died, at the age of sixty, on 19 July 1158, while returning from Constantinople. Fittingly, news of this reached the monks via letter. Wibald’s body returned to Stavelot, where he was formally buried inside the church over a year later, on 26 July 1159. This study needs an endpoint; reluctant as I am to tie this to the death of a single leader, 1159 saw the convergence of several things that mark an end to the early and central-medieval core identity of the houses.
Most significantly, though Wibald’s successor, Erlebald (1158–1192), tried to continue his predecessor’s programs, the age of Stavelot-Malmedy’s great saint-abbots was over. Despite (or perhaps because of) his fame and influence, Wibald was never venerated as a saint.100 No significant works of hagiography followed and there was less investment in the material infrastructure of the cults. Remacle’s relics are still venerated in a church in Stavelot, and Poppo would eventually be canonized in 1624, but the great flourishing of Stavelot’s medieval saint cults was drawing to a close.
Broader changes were afoot. By the 1150s, the crusades had opened for Europe a whole new world of conflict, cultural exchange, and international connections. The evolution of the Cistercian order had dramatically changed the monastic experience; though the Benedictine order remained important throughout the Middle Ages, their dominance of economic, political, and religious landscapes was effectively over. Royal abbeys, too, were eclipsed by institutions founded by minor nobles, knights, and powerful merchants. The decentralization of royal power in the German Empire and the Low Countries and the problems facing the Hohenstaufen house also meant that Stavelot-Malmedy’s special status as a royal house was no longer a guarantee of support and privilege. As their patrons dwindled and the vibrancy of the earlier reform movements shifted to other orders, the forces that had pushed Stavelot to prominence receded, and the monasteries faded away.
There were more subtle changes to monastic identity, visible in a document issued in 1159, just one year after Wibald’s death. The foundation charter for a hermitage at Mie was preserved at Stavelot.101 The Latin original was copied into Old French, and as such is the earliest vernacular document from the monastic archive, reflecting a significant change in archival and documentary practices. There is no reference to the role or power of Remacle and other saints, or of Stavelot-Malmedy’s early history. Also missing, despite the woodland location of the hermitage, is any invocation of the idea of the forest as part of a monastic wilderness, which for centuries had been a fundamental part of Stavelot-Malmedy’s identity.
Faith in the Wilderness
Many medieval monastic communities told stories that linked their early history with a transferred “desert” setting, equating their own landscapes (forests, swamps, mountains) with the dangers and opportunities of the ancient desert wilderness.102 The Anglo-Saxon life of Bertuin, written around 800, sets the foundation of Malonne in “a great forest full of dense bushes and brambles and thorns and the lairs of beasts and thieves’ caves and the abodes of demons.”103 This vision was not limited to the early Benedictine monks; centuries later, a Cistercian monk wrote a vita of St. Godric, an English hermit (d. 1170), that embraced the idea of the forest as a place of solitude and wilderness. Godric “sought out the depths of the forests, and dwelled in the beds of wild animals; he did not flee from wolves, nor from interactions with serpents, nor from looking at or interacting with any part of the wild.”104 In this view, forests were loci horribili, isolated and dangerous places full of wild animals, thieves, and political and spiritual enemies.
The idealization of solitude had its roots in the legends of the desert fathers and emphasized the monastic goal of separation from the world. A topos developed that monasteries were founded in sites devoid of people, “in eremi” or “in solitude”: the desert. It has been suggested that the “desert in northern Gaul was bound up with the notion of the frontier,” invoked in spaces where the monks perceived themselves as marginal or excluded, either socially, linguistically, or religiously.105 This supported the ideas of eremitism as isolation from community, but did not necessarily involve harsh landscapes. Peter Damian’s eleventh-century vita Romualdi describes how that saint (d. ca. 1027) enjoyed hunting before becoming a hermit. When wandering in “the beautiful places (loci amoeni) of the woodlands,” he longed for the desert, saying to himself, “Oh, how well hermits would be able to live in these woodland retreats; how well they could be quiet here, away from all the confusions of the world’s din.”106
Reflecting medieval metaphors, modern scholars also frequently understand medieval forests as synonymous with wilderness, and wilderness as synonymous with fear and isolation. In her work on medieval forests, Corinne Saunders went so far as to describe Richard FitzNigel’s discussion of the forest as “clearly implying a wooded and therefore wild landscape.”107 Images of monastic solitude are also connected to depictions of the medieval wilderness (and forests) as “waste” land, unattractive and desolate areas not used or cultivated by people; land beyond the bounds of ordered and civilized nature. Jacques Le Goff, though recognizing that it was not “wholly wild,” described the forest-wilderness as being located “on the extreme fringes of society.”108 Vito Fumagalli, in his evocatively titled Landscapes of Fear, viewed the forest of the early Middle Ages as an aggressive foe: “people were swallowed up in a countryside which was still largely untamed and had vast expanses of wilderness everywhere.”109 And in his article “Moines et nature Sauvage,” René Noël tied the early medieval Ardennes into this view, describing them as overwhelmingly wild. At Stavelot, he claimed, Remacle found “instead of fields, vines, and fruiting trees, the enormity of the wooded solitude, of the desert wasteland. The hard Ardennes.”110
Yet early medieval rhetoric and later Romanticism aside, by 648, Stavelot, far from isolated and wild, was in the middle of a landscape marked by successful Merovingian settlement. And by the 700s, “on a map, the fiscs form an almost unbroken chain” of settlements.111 In these two interpretations of the character of the early medieval Ardennes lies the problem of evaluating monastic sources. Did the monks of the Ardennes live in forests that centuries of human settlement had shaped into a familiar and domesticated landscape, or in a wild landscape? Were monks living dominated by dense (and dangerous) forests? Or were they imagining that they did?
In spite of the endurance of the idea of “desert,” Benedictine monks did not normally live in untamed and isolated wastelands. They established monasteries in regions that had long settlement histories and included the conversion and care of local populations as part of their religious mission. The monks not only lived in this domesticated landscape; they themselves were part of the process of its domestication. Throughout the Middle Ages, monastic institutions were not only religious leaders, but also careful and creative property owners. This can and has been interpreted (by both their peers and modern historians) as a conflict between faith and wealth, between spiritual and secular success. However, critics may have painted these contrasts too sharply; though individual monastic leaders and communities certainly wrestled with the ideas, many monastic groups had reconciled these tensions for themselves. The monastic locus amoenus provided not just an antithesis to the wild, but a separate metaphor that helped the monastic authors forge links between agricultural labor and spiritual reform.
Around 937, a monk from Saint-Hubert wrote a vita of St. Beregisus, the eighth-century founder of his monastery. He describes the Ardennes as a remote and isolated place and promotes the value of carving out a holy space from wild nature. Yet though it has echoes of the desert wilderness, this story reveals a different set of relations between monks and forests, characterized by engagement and control rather than fear. Dense, “shady woods” surrounded the place where Beregisus established the monastery, and “he began in earnest to fell the leafy [trees] and to expand the space for the construction of buildings.” Finally, with “the woods having been cut down, a dwelling space was measured out.”112
In medieval religious experience, fear and safety could be part of the same dynamic, and the forest was also connected
