uncovering knowledge about past environments. But he also pointed out that “one topic of pre-modern environmental history, central in its early days, now appears to be fading from among concerns in the field.… it is less concerned with ideas about nature. It is more about science and the use of science to inform analysis of the past interactions of people and their environments.”29
Because of this range of approaches, environmental history, described by Ritvo as “an unevenly spreading blob” and by Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll more simply as “heterogenous,” has been difficult for practitioners to pin down under a single framework.30 The best-known explanation of the field is by Worster, who identified three “layers” of environmental history: (1) “understanding nature itself, as organized and functioning in past times,” (2) “the socioeconomic realm as it interacts with the environment,” and (3) “that more intangible and uniquely human type of encounter,” that of “studying the perceptions and values people have held about the nonhuman world.”31 Worster argued that cultural history is, in fact, necessary to fully appreciate the relationship between people and nature, writing that “environmental history must include in its program the study of aspects of esthetics and ethics, myth and folklore, literature and landscape gardening, science and religion.”32
Environmental history must include analysis of cultural ideas, because, as Lawrence Buell pointed out, the metaphors and words that societies and individuals use to describe nature, though abstract, have concrete power: “how we image a thing, true or false, affects our conduct toward it.”33 People act based not only on material constraints and political situations, but also on what they think and what they perceive. John McNeill, in a recent overview of the environmental history, echoes Worster’s levels, and defines cultural environmental history as that which “concerns what humans have thought, believed, written—and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced—dealing with relationships between society and nature.”34
Richard White observed that “the inspiration” for Worster’s view of environmental history “is really Braudelian.”35 Fernand Braudel and the Annales school, in many ways the taproot of European environmental history, did give culture more prominence. The Annalistes were not only interested in material realities; they also emphasized culture, mentalités, and the intersection of place, social structure, and worldview. In contrast to the current modernism of most environmental history, the most famous practitioners of the Annales program, including Braudel, Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Le Roy Ladurie were premodernists. Though often connected to social and economic history, these scholars’ concerns resonate with those of environmental historians.
Braudel once described his historical interests in ways that would not feel out of place in Aldo Leopold’s work or in the preface of a modern environmental history: “I could name the plants and trees of this village of eastern France. I knew each of its inhabitants: I watched them at work…. I observed the yearly rotation of crops on the village lands which today produce nothing but grass for grazing herds. I watched the turning wheel of the old mill, which was, I believe, built long ago for the local lord by an ancestor of mine.”36 Annalistes were concerned with the socioeconomic structures that produced both mills and lordship, and with how communities throughout agrarian, premodern Europe engaged with the natural world through agricultural practices, technological innovations, settlement patterns, and exchange networks. Medievalists have, in effect, been doing environmental history for generations.
Yet as Unger pointed out, some aspects of the Annales program have been left behind in the rise of the modern ecological sciences and the growth of the modern, self-conscious field of environmental history, notably the use of microhistories to explore the intersection between place and religious culture. Carlo Ginzburg’s reconstruction of the mental universe of a small-town miller and Le Roy Ladurie’s of the social and cultural world of heretical shepherds are both influential models of how investigating premodern ideas about God, agriculture, community, and daily life can enrich our sense of how connected culture and nature were.37 Though both of these works predate the rise of environmental history, they demonstrate how scholars have attempted to link the daily experience of agricultural communities into intellectual, spiritual, and cultural history.
There is a deep tradition in environmental history of using a single place as an access point to broader questions of human relations to the rest of nature: Leopold’s Sand County, Worster’s Kansas, Cronon’s Chicago, Richard White’s Columbia River, and even Thoreau’s Walden Pond.38 These works all used single places, ecosystems, and communities to explore bigger questions about America’s relationship with the natural world. There are still only a handful of monographs on medieval environmental history, and even fewer that focus such attention on single places or communities. Most of the monographs have been about water history or about landscape history, and the most prominent examples of case studies have been focused on forests and cities.39
There is a deeper history of detailed case studies in monastic history. The monastery of Cluny, for example, has been the subject of many full-length studies.40 Yet Stavelot-Malmedy has not received much attention from modern scholars. There have been several biographical studies of the three most prominent abbots: Odilo, Poppo, and Wibald. Though the most recent of these is a 1991 dissertation on Poppo, most date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 The most prolific (and influential) historian of Stavelot-Malmedy was François Baix in the interwar period, who wrote several institutional and religious history studies of the houses, including a survey of their hagiography.42 Other historians have studied the houses as part of larger studies of multiple monasteries.43 Most recently, detailed studies have focused on the abbeys’ art and manuscripts, and there has been renewed attention to Wibald, including museum exhibitions and an ongoing project by the MGH to produce a new edition of his letters.44 But in general, there has been remarkably little work done on these monasteries, despite the rich body of sources.
Here, I use Stavelot-Malmedy as a case study to explore the ways that the natural environment shaped monastic experiences and imaginations. This book analyzes how monks negotiated layers of stories and memories, fixed their own identity within a religious and environmental landscape, and connected several differing interpretations of nature’s value. Because the monks’ ideas about (and uses of) the natural world developed over time, this book has a long time frame, approximately A.D. 650–1150. Monastic ideas and actions were influenced by changing institutional contexts, individual leaders, and the continuous roles of local saints and landscapes.
Monastic “environmental imagination” was complex, and cannot be accessed directly, nor through any single body of evidence. Instead, we must read across the barriers of source genre, using both narrative and normative sources to reconstruct not only how medieval people used the environment, but also what they thought about the natural world. Stavelot-Malmedy’s source base encourages this approach to sources. Over the five hundred years I am examining, the monasteries produced and received hundreds of charters; these recorded land grants and exchanges, taxes, property rights, conflicts and their resolutions, abbatial elections, and other administrative affairs. A further remarkable administrative source survives from the 1130s–40s: the collected correspondence of Wibald, arguably the most influential of Stavelot-Malmedy’s abbots.45
When using these sources to understand both the houses’ physical environs and how the monks exploited, defined, and controlled their landscape, I am on familiar ground, since to date, most environmental history of the early and high Middle Ages has focused on administrative, normative, or paleo-environmental sources. Oliver Rackham has shown just how many details of land use can be shaken out of the “forest” of early medieval charters, and Della Hooke’s work on the Anglo-Saxon landscape models how these sources can be used to reconstruct lost landscapes. Several climate historians have shown the utility of charters, annals, and other “datable” sources in reconstructing the history of medieval climate.46
For
