In Fortunatus’s Ardennes, also full of wild animals, there is no sense of fear, and no sense of a struggle for survival (either physical or metaphysical). Instead, this is a landscape for leisure and livelihood, and Gogo, an early medieval man, can enjoy the pleasures of the Roman upper classes. The Ardennes teem with a wide and abundant set of game animals, and Fortunatus exults in the abundance of God’s Creation.
The parallels to the Roman pastoral are clear, especially in the final evocation of the power of the plow. Gogo tames the bull, and through his cultivation turns the “sunny groves and glens” of the Ardennes into a productive landscape. This “wilderness” is not at all removed from the agricultural landscape. This is, as Cronon would have us see, a domesticated landscape but one that is not separate from the wild.
Fortunatus’s Late Antique images of the Ardennes seem to come from a different world than the harsh and isolated forests that accompanied stories of monastic foundations. Yet the monks, too, could view the Ardennes as safe, productive, and beautiful. They wrote passages that reflect these vibrant and verdant landscapes, taking up the mantle of classical and Late Antique pastoral writing. The tenth-century vita Beregisi, for example, details how the saint established Andage/Saint-Hubert in a wooded spot (saltus) that was divinely revealed to him. It was a beautiful place: the woods (nemora) were dense and leafy, and it was also (as fits the image of the Ardennes as a desert) “far removed from the city.” The lush forest, with its fruit-bearing trees, was aplace of beauty and abundance: “There, the place made fertile by very clear and healthful waters, bearing verdant meadows with rich soil, surrounded by the loveliness of woods (nemora), it offers great benefit for those seeking the solitary life.”145
The vita Beregisi describes the fertile waters and grasses of the Ardennes; the Translatio Quirini describes the animal resources. The area around the Amblève River was fertile and abounding in wild game: “The hunter, becoming lost, was accustomed to carry a spear through the places where many wild animals were known to arise, attending to the more abundant pastures, and to throw out fishing or birding nets, to catch up all the flying and swimming creatures that thrived there in abundance.”146 Though found in an eleventhcentury work, this could be Gogo’s Ardennes. Yet these pastoral references are incorporated seamlessly into hagiographical works—connecting monasticism and monastic uses of nature not to images of stark wildness, but to ideas of boundless nature, utility, and fertility.
Chapter 2
Controlling the Domesticated Landscape
Value, Ownership, and Religious Interpretations
Even though the idea of the forest as desert wilderness was so dominant in the monks’ imagination, they did not use the image of isolation to hide their use of nature or to ignore the productive landscape. The monks moved beyond the “desert” by including the realities of an inhabited and domesticated natural world in their understanding of their religious and cultural identities and legacies. They built on the long Latin literary tradition of the pastoral, and, as Venantius Fortunatus had done, they connected the classical idea of a locus amoenus to Christian concepts of holiness. Success in the material world provided an alternate way for the monks to understand their relationships with their dependents and neighbors, their natural environment, and their God.
The connection between spirituality and land management has not gone unnoticed. Historians have raised important discussions of the connections between Cistercian ideology and practice, especially concerning the tension between agricultural development and wilderness and waste topoi, but this scholarship focuses largely on the Cistercians rather than their early medieval precedents.1 This can be seen in the Cistercian “foundation” story of the conversion of Pons of Leras, which intimately connects the adoption of Cistercian religious ideas to the forested landscape. As Constance Berman notes, “the account begins with an elaborate play on the words silva, silvaniensis, and salva nos in its discussion of the role of salvation at Silvanés,” and this “wilderness solitude” is in fact marked most by agricultural labor.2 The reputation of the Cistercians for turning wilderness into productive land is itself part of a Cistercian rhetoric of monastic reform and rehabilitation, connected to the effective eclipsing of similar Benedictine wilderness ideas. As John Van Engen has pointed out, the almost univocal Cistercian critique of earlier monks has drowned out much of the dynamism and vitality of Benedictine spirituality (and, I would add, of Benedictine land management).3 Here is another way in which this case study can highlight the complexity of monastic culture and practices; the previous chapter showed how the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy constructed ideas of the Ardennes as wild. This chapter focuses on the ways that the monks interacted with that same landscape in ways that encouraged them to see it as domesticated.
The most striking feature of the Ardennes, then and now, is the extensive forest cover, which has been altered by human inhabitation for millennia. By the early medieval period, this forest would in some ways have contributed to a monastic sense of isolation, of marginalization from the champion landscape further to the south (even by the 600s clearly more fully settled and agriculturally developed), and even of living in an uncontrollable and inhospitable landscape. Yet the monasteries of the Ardennes were successful not in spite of their mountains, swift streams, and dense forests, but because of them. The forests themselves were of fundamental agricultural and economic importance; Stavelot-Malmedy’s leaders invested deeply in the agricultural infrastructure of the Ardennes, and their activities helped to shape a domesticated, pastoral landscape that was at times teeming with abundance, managed, and molded to shape human needs.
Though the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy would later claim otherwise, people had settled along the major river valleys in and near the Ardennes as early as 1000 b.c., when Neolithic people and animals first began to alter the dense forests of the Ardennes. Prehistoric clearance of forested land for fields and animal grazing established a base pattern of agricultural settlement in the region that would only intensify as the years passed.4 Human exploitation of the natural forest and woodland resources continued with the Roman incursions and early medieval settlement. Yet even with such anthropogenic effects, the Ardennes remained heavily forested.
This is in part due to the sheer scale of those forests and in part to the fact that despite the focus in some scholarship on deforestation, medieval forests were not haphazardly drained of resources. Beginning around the 1960s, scholars created a picture of the ancient world as severely deforested and desiccated through human agency.5 One archaeologist argued that the initial Celtic clearance of part of the Ardennes was “the fundamental basis for first the degradation and finally the disappearance of the forests.”6 When connected with the broader discussion of the deforestation of France and Belgium (the “Great Clearances”) over the course of the central Middle Ages, such views paint medieval people as carelessly and rampantly clearing forests in favor of arable land, fuel for industry, and profit-driven agriculture. Based on an example from the monastery of Saint-Denis from the 1100s, Marc Bloch remarked that by the Central Middle Ages “as a result of this relatively intensive and quite unregulated exploitation the ranks of the trees became progressively thinner … [and] there were already places where the woodland was sparse.”7 This extensive use of woodland, he claimed, combined with clearance for agricultural purposes and general economic and demographic decline led to a post-Carolingian countryside that had “an undeniably depopulated aspect, riddled with pockets of emptiness.”8 Using the same example, Georges Duby mirrored Bloch’s assessment of early medieval forest use, noting that the “open forests of the early Middle Ages [were] badly maintained and damaged by unplanned utilization.”9
However, an alternate approach has developed, spearheaded by the work of Oliver Rackham, a professional forester who advocates an understanding of the ancient and medieval forest as sustainably managed and developed rather than thoughtlessly destroyed. This approach emphasizes the continuity of forest use, concluding that medieval forest use was extensive and deliberate, but also much more stable, and focused on preserving