Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold

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СКАЧАТЬ souls and shunning the company of women… so that in the absence of the press of the people or of the tumultuous affairs of the world, they might be without anything but God alone.”⁴

      Subsequent administrative documents perpetuated this idea of solitude. A charter from 652/653 again described the Ardennes as an “empty desert.”⁵ Around 744, King Childeric III referred to the Ardennes as a forest in which Stavelot and Malmedy sheltered a “host of many monks… seeking peace and tranquility.”⁶ This brings up another complex point when dealing with charters—whose interests, worldview, and language do charters reflect? Participants and recipients of charters could be just as active in their production as the king or his scribes. Karl Heidecker has pointed to a shift in studies of “sovereign charters” away from an “approach that sees charters mainly as expressions of royal issuers” and toward a reevaluation of the role of the recipient, “who also wanted the charter to express something.”⁷ These charters can thus be seen as the earliest expressions of a rhetoric of solitude that the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy created and maintained well into the twelfth century. Yet still other charters reveal the deep degree to which the monks were also concerned with the settled, secular aspects of monastic life in the Ardennes, recording numerous conflicts between the growing monastic populations and local communities. As a result, charters only rarely repeated such statements of isolation. Instead, over the next several centuries, the ideas of solitude were inherited and transformed by religious narrative sources.

      Monastic Foundations in the Wilderness

      As Remacle and the Merovingian foundation faded from living memory, the monasteries began to actively promote their founder and their own history. The first retelling of the monasteries’ early history was a biography or vita of St. Remacle, written around 850 (the vita prima).⁸ Its discussion of the monastic foundation in particular is based quite extensively on the early Merovingian charters. In language that itself feels like a diplomatic record, the vita describes King Sigibert and Grimoald (his mayor of the palace) as the initiators of the foundation. These nobles ensured that “through the will of God and the counsel of their optimati, the monasteries were built within the forest (forestis) located in the pagus called the Ardennes; [these monasteries] were named Stavelot and Malmedy, in which religious monks could stay and there spiritually serve Christ.”⁹ The anonymous author (a monk from Stavelot) then reported that only once the king had built and dedicated the church at Stavelot did he send for Remacle, who was then serving as the bishop of Tongres. Since it closely followed Sigibert’s charter, the vita prima depicts the foundation of Stavelot and Malmedy as an act of royal initiative, a reminder that monastic identities were not products of only monastic interests. Monarchs also had reasons to found and support monasteries, to control monastic reform and (as Stavelot’s history shows) choose monastic leaders.

      According to this account, Remacle appears to have been a “starter abbot.” He originally intended to return to Tongres, but “after a very short time,” he “petitioned the king that he be allowed to relinquish his pontifical seat to his successor, so that, as he had long desired, he could go to this deserted space (eremus locus), and there, remote from men, [live] without anything but God.”¹⁰ By focusing on this decision, the author of the vita prima was able to begin the process of disassociating Stavelot and Malmedy from the royal mission and from episcopal oversight and linking them more closely to monastic goals and identity.

      The author of the ninth-century vita prima was not simply inventing a Merovingian past; he instead converted the royal charter to serve monastic purposes. This can be seen in the way that the language reflects (though does not copy) that of the founding charter, for example in passages describing the donation of “twelve leugas” of land to the monastery.¹¹ Whereas the royal charter defines this act as an attempt to forestall conflict with other people, the vita prima reports that the boundary meant that within that area the monks would encounter no one. The author then explains that Remacle considered the site to be an empty place, a place of hermitage, where “having observed the flattering enticements of the world, [the monks] could live withdrawn from secular cares.”¹²

      The promotion of the ideal of solitude is still found a century later in the vita Remacli, written in the late 900s by Heriger of Lobbes (d. 1007), who based his work on the charters and the vita prima and also made significant alterations to the narrative. Heriger, an active monastic leader who was perhaps also concerned about the growing tenth-century tensions between clergy and local lords, revived and perpetuated the solitude topos. He did this in part through descriptions of the environment as inhospitable and isolated. Stavelot was “confined by mountains,” and construction of buildings at Malmedy was “impeded by the swamps.” The idea of physical solitude was reinforced by the absence of people; local populations were “not fully established,” and there were only remnants of the former inhabitants, who had been “bound up in idolatry.” These unnamed people had constructed a hostile pagan landscape full of temples and effigies, and for Remacle and the monks, the ghostly presence of the former residents was as much a tangible obstacle as the swamps.¹³

      Heriger’s vita also includes a discussion of Remacle’s earlier (failed) attempt at founding a monastery at Cugnon. As with Stavelot-Malmedy, the earliest mention of Cugnon is from a seventh-century royal charter, which reports that Sigibert III decided to found a regular monastery “in honor of our patrons Peter, Paul, John, and the other martyrs, in our lands, the silva Ardenense, at a place called Cugnon, surrounded by the Semois River.”¹⁴ Although the vita prima passes over the foundation of Cugnon in silence, the vita Remacli does mention it, noting that it was “a place that was seen to be well-suited for monastic life.”¹⁵ This ideal site “located in the harsh mountains” and “on the soil of the Ardennes” was surrounded by a river and “carved out of the rocks.”¹⁶ Both the charter and the vita, though written centuries apart, emphasize the location of the monastery—surrounded by a river and a forest, cut off from the secular world. But this proposed foundation appears never to have been actualized—only the single charter survives, preserved as a part of Stavelot-Malmedy’s records, and excavations have yielded no evidence of a monastic complex.¹⁷ Yet though the foundation failed, in the tenth century the place remained, according to Heriger, a “place of prayer.”¹⁸

      Heriger also emphasized the importance of solitude in another of his works, the vita Hadalini, on a monastic founder who was a contemporary of Remacle’s. This work briefly describes the early history of Stavelot-Malmedy: “after [Remacle] had established his monasteries and had gathered monks to him, he built a great housing unit ideal for monastic use” where the monks could always follow “a life of prayer and solitude.”¹⁹ Remacle also instructed Hadalinus to build his own monastery, Chelles, “in the valley that is next to the forest (saltus) near the Letia river,” at a place called “between the four mountains.” Life there was predictably harsh; isolated by the mountains and the forest, Hadalinus cleared a space in this deserted landscape, working through hunger and thirst, in the cold and in utter poverty.²⁰ Thus, though the forest in its broadest sense provided isolation and protection, it could also be dangerous, and fit to be cleared and “converted” and used by the monks for their own purposes.

      The association of Stavelot-Malmedy’s local landscape with physical and social isolation, so prominent in the foundation charter and the early legends, is still found during Wibald’s abbacy, another period of broader regional turbulence and monastic consolidation. There is a difference, however; whereas the earliest foundation stories explicitly presented the isolation of the forest/desert/wilderness as a means of perfecting monastic purpose, this idealization of the retreat was so ingrained by the twelfth century that Wibald was able to indicate this complex set of ideas in a type of rhetorical shorthand. Yet it is at this point that Stavelot-Malmedy was arguably the most connected to other parts of Europe and the world. Urbanization in the Low Countries, ties of local leaders to the internationalizing force of the crusades, participation in regional synods, and monastic СКАЧАТЬ