ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the medieval buildings Jane Austen worshipped in, inhabited, or visited, and suggests that her contact with them deepened her nostalgia for the world they represented. Austen's historical consciousness was similarly shaped by the topography of England's medieval sacred landscape. Austen's early experience with relics at Reading may have been especially poignant and enduring. Scholars of Austen often discuss the importance of Bath in eighteenth-century English culture, but they usually ignore its medieval history, when the town was dominated by its powerful Benedictine priory. With the exception of the enormous priory church, very little of the monastic fabric remained during Austen's time in Bath, although surviving medieval hospitals testified to the enduring importance of ancient traditions of hospitality and healing. The transformation of one other Winchester institution, the Hospital of St. Cross, also occasioned comment in the early nineteenth century and provides some context for Austen's exploration of hospitality.
