William Stukeley and the exploration of Paradise

This article examines the writings of eighteenth-century antiquarian William Stukeley. It argues that Stukeley conceived of the megalithic monuments of England as portals into a transfigured, paradisiacal landscape in which matter was spiritualized and spirit materialized. Throughout, the piece draws on Henry Corbin’s discussion of imagination as a mode of super-sensory perception and its revelation of a visionary geography which in turn mirrors back the truth of imaginative perception in endless co-creation. However, Stukeley, it goes on to argue, believed that the spiritualized landscape was being destroyed by a new materialism, so that he had to rely less on the presence of a divine landscape and more on personalized imagination as a way of accessing Paradise. The article also briefly examines Stukeley’s influence on poets, artists, antiquarians and the wider English public, particularly in the way they conceived of and experienced the relationship between imagination and divinized landscape.