My cultural approach to the medieval environment is also related to the questions asked by literary scholars practicing ecocriticism. This field’s purpose has been described as “to investigate literature’s capacity for articulating the non-human environment.”49 Despite what Clarence Glacken earlier described as the popular and pernicious misconception “that the peoples of classical antiquity and of the Middle Ages had neither interest in nor capacity for appreciating nature,” there is a growing body of work that explores how literary sources from the medieval and early modern world imagine, describe, and interpret nature.50 Yet these works deal primarily with literary and vernacular sources, and use field-specific methods of literary interpretation. Thus, though my questions are influenced by those asked by literary scholars, this book is not attempting a traditional ecocriticism. I am instead approaching hagiographical materials as a historian interested in the construction of cultural identities and the sources’ historical context. Furthermore, I am using sources that were theocentric rather than ecocentric; hagiographical sources were about God, religion, monasticism, saints, and morality. However, as Lawrence Buell has argued, although few sources “qualify unequivocally and consistently” as environmental there is a wide and diverse range of texts (both fictional and nonfictional) that can be used to explore attitudes toward nature.51
These are full of nature, natural metaphors, depictions of human uses of nature, and stories about the ways that nature affected and changed people. By picking up the traces of nature in these stories, and reading them in the context of the religious stories, I am, in effect, attempting an “environmental exegesis”52 of these sources. By introducing this concept of “environmental exegesis” I want to call attention to what I feel is the biggest contribution of this book—the deliberate inclusion of the ideas, goals, stories, and worldview of hagiographers into medieval environmental history. Stories of saints and miracles reflect particular medieval cult practices, and because of that, they are often set in real places and involve real people, written to achieve a “verisimilitude effect” that connected miracle to daily life.53 They resonate with and reflect real experiences, yet they are not exact snapshots. Latin, cultbased, hagiographic materials were just as much works of the imagination, and just as much structured, authored, and symbolic as were Romances, poems, and sagas. They can be treated as constructed, imagined texts, and they can be read with an eye toward the way that the natural world was imagined, constructed, and described.
The potential value of these sources for environmental history, particularly the hundreds of stories in miracle collections and the lives of minor or only regionally important saints, has not yet been fully explored. As Ashley and Sheingorn point out, it is important to see that for the cult of St. Foye, “the cultural work performed by its hagiographic texts serves purposes that cannot be identified as solely religious.”54 Scholars have returned with new questions to this old corpus of writings, highlighting the depth and texture of monastic sources. Of these, several have had a significant influence on my approach. Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on food, identity, and spirituality is a model for how to trace the intersections of religious and gender identities, material culture, and the goals of local hagiographers.55 Barbara Rosenwein’s work on Cluny and on emotional history, Patrick Geary and Rosamond McKitterick’s studies of memory and the written record, and Sharon Farmer’s textured investigations of Louis IX’s sainthood trials all provide models for how religious ideas, economic and political practices, and the processes of writing and record-keeping can be woven together for a more complete image of medieval communities.56
Hagiographical sources do of course present problems for environmental analysis, in part because of the depth of borrowings from earlier religious writings. However, though they contain echoes of earlier works, most were composed and compiled locally, with clear agendas, including that of tying saintly power closely to the local landscape. This would prevent authors from borrowing too heavily from irrelevant topoi when describing local events and geographies. Moreover, as I demonstrate throughout this book, hagiographic materials did not exist in a vacuum; they were associated with and interacted with a body of charters, letters, and other documents, and all of these are bound up together in monastic ideas about the control of people, the saints, and the natural world. These works were also tied to the local concerns of the authors: “communities did not produce historical narratives fortuitously, but rather that they did so under specific circumstances and that the writing of a text often served as a catalyst for the resolution of internal or external crises.”57
The hagiographical materials from Stavelot-Malmedy have been routinely dismissed because they were derivative and copied too heavily from other works—a kind of religious bricolage. One scholar even described the Passio Agilolfi as a kind of “fantasy building,” unmoored from any real foundation.58 Because quotations, borrowing, forging, and manipulation of earlier works were a routine part of medieval writing across all genres, saints’ lives (like histories and charters) should not be dismissed because of the echoes of earlier sources. Instead, the echoes should be treated as a deliberate part of the process of creating the sources. As McKitterick points out in her discussion of the Liber Historia Francorum (itself an important source in the imagination of at least one of Malmedy’s monks), “it should not be seen in terms merely of what is borrowed or new, but as a complete text with very distinctive emphases of its own.”59
This book takes as its starting point an assumption that the generations of monks who collectively and individually built the history, economy, and religious culture of Stavelot-Malmedy acted within a set of cultural and religious frameworks that were both part of broader cultural trends and shaped by local peculiarities. They were influenced by their religious goals, by the landscape they inhabited, by relations with allies and enemies, and by the stories they told themselves and others about all of those things. Uncovering the many ways that environment was connected to this community’s identity and history can let us see not only these monks’ environmental imagination, but also point toward ways of seeing place, nature, landscapes, and environmental worldview in the ideas, actions, and sources of other medieval people. But because local identity and history matter, before broader issues are addressed it is important to understand the political and religious history of these houses.
Historical Background: Stavelot and Malmedy
Stavelot and Malmedy were founded by St. Remacle (Remaclius or Rimagilius,60 d. 670), one of a cadre of seventh-century monk-bishops who led the conversion of the Ardennes and founded almost fifty monasteries in modern Belgium by about 725.61 Remacle began his religious career at Luxeuil, then became abbot of Solignac in 632.62 After more than a decade, he left in order to establish his own monastery in the Ardennes, first choosing a site called Cugnon. This foundation failed, and Remacle moved to the Meuse River valley where he founded Stavelot and Malmedy in the mid-seventh century. Charters claim a foundation date of 648, and the Annales Stabulenses (compiled in the eleventh century) date the building of the monasteries to 652.63 Records do not show which house was founded first, and the two houses would debate this for centuries.
Remacle’s motives in founding two houses are also unknown. He may have intended the houses to be a double monastery with a monk-bishop as its abbot, comparable to similar foundations at Ghent and Marchiennes. He may also have been working in the model of Solignac, creating an Irish-style community that would have been the first of its kind in eastern Belgium.64 The double foundation was further complicated by the fact that Remacle founded Stavelot in the diocese of Tongres-Maastricht/Liège and Malmedy in that of Cologne.65
The two monasteries were bound together not only by Remacle’s joint foundation, but also by patronage and politics. Around the year 648 a charter appears under King Sigibert’s name, confirming