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Billy Colfer's Wexford Castles expands the IRISH LANDSCAPES series
by taking a thematic approach, while still staying loyal to the
central landscape focus. Rather than adapting a narrowly
architectural approach, he situates these buildings in a superbly
reconstructed historical, social, and cultural milieu. County
Wexford has three strikingly different regions - the Anglo-Norman
south, the hybridised middle and the Gaelic north - which render it
a remarkable version in parvo of the wider island. Colfer's
wide-angle lens takes in so much than the castles themselves, as he
ranges widely and deeply in reading these striking buildings as
texts, revealing the cultural assumptions and historical
circumstances which shaped them. In this most cosmopolitan of
counties, we range far and wide in search of the wide-spreading
roots of its cultural landscape - from the Crusades and the Mani
peninsula in Greece to the Bristol Channel, from Crac des
Chevaliers to Westminster, from the Viking north and the cold
Atlantic to the warm Mediterranean south. The book breaks new
ground in exploring the long-run cultural shadow cast by the
Anglo-Normans and their castles, as this appears in the Gothic
Revival, in the poetry of Yeats and in the surprisingly profuse
crop of Wexford historians and writers. While most books on a
single architectural form can end up visually monotonous,
creativity has been lavished on this volume in terms of keeping the
images varied, fresh and constantly appealing. The result is a
sympathetic and innovative treatment of the castles, understood not
just as a mere architectural form, but as keys to unlocking the
mentalite of those who lived in them. Wexford Castles: landscape,
context and settlement is a worthy conclusion of Billy's Colfer's
superb trilogy of landscape studies.
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