Negotiating the Landscape

Ellen F. Arnold teaches history at Ohio Wesleyan University.

• Introduction: Approaching the Medieval Landscape 1Chapter 1. Religious Roots: Foundation in the ''Forest Wilderness'' 31Chapter 2. Controlling the Domesticated Landscape: Value, Ownership, and Religious Interpretations 62Chapter 3. Fighting over Forests: Establishing Social and Religious Authority 110Chapter 4. Creating Conflict: Forests in the Monastic Imagination 145Chapter 5. The Religious Landscape and Monastic Identity 173Epilogue: The Passio Agilolfi Revisited 213Timeline 219Handlist of Sources 223Notes 227Bibliography 271Index 289Acknowledgments 299

"Arnold has made an imaginative and entirely original contribution to the massive amount of scholarship on medieval monasticism as well as to the new and still small field of medieval environmental history." (American Historical Review) "Negotiating the landscape breaks new ground i[n] its approach to cultural and environmental matters as well as our understanding of both. It demonstrates the possibility of developing research on the relationship between pre-modern human beings, their environments, and their ideas about those environments." (European Review of History) "A well‐conceived and well‐researched study . . . that will richly reward readers interested in medieval environmental studies and in the general topic of monastic use and understanding of land, both wild and cultivated." (Sehepunkte) "A capacious and thorough account. . . . 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." (Parergon) "By suggesting new approaches, this perceptive study encourages further work on topics of environmental perception and the construction of medieval cultural landscapes." (Journal of Interdisciplinary History) "Ellen Arnold's study of two monasteries in the forest of the Ardennes pioneers a culture-based approach to the environmental history of medieval Europe. From what may appear sterile and intractable sources, she extracts the diverse conceptual frameworks within which the monks dealt with the natural world, and in doing so convincingly challenges any simple view of early medieval 'wilderness.' Medievalists and environmentalists will learn much from this book." (Richard C. Hoffmann, York University)