Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes by Ellen F. Arnold, and: The Medieval Discovery of Nature by Steven A. Epstein (review)

Ellen Arnold’s Negotiating the Landscape and Steven Epstein’s The Medieval Discovery of Nature reveal in starkly different ways the challenges and the promise facing medieval environmental historians. Although rich in sources and subjects of analysis, medieval environmental studies too often remain bound in reconstructions of the practical and the material to break into the broader historiographical canon, still heavily dominated by American environmental histories. Medieval environmental historians must master both the skills required for premodern historical study—numerous languages, paleography, literary analysis, and more—and a panoply of technical or scientific skills in order to understand and explain ecology, terrestrial and marine ecosystems, climate change, and other environmental topics.

The two works reviewed here help bring medieval environmental history to a broader audience, albeit in two very different ways. Arnold’s work reveals a sophistication and maturity in conceptual and cultural approaches to the medieval environment; she contextualizes her study of the medieval Ardennes alongside the works of European and American historical colleagues. As a result, hers is a work that should easily find a home on postgraduate reading lists and the bookshelves of all environmental historians. Epstein’s work perhaps will be more limited in its audience, appealing particularly to intellectual and medieval environmental historians who seek answers to more finite questions of medieval concepts regarding specific aspects of nature. In sum, these are two very different and valuable approaches to environmental history useful to juxtapose and both excellent additions to many fields of study.

Negotiating the Landscape is a book that many of us will read with envy, owing both to Arnold’s historical skills and her rich topic. The author has chosen a familiar and important landscape in the early and central medieval Ardennes, circa 650–1150. This is a dense landscape, simultaneously wild and pastoral, religious and political. In this case study of the paired Benedictine monasteries of Stavelot and Malmedy, readers are taken on a journey through a varied, fertile, and forested world, competitive, contested, and highly spiritual, and one that is managed in complicated ways. Arnold’s nuanced reading of varied sources—historical, hagiographical, literary, legal—reveals changing and complex integrations of monastic landholdings and management of landscapes as demanded by varied authors, abbots, bishops, saints, and rivals. In five chapters, Arnold presents the interwoven and complex world of the Merovingian and medieval Ardennes. Using monastic records, conflict narratives, saints’ lives, and passion stories, intricacies of medieval historical traditions are made clear in case studies of disputes and arrangements, conflict avoidance, and land management. Her clarity in use and discussion of these sources is one aspect of Negotiating the Landscape‘s value; unlike some medieval environmental studies, this one will not alienate a nonspecialist audience. Arnold’s adept handling of complicated medieval sources renders these works accessible in impressive ways.

Following the lead of her medieval sources, Arnold presents depictions of the forest wilderness of Stavelot-Malmedy as fluid and flexible (p. 40). Monks and abbots of the Ardennes defined and defended their properties with watchful eyes toward management and maintenance, appropriately invoking saintly protective powers and punishments when conflicts abutted their territories. Most importantly, they inscribed their landscapes with varied meanings, suited to different occasions and eras. This was a landscape that was at times filled with dangers, as shown in chapter 1, with the threat of animals, storms, and disasters. With the aid of Saint Remacle and others, this was also a landscape infused with an expansive saintly justice, as shown in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 2’s analysis of the domestic landscape, which will be familiar to medieval environmental historians in its treatment of resources, offers a useful case study to non-medievalists in its clear...