the rains stopped, and for a long time afterwards, all of the different places suffered no damages from the storm.”36
This description’s emphasis on agricultural damages is further suggestion that the monks were interested in presenting a miraculous world that paralleled their lived environment. Fears of hail- and thunderstorms during the Carolingian period were very real, and frequently linked to agricultural risk; the cereal crops typical of Northern Europe were vulnerable to this weather, and this fear often led to attempts to avoid or prevent storm damages.37 The ninth century was also marked by an attempt by church leaders to show divine rather than human control of nature, and to redefine their authority in the wake of Carolingian reforms. And so the monks of Saint-Hubert invoked the type of storm that local groups in the Ardennes may have faced and dreaded, and then demonstrated that it could be both caused and stopped by God and his saint.
The miracles of Saint-Hubert also contain a second story about a sudden hailstorm that models how the monks imposed their own interpretations over natural phenomena. God could use nature to punish as well as protect. An army crossing through the Ardennes ransacked a village associated with Saint-Hubert: “when the horses sent out immoderately had destroyed the pastures, and the inhabitants, having lost any hope of being able to feed their own animals, had suffered, [the soldiers] did not leave them with only this pain; instead they also violently broke into their houses, and seized all of the foodstuffs that were inside them.” The soldiers then set up camp, and “the servants of the church petitioned their patron for help against this injury, and suddenly the covering heavens resounded terribly, and the greatest of storms bore down.”38
The storm soon completely darkened the sky and a sudden downpour inundated the encamped army; the soldiers risked being swept away by the torrential rain, and “fleeing with their shields over their heads to prevent colliding with the hail stones, they were scattered.” The army had to beg forgiveness of the villagers and seek shelter in their houses, and as morning broke, they left “quickly and fearfully” only to discover that all but two of their horses had been killed in the storm. This miracle again ties a local storm to divine protection and allowed the monks of the Ardennes to link control of a wild and dangerous nature to monastic and saintly protection of an agricultural landscape.
Weather could also be associated directly with living saints. One of the best-known experiences of weather in the Ardennes is that of St. Lambert, the evangelizing bishop of Liège, who spent several years (from 674 to 681) in temporary exile at Stavelot. During one winter, Lambert stood nightly vigils, which were recorded in two hagiographical works, both of which emphasize the cold, wet winter nights that Stavelot’s monks routinely experienced. Lambert’s biographer noted that the saint penitently endured the weather, standing in front of the cross in the middle of the night, “naked and shuddering in the cold of winter.”39 In the vita Remacli, Heriger claims that Lambert scorned the weather, standing in the middle of the night “saying psalms and prayers, in contempt of the cold and with his feet shod in snow.”40 Though the barefoot penitent is of course a standard medieval image, this iteration of it became a fixture of Stavelot’s lore. Lambert’s life provided a model for withstanding the trials of nature. His death then became a reminder of the reason that dangerous landscapes were not only feared but also valued as a means of proving religious strength. Heriger wrote that in the end, Lambert’s spiritual excellence was signified by his “stormy martyrdom.”41
Danger and martyrdom were also part of most prominent monastic image of danger from the forest: wild animals. Wild animals were central to Sigibert’s 648 description of the Ardennes, retained their importance in Carolingian hagiography, and were still an active part of the monastic imagination in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Fear of these wild animals, both real and imagined, loomed large: in charters and hagiographical materials alike, readers encounter wolves, lions, bears, and unnamed wild beasts. There were many standard metaphors in Christianity that tied animals to moral, religious, and political ideas. These “animal exemplars” appeared in bestiaries, biblical commentaries, encyclopedias, and other writings. By discussing animals as part of Stavelot’s environmental imagination, I am not arguing that the monks were unique in equating wolves, lions, or sheep with people and moral ideas. It is important to recognize that they were building on, and at times elaborating on, a common well of imagery, and that these images recur frequently and vividly over five centuries of sources.42 My goal here is to explore the examples employed within this single set of sources, and, specifically, to show how these uses relate to the idea of wilderness and to fear of the forest environment.
The presence of wild animals, both dangerous and docile, was one of the hallmarks of medieval forests; bears, wolves, boar, beaver, deer, squirrels, and many other animals dwelled in the forests, using the trees as shelter and the rivers and glades for nourishment, part of what has been described as an early medieval world of “vigorous animality.”43 Archaeology reinforces textual impressions; in the Ardennes, excavations have yielded remains from deer, roe deer, boars, foxes, and possibly aurochs. A single deposit at Wellin, inhabited as early as A.D. 650, produced bones from boar, deer, roe deer, fox, and sparrow-hawk.44
No wolf bones have been excavated in the Ardennes, and there are no medieval records of wolf numbers for the region, but comparative evidence suggests that the medieval Ardennes would have sheltered many wolves.45 Charlemagne’s wolf-hunters were given instructions in the capitulary De Villis, and a bishop of Metz wrote to the emperor, boasting about killing more than a hundred wolves.46 Whatever their actual numbers, wolves dominated the imagination of the monks of Stavelot (even though in this period, the direct link between Remacle and the wolf that is celebrated today was not yet established). In part, this discrepancy is due to a broader human fear of wolves that is unconnected to the degree of threat they pose. Wolves rarely attack people. Instead, as Jon Coleman has argued, because they pose a threat to sheep, deer, and the human use of animal resources, they are perceived as dangerous and monstrous.47 Because wolves were imagined to be a threat, the monks told vivid stories of actual and metaphoric wolves attacking people and threatening the monastic lifestyle.
The vita Popponis (ca. 1060), for example, includes a detailed story of a wolf attack. Its author (or authors—see handlist) ascribes a malicious intent to the wild animal, invoking the fear that people, daily exposed to danger, might have had of the randomness of the wilderness. “Behold!” the author commanded, “a wolf, then thirsting for human blood made an attack from out of the dark forest haunts, and violently seized a shepherd who had been grazing his flock in the area and dragged him by his defenseless neck to a distant place that was fit for his foul desires.”48 Unfortunately, the search party sent out into the swamps arrived too late, and they were “unable find any traces of life in the man, nor did they see the wolf anywhere.”49
The sources from Stavelot abound with saints and abbots described as shepherds protecting the flocks of the faithful from spiritual danger, represented by wolves. Sometimes, these messages are cursory and abbreviated, such as Wibald’s request for papal support, “lest the errant sheep be torn apart in the jaws of the wolves.”50 But some of the sources elaborate on the theme, highlighting the ferocity of the wolves and the flexibility of biblical images. In the vita Remacli, Heriger invented dying words for the saint, who tells his monks, “I fear for you, lest, if the rapacious wolves were to come at you, there would be no one who could repel them from you.”51 Heriger also wrote that monks, “the most brave fighters for Christ, not wishing to be bound fast inside the peace of the cloister, spring forward, lain bare, into the field of battle; so that they might not be made deserters from the spiritual battle, nor be like mercenaries fleeing at the sight of a wolf.”52
Wibald acknowledged that the wolf was a metaphor for danger, fear, and even the wilderness. During a period in which he was struggling with maintaining three houses, and wrapped up in several political struggles, Wibald described the many problems and dangers faced by the church of Stavelot. Mixing his metaphors, he wrote: “We saw therefore not one single
