ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades the place of landscape in European thought has changed, and at several levels: public, professional and scientific. The long-established conceptualisation of landscape formed in and after the Renaissance (which had replaced older notions of landscape or landskip based on territory) possessed a relatively narrow focus on natural beauty or scenery, often related to ideas about artistic representation. This simple view has now been absorbed into a richer, more complex understanding, one that sees landscape as both a material thing and as a complex mental construction that is perceived through all the senses, is dependent on cognition, knowledge and memory and is often constructed socially and politically. The change has been particularly driven in recent years by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe 2000). Every chapter in this book probably at some level approaches the idea of landscape through an acknowledgement of this all-encompassing perspective, albeit following a variety of different disciplinary or practical routes.
