An exhilarating journey across a distant literary landscape, this book takes us to those places described, evoked, or invented in "Beowulf" and the sagas of Iceland. Chronicling their own travels in Scandinavia, charting the geography of medieval history and fiction, the authors negotiate the complex territory where past and present meet. In this encounter, medieval and modern viewpoints converge, forming a new way into the northern world of medieval literature. The authors use a variety of approaches, borrow from different disciplines, and employ an array of styles to discover and "reinvent" the landscape of these texts. In scholarly appraisals and personal encounters, in maps and photographs, we accompany them on a voyage along Beowulf's route and follow them along the road to Drangey. Here and at many other legendary sites, we see how the past is made up of divergent stories told in the present, and how our own histories and desires influence the shape and purpose of those stories. This book should appeal to medievalists, historians, cultural geographers, critical theorists, and those who like to travel, whether in literature or their own good time.

Medievalists have much to gain from a thoroughgoing contemplation of place. If landscapes are windows onto human activity, they connect us with medieval people, enabling us to ask questions about their senses of space and place. In A Place to Believe In Clare Lees and Gillian Overing bring together scholars of medieval literature, archaeology, history, religion, art history, and environmental studies to explore the idea of place in medieval religious culture.

The essays in A Place to Believe In reveal places real and imagined, ancient and modern: Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (home of Whitby and Bede's monastery of Jarrow), Cistercian monasteries of late medieval Britain, pilgrimages of mind and soul in Margery Kempe, the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1940, and representations of the sacred landscape in today's Pacific Northwest.

A strength of the collection is its awareness of the fact that medieval and modern viewpoints converge in an experience of place and frame a newly created space where the literary, the historical, and the cultural are in ongoing negotiation with the geographical, the personal, and the material. Featuring a distinguished array of scholars, A Place to Believe In will be of great interest to scholars across medieval fields interested in the interplay between medieval and modern ideas of place.

Contributors are Kenneth Addison, Sarah Beckwith, Stephanie Hollis, Stacy S. Klein, Fred Orton, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Diane Watt, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, Ulrike Wiethaus, and Ian Wood.