In the opening passages of the Vita Remacli, Heriger described Gaul as “rich in streams and rivers full of fish, the most fertile soil, the richest pasture for cattle, rich in nectared vines, numerous glades (nemora), abounding in a great plenty of fruits, gold and silver and other metals.”128 This description is part of a long literary tradition based on the glorification of places (encomium), perhaps best known to medievalists from Bede’s description of England in the Ecclesiastical History (available by the eleventh century at Stavelot’s library). After establishing the political geography of Britain, Bede writes that “the island is rich in crops and in trees, and has good pasturage for cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in certain districts and has plenty of both land- and waterfowl of various kinds. It is remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in fish.”129 Such images of abundance borrow from classical descriptions of the pastoral, and appear in Late Antique descriptions of the famous rivers of Germany and Belgium.
Ausonius, a Gallo-Roman rhetorician and poet, penned what is perhaps his most famous work, a 483-line poem in praise of the Mosel River, around A.D. 371.130 The poem describes a journey down the Mosel, acknowledging the beauty of the landscape and the river, the presence of humans and their industries, and the river’s abundance and fertility. “Hail river,” he wrote:
blessed by the fields, blessed by the husbandmen, to whom the Belgae owe the imperial honour which graces their city (Trier): river, whose hills are o’ergrown with Bacchus’ fragrant vines, o’ergrown, river most verdant, thy banks with turf … thou hast all that belongs to springs, brooks, rivers, lakes, and tidal Ocean with his ebb and flow.… Do thou for me, O Nymph, dweller in the river’s realm, declare the hosts of the scaly herd, and from the depths of thy watery bed discourse of those throngs which glide in the azure stream.131
Ausonius addresses and praises the charms of all of the different fish in the river, while also describing fishing (from the perspectives of both the fisher and the fish), milling, and other human uses of natural resources. Though the Belgian people figure prominently in the poem, in the closing passages he reminds the reader of his broader intent: “and, putting off the praise of famous men, let me tell of the happy river in its joyous course through the green country-side, and hallow it in the waters of the Rhine.”132
In the sixth century, the Latin poet and bishop Venantius Fortunatus continued this literary tradition, composing a series of poems that described the natural and human-made beauty of the Mosel River valley. Fortunatus, a native of the Vosges, wrote with a rich blend of classical literary tradition and Christian spirituality. His Mosel poems, written after 566 when he returned to live in Gaul, blend panegyric and encomium and demonstrate how German and Belgian landscapes were idealized and imagined at the dawn of the Middle Ages.133
Fortunatus’s Mosel poems draw heavily on his classical training, and as Michael Roberts has pointed out, they are deeply indebted to the style and symbolism of Ausonius’s poems, drawing on a similar set of “features of the Gallo-Roman landowning ideal.”134 Yet whereas Ausonius compares the Mosel extensively to sites in classical Greco-Roman world, and addresses many of the classical nymphs, deities, and spirits of the waters, Fortunatus frequently compares the river to his own home and connects his praise of nature to the Christian religion. Building on even earlier pastoral poetry and literature, these two poets bridged Late Antiquity, and helped to ensure that the elements of the classical pastoral survived to become incorporated into Christian writing. Indeed, Fortunatus is in every way a bridge between those genres, because in addition to writing classical poetry about the new Frankish leaders and territories, he was also the author of several vitae and miracle collections.135
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