Abstract
This contribution examines the relationship between human beings and landscape in selected medieval texts. Literary concepts of landscape appear innately bound up with human experiences that lend expression to religious, political and aesthetic convictions. The religious appropriations of landscape revolve around cosmological ideas for or against life in this world in political contexts, landscape functions as a medium of power for the legitimisation of rule, or as an apocalyptic backdrop. Courtly poetry exploits certain details of landscape to symbolise the status of individuals in society or the condition of society itself. In accounts of pilgrimage, the sense of landscape is reduced to a consideration of the accessibility of holy sites and the measurable distance of the journey.
© by Akademie Verlag, Düsseldorf, Germany
