Requiescant in Pace. Staging Nature as a Socio-Religious Practice in Highgate Cemetery

Abstract

From Highgate Cemetery, a few select examples are taken as a case in point, and focused on historical and current source material that presents and represents a particular performativity attributed to nature. The author discusses facets of the theatricality of the landscape, be it the melancholic atmosphere ascribed to it, its aura of wild, romantic seclusion or its role as a peaceful abode. Indeed, such talk of ‹nature› was part of a carefully chosen rhetoric already in the first decades of the 19th century, when the cemetery was realized. It aimed at relating a specific, chosen space to a largely shared imaginary—whereby the term ‹imaginary› refers to a product of imagination, to a framework of mental and material images, to a common ground and dimension of society.