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 single view of nature, we should combine the different ideas about nature that the monastic authors created and that coexisted in the same time and place. Stavelot-Malmedy’s example suggests that medieval people may have been much more comfortable than we are with fusing together the tame and the untamed in their view of nature and wilderness. Our understanding of the medieval world will be deepened if we allow the lines to blur between wilderness and domestic nature, the secular and the spiritual, the miraculous and the mundane, and monastic ideal and reality.
Looking closely at the many goals, practices, actions, ideas, and stories from a single monastic community shows that neither (and both) of these ideas were right. The monks of Stavelot-Malmedy had a complicated relationship with nature that was based on their struggles to define and shape their own identity, and to exert social, political, and, most importantly, religious power over the landscape and people of the Ardennes. Throughout the centuries, monks of the Ardennes developed the idea of the forest as a wild and dangerous landscape because it tied them to their religious heritage. But they had established their monasteries in a landscape that had long been full of people, and they were active participants in the region’s social and agricultural structures. Thus, the monks not only had to define themselves in relation to the wild; they also had to define themselves in relation to local people and the domesticated landscape. To do this, they told stories of how the power of the saints and of God allowed the monks to transform the wilderness into a beautiful and controllable landscape. They then, in turn, used this calm and pastoral view of the forest to represent rebirth, tranquility, and the fertility of both land and souls.
This double set of ideas—forests as wilderness and pastoral—is the subject of the next two chapters. Chapter 1 takes a deeper look at the idea of the forest as a dangerous and hostile place. Beginning with foundation accounts (from both legal and religious sources), I explore both the physical and cultural forces that led the monks to imagine their forests as a place of trial, temptation, and solitude. This chapter also addresses some of the difficulties in using legal sources and vocabulary through a discussion of the term forestis—was it, by definition, a wood or a wasteland? Multiple terms and definitions encouraged the monks to nurture multiple ideas about the natural world that surrounded them—including seeing it as pastoral and nurturing. These ideas are explored in Chapter 2, which shifts focus to the ways that the Ardennes supported agriculture and the many ways the monks used woodland resources to support their economic goals. This monastic familiarity with the domesticated landscape led to stories that viewed the forests as beautiful and that showed the saints protecting