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Abstract
This dissertation explores the way that the environment, both tangible and imagined, influenced and shaped medieval culture and society. It surveys the social and political history and religious culture of the monasteries of Stavelot and Malmedy, in the Ardennes (modern Belgium). Administrative documents show that the forested landscape of the Ardennes influenced the monasteries' economic decisions and social relations. The religious sources---such as miracle stories and saints' lives---show that control of the environment was also culturally and religiously significant.
This project explores many of the ways that this significance was expressed. First, it surveys the history of the monasteries and the historical environment of the Ardennes. Then, it turns to the ways that the monks and others assessed and reported the economic and social value of their forests and woodlands, revealing an inconsistency and flexibility, which could lead to uncertainty and conflict. Conflicts over land and forest resources were important, and the monastic communities developed a remarkable variety of ways to deal with them. The discussion of conflict focuses on the ways that the monks used not only their political power, but also abstract ideas of religious power and the role of saints in the earthly world. This is, in part, because of the degree to which the forested landscape that surrounded Stavelot and Malmedy dominated the monastic imagination.
The final theme of this dissertation is an analysis of the many different ways in which the monks constructed literary and religious images of the natural world. The forests of the Ardennes were alternately depicted as an isolated desert and as a domesticated and well-settled landscape; as dark and forbidding and as beautiful and pastoral; as part of the human world of politics and part of a landscape of divine power. The monks skillfully combined these often contradictory ideas in order to develop and maintain their own identity vis-à-vis other medieval groups, and to assert their control over the landscape and the other people living in it.
