Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold
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