Definition
Ruined abbeys are ubiquitous in eighteenth-century and Romantic women’s literature, appearing in countless meditative and topographical poems, travel narratives, and gothic novels. England’s abbeys had been dissolved in the sixteenth century in an immense land grab thinly disguised as religious reform; the destruction cast a long shadow over English history, and the ruins became particular objects of fascination in the Romantic era. Ruined abbeys allowed writers to indulge in the emotions associated with sublime and picturesque scenery, but they also inspired serious reflection on social and theological issues. Many Romantic-era authors build on the anti-Catholic prejudices of the early Protestant reformers in their representations of these ruined spaces, regarding them as places of superstition, cruelty, and horror from which the English realm has been providentially delivered. The destruction of French monasteries in the 1790s reinforced these sentiments for some. Other...
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References
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Further Reading
Austen, Jane. (1816) 1980. Emma. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
--. (1817) 1980. Sanditon. Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burke, Edmund. 2015. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Paul Guyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Denham, John. 1655 “Cooper’s Hill.” London: Humphrey Moseley.
Gray, Thomas. 1977. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” In Thomas Gray And William Collins: Poetical Works, edited by Roger Lonsdale, 33–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hunt, Mary. 1792 “Written Visiting the Ruins of Dunkeswell-Abbey, in Devonshire.” In Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall volume 1, edited by Richard Polwhele, 134–136. R. Cruttwell: Bath.
Kennedy, Deborah. 2001. “The Ruined Abbey in the Eighteenth Century.” Philological Quarterly 80: 501–523.
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Taylor, Dennis. 2002. “The Abbey Meditation Tradition: Wordsworth’s Sources in the Eighteenth Century.” In Sacred Text, Sacred Space: Architectural, Spiritual, and Literary Convergences in England and Wales, edited by Joseph Sterrett and Peter Thomas, 195–225. Leiden: Brill.
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Moore, R.E. (2022). Ruined Abbeys. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Romantic-Era Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_61-1
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Ruined Abbeys- Published:
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_61-2
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Ruined Abbeys- Published:
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11945-4_61-1