Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold
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