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Introduction

Approaching the Medieval Landscape

In the middle of a cold, icy medieval winter, the bare trees of the Ardennes would have provided little shelter from biting winds, snow, and freezing rain. But once spring arrived and “it was the time when the hoary ice melts off of the mountains and the west wind loosens up the fetid earth,” the Ardennes were beautiful. On one particular morning in April 716, as a monk named Agilolf walked through the beautiful forest toward his death, “the woods were in leaf, the plants were bright with flowers.”¹

Changes of the seasons often brought dramatic alterations in the appearance of the mountainous, forested Ardennes. Although at times the woods may have presented a dark visage to strangers, as spring approached they would have been clothed in a range of brilliant new greens, filled with beeches and birches, water-loving alders, and leafy, shady oaks.² As the canopy grew in over the summer, trees would provide shade and shelter for plants, people, and animals. Glades and clearings were sprinkled throughout the shady, cool woods, and they would have been bright and open places, their grasses and flowers welcoming people and animals. Then the fall would usher in a new range of colors, fruits, and nuts. Tangles of brush and trees would have grown up in the places where woods and glades met, creating a varied, interesting, and complex ecosystem.

Agilolf was walking near the Amblève River, and on the day in question, the spring thaws would have already begun. The river would have been swollen and swift, running down from its source in the Hohe Venn, a high plateau that dominates the Northern Ardennes. After flowing through the mountains surrounding the plateau and past some high, forested hills, the river is joined by one of many tributaries. The beds of both rivers were swampy, with drier land located twenty meters higher up, and a medieval author explained that they “provided many accommodations and amenities, especially an abundance of grass.”³ Before reaching the monastery of Stavelot (where Agilolf was the abbot), the river flowed by a settlement that shared its name, the manor of Amblève (or Amel), which had existed since at least Roman times.⁴

Situated in the heart of the medieval Ardennes, far from major cities, the manor was seemingly safe in the river valley, “surrounded by a dense wood at a high elevation, and defended by hills.”⁵ Medieval evidence suggests these woods would have been filled with an abundance of wild animals such as deer, boar, and wolves. Yet the manor was also in the middle of a managed agricultural landscape, and the forest provided resources, shelter, and even additional grazing land to augment the riverside pastures and arable fields. Irrigation networks, fences, roads, and bridges traced a man-made network across the natural landscape. Charters reveal that the manor had at least one watermill, other agricultural structures, domestic buildings, and a church. The church, built on the higher land, was surrounded by a small wall that contained terraced land on the hillside.⁶ Fences and boundaries protected the manor from both wildlife and unwanted human interest and divided it up between the many groups that owned parts of the estate. One of the principal owners was Stavelot-Malmedy, and Agilolf and other abbots of the twin houses would have been very familiar with this property that was quite near their monasteries.

Agilolf might have walked through this small and vibrant corner of the Ardennes regularly, delighting in the ever-changing woodlands that were so close to his monastic retreat. On the morning in question, “the holy man passed through the woods… walked through a green field”⁷ and entered into the lore of the monastic communities. Agilolf was about to play a critical role in the history of the Carolingian Empire. For in this verdant and sunny clearing, he was viciously murdered by some of Charles Martel’s political enemies. He was killed because of his ties to Martel, who would avenge his death only days later, winning a key victory along the Amblève. The battle, which took place in April 716, would lead to Martel’s final victory and assumption of the crown.

This is a striking story, but almost entirely fictional. There is very little evidence for Agilolf’s life aside from this legend, and no corroborating evidence that links him to Charles Martel or the famous battle near the monasteries. The reality of this battle was interesting enough, but the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy reinvented it, creating an elaborate narrative about an almost fictional saint. Why did they do this? What impulses led the unknown author of the story of Agilolf to place a semi-imaginary figure in the middle of historic events, and to rewrite local and imperial history? Moreover, why did the Amblève River and its surrounding forest figure so prominently in the account? Why highlight the beauty of their landscape while at the same time framing it as the site of a grisly murder?

This book seeks to explore and explain the many religious, cultural, and social forces that met in this account and to understand the relationship that the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy had with their local environment. I am interested in accessing how nature informed cultural metaphors, how it shaped the monks’ religious identity, and how religious culture in turn influenced how the monks acted in their landscape and used their resources. Through both their experiences and their ideas, monks created and then manipulated a complex understanding of their own environment. They had, to draw on a concept from modern environmental studies, an “environmental imagination,” much of which was directed toward understanding the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation.

Environmental History and Medieval Christianity

Medieval forests were essential to the economic and agricultural vibrancy of medieval Europe, and the monks of the Ardennes drew on and successfully husbanded the forests for fuel, food, shelter, and wealth. However, it is only by also looking to their cultural and religious productions that we can understand the full extent of their engagement with nature. They imagined a world in which nature, God, the saints, and men interacted on a daily basis. They believed that the natural world reflected divine teachings and that in turn, God and the saints could change nature to teach people moral lessons, punish, and protect. The saints were tied to specific places, and places were inscribed with saintly power. People were in turn responsible for both recognizing and remembering these connections, and local landscapes became intertwined with local history, cult practices, and monastic memory.

For several decades now, scholars have turned the tools of environmental history on the medieval past, exploring such topics as medieval ecosystems, responses to climate change, resource management, landscape modification, fisheries management, urbanization, and deforestation.⁸ Many of these projects have been closely aligned with historical ecology (the use of written and natural records to reconstruct past ecosystems), and indeed several of its practitioners are in centers of historical ecology and environmental sciences. Scholars in Europe and America have developed methods for understanding the ecological and social metabolisms of premodern ecosystems (or medieval “ecological footprints”). Others have pursued detailed histories of medieval climate and weather extremes. There has also been interest in understanding the impact of global climate change on medieval and early modern peoples.⁹

Historians have also developed much deeper analyses of the ways that medieval political, social, and economic structures responded to and altered local and regional landscapes; an excellent example of this is Dutch peat use and the related polder system.¹⁰ Some works, like Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism and John Richards’s Unending Frontier, show the sweeping environmental impact of premodern decisions and activities.¹¹ Others are detailed studies of individual resources (such as fish populations, timber, and rabbits) that have shown both the relevance of paying attention to animal populations and resource ecologies and the deep ways that human economies and ecologies responded to and often caused changes in resource pools.¹² These approaches have demonstrated the degree to which medieval and early modern people were bound to their ecosystems, the depth of the history of human environmental manipulation, and the surprising versatility of medieval sources as tools for environmental history.

Most of these works focus on the tangible changes that nature and humans wrought on one another. But, as Donald Worster has pointed out, environmental history can also be cultural analysis, “studying the perceptions and values people have held about the nonhuman world.”¹³ Though there are some key works that address ancient and medieval ideas about nature (perhaps most notably Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore), sufficient models of a cultural approach to environmental history do not yet exist for the Middle Ages. In the wake of such expanded knowledge of medieval ecosystems and the human role in them, it is time for medieval environmental historians to again embrace and explore the spiritual and religious character of the medieval world.

This book foregrounds the cultural and spiritual implications of the medieval relationship with nature. At its heart is a question: how did living in and interacting with the natural world shape medieval religious identities? This is not an entirely new question, and as Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, religious history has been an important framework for understanding medieval interactions with nature.¹⁴ But this conversation has been for far too long framed around the well-known and provocative article by Lynn White, Jr. on the relation between Christian theology and ecological dominion. White argued that Christian theology created an intellectual space in which the medieval attitude toward nature became one of control and dominion. Christianity, he claimed, is “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” He connected “dominion over nature” to the advent of the moldboard plow, which reflected “violence,” “ruthlessness,” and an “exploitative attitude.”¹⁵ His conclusion was that medieval civilization was, in the words of one of my twelfth-century sources, centered on an idea of nature as “soulless, senseless, and created by God for human uses.”¹⁶

In 1993, Elspeth Whitney could claim that White’s thesis was “almost overwhelmingly familiar,” since it had been “repeated, reprised, and criticized in over two hundred books and articles.”¹⁷ Though it is true that White’s work has “proven a generative thesis,” much of the discussion that it spurred has been about the modern world, and many of his assumptions about medieval Christianity have been left unchallenged. White “helped to develop the academic fields of environmental ethics and of religion and ecology.”¹⁸ Thus, much of the criticism of “the White thesis” has been directed to evaluating his scriptural analysis and his philosophy of technology, and to posing alternative readings of the Bible rather than showing other versions of the medieval worldview.¹⁹

Richard Hoffmann points out that “medieval thinkers did assume human use of animals, plants, and inanimate nature as enjoined by God but, insofar as they bothered to engage these issues at all, they dwelt more on the injunction to ‘increase and multiply’ than on any implications of ‘dominion.’”²⁰ The legacy of this other medieval idea about nature is thoroughly explored by Jeremy Cohen, who concludes that “with regard to Gen. I:28 itself, the ecologically oriented thesis of Lynn White and others can now be laid to rest. Rarely, if ever, did premodern Jews and Christians construe this verse as a license for the selfish exploitation of the environment.”²¹ He also calls attention to the need for scholars to study not just the Biblical verses, but also “the interpretive tradition” of exegetical literature. The Western medieval world generated a rich range of exegetical texts and cultural interpretations of the Bible’s message. White mentions only a handful of these, and notably none produced between the second and thirteenth centuries. Furthermore, the cult of saints, which White connects only to the destruction of animism, produced volumes of Christian writing that express both medieval theology and medieval religious practice. Though the Bible was the base text for medieval Christianity, biblical themes and verses were not stagnant, but used in creative ways as new texts and new stories joined the cultural canon.

To construct a richer, multilayered view of medieval religion and nature, it is time to shift focus. White’s thesis encourages a perspective on Western Christianity’s sense of dominion that has been called a “single-visioned” view of an “inherited, unchanging essence” of medieval Christianity.²² This denies medieval Christianity its vitality, variety, and nuance. As recent work in religious culture has highlighted, medieval religious experiences and even beliefs varied from place to place and from community to community. To access a broader range of evidence for how religious ideas affected and reflected daily experiences with nature, agriculture, and landscape, scholars need to turn their attention away from “universal” theological texts toward locally produced hagiographical materials.

Environmental historians have demonstrated that medieval environmental practices and experiences were multitudinous, in part because of the strikingly different natural worlds that medieval people inhabited. It stands to reason, therefore, that medieval people also thought many different things about nature. Before attempting to reconceptualize broader medieval environmental imaginations, we must first develop stronger case studies, to appreciate the full range and variety of medieval ideas. This book provides one such case study, exploring the cultural, religious, and social contexts through which the Benedictine monks of Stavelot-Malmedy interpreted the natural world, from their mid-seventh-century foundation through the midtwelfth century. It examines their environmental practices, their land management goals, their relationships with the people who shared their landscape, and the way they integrated their immediate landscape into their worldview.

These monasteries are compelling for several reasons; they were founded in a densely forested landscape, and they had economic, political, and religious prominence despite their (arguably) isolated geographic location. They were closely allied with multiple generations of kings, participated in early medieval waves of monastic reform, and generated several regionally renowned saints and monastic leaders. Bishops of Cologne and Liège variously supported and opposed the houses’ interests, even at times participating in their cults of saints and hagiographical productions. The houses were also economically and culturally connected to several other Benedictine communities in the Ardennes, particularly Prüm and Andages/Saint-Hubert, whose sources and experiences augment this study.²³

The Ardennes defined the monks’ economic opportunities and shaped the religious culture of the entire community. The monks built up an economy, a power base, and an agricultural infrastructure in the forested Ardennes, and made decisions about land use, social relationships, and the local economy based on the opportunities and constraints of that landscape. These monks interacted with their surroundings in ways that resonated with broader medieval forest experiences but that differed from those of monastic communities located in regions supporting traditional open-field agriculture, or near larger urban centers. This particular landscape shaped how the monks remembered their history, framed their own experiences, and imagined the lives and powers of their saints. In turn, the monks altered the Ardennes; they built farms, managed woodlands, cleared trees, built churches and religious landmarks, and even rewrote local history, creating literary images of the Ardennes. Sometimes, these reflect the region’s real topography and landscape; at other times, they represent an ideal or imagined landscape.

Stavelot-Malmedy’s relationship with nature was full of contradictions, many related to the inherent problem of a monastic community dealing with the conflict between ideals and realities. The monks were stewards of land and aggressive exploiters of resources, religious leaders and economic agents, isolationists and social leaders, builders of agriculture and lovers of untamed nature all at the same time. Because of this, they had no single unifying vision of nature. Instead, the monks of the Ardennes developed multiple, coexisting ideas about the nonhuman world. The local landscape was a wild and dangerous place, connected to images of the monastic “desert”—but it was also domesticated and peaceful, tied to classical ideas of the pastoral and to the economic realities of agricultural life. The monastic communities actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to the other people who shared their landscape.

Environmental history is about the relationships between people and the natural world they inhabit; it is about interdisciplinary approaches to the past, and about how lived experience in certain environments connects to culture and art. Donald Worster, one of the pioneers of the field in America, defined environmental history as that which “deals with the role and place of nature in human life,” and, more recently, John McNeill wrote that environmental historians “write history as if nature existed. And they recognize that the natural world is not merely the backdrop to human events but evolves in its own right, both of its own accord and in response to human actions.”²⁴ In all definitions, it is the dynamism of an interest in both people and ecosystems that distinguishes environmental history both from traditional historical fields and from fields like historical ecology and paleoclimatology.²⁵ Many environmental historians draw heavily on these scientific fields to help them to understand the role people have played over time in shaping ecologies. But abstract forces also play a role in how humans are connected to broader ecosystems, and recognition of this has led to works that give priority to cultural and intellectual history.²⁶

Environmental history is broad enough to encourage the participation of scholars with an increasingly wide array of methods and approaches, and who work on many different regions and eras.²⁷ This has, naturally, led to different sets of priorities and scholarship. American environmental historians have placed more emphasis than others on cultural ideas of wilderness, environmental justice, the politics of conservation and environmental writers. As McNeill points out, European environmental history has traditionally been more closely aligned with historical ecology and with a methodological emphasis on “social metabolism” that he notes is both theoretical and “a hypermaterial form of environmental history.”²⁸ Richard Unger drew a similar conclusion about the status of premodern environmental history, praising the degree to which medievalists have embraced science and succeeded in uncovering knowledge about past environments. But he also pointed out that “one topic of pre-modern environmental history, central in its early days, now appears to be fading from among concerns in the field.… it is less concerned with ideas about nature. It is more about science and the use of science to inform analysis of the past interactions of people and their environments.”²⁹

Because of this range of approaches, environmental history, described by Ritvo as “an unevenly spreading blob” and by Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll more simply as “heterogenous,” has been difficult for practitioners to pin down under a single framework.³⁰ The best-known explanation of the field is by Worster, who identified three “layers” of environmental history: (1) “understanding nature itself, as organized and functioning in past times,” (2) “the socioeconomic realm as it interacts with the environment,” and (3) “that more intangible and uniquely human type of encounter,” that of “studying the perceptions and values people have held about the nonhuman world.”³¹ Worster argued that cultural history is, in fact, necessary to fully appreciate the relationship between people and nature, writing that “environmental history must include in its program the study of aspects of esthetics and ethics, myth and folklore, literature and landscape gardening, science and religion.”³²

Environmental history must include analysis of cultural ideas, because, as Lawrence Buell pointed out, the metaphors and words that societies and individuals use to describe nature, though abstract, have concrete power: “how we image a thing, true or false, affects our conduct toward it.”³³ People act based not only on material constraints and political situations, but also on what they think and what they perceive. John McNeill, in a recent overview of the environmental history, echoes Worster’s levels, and defines cultural environmental history as that which “concerns what humans have thought, believed, written—and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced—dealing with relationships between society and nature.”³⁴

Richard White observed that “the inspiration” for Worster’s view of environmental history “is really Braudelian.”³⁵ Fernand Braudel and the Annales school, in many ways the taproot of European environmental history, did give culture more prominence. The Annalistes were not only interested in material realities; they also emphasized culture, mentalités, and the intersection of place, social structure, and worldview. In contrast to the current modernism of most environmental history, the most famous practitioners of the Annales program, including Braudel, Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Le Roy Ladurie were premodernists. Though often connected to social and economic history, these scholars’ concerns resonate with those of environmental historians.

Braudel once described his historical interests in ways that would not feel out of place in Aldo Leopold’s work or in the preface of a modern environmental history: “I could name the plants and trees of this village of eastern France. I knew each of its inhabitants: I watched them at work…. I observed the yearly rotation of crops on the village lands which today produce nothing but grass for grazing herds. I watched the turning wheel of the old mill, which was, I believe, built long ago for the local lord by an ancestor of mine.”³⁶ Annalistes were concerned with the socioeconomic structures that produced both mills and lordship, and with how communities throughout agrarian, premodern Europe engaged with the natural world through agricultural practices, technological innovations, settlement patterns, and exchange networks. Medievalists have, in effect, been doing environmental history for generations.

Yet as Unger pointed out, some aspects of the Annales program have been left behind in the rise of the modern ecological sciences and the growth of the modern, self-conscious field of environmental history, notably the use of microhistories to explore the intersection between place and religious culture. Carlo Ginzburg’s reconstruction of the mental universe of a small-town miller and Le Roy Ladurie’s of the social and cultural world of heretical shepherds are both influential models of how investigating premodern ideas about God, agriculture, community, and daily life can enrich our sense of how connected culture and nature were.³⁷ Though both of these works predate the rise of environmental history, they demonstrate how scholars have attempted to link the daily experience of agricultural communities into intellectual, spiritual, and cultural history.

There is a deep tradition in environmental history of using a single place as an access point to broader questions of human relations to the rest of nature: Leopold’s Sand County, Worster’s Kansas, Cronon’s Chicago, Richard White’s Columbia River, and even Thoreau’s Walden Pond.³⁸ These works all used single places, ecosystems, and communities to explore bigger questions about America’s relationship with the natural world. There are still only a handful of monographs on medieval environmental history, and even fewer that focus such attention on single places or communities. Most of the monographs have been about water history or about landscape history, and the most prominent examples of case studies have been focused on forests and cities.³⁹

There is a deeper history of detailed case studies in monastic history. The monastery of Cluny, for example, has been the subject of many full-length studies.⁴⁰ Yet Stavelot-Malmedy has not received much attention from modern scholars. There have been several biographical studies of the three most prominent abbots: Odilo, Poppo, and Wibald. Though the most recent of these is a 1991 dissertation on Poppo, most date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴¹ The most prolific (and influential) historian of Stavelot-Malmedy was François Baix in the interwar period, who wrote several institutional and religious history studies of the houses, including a survey of their hagiography.⁴² Other historians have studied the houses as part of larger studies of multiple monasteries.⁴³ Most recently, detailed studies have focused on the abbeys’ art and manuscripts, and there has been renewed attention to Wibald, including museum exhibitions and an ongoing project by the MGH to produce a new edition of his letters.⁴⁴ But in general, there has been remarkably little work done on these monasteries, despite the rich body of sources.

Here, I use Stavelot-Malmedy as a case study to explore the ways that the natural environment shaped monastic experiences and imaginations. This book analyzes how monks negotiated layers of stories and memories, fixed their own identity within a religious and environmental landscape, and connected several differing interpretations of nature’s value. Because the monks’ ideas about (and uses of) the natural world developed over time, this book has a long time frame, approximately A.D. 650–1150. Monastic ideas and actions were influenced by changing institutional contexts, individual leaders, and the continuous roles of local saints and landscapes.

Monastic “environmental imagination” was complex, and cannot be accessed directly, nor through any single body of evidence. Instead, we must read across the barriers of source genre, using both narrative and normative sources to reconstruct not only how medieval people used the environment, but also what they thought about the natural world. Stavelot-Malmedy’s source base encourages this approach to sources. Over the five hundred years I am examining, the monasteries produced and received hundreds of charters; these recorded land grants and exchanges, taxes, property rights, conflicts and their resolutions, abbatial elections, and other administrative affairs. A further remarkable administrative source survives from the 1130s–40s: the collected correspondence of Wibald, arguably the most influential of Stavelot-Malmedy’s abbots.⁴⁵

When using these sources to understand both the houses’ physical environs and how the monks exploited, defined, and controlled their landscape, I am on familiar ground, since to date, most environmental history of the early and high Middle Ages has focused on administrative, normative, or paleo-environmental sources. Oliver Rackham has shown just how many details of land use can be shaken out of the “forest” of early medieval charters, and Della Hooke’s work on the Anglo-Saxon landscape models how these sources can be used to reconstruct lost landscapes. Several climate historians have shown the utility of charters, annals, and other “datable” sources in reconstructing the history of medieval climate.⁴⁶

For Stavelot-Malmedy, this approach alone is unsatisfying. As Baix pointed out, there are not enough administrative documents to enable a thorough analysis of the houses’ properties, economy, or administrative history.⁴⁷ There are large temporal gaps, and as will be seen, many of the surviving records lack the kind of detail that environmental and agricultural historians have successfully used elsewhere. But as Paolo Squatriti pointed out, even when they are full of detail, “charters are most communicative when integrated with narrative sources, letters, chronicles, and biographies.”⁴⁸

Luckily, Stavelot-Malmedy also produced and commissioned a varied and under-studied body of religious writings. These appeared as early as the mid-ninth century with the first full vita of St. Remacle, the monasteries’ founder. This period saw monasteries across the Empire retelling their histories and renegotiating relationships with the monarchy, especially as Louis the Pious emphasized monastic reform and endowment. In Stavelot’s case, Remacle’s cult grew over the next decades, and production of a miracle collection followed. This was written in several stages from the ninth through eleventh centuries, and a second vita of Remacle was written in the midtenth century. This biography was written by a leading monastic scholar under the direction of a powerful bishop, showing the degree to which the abbots of Stavelot-Malmedy had worked on developing nonroyal relationships and allies as the power of the Carolingians waned.

Other figures also merited vitae, including Poppo, an eleventh-century abbot, and Agilolf, that semi-legendary figure from the Carolingian age. The eleventh century (a period of rivalry between the two houses) also led to a translation story of several saints from Paris to Malmedy and an elaborate record of a triumph for Remacle’s relics in support of Stavelot. This rich set of hagiographical evidence is under-studied, and has never been fully integrated alongside the administrative sources, despite many close ties between periods of administrative activity, political crisis, and hagiographical production. Environmental history, with its emphasis on the deeper connections between all human and natural spheres, provides an opportunity to highlight the way that this web of medieval ideas, stories, and sources can be studied together to appreciate the deep connections between people, places, and imagination.

My cultural approach to the medieval environment is also related to the questions asked by literary scholars practicing ecocriticism. This field’s purpose has been described as “to investigate literature’s capacity for articulating the non-human environment.”⁴⁹ Despite what Clarence Glacken earlier described as the popular and pernicious misconception “that the peoples of classical antiquity and of the Middle Ages had neither interest in nor capacity for appreciating nature,” there is a growing body of work that explores how literary sources from the medieval and early modern world imagine, describe, and interpret nature.⁵⁰ Yet these works deal primarily with literary and vernacular sources, and use field-specific methods of literary interpretation. Thus, though my questions are influenced by those asked by literary scholars, this book is not attempting a traditional ecocriticism. I am instead approaching hagiographical materials as a historian interested in the construction of cultural identities and the sources’ historical context. Furthermore, I am using sources that were theocentric rather than ecocentric; hagiographical sources were about God, religion, monasticism, saints, and morality. However, as Lawrence Buell has argued, although few sources “qualify unequivocally and consistently” as environmental there is a wide and diverse range of texts (both fictional and nonfictional) that can be used to explore attitudes toward nature.⁵¹

These are full of nature, natural metaphors, depictions of human uses of nature, and stories about the ways that nature affected and changed people. By picking up the traces of nature in these stories, and reading them in the context of the religious stories, I am, in effect, attempting an “environmental exegesis”⁵² of these sources. By introducing this concept of “environmental exegesis” I want to call attention to what I feel is the biggest contribution of this book—the deliberate inclusion of the ideas, goals, stories, and worldview of hagiographers into medieval environmental history. Stories of saints and miracles reflect particular medieval cult practices, and because of that, they are often set in real places and involve real people, written to achieve a “verisimilitude effect” that connected miracle to daily life.⁵³ They resonate with and reflect real experiences, yet they are not exact snapshots. Latin, cultbased, hagiographic materials were just as much works of the imagination, and just as much structured, authored, and symbolic as were Romances, poems, and sagas. They can be treated as constructed, imagined texts, and they can be read with an eye toward the way that the natural world was imagined, constructed, and described.

The potential value of these sources for environmental history, particularly the hundreds of stories in miracle collections and the lives of minor or only regionally important saints, has not yet been fully explored. As Ashley and Sheingorn point out, it is important to see that for the cult of St. Foye, “the cultural work performed by its hagiographic texts serves purposes that cannot be identified as solely religious.”⁵⁴ Scholars have returned with new questions to this old corpus of writings, highlighting the depth and texture of monastic sources. Of these, several have had a significant influence on my approach. Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on food, identity, and spirituality is a model for how to trace the intersections of religious and gender identities, material culture, and the goals of local hagiographers.⁵⁵ Barbara Rosenwein’s work on Cluny and on emotional history, Patrick Geary and Rosamond McKitterick’s studies of memory and the written record, and Sharon Farmer’s textured investigations of Louis IX’s sainthood trials all provide models for how religious ideas, economic and political practices, and the processes of writing and record-keeping can be woven together for a more complete image of medieval communities.⁵⁶

Hagiographical sources do of course present problems for environmental analysis, in part because of the depth of borrowings from earlier religious writings. However, though they contain echoes of earlier works, most were composed and compiled locally, with clear agendas, including that of tying saintly power closely to the local landscape. This would prevent authors from borrowing too heavily from irrelevant topoi when describing local events and geographies. Moreover, as I demonstrate throughout this book, hagiographic materials did not exist in a vacuum; they were associated with and interacted with a body of charters, letters, and other documents, and all of these are bound up together in monastic ideas about the control of people, the saints, and the natural world. These works were also tied to the local concerns of the authors: “communities did not produce historical narratives fortuitously, but rather that they did so under specific circumstances and that the writing of a text often served as a catalyst for the resolution of internal or external crises.”⁵⁷

The hagiographical materials from Stavelot-Malmedy have been routinely dismissed because they were derivative and copied too heavily from other works—a kind of religious bricolage. One scholar even described the Passio Agilolfi as a kind of “fantasy building,” unmoored from any real foundation.⁵⁸ Because quotations, borrowing, forging, and manipulation of earlier works were a routine part of medieval writing across all genres, saints’ lives (like histories and charters) should not be dismissed because of the echoes of earlier sources. Instead, the echoes should be treated as a deliberate part of the process of creating the sources. As McKitterick points out in her discussion of the Liber Historia Francorum (itself an important source in the imagination of at least one of Malmedy’s monks), “it should not be seen in terms merely of what is borrowed or new, but as a complete text with very distinctive emphases of its own.”⁵⁹

This book takes as its starting point an assumption that the generations of monks who collectively and individually built the history, economy, and religious culture of Stavelot-Malmedy acted within a set of cultural and religious frameworks that were both part of broader cultural trends and shaped by local peculiarities. They were influenced by their religious goals, by the landscape they inhabited, by relations with allies and enemies, and by the stories they told themselves and others about all of those things. Uncovering the many ways that environment was connected to this community’s identity and history can let us see not only these monks’ environmental imagination, but also point toward ways of seeing place, nature, landscapes, and environmental worldview in the ideas, actions, and sources of other medieval people. But because local identity and history matter, before broader issues are addressed it is important to understand the political and religious history of these houses.

Historical Background: Stavelot and Malmedy

Stavelot and Malmedy were founded by St. Remacle (Remaclius or Rimagilius,⁶⁰ d. 670), one of a cadre of seventh-century monk-bishops who led the conversion of the Ardennes and founded almost fifty monasteries in modern Belgium by about 725.⁶¹ Remacle began his religious career at Luxeuil, then became abbot of Solignac in 632.⁶² After more than a decade, he left in order to establish his own monastery in the Ardennes, first choosing a site called Cugnon. This foundation failed, and Remacle moved to the Meuse River valley where he founded Stavelot and Malmedy in the mid-seventh century. Charters claim a foundation date of 648, and the Annales Stabulenses (compiled in the eleventh century) date the building of the monasteries to 652.⁶³ Records do not show which house was founded first, and the two houses would debate this for centuries.

Remacle’s motives in founding two houses are also unknown. He may have intended the houses to be a double monastery with a monk-bishop as its abbot, comparable to similar foundations at Ghent and Marchiennes. He may also have been working in the model of Solignac, creating an Irish-style community that would have been the first of its kind in eastern Belgium.⁶⁴ The double foundation was further complicated by the fact that Remacle founded Stavelot in the diocese of Tongres-Maastricht/Liège and Malmedy in that of Cologne.⁶⁵

The two monasteries were bound together not only by Remacle’s joint foundation, but also by patronage and politics. Around the year 648 a charter appears under King Sigibert’s name, confirming the houses’ foundation and bequeathing them lands and privileges. Grimoald, the Pippinid mayor-of-the-palace, also signed the charter, and it has been suggested that he was the real force behind the new foundation.⁶⁶ The monasteries do appear to have enjoyed steady royal protection and privilege through the Merovingian period, and Stavelot and Malmedy may have been among the best endowed of the royal monasteries.⁶⁷ The houses also received papal support from an early date. In 660, Pope Vitalian (657–672) issued one of the houses’ oldest surviving charters. The pope not only gave Babolenus a legal document; he also gave him a saint. Vitalian allowed Babolenus to move the relics of a little-known martyr, St. Semetrius, to Stavelot.⁶⁸ This became the first of an important series of translations, and marked the start of Stavelot-Malmedy’s rich cult of saints.

The houses received another boon as the Pippinid/Carolingian dynasty rose to power and prominence. Grimoald had been an early supporter of Stavelot-Malmedy, and the houses were near not just the site of Charles Martel’s victory at Amblève, but also Pippin’s homeland of Herstal and the government centers of Aachen and Cologne. These connections were the launching point of the houses’ regional prominence, and proved important to monastic power, memory, and self-definition. Over the course of the ninth century, Stavelot and Malmedy solidified their relationships with the Carolingian monarchy. Louis the Pious (r. 814–840) was particularly prominent in this process, confirming the monasteries’ core holdings and protecting their interests. Later abbots (and monarchs) repeatedly referenced Louis and his rulings in later charters, and the monks later included a story about him in the collection of miracles attributed to St. Remacle.⁶⁹ It was around the end of Louis’s reign (840) that the first biography of Remacle (the vita prima) was written.

Stavelot-Malmedy continued to acquire new lands and grow, and by the late 800s, Stavelot and Malmedy seem to have been relatively successful, prominent, and economically secure. Baix characterized the monks of the period as “tenacious,”⁷⁰ but a crisis point was approaching. In the winter of 881, according to the Annales Fuldenses, Vikings attacked the monasteries of Stavelot, Malmedy, Prüm, and Inda, the palace in Aachen, and the cities of Cologne and Bonn. Regino of Prüm confirms the attack on Stavelot-Malmedy, and the Annales Stabulenses report that in 881, “the monastery of Stavelot is burned up by the fire of the Normans.” As a result of the attacks, “the body of St. Remacle was brought out of its tomb on 6 December.”⁷¹ The monks abandoned the monastery, taking Remacle’s relics with them. This led to a forced tour of monastic properties that allowed the monks to remind the residents of the broader region of the presence and miraculous powers of St. Remacle.

Whether or not there was any substantial damage done to the monasteries by the Vikings, the cultural, political, and religious impact of the attacks was wider reaching and longer lasting than the loss of buildings and treasure alone could possibly have been. The attacks encouraged the monks to rebuild infrastructure, to promote themselves in order to find new benefactors and defenders, and to consolidate both their administrative and religious records. They also triggered a flurry of hagiographical writing, most particularly the second book of the Miracula Remacli (hereafter Miracula), a collection of almost forty miracle stories that were pivotally important in the preservation of the houses’ religious memory and in setting religious and behavioral models for later monks, patrons, and dependents. The tales range from the curing of the ill and possessed to the preservation of the monks against nature and the elements and the punishment of those who (like the Vikings) chose to attack rather than support the houses and their mission.

The Vikings were not the only setback Stavelot-Malmedy endured in the ninth century; they also had to deal with more direct control by the crown. Under Lothar II (855–869), the royal court took direct control of the houses, and in the subsequent forty years, there were seven external lay abbots.⁷² The narrative sources for Stavelot and Malmedy are silent about this period of lay abbacy, but the vita of John of Gorze claims that Stavelot’s next reform abbot, Odilo, sought “to correct to straight lines, with the help of Christ, those whom he had found to be powerfully crooked.”⁷³

Odilo was also a royal appointee, and he linked Stavelot to the Gorze reforms, part of a general reform trend in the tenth century that included the better-known reforms at Cluny.⁷⁴ Early historians of Stavelot saw Odilo’s abbacy (937/38–954) as ushering in a new era of religious fervor, intellectual drive, and monastic prestige at Stavelot. A. Courtejoie wrote that as a result, Stavelot again became “a seed-bed for saints and a training school for great men.”⁷⁵ Yet no literary or religious works survive from his abbacy. Instead, there are only a handful of administrative charters.⁷⁶ Odilo encouraged the bureaucratic consolidation of the monastic estate and the development of the chancery, a focus that would be repeated by subsequent “reform” abbots.

Another result of Odilo’s abbacy was that in 954 he was able to restore Stavelot-Malmedy’s rights to free abbatial election. He died shortly thereafter, and for the first time in nearly a century, the monks elected their own abbot, Werenfrid (954–980). The monasteries enjoyed a renewed sense of self-directed purpose, but in that same year an external factor confirmed many of their fears. At the beginning of the military excursion that would culminate in the Battle of the Lechfeld (955), the Magyars crossed through Belgium. En route, a small group attacked and burned Malmedy. The attack is recorded in a charter from 1007 and in the Annales Stabulenses, which reports that in 954 the “Hungarians filled the regions of Gaul.”⁷⁷ Thus, less than a century after the Viking attacks, and in the wake of marked internal attention to religious and fiscal management, the monks were again forcibly reminded of the range of potential threats to their properties.

In the following years, they compiled their first cartulary, the Codex Stabulensis. Like many central medieval cartularies, this appears to have been intended to shore up property claims, confirm existing social bonds, protect their legal rights, and preserve monastic history and memory.⁷⁸ As part of this same process, Stavelot-Malmedy also commissioned new hagiographic works, most notably the vita Remacli secunda (hereafter Vita Remacli).⁷⁹ Notger, the archbishop of Liège, claimed authorship of this work in a preface, but it appears that he farmed it out to Heriger of Lobbes.⁸⁰

This renewed interest in hagiographical production was sustained by Stavelot-Malmedy’s next reforming abbot, Poppo (1020–1048), who worked to develop the material infrastructure of Stavelot and to expand Remacle’s cult.⁸¹ Poppo, another external appointee, had connections to the emperor and the reform leader Richard of Verdun. In all, Poppo was involved with the reform and leadership of least twenty houses, and ensured that many of his followers and supporters became leaders of monastic communities in the region.⁸² These political and religious connections gave Poppo an immense ability to effect change at Stavelot. He rebuilt Stavelot’s basilica, oversaw the completion of the Miracula Remacli, worked to ensure Stavelot’s rights to free abbatial election, and restored and consolidated properties. Yet he was ultimately unable to fully unite the two houses, which had been fighting off and on over supremacy since the tenth century.

The final stages of this conflict are recorded in the Triumphus Remacli (hereafter Triumphus), which was written around 1065 by monks from Stavelot. The Triumphus provides details of the worst part of the schism and the formal separation of Malmedy from Stavelot, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. It also makes a powerful hagiographical claim of Remacle’s ultimate control of both houses. Malmedy’s monks countered Stavelot’s claims in part by producing their own hagiographic literature, including the Translatio et Miracula s. Quirini (hereafter Translatio Quirini) and the Passio Agilolfi. Both works, probably written between 1061 and 1071, are attributed by most scholars to the same unknown author (a monk from Malmedy). The Translatio Quirini records the translation of the bodies of saints Quirin, Nicasius, and Scubicule from the outskirts of Paris to Malmedy. The text contains stories of the trip, including the miracles performed by the saints and the reception of the monks by various communities. The second source, the Passio Agilolfi (hereafter Passio) tells the story of a single saint, Agilolf, the semi-mythical eighth-century abbot we met at the start of the chapter.

The burgeoning hagiographical output was part of a general rise in Stave-lot-Malmedy’s cultural profile over the course of the 1000s. The Meuse River valley had become a center for monastic and church schools, and Liège was a literary and cultural center of note. The literary and especially artistic and crafts productions of the region are referred to now as “Mosan” works. The chance survival of a library catalog from Stavelot shows that the monks had a large collection of religious and secular works. In addition to many commentaries on scripture, liturgical books, hymnals, antiphonaries, numerous copies of the Bible, and theological works, they had standard works of importance to monastic houses, such as the lives of the ancient fathers and the rules of St. Basil and St. Benedict. The monks also had copies of the most popular and common hagiographical works and, of course, the biographies of saints of local importance. The breadth of these religious holdings is a reminder that the monks of Stavelot developed their worldview and their environmental imagination based on more than just scripture. Ties to Liège might have helped the monks also develop substantial holdings in geography, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, agriculture, law, and zoology.⁸³

By 1100, signs pointed to a renewed cultural and religious florescence, but the monasteries faced another abbatial crisis. Between 1098 and 1119, two external abbots were in charge. One of these, Poppo II of Beaumont (1105–19), was remembered (according to an 1128 charter) as the “depopulator of our lands.”⁸⁴ After Poppo II’s abbacy, the monks of Stavelot elected their own candidate, Warnier, but the emperor never confirmed him and the pope deposed him five years later. Finally, in 1124, the monks elected Cuono de Logne, and he was confirmed. However, Cuono was not a monk from Stavelot, but from Malmedy, making him the first monk of Malmedy to be appointed as abbot of both houses.⁸⁵

When Cuono was elected, a monk named Wibald was the porter at Stavelot. Wibald was a native of the Ardennes. He became a monk at Waulsort and then went to Liège to study theology, liberal arts, medicine, and agronomy under Rupert of Deutz, an influential scholar and a leading figure in the investiture controversy. Wibald gained the attention of the royal government, and in 1131 Lothar III invested him as abbot of Stavelot-Malmedy. He was a powerful and learned abbot who reshaped both the material and intellectual property of the monasteries, and his abbacy heralds what many historians have identified as Stavelot-Malmedy’s “golden age.”⁸⁶

In the 1130s, Wibald accompanied Lothar III to Italy, where he briefly served as abbot of Monte Cassino. This risky post did not go unrewarded. Only three days after he placed Wibald as head of Monte Cassino, Lothar gave Stavelot the “Golden Bull of Aquino.” Issued on purple parchment, written in gold ink, and sealed with the golden bull, this charter was “the most honorable, most distinguished, and at the same time most extensive charter that Stavelot ever received.”⁸⁷ This was a comprehensive confirmation of the relationship between the monastery and the Empire. In addition to affirming all earlier holdings granted by former emperors, Lothar reestablished Otto II’s election rules, added to Stavelot’s landed wealth, and again confirmed Stavelot’s supremacy, decreeing that Malmedy was never to be allowed to separate from Stavelot “which it is now tempted to do for the third time.”⁸⁸ He placed the monasteries under his explicit protection and control, stating that their holdings would remain “in the hands and in the service” of the emperor.

When elected abbot of Stavelot, Wibald swore “to regain scattered properties” and protect the monks and their lands.⁸⁹ He actively pursued new lands and new privileges, procuring at least eight royal charters for Stavelot, and six for Corvey.⁹⁰ This is more than have survived from the previous 130 years, and the two diplomas that Wibald received from Frederick Barbarossa in 1152 and 1153 would be the last surviving royal charters to the monasteries for almost two hundred years.⁹¹ Wibald also received privileges from at least five of the six popes who reigned while he was abbot.⁹²

Yet because of his international reputation, Wibald was rarely in residence at Stavelot. His longest stay was from 1130 to 1135, and his last substantial residence at Stavelot was in 1148, when he remained for almost a year. From 1139 on, Wibald spent a considerable amount of time in the court of Conrad III of Staufen (1138–1155). He served in the royal chancery, attended imperial assemblies, and was involved in all affairs between Conrad and Byzantium.⁹³ Wibald’s support for Conrad’s political concerns eventually led to his leadership of a third monastery, Corvey, which split his attention even further.⁹⁴ He was also frequently involved in broader church affairs, traveling to other monasteries, attending church assemblies, and visiting Rome.

After the winter of 1150/51, Wibald spent most of his time at Corvey. Although not particularly beneficial for Stavelot, Wibald’s long periods of absence are advantageous for modern historians, since he accumulated a vast correspondence. Wibald wrote and received hundreds of letters from emperors, popes, bishops, nobles, and his own subordinates, and collected them in his “letter book.”⁹⁵ Wibald’s letters (along with the other documents associated with his abbacy) comprise more than one-third of all of the documents surviving from the foundation of Stavelot and Malmedy to around 1200.⁹⁶

A man of letters with an interest in science, Wibald was a true “twelfthcentury Renaissance” man. The subjects of his letters range from discussions of fine theological points to the handling of routine administrative tasks. He used these letters to exchange knowledge, manuscripts, medicines, and even, in one case, rabbits.⁹⁷ Wibald was also a patron of local artisans, and invested heavily in the decoration of Stavelot’s altars and shrines. One of Wibald’s surviving commissions, a bust of St. Alexander, is a fine example of Mosan metal- and enamel-working, as is the thirteenth-century reliquary of Remacle, considered a masterpiece of the style.⁹⁸ Wibald also commissionedand probably designed two elaborate golden altarpieces (or retables), both now lost. Their programs are known, however: the first depicted Remacle’s foundation of the houses, and the second showed the mysteries of the passion and the resurrection of Christ, with the figures of Wibald and his patroness and correspondent Empress Irene. Further underscoring his broad imperial connections, he may also have commissioned a gold and enamel reliquary known as the Stavelot Triptych to house a fragment of the true cross from Byzantium.⁹⁹

Wibald died, at the age of sixty, on 19 July 1158, while returning from Constantinople. Fittingly, news of this reached the monks via letter. Wibald’s body returned to Stavelot, where he was formally buried inside the church over a year later, on 26 July 1159. This study needs an endpoint; reluctant as I am to tie this to the death of a single leader, 1159 saw the convergence of several things that mark an end to the early and central-medieval core identity of the houses.

Most significantly, though Wibald’s successor, Erlebald (1158–1192), tried to continue his predecessor’s programs, the age of Stavelot-Malmedy’s great saint-abbots was over. Despite (or perhaps because of) his fame and influence, Wibald was never venerated as a saint.¹⁰⁰ No significant works of hagiography followed and there was less investment in the material infrastructure of the cults. Remacle’s relics are still venerated in a church in Stavelot, and Poppo would eventually be canonized in 1624, but the great flourishing of Stavelot’s medieval saint cults was drawing to a close.

Broader changes were afoot. By the 1150s, the crusades had opened for Europe a whole new world of conflict, cultural exchange, and international connections. The evolution of the Cistercian order had dramatically changed the monastic experience; though the Benedictine order remained important throughout the Middle Ages, their dominance of economic, political, and religious landscapes was effectively over. Royal abbeys, too, were eclipsed by institutions founded by minor nobles, knights, and powerful merchants. The decentralization of royal power in the German Empire and the Low Countries and the problems facing the Hohenstaufen house also meant that Stavelot-Malmedy’s special status as a royal house was no longer a guarantee of support and privilege. As their patrons dwindled and the vibrancy of the earlier reform movements shifted to other orders, the forces that had pushed Stavelot to prominence receded, and the monasteries faded away.

There were more subtle changes to monastic identity, visible in a document issued in 1159, just one year after Wibald’s death. The foundation charter for a hermitage at Mie was preserved at Stavelot.¹⁰¹ The Latin original was copied into Old French, and as such is the earliest vernacular document from the monastic archive, reflecting a significant change in archival and documentary practices. There is no reference to the role or power of Remacle and other saints, or of Stavelot-Malmedy’s early history. Also missing, despite the woodland location of the hermitage, is any invocation of the idea of the forest as part of a monastic wilderness, which for centuries had been a fundamental part of Stavelot-Malmedy’s identity.

Faith in the Wilderness

Many medieval monastic communities told stories that linked their early history with a transferred “desert” setting, equating their own landscapes (forests, swamps, mountains) with the dangers and opportunities of the ancient desert wilderness.¹⁰² The Anglo-Saxon life of Bertuin, written around 800, sets the foundation of Malonne in “a great forest full of dense bushes and brambles and thorns and the lairs of beasts and thieves’ caves and the abodes of demons.”¹⁰³ This vision was not limited to the early Benedictine monks; centuries later, a Cistercian monk wrote a vita of St. Godric, an English hermit (d. 1170), that embraced the idea of the forest as a place of solitude and wilderness. Godric “sought out the depths of the forests, and dwelled in the beds of wild animals; he did not flee from wolves, nor from interactions with serpents, nor from looking at or interacting with any part of the wild.”¹⁰⁴ In this view, forests were loci horribili, isolated and dangerous places full of wild animals, thieves, and political and spiritual enemies.

The idealization of solitude had its roots in the legends of the desert fathers and emphasized the monastic goal of separation from the world. A topos developed that monasteries were founded in sites devoid of people, “in eremi” or “in solitude”: the desert. It has been suggested that the “desert in northern Gaul was bound up with the notion of the frontier,” invoked in spaces where the monks perceived themselves as marginal or excluded, either socially, linguistically, or religiously.¹⁰⁵ This supported the ideas of eremitism as isolation from community, but did not necessarily involve harsh landscapes. Peter Damian’s eleventh-century vita Romualdi describes how that saint (d. ca. 1027) enjoyed hunting before becoming a hermit. When wandering in “the beautiful places (loci amoeni) of the woodlands,” he longed for the desert, saying to himself, “Oh, how well hermits would be able to live in these woodland retreats; how well they could be quiet here, away from all the confusions of the world’s din.”¹⁰⁶

Reflecting medieval metaphors, modern scholars also frequently understand medieval forests as synonymous with wilderness, and wilderness as synonymous with fear and isolation. In her work on medieval forests, Corinne Saunders went so far as to describe Richard FitzNigel’s discussion of the forest as “clearly implying a wooded and therefore wild landscape.”¹⁰⁷ Images of monastic solitude are also connected to depictions of the medieval wilderness (and forests) as “waste” land, unattractive and desolate areas not used or cultivated by people; land beyond the bounds of ordered and civilized nature. Jacques Le Goff, though recognizing that it was not “wholly wild,” described the forest-wilderness as being located “on the extreme fringes of society.”¹⁰⁸ Vito Fumagalli, in his evocatively titled Landscapes of Fear, viewed the forest of the early Middle Ages as an aggressive foe: “people were swallowed up in a countryside which was still largely untamed and had vast expanses of wilderness everywhere.”¹⁰⁹ And in his article “Moines et nature Sauvage,” René Noël tied the early medieval Ardennes into this view, describing them as overwhelmingly wild. At Stavelot, he claimed, Remacle found “instead of fields, vines, and fruiting trees, the enormity of the wooded solitude, of the desert wasteland. The hard Ardennes.”¹¹⁰

Yet early medieval rhetoric and later Romanticism aside, by 648, Stavelot, far from isolated and wild, was in the middle of a landscape marked by successful Merovingian settlement. And by the 700s, “on a map, the fiscs form an almost unbroken chain” of settlements.¹¹¹ In these two interpretations of the character of the early medieval Ardennes lies the problem of evaluating monastic sources. Did the monks of the Ardennes live in forests that centuries of human settlement had shaped into a familiar and domesticated landscape, or in a wild landscape? Were monks living dominated by dense (and dangerous) forests? Or were they imagining that they did?

In spite of the endurance of the idea of “desert,” Benedictine monks did not normally live in untamed and isolated wastelands. They established monasteries in regions that had long settlement histories and included the conversion and care of local populations as part of their religious mission. The monks not only lived in this domesticated landscape; they themselves were part of the process of its domestication. Throughout the Middle Ages, monastic institutions were not only religious leaders, but also careful and creative property owners. This can and has been interpreted (by both their peers and modern historians) as a conflict between faith and wealth, between spiritual and secular success. However, critics may have painted these contrasts too sharply; though individual monastic leaders and communities certainly wrestled with the ideas, many monastic groups had reconciled these tensions for themselves. The monastic locus amoenus provided not just an antithesis to the wild, but a separate metaphor that helped the monastic authors forge links between agricultural labor and spiritual reform.

Around 937, a monk from Saint-Hubert wrote a vita of St. Beregisus, the eighth-century founder of his monastery. He describes the Ardennes as a remote and isolated place and promotes the value of carving out a holy space from wild nature. Yet though it has echoes of the desert wilderness, this story reveals a different set of relations between monks and forests, characterized by engagement and control rather than fear. Dense, “shady woods” surrounded the place where Beregisus established the monastery, and “he began in earnest to fell the leafy [trees] and to expand the space for the construction of buildings.” Finally, with “the woods having been cut down, a dwelling space was measured out.”¹¹²

In medieval religious experience, fear and safety could be part of the same dynamic, and the forest was also connected to the idea of locus amoenus and the pastoral. John Howe has noted that though contradictory, these ideas were “a double heritage, intertwined from biblical times onward.”¹¹³ This dichotomy is visible even in Athanasius’s vita of St. Anthony, who though fleeing to the depths of the desert, took care to establish and grow a vegetable garden. As Dominic Alexander points out, “the fruitfulness of the uncultivated wilderness became established as a theme early on in the West.” He adds that the monks and hermits were also interested in protecting this abundance, and “were clearly determined to mark their possession of sylvan resources.”¹¹⁴ The medieval blurring of desert/bounty and wild/pastoral is very important to understanding monastic interactions with nature, and the sources from Stavelot-Malmedy demonstrate that seemingly opposite views of the same landscape could be closely connected. The monks used contradictory images of the natural world together to help create and reinforce their religious culture and identity.

The monastery of Fulda is a well-studied example of these issues. Fulda was founded by St. Sturm in the mid-eighth century. Though the house’s early charters show that there was significant settlement before the monks arrived, a letter from St. Boniface (Sturm’s mentor) to Pope Zacharius employs the language of solitude, describing Fulda as “a wooded spot in a hermitage of vast solitude.”¹¹⁵ This statement has been interpreted in several ways by scholars. It has been suggested that the issue of solitude here might reflect not just the monastic ideal, but also an attempt by the monks to assert specific claims over the nature of their properties. Yet other scholars have argued against such interpretations of solitude tropes as “knowing and deceptive” misrepresentations of the legal status of property rights, pointing out that authors of vitae often acknowledged previous settlement, “and saw therein no contradiction to solitudine.”¹¹⁶

Help with how to reconcile these monastic contradictions can be found in modern discussions of the American Wilderness Ideal. In a well-known article “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon, writing about U.S. environmental history, argues for a more expansive definition of wilderness. This article has received much criticism from modern wilderness activists, and is part of a longer debate about the goals and practices of the American Wilderness movement.¹¹⁷ Though much of that debate centers on the implications of these ideas for modern wilderness preservation, Cronon’s criticism of a one-sided approach to the idea of wild nature is very relevant to the study of medieval relations to nature. He claims that the planted, known, and domesticated natural world is not something separate from wilderness, but is instead part of a single set of human interactions with nature. He calls attention to two trees: a tree in a backyard garden and a tree in “an ancient forest.” He points out that the modern idea of wilderness does not take the tree in the garden into account, despite the fact that it is no more or less a part of nature than the other tree. The domesticated landscape has been marginalized from the modern view of nature and the wild. Yet true appreciation of the relation between humans and nature, he concludes, is only possible “if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild.” Instead, he continues, “we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural.”¹¹⁸

Perhaps the most widely known work on the medieval wilderness is Jacques Le Goff’s 1980 essay on the monastic “desert-wilderness.” In this provocative and expressive essay, Le Goff argued for a complex view of the value of wilderness for medieval people. Following monastic sources, he explored the origins of the medieval wilderness in the desert ethos of Eastern monasticism, whose themes “were tirelessly reworked, multiplied, and embellished,” by John Cassian (and other early medieval authors).¹¹⁹ Le Goff in turn relies on monastic writings and secular literature, seeing in both ideas of wild nature as both dangerous and bountiful; however, Le Goff draws a line between the two genres that I would like to erase. He looked to saints’ lives, cartularies, annals, and other monastic writings for one type of wilderness, but then claimed that “the deeper symbolic significance of the forest must be sought in works of the imagination,” by which he meant exclusively secular writings. Throughout this book, I present hagiographies, histories, and even the occasionally forged charters as just as imagined as vernacular romances.

In summary, he claimed that “opposed to the forest-wilderness in the medieval Western value system was the ‘world,’ that is, organized society.” The forest wilderness allowed for the construction of an opposition “between nature and culture, expressed in terms of the opposition between what was built, cultivated and inhabited (city, castle, village) and what was essentially wild (the ocean and forest, the western equivalents of the eastern desert).”¹²⁰ Wilderness, the forest, and the desert all become one thing in his analysis, and he wrote that “all went to the forest to behave as men of nature, fleeing the world of culture in every sense of the word.”¹²¹

While I agree that the forest (and the monastic wilderness) was often set in contrast to urban (and courtly) civilization, it is important to recognize that the monks were not in fact fleeing “culture in every sense of the word.” Instead they were constructing their own culture, using images of both wildness and domesticity to build, reinforce, and confirm a monastic identity that was both connected to the world and yet somehow apart from it.

As Cronon argues, wilderness cannot be separated from the broader range of nature as neatly as many people try to. Wilderness is not just the empty place—it is intimately bound up with the domestic. The domestic, the wild, and the pastoral were not clearly separated in the Middle Ages. In spite of their goal of isolation, monks lived and worked in an environment that was known, managed, and mundane, and they did so while interacting with other people. There was no one set of medieval ideas or images about nature that could be used to establish what was human, what was wild, and what was divine. God interacted with the human and the nonhuman. Saints sought out the wilderness during their lives, and after death acted in the human landscape, protecting agricultural space, crops, and other resources. Alongside the descriptions of wild animals and frightening isolation, the monks of Stavelot and Malmedy adopted a view of forests and nature as pastoral. This allowed them to include the human presence in their view of the natural world. Pastoral descriptions and domesticated nature are part of the same continuum as the wild, and the monks actively used all of these in their construction of the “wilderness.”

The natural world that shaped medieval life and culture had room for people, farming, and the tree in the garden. A monastic career could be forged in harsh isolation, by tempting the wild beasts and enduring environmental hardships. But it could also, and at the same time, be supported, nurtured, and irrigated, both through God’s grace and through the work of individual people. One of Malmedy’s hagiographical authors wrote that “in the house of the Lord we will be a plantatio (or a deliberately farmed and planted tree), fertile and ornately flowering without end.” Arnold, the archbishop of Cologne, in a letter to Wibald, pointed out that young souls are like new crops: “you shall give [them] irrigation, by which everything that grows increases, so that your plantation will not be destroyed.”¹²²

Human control, manipulation, and reshaping of nature is not only represented by the planting or the felling of trees; it is also represented in the construction of ideas about trees. Medieval monks interpreted forests, nature, and the wilderness in a much more complex and contradictory way than they are usually credited with. Monastic literature idealized the forest not only as wild and isolated but also as domestic and pastoral. Wild nature and domestic nature were clearly linked by the power of God and by his ability to act through the saints. Although there was a boundary of sorts between the wilderness and civilization, it was easily and frequently crossed, and it was not absolute. In spite of monastic expressions of solitude, there was room in the medieval wilderness not only for God, but also for people and human endeavors, which all served God in different ways.

Rather than ignoring human use of nature, medieval authors incorporated it alongside and as a part of their ideas of wild nature, and if we are to fully understand their relationship with their environment, we need to follow their example. Rather than look to monasteries to provide a single view of nature, we should combine the different ideas about nature that the monastic authors created and that coexisted in the same time and place. Stavelot-Malmedy’s example suggests that medieval people may have been much more comfortable than we are with fusing together the tame and the untamed in their view of nature and wilderness. Our understanding of the medieval world will be deepened if we allow the lines to blur between wilderness and domestic nature, the secular and the spiritual, the miraculous and the mundane, and monastic ideal and reality.

Looking closely at the many goals, practices, actions, ideas, and stories from a single monastic community shows that neither (and both) of these ideas were right. The monks of Stavelot-Malmedy had a complicated relationship with nature that was based on their struggles to define and shape their own identity, and to exert social, political, and, most importantly, religious power over the landscape and people of the Ardennes. Throughout the centuries, monks of the Ardennes developed the idea of the forest as a wild and dangerous landscape because it tied them to their religious heritage. But they had established their monasteries in a landscape that had long been full of people, and they were active participants in the region’s social and agricultural structures. Thus, the monks not only had to define themselves in relation to the wild; they also had to define themselves in relation to local people and the domesticated landscape. To do this, they told stories of how the power of the saints and of God allowed the monks to transform the wilderness into a beautiful and controllable landscape. They then, in turn, used this calm and pastoral view of the forest to represent rebirth, tranquility, and the fertility of both land and souls.

This double set of ideas—forests as wilderness and pastoral—is the subject of the next two chapters. Chapter 1 takes a deeper look at the idea of the forest as a dangerous and hostile place. Beginning with foundation accounts (from both legal and religious sources), I explore both the physical and cultural forces that led the monks to imagine their forests as a place of trial, temptation, and solitude. This chapter also addresses some of the difficulties in using legal sources and vocabulary through a discussion of the term forestis—was it, by definition, a wood or a wasteland? Multiple terms and definitions encouraged the monks to nurture multiple ideas about the natural world that surrounded them—including seeing it as pastoral and nurturing. These ideas are explored in Chapter 2, which shifts focus to the ways that the Ardennes supported agriculture and the many ways the monks used woodland resources to support their economic goals. This monastic familiarity with the domesticated landscape led to stories that viewed the forests as beautiful and that showed the saints protecting monastic resources.

This saintly protection was necessary because the monks and their dependents faced many conflicts over their properties, both from local and regional competitors. The monasteries felt the same forces that threatened the agricultural and economic stability of their dependents, and they tried to protect their human and material resources from natural and human-made threats. Chapter 3 focuses on the numerous conflicts that the monks faced over control of their forests and the secular strategies that they used to protect their territories. They also had religious strategies—the monks controlled religious stories, which they deployed in part to protect land, win conflicts, and present a morality of land and resource use. This power to shape narratives extended to the ability to invent and imagine conflicts, and Chapter 4 explores two specific monastic conflict narratives involving forests. Religious and normative sources used together demonstrate how the monastic environmental imagination was connected to the specifics of local history and local conflicts.

The final chapter pulls these themes together to show how the monasteries created a religious landscape—one in which monastic power, ideology, and religious identity were inscribed onto the people and natural world. The first step of that process was that of religious conversion—both of the individuals living in the Ardennes and of the environment itself. But the process could not and did not end there. The monks also needed to establish and maintain the importance of their own monasteries within the newly Christianized area, and to expand their influence as far as possible. Landowners and laborers paid taxes and religious tithes to the monasteries, attended religious services and feast day celebrations, and sent the fruits of their labor to the monastery. The monks built religious landmarks, brought the saints out into the communities, and recorded miracles that associated the saints with specific sites throughout the Ardennes. The forests, fields, waters, and towns of the Ardennes were intertwined with the religious fears and hopes of not only the monks, but also the broader Christian community.

Monks interacted with and attempted to control and regulate the natural and human-made landscapes of medieval Europe, and the resulting administrative record greatly expands our knowledge about medieval Europe’s physical surroundings. But other monastic sources and projects reveal that landscape was not only experienced physically: it was also drawn into the monastic world of religion and miracle. By imagining connections to the idealized “desert” and to paradise, the monks tied themselves to broader Christian culture. But by telling stories that reflected real places, they tried to anchor their stories in their local landscape. The monks of the Ardennes used the saints and their presence in the natural world to connect the tangible and the intangible, the living and the dead, heaven and earth, ideas and experience.