The final chapter pulls these themes together to show how the monasteries created a religious landscape—one in which monastic power, ideology, and religious identity were inscribed onto the people and natural world. The first step of that process was that of religious conversion—both of the individuals living in the Ardennes and of the environment itself. But the process could not and did not end there. The monks also needed to establish and maintain the importance of their own monasteries within the newly Christianized area, and to expand their influence as far as possible. Landowners and laborers paid taxes and religious tithes to the monasteries, attended religious services and feast day celebrations, and sent the fruits of their labor to the monastery. The monks built religious landmarks, brought the saints out into the communities, and recorded miracles that associated the saints with specific sites throughout the Ardennes. The forests, fields, waters, and towns of the Ardennes were intertwined with the religious fears and hopes of not only the monks, but also the broader Christian community.
Monks interacted with and attempted to control and regulate the natural and human-made landscapes of medieval Europe, and the resulting administrative record greatly expands our knowledge about medieval Europe’s physical surroundings. But other monastic sources and projects reveal that landscape was not only experienced physically: it was also drawn into the monastic world of religion and miracle. By imagining connections to the idealized “desert” and to paradise, the monks tied themselves to broader Christian culture. But by telling stories that reflected real places, they tried to anchor their stories in their local landscape. The monks of the Ardennes used the saints and their presence in the natural world to connect the tangible and the intangible, the living and the dead, heaven and earth, ideas and experience.
Chapter 1
Religious Roots
Foundation in the “Forest Wilderness”
There is no single authoritative foundation story for Stavelot-Malmedy; the narrative was told in several different forms (charters, vitae, and even artwork) and changed over time. All of the stories are linked to the monastic attempt to define themselves in relation to others, and all connect spirituality and monastic activity directly to the landscape. There are many different versions of these narratives, and dealing with them as historical evidence is tricky territory. These legends cannot be viewed in the same way as knowable fact, and yet for the monks, and “as products of imaginative memory, monastic foundation legends belong in the realm of what was believed to be true, rather than what was seen to be fiction.”1 Stavelot-Malmedy’s foundation stories do share common themes that are important to explore further: wilderness, solitude, physical and spiritual danger, and monastic leaders giving up power in order to pursue peace.
The first version of the foundation story is found in Sigibert III’s charter from ca. 648, which introduces a connection between local landscapes and an abstract idea of the desert. The king claimed the foundation of Stavelot-Malmedy for himself, reporting that he decided to build the two monasteries “in our forest called the Ardennes, in an empty place of solitude.” He added that the forest was a place “in which a throng of wild animals springs forth.”2 Sigibert, supported by Grimoald, his mayor-of-the-palace, then carved out a zone of immunity—lands that would belong to the monasteries—making the houses the literal center of a landscape of administrative control. Thus, from the start the idea of the empty wilderness was imagined alongside the recognition of competing human interests in this territory. Finally, the royal protector of the monastic communities ordered that they were to remain undisturbed in their forest: “the custodians of those churches ought to be able to lead a quiet, regular, and contemplative life according to divine command.”3
Despite the king’s rhetorical and financial support for this monastic ideal of solitude, the “desert” was at heart intended to disconnect the monks from kings and other secular concerns. Solitude was a moral buffer; it implied the absence of dangerous secular concerns and the ability of the monks to be “undisturbed” in their religious goals. Though Sigibert’s charter suggests that their forest location placed the monks in danger from the wild animals inhabiting the area, this threat was very clearly counterbalanced by the absence of the moral threat posed by exposure to the secular world. The forest/desert allowed the monks to live in solitude, “guarding against the dangers to their souls and shunning the company of women… so that in the absence of the press of the people or of the tumultuous affairs of the world, they might be without anything but God alone.”4
Subsequent administrative documents perpetuated this idea of solitude. A charter from 652/653 again described the Ardennes as an “empty desert.”5 Around 744, King Childeric III referred to the Ardennes as a forest in which Stavelot and Malmedy sheltered a “host of many monks… seeking peace and tranquility.”6 This brings up another complex point when dealing with charters—whose interests, worldview, and language do charters reflect? Participants and recipients of charters could be just as active in their production as the king or his scribes. Karl Heidecker has pointed to a shift in studies of “sovereign charters” away from an “approach that sees charters mainly as expressions of royal issuers” and toward a reevaluation of the role of the recipient, “who also wanted the charter to express something.”7 These charters can thus be seen as the earliest expressions of a rhetoric of solitude that the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy created and maintained well into the twelfth century. Yet still other charters reveal the deep degree to which the monks were also concerned with the settled, secular aspects of monastic life in the Ardennes, recording numerous conflicts between the growing monastic populations and local communities. As a result, charters only rarely repeated such statements of isolation. Instead, over the next several centuries, the ideas of solitude were inherited and transformed by religious narrative sources.
Monastic Foundations in the Wilderness
As Remacle and the Merovingian foundation faded from living memory, the monasteries began to actively promote their founder and their own history. The first retelling of the monasteries’ early history was a biography or vita of St. Remacle, written around 850 (the vita prima).8 Its discussion of the monastic foundation in particular is based quite extensively on the early Merovingian charters. In language that itself feels like a diplomatic record, the vita describes King Sigibert and Grimoald (his mayor of the palace) as the initiators of the foundation. These nobles ensured that “through the will of God and the counsel of their optimati, the monasteries were built within the forest (forestis) located in the pagus called the Ardennes; [these monasteries] were named Stavelot and Malmedy, in which religious monks could stay and there spiritually serve Christ.”9 The anonymous author (a monk from Stavelot) then reported that only once the king had built and dedicated the church at Stavelot did he send for Remacle, who was then serving as the bishop of Tongres. Since it closely followed Sigibert’s charter, the vita prima depicts the foundation of Stavelot and Malmedy as an act of royal initiative, a reminder that monastic identities were not products of only monastic interests. Monarchs also had reasons to found and support monasteries, to control monastic reform