and by no means isolated leader, Wibald nevertheless clearly associated isolation from the world with the ultimate goal of a religious life (though one he himself could not realize).
Wibald used the inherited tradition of woodland isolation as an extension of the desert in order to manipulate his readers into thinking of his noted absences as an extension of his larger commitment to the monastic ideal. For example, he used it to avoid a trip to Rome with Archbishop Arnold of Cologne. First, he noted, he had been busy with local political concerns. He also reminded Arnold of the danger of the trip to Rome; he himself had “often been thrown into incredible dangers” en route. Finally, he wrote that he would gladly meet Arnold in Saxony in late August, but at the present he was unwilling and unable to leave his isolated location. “With us being fixed in our ancient woodland solitude,” he wrote, “these pleasant religious duties rarely come to [our] attention.”21 Despite this isolation, in another letter Wibald told the bishop of Havelberg that if the papal chancellor were ever to demand his presence, he would drop everything to go to Rome and arrive “at his feet,” even if he had decided never again to visit Rome because he was “living in the most remote desert.”22
The Value of Danger in the Landscape
A long-settled, mountainous, and forested region such as the Ardennes could in fact be a desert. Because of their relative separation from the royal court and urban life the monks could easily feel that, in the midst of a settled landscape, they lived in comparative isolation, and faced a dangerous wilderness. Heriger’s work provides another tie to the ancient desert wilderness: fear. In the vita Remacli, he reports that in the earliest stages of foundation, the monks were often frightened by the roars of unseen wild animals. Full of horror, they fled to Remacle, who told them that the animals were tied to the devil, and represented temptation. He explained that the devil was “like a lion in a cave,” lying in wait to deter men from their purposes, and that withstanding their fear of the animals would give them strength.23
And there was real reason to fear the forest; the residents of the Ardennes and their livestock faced wild animals and human predators, groups that monastic sources unsurprisingly equated with one another. The real dangers faced by the monks and their dependents led to an escalated rhetoric of danger. Vito Fumagalli argued that terror in the face of forests and wild animals was a key part of medieval responses to nature. He called this the “landscape of fear,” arguing that early medieval culture was dominated by large, remote wildernesses and that “people were swallowed up in a countryside which was still largely untamed and had vast expanses of wilderness everywhere.” Perhaps too swept up in monastic language, he pictured the forest as a dynamic enemy to civilization, and “trees, bushes and undergrowth everywhere encroached on and smothered the ruins of long-deserted towns and villages.”24
Danger did not deter the monks from seeking out the forest; danger was a draw. And from the moment they first appear in the historical record, the Ardennes are big, dark, and dangerous. In the first century b.c., Caesar described the “forest of the Ardennes, which is of great size”25 as a dangerous and hostile landscape, dominated by dense trees, swamps, and thickets of underbrush broken only occasionally by small clearings and glens where farmers clung to a tenuous existence. Only narrow paths cut through the dense trees that hid enemies and prevented easy travel. He wrote that the Germans “had settled where a hidden valley or a wooded locality (locus silvestris) or an entangled morass offered some hope of defense or security,” and “the woods forbade the advance of any close-formed body [of troops] along the hidden and uncertain tracks.”26 Tacitus explained that the Germans “plant themselves separately and individually at some favorite spring or plain or grove.” The Germans had “sacred woods and groves,” but the forests were also fortresses. Though he did not specifically discuss the Ardennes, like Caesar, he described the Northern forests as a protection for the Germanic warriors, sheltered by “ramparts of forest or river.”27
These impressions of an imposing environment are not merely products of Mediterranean minds. The medieval Ardennes were in many ways similar to those of the modern period; one imagines that Caesar’s troops were often as miserable, frightened, and cold as those entrenched in the Battle of the Bulge. The landscape—dominated by steep mountains, dense forests, and rivers prone to flooding—could be a source of discomfort, fear, and even actual danger. For the Ardennes are rainy, foggy, and cold, with winds that race through the narrow river valleys. They can also be dangerously cold; Wibald’s correspondence includes a list of herbs from the Ardennes that were used as a medicinal treatment for chilblains, and the vita Popponis tells the story of a leper who risked dying of exposure. In the style of Martin, Poppo covered the man with his own cloak, after which the leper “sweated out” his leprosy.28 The medieval sources bundle together descriptions of winter, darkness, and cold, all of which seem to outweigh other weather features. The Passio praised Agilolf for his ability to endure “many passions: hunger, vigils, cold, thirst, and the reproach of envy!”29
The area around Stavelot is the coldest and wettest region in Belgium, and the early Middle Ages saw recurring “hundred year winters,” strong enough to kill people, trees, vines, and animals; create famines; freeze major European bodies of water; and trigger health crises. Stavelot’s annals record two of these: in 972 there was an unusually harsh winter, and 872 saw “a most severe winter, floods, an earthquake, and, in certain places, plagues of locusts.”30 Other chronicles name 873 as the year with the worst of the weather: plagues of locusts preceded a winter that defied all expectations and experiences. Hincmar of Reims wrote that the winter was “long and strong, and the snow was spread about in a quantity such as no one could remember ever seeing.”31
Annalists in Xanten and Fulda also remembered 872, reporting that the summer was full of devastating storms. The author of the Translatio Quirini describes a night when “there were enormous winds, drenching rain, and the crash of thunder, from the morning to the sixth hour of the day.”32 The potential intensity of the weather is most clearly seen in the story of a storm so remarkable that it was recorded several times in miracle stories from Saint-Hubert. The first account, from about 850, describes a storm “So great that [its] monstrous fury… could not be satisfied except through the nearcomplete devastation of some of the nearby surrounding places.” Frightened for their immediate safety as well as their future livelihoods, the residents of the nearby village went to the monastery and the abbot led them in prayer at the saint’s tomb. When the prayers were finished, the author reports that “it happened that without any delay, the strength of the storm was then ended, and the darkness of the dense clouds, broken through by the radiant beams of the sun, was soon brightened.”33
The second collection of Hubert’s miracles was written around 1050, and parallels but significantly rewrites the stories from the first collection, either expanding upon or reducing the amount of detail. The second description of the storm adds several significant details, including dating it to the year 837,34 which suggests that the monks were interested in presenting this storm as a real historic event, with the hope that the story would resonate with other peoples’ own experiences and fears, perhaps also spurring them on to penitence and support of the saint. In this retelling, the storm is still associated with anger, but the religious message is even stronger. The storm is not personified; rather, the anger is attributed to God. “It so happened,” this version begins, “that the furious anger of divine punishment was raging, and the greatest weight of that fury was put on the areas surrounding Saint-Hubert.”35
The association between uncontrollable weather and the will of God to punish or reward is a common theme in miracle literature. The ensuing description, however, is not generic, and instead seems to seek verisimilitude with the audience’s experiences: “so enormous were the torrential rainstorms and so ferocious the savagery of the storms, that it was enough [that the crop] was either torn out by the roots or weighted down to the ground, and because of the danger of hunger, death reached out menacingly to everyone.” Again, the story moves to the monastery, where the locals pray
