Mountains Before Mountaineering: The Call of the Peaks Before the Modern Age

The human story of mountains, long before modern mountaineers battled to be ’first’ upon their summits

Today, mountains are spaces of adventure: hill-walking, skiing, rock-climbing and mountaineering. Mountain regions are treasured as places for human beings to connect with nature, encounter the sublime, and challenge themselves. It has often been said that the love of mountains is relatively new: that before modern mountaineers planted flags upon the peaks, the average European was more likely to revile and avoid a mountainous landscape than admire it.

Mountains Before Mountaineering tells a different story, of the way mountains were experienced and enjoyed in Europe before 1750. It gives voice to the early modern travelers who climbed peaks and passes with fear and delight, to the ’real mountaineers’ who lived and died upon the mountain slopes, and to the scientists who used mountains to try to understand the origins of the world.

Dawn L. Hollis is a historian and hill-lover, despite being born in low-lying East Anglia. Over the course of her studies and research at Oxford, Cambridge, and St Andrews she became fascinated with the question of how people experienced mountains before the birth of mountaineering. She has spoken and written widely on the topic in academic contexts but has always felt that the stories of her early modern ’friends’ deserved to be shared with a wider audience. She lives in Scotland, by the sea, with her family and a nineteenth-century iron printing press.