Book ID: CBB001550372

Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (2013)

unapi

Arnold, Ellen Fenzel (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: 301 + pp.; maps
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Ritchey, Sara (2014) Review of "Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes". Early Medieval Europe (pp. 361-363). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001550372/

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Authors & Contributors
Shih, Ashanti
McGregor, James H. S.
Paolo Vidali
Zagari, Francesca
Newhauser, Richard
Willard, Thomas Spaulding
Concepts
Nature
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Environmental history
Environmental sciences
Natural history
Ecology
Time Periods
Medieval
20th century
20th century, late
Renaissance
19th century
Early modern
Places
United States
France
Western states (U.S.)
Mediterranean region
Hawaii (U.S.)
Spain
Institutions
United States. National Park Service
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