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.
About the author
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.
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