Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes by Ellen F. Arnold (review)

With Negotiating the Landscape, Ellen Arnold provides an account of medieval monastic use of, and interaction with, the medieval Ardennes through an interpretative lens that moves beyond the purview of conventional environmental history. This capacious and thorough account of a complex relationship between life - be it the life without or the life within - and monastic space - situated externally and within in equal measure - calls for medieval environmental historians to 'again embrace and explore the spiritual and religious character of the medieval world' (p. 4). In a precisely executed first monograph, Arnold seeks to provide broad applicability through a focused case study, a locus for the apprehension of the diverse environmental practices and experiences of medieval people. Arnold argues that 'medieval people … thought many different things about nature', and demonstrates this variety through a multifaceted account of the Benedictine monks of the Stavelot-Malmedy double monastery in what is now Belgium. This approach allows for an unpacking of monastic transactions with a complex landscape through imaginings and practices that were equally complex. The landscape explored by Arnold's chosen study reveals the shaping by landscape of 'how the monks remembered their history, framed their own experiences, and imagined the lives and power of their Saints', coupled with a reciprocal shaping of landscape through husbandry, history, and narrative (p. 7).

After a brief Introduction that sets the work in context and evokes some of the most salient literature within her chosen niche, Arnold launches into a diptych of chapters, the first focused on monastic foundation in the 'Forest Wilderness', the second on monastic control in the domesticated landscape. In Chapter 1, Arnold presents a monastic imagination in and with the wilderness that is a complex composite of dangers, ambiguities of classification, and moral tropes. The 'wilderness' entered and apprehended by monastics, that is here revealed, was a riotous array of often uneasily coexisting interpretations, especially in the early medieval heyday of foundation narrative. In Chapter 2, Arnold presents a clever slide of interpretation from an account of the management and economic practices of Stavelot-Malmedy to a discussion of the notion of 'value'; she transitions from purely economic indicators into a discussion of religious evaluation in the form of spatial and environmental topoi and their corresponding moral themes. In each of these two chapters, Arnold reveals a world balanced between quotidian and abstract interaction, and economic and spiritual assessment.

Chapters 3 and 4 counterbalance two stories of conflict over landscape, the former a societal and judicial account, the latter a spiritual and literary account. The focus of Chapter 3 is on the 'long and often bitter conflicts' of monks and their allies over the control of landscape, valued as a source of diverse taxes, tithes, and use rights, as well as a source of religious authority (p. 144). In Chapter 4, Arnold explores the narrative and the moralisation of religious landscape as a means to greater authority and control. Through the power of Saints in vitae and establishment narratives, the monastic landscape became valuable 'not just as a stage for human events, but … also an agent and weapon of human conflicts' (p. 172).

The fifth and final chapter cleverly weaves these threads together to tell a composite tale of monks that 'used natural resources to build the strength of their community, and … used stories about nature to build a past, then to blur it and rewrite it again' (p. 212). The book ends with a series of useful appendices, including a timeline for the often-complex actions of the Stavelot-Malmedy monks, and a handlist of sources that provides a brief précis of the primary material, placing it in chronological order and establishing its interrelationships.

The value of Negotiating the Landscape lies not solely in its account of monastic environmental history or in its account of monastic thought, but in its...