A break-out study on Adomnán’s De locis sanctis and the Jerusalem pilgrim texts, From Topography to Text uses new methodological findings on the Christian topography of Jerusalem to examine the source material, religious imagination and mental maps in the related writings of Eucherius, Adomnán and Bede.

This book investigates how, from the seventeenth century onward, philosophers, philologists and historians described various world ‘cultures’, colonized the past (or national pasts), and thus invented Europe’s philosophical nature.