ABSTRACT
Cemeteries, painting and poetry regularly use nature to offer solace for grief in northern Europe’s historically Protestant and secular cultures, but rarely in southern Europe’s Catholic cultures. To explain this difference, the chapter examines two hypotheses. The first argues that the comfort that northern European mourners find in nature is rooted in nationalistic forms of romanticism. The second hypothesis takes this further to show how northern European mourners’ love of nature is rooted historically in anti-Catholic movements-the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. From the eighteenth century right through to the twenty-first century, Protestants and secularists, being unable to pray for the deceased’s soul, have shifted attention to the mourner’s grief. Lacking Catholic rites for the dead, they turned elsewhere to express grief and find comfort. One place to which they turned was nature, Protestantism tending to favour romantic nature, secularism favouring classical nature. Examples are given from a range of Western European countries (plus brief mentions of Russia and Greece), chiefly from cemeteries but also from poetry and painting; examples not readily explicable by either hypothesis are discussed. The chapter concludes that cultural understandings of nature can shape not only grief’s expression but also forms of solace, and grief itself.
