Two of his Mosel poems were written as panegyrics for local bishops. In a poem praising bishop Nicetius of Trier’s construction of a Mosel fortress, Fortunatus describes the waters that “desire to bring forth bounties. As much as the waters swell, the neighboring area yields up fish; from here banquets are produced.” Yet this fertility is also produced through the intervention of people, and “the native, rejoicing, recognizes the fruitful furrows, bearing prayers of fertility to the ripening field. The farmers nourish their eyes from the future harvest.”136 This poem neatly reconciles the bishop’s material and spiritual efforts and binds early medieval religious culture with the classical literary tradition.
In a poem addressed to the bishop of Metz, Fortunatus begins with praise of the Mosel’s “dark stream,” which “softly rolls alongits great waters; it laps the banks, scented with the verdant sward, and the wave gently washes the grassy blades.” As with Ausonius’s poem, Fortunatus incorporates human industry seamlessly into his view of the natural beauty of the river. This pastoral, lush landscape is augmented by the human presence. Metz, a “gleaming” city, displays both natural abundance and the beauty of human industry and agriculture. Metz “rejoices, both sides besieged by fish. The delightful domain is bright with flourishing fields; here you see tended crops, and there you behold roses. You look forth on hills clothed in shady vines, fertile growth of all kinds strives for place.”137
For Fortunatus, wine and vineyards, rich with both classical and Christian meaning, are one of the key markers of Gaul’s natural abundance. In a short epigram to Bishop Vilicus, he mentions Falernian wine as a symbol of class and taste. Yet though this classical culture lingers, the Christian metaphors abound. Where Ausonius invoked Bacchus, Fortunatus relies on the Christian God. In a poem to the bishop of Galicia, he wrote that “The vine dresser orders the rows in apostolic manner.… He cuts the fruitless wild vines out of the Lord’s field, and there are clusters of grapes where once were shrubs… and the fruitful harvest springs up evenly.”138 Fortunatus’s Mosel is drawn into a Christian pastoral landscape, and aspects of the natural world that could also serve as markers of the desert wilderness are here transformed into signs of fertility. In poem 10.9, he writes, “not even here are the unyielding stones free to be without fruit; indeed the rocks are fruitful and flow with wine … the vines are clustered thickly in rows planted on the crags… the patches cultivated by the farmers shine amidst the savage rocks.”139
Throughout his poems, Fortunatus praises human industry and the deliberate harvest and use of resources. At Andernach, “there are vineyards here in broad stretches on the hills, another area is of level tilled land; but the abundance of that beautiful place is all the greater because there is a second harvest for the people in the waters.”140 Fish, in Fortunatus’s poems, are not Ausonius’s personified resources. Instead, alongside wine, they are symbolic markers of both natural and Christian fertility. From the Mosel, “the fish leaps up from the wave,” and the nets of fishers are spread so thickly that they could ensnare boats.141 In the epigram to Bishop Vilicus, Fortunatus made the Christian connection explicit, writing, “your nets, father, are overflowing with heavy fish; it seems that you have merited the part of Peter.”142
Fortunatus also wrote about the Ardennes and the Vosges, drawing the forests into both the world of lyric landscape poetry and that of the Gallo-Roman leisure class. He imagined an idyllic region, where his friend, Gogo, could experience what we would today call an outdoor lifestyle:
What occupies his carefree mind in tranquil times? if he lingers by the banks of the wave-driven Rhine to catch with his net in its waters the fat salmon, or roams by the grape-laden Moselle’s stream143
The poem continues, invoking the “gentle breeze,” and the soothing shade provided by the riverside vineyards. It also links up the region’s other tributary streams, and moving Gogo (and the reader) deeper into the lands that within a generation would be swept up in the monastic world that had been so influenced by Fortunatus’s hero-bishops and the saints and monks whose biographies he wrote:
Or else does he wander the sunny groves and glens and with his net snare wild animals, with his spear kill them? Does the forest crack and thunder in the Ardennes or Vosges with the death of stag, goat, elk, or aurochs, shot by his arrows? … Or does he cultivate his property, furrowing the dried-out tilth, as the bull groans at the plow’s weight on his untrained neck?144
In Fortunatus’s Ardennes, also full of wild animals, there is no sense of fear, and no sense of a struggle for survival (either physical or metaphysical). Instead, this is a landscape for leisure and livelihood, and Gogo, an early medieval man, can enjoy the pleasures of the Roman upper classes. The Ardennes teem with a wide and abundant set of game animals, and Fortunatus exults in the abundance of God’s Creation.
The parallels to the Roman pastoral are clear, especially in the final evocation of the power of the plow. Gogo tames the bull, and through his cultivation turns the “sunny groves and glens” of the Ardennes into a productive landscape. This “wilderness” is not at all removed from the agricultural landscape. This is, as Cronon would have us see, a domesticated landscape but one that is not separate from the wild.
Fortunatus’s Late Antique images of the Ardennes seem to come from a different world than the harsh and isolated forests that accompanied stories of monastic foundations. Yet the monks, too, could view the Ardennes as safe, productive, and beautiful. They wrote passages that reflect these vibrant and verdant landscapes, taking up the mantle of classical and Late Antique pastoral writing. The tenth-century vita Beregisi, for example, details how the saint established Andage/Saint-Hubert in a wooded spot (saltus) that was divinely revealed to him. It was a beautiful place: the woods (nemora) were dense and leafy, and it was also (as fits the image of the Ardennes as a desert) “far removed from the city.” The lush forest, with its fruit-bearing trees, was aplace of beauty and abundance: “There, the place made fertile by very clear and healthful waters, bearing verdant meadows with rich soil, surrounded by the loveliness of woods (nemora), it offers great benefit for those seeking the solitary life.”145
The vita Beregisi describes the fertile waters and grasses of the Ardennes; the Translatio Quirini describes the animal resources. The area around the Amblève River was fertile and abounding in wild game: “The hunter, becoming lost, was accustomed to carry a spear through the places where many wild animals were known to arise, attending to the more abundant pastures, and to throw out fishing or birding nets, to catch up all the flying and swimming creatures that thrived there in abundance.”146 Though found in an eleventhcentury work, this could be Gogo’s Ardennes. Yet these pastoral references are incorporated seamlessly into hagiographical works—connecting monasticism and monastic uses of nature not to images of stark wildness, but to ideas of boundless nature, utility, and fertility.
Chapter 2
Controlling the Domesticated Landscape
Value, Ownership, and Religious Interpretations
Even though the idea of the forest as desert wilderness was so dominant in the monks’ imagination, they did not use the image of isolation to hide their use of nature or to ignore the productive landscape. The monks moved beyond the “desert” by including the realities of an inhabited and domesticated natural world in their understanding of their religious and cultural identities and legacies. They built on the long Latin literary tradition of the pastoral, and, as Venantius Fortunatus had done, they connected the classical idea of a locus amoenus to Christian concepts of holiness. Success in the material world provided an alternate way for the monks to understand their relationships with their dependents and neighbors, their natural environment,
