souls of the indigent.Footnote ⁶¹ Hill's emotional entanglement with things even extended to the terrible ‘sense of injustice’ she felt when planting a Virginia creeper in one of her tenements. She could not rid herself of the guilt that it was exposed ‘to so different a fate from its companions’.Footnote ⁶² In Octavia Hill, we find something approaching animism in the late Victorian slums of London.

This brief sketch of an epistemological revolution 200 years ago is not only intended to signal that we have been here before; though we have. It is also meant to pose a problem: a conceptual and methodological issue for those of us interested in the effect of the material world on individuals and societies in the past; the problem with which I began this paper. Even in this now re-enchanted world, scholars remain unsure about material agency. There are those who would wish to deny any distinction between human and non-human actors: those, like the archaeologist Dan Hicks, who would reject what he terms ‘the false impression that the dirt on my hands is somehow ontologically different from my hands themselves’.Footnote ⁶³ There are those, too, like the historian Chris Otter, who would deny the term agency altogether, seeing it as an unhappy and unhelpful anthropomorphism, which – as he puts it – ‘ironically, disrespects a resolutely non-human, inorganic process’.Footnote ⁶⁴ For most, the solution is a still greater emphasis on materiality. Indeed, it is a routine complaint by writers of wildly divergent views that previous scholars – even, perhaps especially, those writing on the material – have not taken materiality seriously enough. For Tim Ingold, for instance, only through making – through scholars weaving, flint napping, dancing, focusing intently on things in themselves and for themselves – will we come to understand how things work and how people are things.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Ian Hodder, only a willingness to abandon a human-centred analysis for one focused more firmly on things will unravel the entanglements of people and the material world.Footnote ⁶⁶

There is a virtue in this. Hodder is surely right to criticise phenomenologists like Christopher Tilley for blithely assuming that ‘our own embodied experiences of landscapes and monuments today must reveal to us something of the experiences of the people who once inhabited those same places in the past’.Footnote ⁶⁷ But his solution – to focus yet further on the material itself – is no real solution at all, at least for my purposes, because it tells us no more about how that material was understood and experienced than the phenomenologists can. It replaces conjecture with something seemingly – literally – more solid. But it remains problematic, because it assumes, with a wonderful circularity, that if we only understood the thing we will come to understand how the thing was understood. Put more simply: just as we can have no confidence that our present-day experiences are the same of those of people in the past, so we can have no confidence that our understanding of materiality itself is the same as that of our subjects.Footnote ⁶⁸

What I have sought to show is that within the space of a generation the material world can be enchanted or disenchanted; it can be seen to possess agency, or any sort of agency can be strongly denied. In other words, different periods possess what we might call different regimes of materiality. They do not just understand the world differently; they experience it differently; they interact with it differently. As Chris Gosden acknowledges towards the end of an essay which appears to say quite the reverse, ‘The world changes not just in its forms but in its feelings.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Any approach which assumes the existence of material agency, which imports our assumptions into a period which did not share them, will necessarily fail to capture that. Before we look at the material world, therefore, we need to examine how the material world was looked at, how it was conceptualised.

These regimes of materiality were, of course, never secure. They were fluid and changeable. They encompassed a striking variety of different approaches. After all, when the anthropologist Daniel Miller went to explore how a people in a single street used things, he found thirty different experiences in thirty virtually identical houses.Footnote ⁷⁰ Regimes of materiality might also be small scale and quite specific. They might be highly individuated even. After all, Kenneth Dover's notably enthusiastic response to the landscape reflected a regime which perhaps few other people have ever shared. But, just like the different emotional regimes explored by William Reddy in his work on The Navigation of Feeling, these differing regimes of materiality defined what was reasonable to believe about the world and what was possible to experience in the world.Footnote ⁷¹ It is by uncovering and re-articulating these regimes of materiality that historians can come to understand both their subjects and how their subjects experienced the world.

This claim has an obvious implication for the study of buildings and landscapes. In a typically lapidary phrase, W. J. T. Mitchell once observed that he hoped ‘to change “landscape” from a noun to a verb’, from ‘an object to be seen or a text to be read’ into a ‘process by which social and subjective identities are formed’.Footnote ⁷² In this paper, I have tried to suggest that both these accounts – both the idea of the landscape as fixed and the idea of the landscape as active – had different purchases at different times in history, in different regimes of materiality. If landscape is a verb, it is one that has been translated and comprehended very differently in these different regimes of materiality.