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.
Chapter 1
Religious Roots
Foundation in the “Forest Wilderness”
There is no single authoritative foundation story for Stavelot-Malmedy; the narrative was told in several different forms (charters, vitae, and even artwork) and changed over time. All of the stories are linked to the monastic attempt to define themselves in relation to others, and all connect spirituality and monastic activity directly to the landscape. There are many different versions of these narratives, and dealing with them as historical evidence is tricky territory. These legends cannot be viewed in the same way as knowable fact, and yet for the monks, and “as products of imaginative memory, monastic foundation legends belong in the realm of what was believed to be true, rather than what was seen to be fiction.”1 Stavelot-Malmedy’s foundation stories do share common themes that are important to explore further: wilderness, solitude, physical and spiritual danger, and monastic leaders giving up power in order to pursue peace.
The first version of the foundation story is found in Sigibert III’s charter from ca. 648, which introduces a connection between local landscapes and an abstract idea of the desert. The king claimed the foundation of Stavelot-Malmedy for himself, reporting that he decided to build the two monasteries “in our forest called the Ardennes, in an empty place of solitude.” He added that the forest was a place “in which a throng of wild animals springs forth.”2 Sigibert, supported by Grimoald, his mayor-of-the-palace, then carved out a zone of immunity—lands that would belong to the monasteries—making the houses the literal center of a landscape of administrative control. Thus, from the start the idea of the empty wilderness was imagined alongside the recognition of competing human interests in this territory. Finally, the royal protector of the monastic communities ordered that they were to remain undisturbed in their forest: “the custodians of those churches ought to be able to lead a quiet, regular, and contemplative life according to divine command.”3
Despite the king’s rhetorical and financial support for this monastic ideal of solitude, the “desert” was at heart intended to disconnect the monks from kings and other secular concerns. Solitude was a moral buffer; it implied the absence of dangerous secular concerns and the ability of the monks to be “undisturbed” in their religious goals. Though Sigibert’s charter suggests that their forest location placed the monks in danger from the wild animals inhabiting the area, this threat was very clearly counterbalanced by the absence of the moral threat
