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Today, mountains are spaces for adventure: treasured places for people to connect with nature, encounter the sublime and challenge themselves, whether it be skiing in the Italian Alps or scaling the heights of the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Some regard our love of mountains as relatively new, claiming that before modern mountaineers planted flags upon the peaks, the average European was more likely to revile and avoid a mountainous landscape than to admire it.
Mountains before Mountaineering tells a different narrative. It reveals the way mountains inspired curiosity and fascination and how they were enjoyed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It gives voice to the early modern travellers who climbed peaks and passes with fear and delight; to the 'real mountaineers' who lived and died upon the mountain slopes; and to the scientists who used mountains to try to understand the origins of the world.
This book invites you on a journey through the mountains, long before Everest was 'discovered' as the highest mountain in the world or before the first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc. It is the story of how our love of the mountains has been a part of us from the very beginning.
Dawn L. Hollis is a historian and hill-lover, despite being born in low-lying East Anglia. Over the course of her studies and research at Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews she became fascinated with the question of how people experienced mountains before the birth of mountaineering. She has spoken and written widely on the topic in academic contexts but has always felt that the stories of her early modern 'friends' deserved to be shared with a wider audience. She lives in Scotland, by the sea, with her family and a nineteenth-century iron printing press.
"Engrossing, astonishing, thought-provoking; shatters the long-standing illusion that mountains were held in abhorrence during the early modern era. Fascinating to read about mountains as seen through the eyes of early modern travellers, writers, poets, philosophers, naturalists, artists, map-makers, and the people who actually lived there."
– Jo Woolf, author of Britain's Landmarks and Legends
"Like a passionate guide, Dawn Hollis leads you along the little-travelled paths of pre-modern mountains [...] With a sharp and reflexive eye for the practice of historical research, she challenges the prevailing notion of 'Mountain Gloom' associated with that era. Spanning centuries and continents, she unveils the diverse perceptions and uses of mountains beyond the single practice of mountaineering."
Dr Gilles Rudaz, University of Geneva
"Dawn Hollis's rich and compelling account will transform the way we think about the history of human engagement with mountains. It shows decisively that places of high altitude could be sources of pleasure and even joy in many different contexts within European culture long before the mid-eighteenth century [...] Based on painstaking research across a vast range of sources, it brings to life the responses of individuals and communities whose stories have been sidelined from traditional histories of mountains and mountaineering."
– Professor Jason Koenig, University of St Andrews
"From studying mountain stories for 25 years, I've learned that authors and mountaineers believe that they are the lucky ones. Ice axes and sticky rubber enabled them to climb. They also believed that those before them were blind to mountains' beauty or incapable of fathoming their sublime. Even I accepted it as dogma. But Dawn L. Hollis' thorough research strips the myth down to uncover our longer human respect, curiosity, and affection for the mountains that predates mountaineering. Mountains before Mountaineering challenges us to reconsider our human relationship with mountains and who we are as adventurers and people."
– Andrew Szalay, The Suburban Mountaineer
"We have heard all too often the tired old cliche that appreciation of mountain scenery is a modern invention, prompted by Wordsworth, Colderidge and those other eighteenth century inventors of 'The Sublime'. Dawn Hollis digs a bit deeper to unearth the adventures of much earlier romantic travellers, equally enthralled by the mountains. [...] Hollis wears her erudition lightly and writes engagingly, with a lovely conversational tone brightened by sparks of humour, inviting us generously to share and enjoy her discoveries."
– Stephen Venables
"Written by a woman mountaineer, this book asks what mountains meant before mountaineering came be about conquering particular peaks. Hollis destroys the myth that mountaineering is a quintessentially modern pursuit, or that pre modern people feared mountains. [...] Hollis introduces us to a raft of extraordinary characters, like the fictional Theuerdank, who pole-vaulted across mountains as he sought to win his bride – she was not impressed. Or Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, who noted local reports of long-tongued, serpent-like dragons in the Alps and whose book depicted them too. [...] Packed with vivid anecdote, this book is a historical anthropology of the peak."
– Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford
"Explores landscapes inhabited by travellers drawn upwards to the roof of the world."
– National Geographic Traveller
