The World Modernity Ended

Folkloric reading from a Fenland field

I’m spending this week on my annual holiday from the Internet, in a field in the East of England with no laptop and almost no phone reception. Since we arrived a few days ago I’ve read multiple books, and I want to tell you about three that take different cuts at the consciousness caesura that England underwent with the onset of modernity.

Yes, this is paradoxical: here I am on holiday from the Internet and taking a brief moment of coverage to write something for the Internet. But after deleting X off my phone a few weeks ago, and following up with this week‘s deliberate phone blackspot, it turns out that for me at least most of the time drain - and also addictiveness - lies in the always-on and constantly updating quality of social media. In its absence, I’ve been amazed at how much time and headspace is suddenly free! Then, as I always have to be reading something, to the book pile.

The first title I chomped through in my sunny East Anglian field was Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries. In it Morello argues against Descartes’ dualistic interpretation of reality, for a re-enchanted relation to the physical and especially the living natural world, and polemically for a restoration of liturgical, traditionalist, and monastic Christianity. Morello’s most unorthodox argument is that Hermetic study, in earlier times understood to be connected with Catholic thought, should be reincorporated into the broader corpus of Christian thinking rather than left in its current, deprecated and marginalised position adjacent to New Ageism and the occult. The more participatory relation this would encourage to the created cosmos would, Morello suggests, help to heal some of the epistemological wounds of modernity and might, in turn, revive a Church he sees as currently accelerating its own decline via a mistaken embrace of Cartesian dualism and liberal theology.

Morello’s is a more polemical style of theological and philosophical argument than the modern world is used to, at least unless (as I do) you count critical theory as a branch of theology, or at least anti-theology. There polemic is routine, but in Morello’s book I was surprised to find terms such as “toerag” mixed in with the more technical vocabulary of philosophy. This will not be to everyone’s taste, though arguably the incursion of polemical language into philosophy serves to enact the retrieval of participation from dualistic abstraction for which Morello argues. If I had a gripe, it’d be that I might have wished for a more critical discussion of technology, and particularly the role of digital, in the phenomena Morello describes, as to my eye this is a vector for a number of the changes he himself represents. But maybe that’s my axe to grind, not his. No book can encompass everything. And though it’s sure to appal some in its quirky cut at our contemporary spiritual crisis this one is, I would argue, a sign of the re-enchanting times.

Then on to Bonnie Lander Johnson’s Vanishing Landscapes: The Story Of Plants And How We Lost Them. It tells the story of Britain’s transition to modernity via our changing cultural relationship to staple plants, including apples, saffron, woad, oak, and wheat. Johnson is an Associate Professor in early modern literature at Downing College, Cambridge, and though she wears her literary erudition lightly in this text it shines through everywhere in this beautifully written book, in quotations from the early modern world and her rich imaginative engagement with its sensibility and thought-worlds.

Vanishing Landscapes has a mournful, elegiac feel, and its overall narrative implicitly poses the question: was it worth it? Was our world of high technology, material comfort, urban living and abstraction worth having lost (or, as with the displaced fenlanders whose struggle she movingly describes, had taken from us) those more embedded, participatory modes of life?

For Johnson, the original moment of rupture for the English landscape between premodern and modern was Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, which initiated a rapid acceleration in private land use and enclosure as well as the dismantling of a whole social order that had previously centred around these ancient institutions. Perhaps the last place in England that retains something of this in its built environment is Walsingham, not far from where I write this, which centres around the-still imposing ruins of a vast Benedictine abbey, and whose shrines are to this day a site of pilgrimage for Catholics from all over the world. Most such English places were wholly demolished, or turned into private homes, their lay communities displaced or forced into new kinds of relation to the lands they’d already known.

I don’t presume to guess at Johnson’s own faith but the contours of her elegy are very Catholic in sensibility. I wanted just a line or two of context on how this massive act of royal nationalisation and de-Catholicisation came to seem acceptable in its time; if Whig historians could take issue with this lack, they might also challenge the book as naively nostalgic. But Johnson is clearly ambivalent about the changes she describes, and situates her critique with disarming frankness within her own urban academic life and its one garden apple-tree she does not have time to pick and preserve. In any case her book is a treasure trove: it invites the most city-dwelling reader to step off the tarmac, wriggle their toes in the grass, pick berries from hedges, and otherwise feel their way into England’s deep, rich and (if you look carefully) still living and spirit-filled landscape.

Finally, while continuing the theme of nature spirits and early English Christianity, I somewhat squared the circle between Morello and Johnson with Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings Of Britain’s Supernatural Beings. If Johnson begins at the Reformation, Young ends there, and in this deeply researched book he draws together evidence and discussion from Iron Age archeology to Reformation literature to sketch a history of Britain’s “godlings” - which is to say the spirits, demons, elves, local gods, and other beings that have always thronged the landscape.

Young argues that what became elves and fairies by the Middle Ages drew on composite and often oral legacies from Celtic Britain on, overlaid sometimes with classical learning and in a complex dialogue with more formal faith and most notably with Christianity, producing a kind of “ship of Theseus” set of beings in which each part has been renewed many times but the form still somehow endured, at least up to the end of the Middle Ages at which point fairies became steadily more marginalised.

Young’s book is more academic in tone, and hence far more shy of participatory rapture, than either of the others. Perhaps relatedly, he never (at least overtly) seems to entertain the most parsimonious explanation for this consistent presence: that it describes something real, which people in every age up to modernity could perceive but which, for reasons tackled by both Morello and Johnson, became less accessible with modernity.

But perhaps this is simply not a tenable stance for an academic. In any case, in his concluding pages You g gestures at the sense that our modern fairy-less world is in turn prompting a backlash, as people begin to treat ecological depletion as the spiritual crisis it is, and not just as as material threat. He seems almost playfully to speculate on whether we might once again find ways to experience the landscape looking g back at us.

I think this is exactly the hinge moment at which we find ourselves now - a sense captured in Morello’s and Johnson’s work as well. And there are plenty of tidbits, albeit delivered in Young’s slightly dry prose, for seekers after England’s mysteries to mull over, or to mine from the book’s wonderfully juicy footnotes.

A governing theme of my work at the moment is my growing hunch that modernity proper ended with the displacement of print as our primary mode of information transmission: that this happened first slowly with radio and TV, and is now happening all at once with digital. I share Bonnie Lander Johnson’s ambivalence about the gifts modernity brought us, and often wonder whether we might be able in its aftermath to retrieve some of what was lost in the process of receiving those gifts. I suppose this is by way of explanation for the paradox whereby I wrote to you, my readers on the internet, from my holiday week away from the internet in which by eschewing the internet I found time to read multiple books about the onset of modernity - all of which I discovered via the internet.

Taken all together, this suggests it may be both possible and necessary to exercise judgement in how we use this potent tool. And perhaps we need not simply fear it as the vector for yet another wave of dispossession or disenchantment - though it may turn out to be all those things as well.

With all this, back to my sunny field! See you next week.