Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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Although [Harte] will retell a tale with a nimble and gleeful charm, he’ll then carefully examine them. Harte's skill as a writer makes this process seamless. It also renders what could be an academic and slightly dry exercise every bit as interesting as the narratives themselves. Come for the telling of folktales; stay for the workings of folklore. Cloven Country is testament to Harte's deep personal and learned knowledge of the folklore of England. He’s seemingly read everything and been everywhere – and given the book is illustrated from his collection, clearly also bought the postcard. His writing style is wry and frequently aphoristic. Harte is one of Britain's most eminent folklorists, whose previous works have included detailed accounts of gypsy folklore, holy wells and an award-winning book on fairy traditions. As Cloven Country is coming from a more recognised publisher, hopefully his work will now reach a wider audience. Purely on the basis of this erudite, witty and exceptionally entertaining book, it clearly deserves to. ' If there is a decisive shift in the Devil tale, it is in the early modern era when a whole range of local boggars, demons, giants and malignant fae become centralised (like the centralised state) as the Devil, reflecting the centralisation of salvation away from a multitude of Catholic saints and devils.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Jeremy Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Jeremy

My guest for this episode is folklorist and author Jeremy Harte, who joined me to talk about his new book Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape. What’s more, far from romantic visions of the Devil as a horned pagan figure, for all that he was the embodiment of the bestial and the antinomian wilderness of the outlaw and the uncivilised, he was no rustic. Indeed, it must be remembered that for the lion’s-share of the time these stories were developing, the majority of people were rustics. Cloven Country is at its core a distillation of the hoof prints left on the English landscape over the centuries. It seeks to unify and contrast local folktales whilst exploring the origins, variations and adaptions made over time. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. Even the choice of the central image on the book’s cover seems telling to this reviewer; a depiction of a popularised and degraded Priapus-as-a-devil, from the 1786 book A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus.Desk and exam copies of certain titles are available to lecturers who wish to consider books as course texts. A maximum of three titles may be requested and retained for 28 days' inspection. All books not returned, or adopted, will be charged for at a 20% discount. Royal Mail industrial action taking place in 2023 may have an impact on delivery times to all destinations both within the UK and internationally. These delays are out of our control. To be fair, many of the tale-tellers would have been illiterate, and thus the Book as motif symbolised arcane learning in some senses, but knowledge disseminated orally is by no means unable to convey and reinforce a worldview. In fact, one may argue that these stories are doing precisely that in some fashion. The point is well made that “magic in folk stories is always something physical and local, a lore of crossroads and thresholds, rings and staffs and bottles.” (p. 155) However, while he is correct that the grimoires are often in love with language and literacy, the reality is that this so-called high magic contained just as many rings, staffs, bottles, crossroads, and thresholds, even in England. 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.

The Devil in the English Landscape Episode 95 - Jeremy Harte - The Devil in the English Landscape

Sometimes the process becomes circular. An invented use of the Devil - whether early modern or later romantic - becomes so embedded in a community that a later folklorist hears the tale, ascribes it to a canon and assumes a great past (though folklorists have got wise to this now). This is my favourite book of the year so far. It is immaculately researched, superbly written and – like all Jeremy Harte’s work – genuinely breaks new ground in folklore studies. Only somebody with his breadth of knowledge, not only of the lore but of related fields of history, myth and literature, could have done as well. ' By 1700, Harte argues, landscape stories were being reworked to include the Devil to “replace older heroes” as “part of a structured forgetting” (p. 52f.).In the battle of good versus evil, personified by God and the Devil, I find the latter to be the more interesting character. God, languidly playing finger-bump with naked Adam, is intentionally aloof, letting Man decide his own destiny. Oh, he has his vengeful side but, frankly, it's been a while since we've had to build an ark. As such, for Harte, these seem to be just stories, or recountings of folk-belief, rather than actual lived realities. This would have to be this reviewer's major criticism of this book: for all its invocation of a widespread belief in spirits creating landscape, and its calling upon the Australian Indigenous Dreaming, it does very little to consider the phenomenological experience and lived realities beyond the surface. This is of course unsurprising, as Harte is primarily a folklorist and museum curator. Owen Davies, Professor in History, University of Hertfordshire, and president of the Folklore Society

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Goodreads

Folklore is intimately connected to trade and travel. The Netflix of the early modern period was the chapbook. These could spread memes widely and feed off each other. Heroes of Devil tales were often from the partially itinerant class that could spread stories in a community, men such as cobblers.Before beginning this I had considered any Devil-related features on the landscapes that I know well. Jeremy has written extensively on local history, folklore and the supernatural and is the curator of the Bourne Hall Museum at Epson and Ewell as well as secretary of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society. Perhaps the most unnerving tales are not those of Hell's Hounds chasing men across Bodmin Moor (bad and selfish gentry are also targets of devil tales which, like fairy tales, can have 'moral purpose) but the use of the Devil to re-envision those lightning strikes on churches that kill the faithful. This is why folklore is so rich and so slippery. It is a temporal phenomenon with most of it being lost as people die and forget, requiring new inventions and transcriptions that, once written down, may save the tales but denies their essence by doing so in canonical and so false form. The local devil becomes the Devil and this Devil can become truly dangerous but can also used as a method of social control in the telling of tales, especially control of women and social outliers. Harte has a whole chapter on the ambiguity of devil tales involving women.