Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

Product Information

Indeed, one need not even have brains to beat the Devil: sometimes it is enough to know the rules which he breaks, by definition.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape, Harte

Cloven Country is an extensive and well-rounded exploration of the image of the Devil as reflected in the English landscape and folklore record, penned in Harte's inimitable clever and witty style. For a variety of reasons, not least industrialisation, the field narrows, leaving the Devil to pick up the slack. Matters go further when literary types find cause to invent and even transfer ideas and tropes from overseas - such as the German romantic tale that was so influential during the Gothick era. p. 71) He is the master of atmosphere which alters perception – the Devil’s Pulpit is an outcropping of rock which, nonetheless, at certain times of day, or under certain conditions, may come to resemble something familiar become strange. He also discusses the cunning men and women of England, though his suggestion that those practitioners did not understand the books they had due to illiteracy seems contentious, particularly given some recent scholarship by scholars like Owen Davies et al.One shot at the ball and it disappeared into the sky in a flash of fire, along with the strange player, and that was the end of the game.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Paperback Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape|Paperback

This Gentleman Devil was still a thaumaturge – still a craftsman of wonders, a literal snake-oil salesman casually capable of performing labours in one night which would break the back of ordinary folk.

One only has to look at John Dee’s shewstone or his alchemical obsessions and productions of minerals whilst seeking the Philosopher’s stone, or the continuance of particular virtues in certain materials as part and parcel of a whole worldview. Only the wicked squire and grasping merchant were beyond redemption, carried off by a black huntsman in the storm.

Cloven Country « enfolding.org Book Review: Cloven Country « enfolding.org

Harte recounts a 17 th-century tale in which the Devil is set upon and beaten up by three London fishwives. On the Norfolk clay he digs drainage ditches, in the West Country he clears stones for a Cornish hedge” (p.The brief comparison with Celtic stories is instructive because the Welsh tradition managed to avoid the early modern emphasis on the Devil and so retained forms of the same stories as the English with an older medieval cast of characters. Did they really find their native landscapes so dark and forbidding that they saw the Evil One stealing everywhere? Even if the phenomenon is not a “natural” construction, but something created by humans in elder days, the key is the disruption to the usual, the everyday. The Devil’s hideous strength laid down great roads in one night, and left scars everywhere as the hard stone melted like wax under those burning feet. As Cloven Country is coming from a more recognised publisher, hopefully his work will now reach a wider audience.