ideas were “a double heritage, intertwined from biblical times onward.”113 This dichotomy is visible even in Athanasius’s vita of St. Anthony, who though fleeing to the depths of the desert, took care to establish and grow a vegetable garden. As Dominic Alexander points out, “the fruitfulness of the uncultivated wilderness became established as a theme early on in the West.” He adds that the monks and hermits were also interested in protecting this abundance, and “were clearly determined to mark their possession of sylvan resources.”114 The medieval blurring of desert/bounty and wild/pastoral is very important to understanding monastic interactions with nature, and the sources from Stavelot-Malmedy demonstrate that seemingly opposite views of the same landscape could be closely connected. The monks used contradictory images of the natural world together to help create and reinforce their religious culture and identity.
The monastery of Fulda is a well-studied example of these issues. Fulda was founded by St. Sturm in the mid-eighth century. Though the house’s early charters show that there was significant settlement before the monks arrived, a letter from St. Boniface (Sturm’s mentor) to Pope Zacharius employs the language of solitude, describing Fulda as “a wooded spot in a hermitage of vast solitude.”115 This statement has been interpreted in several ways by scholars. It has been suggested that the issue of solitude here might reflect not just the monastic ideal, but also an attempt by the monks to assert specific claims over the nature of their properties. Yet other scholars have argued against such interpretations of solitude tropes as “knowing and deceptive” misrepresentations of the legal status of property rights, pointing out that authors of vitae often acknowledged previous settlement, “and saw therein no contradiction to solitudine.”116
Help with how to reconcile these monastic contradictions can be found in modern discussions of the American Wilderness Ideal. In a well-known article “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon, writing about U.S. environmental history, argues for a more expansive definition of wilderness. This article has received much criticism from modern wilderness activists, and is part of a longer debate about the goals and practices of the American Wilderness movement.117 Though much of that debate centers on the implications of these ideas for modern wilderness preservation, Cronon’s criticism of a one-sided approach to the idea of wild nature is very relevant to the study of medieval relations to nature. He claims that the planted, known, and domesticated natural world is not something separate from wilderness, but is instead part of a single set of human interactions with nature. He calls attention to two trees: a tree in a backyard garden and a tree in “an ancient forest.” He points out that the modern idea of wilderness does not take the tree in the garden into account, despite the fact that it is no more or less a part of nature than the other tree. The domesticated landscape has been marginalized from the modern view of nature and the wild. Yet true appreciation of the relation between humans and nature, he concludes, is only possible “if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild.” Instead, he continues, “we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural.”118
Perhaps the most widely known work on the medieval wilderness is Jacques Le Goff’s 1980 essay on the monastic “desert-wilderness.” In this provocative and expressive essay, Le Goff argued for a complex view of the value of wilderness for medieval people. Following monastic sources, he explored the origins of the medieval wilderness in the desert ethos of Eastern monasticism, whose themes “were tirelessly reworked, multiplied, and embellished,” by John Cassian (and other early medieval authors).119 Le Goff in turn relies on monastic writings and secular literature, seeing in both ideas of wild nature as both dangerous and bountiful; however, Le Goff draws a line between the two genres that I would like to erase. He looked to saints’ lives, cartularies, annals, and other monastic writings for one type of wilderness, but then claimed that “the deeper symbolic significance of the forest must be sought in works of the imagination,” by which he meant exclusively secular writings. Throughout this book, I present hagiographies, histories, and even the occasionally forged charters as just as imagined as vernacular romances.
In summary, he claimed that “opposed to the forest-wilderness in the medieval Western value system was the ‘world,’ that is, organized society.” The forest wilderness allowed for the construction of an opposition “between nature and culture, expressed in terms of the opposition between what was built, cultivated and inhabited (city, castle, village) and what was essentially wild (the ocean and forest, the western equivalents of the eastern desert).”120 Wilderness, the forest, and the desert all become one thing in his analysis, and he wrote that “all went to the forest to behave as men of nature, fleeing the world of culture in every sense of the word.”121
While I agree that the forest (and the monastic wilderness) was often set in contrast to urban (and courtly) civilization, it is important to recognize that the monks were not in fact fleeing “culture in every sense of the word.” Instead they were constructing their own culture, using images of both wildness and domesticity to build, reinforce, and confirm a monastic identity that was both connected to the world and yet somehow apart from it.
As Cronon argues, wilderness cannot be separated from the broader range of nature as neatly as many people try to. Wilderness is not just the empty place—it is intimately bound up with the domestic. The domestic, the wild, and the pastoral were not clearly separated in the Middle Ages. In spite of their goal of isolation, monks lived and worked in an environment that was known, managed, and mundane, and they did so while interacting with other people. There was no one set of medieval ideas or images about nature that could be used to establish what was human, what was wild, and what was divine. God interacted with the human and the nonhuman. Saints sought out the wilderness during their lives, and after death acted in the human landscape, protecting agricultural space, crops, and other resources. Alongside the descriptions of wild animals and frightening isolation, the monks of Stavelot and Malmedy adopted a view of forests and nature as pastoral. This allowed them to include the human presence in their view of the natural world. Pastoral descriptions and domesticated nature are part of the same continuum as the wild, and the monks actively used all of these in their construction of the “wilderness.”
The natural world that shaped medieval life and culture had room for people, farming, and the tree in the garden. A monastic career could be forged in harsh isolation, by tempting the wild beasts and enduring environmental hardships. But it could also, and at the same time, be supported, nurtured, and irrigated, both through God’s grace and through the work of individual people. One of Malmedy’s hagiographical authors wrote that “in the house of the Lord we will be a plantatio (or a deliberately farmed and planted tree), fertile and ornately flowering without end.” Arnold, the archbishop of Cologne, in a letter to Wibald, pointed out that young souls are like new crops: “you shall give [them] irrigation, by which everything that grows increases, so that your plantation will not be destroyed.”122
Human control, manipulation, and reshaping of nature is not only represented by the planting or the felling of trees; it is also represented in the construction of ideas about trees. Medieval monks interpreted forests, nature, and the wilderness in a much more complex and contradictory way than they are usually credited with. Monastic literature idealized the forest not only as wild and isolated but also as domestic and pastoral. Wild nature and domestic nature were clearly linked by the power of God and by his ability to act through the saints. Although there was a boundary of sorts between the wilderness and civilization, it was easily and frequently crossed, and it was not absolute. In spite of monastic expressions of solitude, there was room in the medieval wilderness not only for God, but also for people and human endeavors, which all served God in different ways.
Rather than ignoring human use of nature, medieval authors incorporated it alongside and as a part of their ideas of wild nature, and if we are to fully understand their relationship with their environment, we need to follow their example. Rather than look to monasteries to provide a
