Introduction

The study of mountains is of increasing significance in both the modern sciences and humanities. However, historical scholarship has been shackled by the perception that ‘mountain gloom’ gave way to ‘mountain glory’ around the turn of the eighteenth century, resulting in the sense that premodern engagements with landscape are of little relevance to modern responses. Here, we propose moving beyond this traditional framework towards the development of a cross-disciplinary, cross-period perspective which will allow us to understand more clearly both the similarities and the differences between representations of mountains across cultures and centuries. The twelve chapters of this volume represent a vital first step in this project. In this introduction we sketch four key themes – temporality, knowledge, identity and experience – which recur throughout the chapters that follow.