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"Negotiating the Landscape" explores the question of how
medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by
interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the
Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes,
Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and
tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives
from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts
in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was
generated and refined.Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach
to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval
environmental imagination through which people perceived the
nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert
medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to
oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was
regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for
human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than
possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on
their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex
understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and
domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards
of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources.
They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness,
a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively
incorporated these differing views of nature into their own
attempts to build their community, understand and establish their
religious identity, and relate to others who shared their
landscape.
Fishermen, monks, saints, and dragons met in medieval riverscapes;
their interactions reveal a rich and complex world. Using religious
narrative sources to evaluate the environmental mentalities of
medieval communities, Ellen F. Arnold explores the cultural
meanings applied to rivers over a broad span of time, ca. 300-1100
CE. Hagiographical material, poetry, charters, chronicles, and
historiographical works are explored to examine the medieval
environmental imaginations about rivers, and how storytelling and
memory are connected to lived experiences in riverscapes. She
argues that rivers provided unique opportunities for medieval
communities to understand and respond to ecological and
socio-cultural transformations, and to connect their ideas about
the shared religious past to hopes about the future.
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