Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold
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