The return of a spectacular wild fauna and flora at Chernobyl has for a long time acted as one of the paradigmatic showcases for the resilience of nature, when people have to leave overnight following a catastrophe. Today, wolves, wild horses, and bison roam the former villages together with a group of Danish cattle, which had just been imported to a farm before the explosion took place. Today the herd of cattle has gone native and thrives with its feral living conditions. As does the rest of the fauna and flora.

Albeit the wanton destruction of the the Kakhovske Reservoir in June 2023 was a similar tragic and catastrophic event, also this is rapidly turning into a situation which may in time come with a natural bonus, writes Ukrainian scientists.

The reservoir was a dam with a surface area of 2155 km2 on the river Dnieper, which the retreating Russian forces blew up in June 2023. At the time, the event was considered a ecological catastrophe.

However, it now appears that the destruction has led to a fast and fascinating spontaneous restoration of semi-natural ecosystems. New research by Ukrainian scientists, Yuliia Spinova and Vasyliuk Oleksii, has shown an almost immediate recovery of native vegetation. By the end of the year, this recovery led to the natural young forest appearing on a large area freed from the artificial reservoir. Currently, the event is bringing about a restoration of more than 1,800 km² of natural ecosystems of which more than half will be forested. Such a large ecosystem restoration can become a decisive Ukrainian contribution to the European Union ecosystems revival by 2030, claim the scientists involved in monitoring the natural processes. This development is furthered by the Ukrainian government which a few weeks back banned any settlement in the area of the reservoir for other purposes than the reconstruction of the dam. Before that happens, nature will surely have taken over, and thus the question is, whether it will ever be reclaimed by anything but nature?

These processes mirror what is happening elsewhere in the occupied warzones, which people have left. It is calculated that about one million ha are mined to the extent that any cleaning-up of the injured and degraded land will be impossible. Especially since mines rapidly will be buried beneath the roots of shrubbery, trees and vegetation, making a recovery in time will be nearly impossible before the roots “hide” the explosives for good. Currently, the estimate is that the warzone will be inhabitable for at least 70 years.

Thus, spontaneous ecosystem restoration can become a powerful contribution of Ukraine into state tasks on preservation of degraded lands, as well as international obligations in the field struggle from climate change, Spinova and Vasyliuk argue.

SOURCE:

The results of their research is to be presented at the EGEU general Assembly 2024 in Vienna (Se: Spinova, Y. and Vasyliuk, O.: Post-war rewilding as a decision-making influence-factor, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-21661,

FEATURED PHOTO:

The Kakhovske Reservoir after the destruction. Source: Glavcom.ua/Open Source

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Rewilding is all about setting nature free to further its own natural processes by reintroducing lost species, setting the hydrology free, and bringing back habitats, tells Rewilding Britain. While the science is clear, some farming communities are hesitant pointing out that it does not make sense to take land away from agricultural production. Experience shows, however, that local economy flourishes as rewilding produce free range food of high quality and at premium prices, crates jobs and boost local ecotourism. Basic food production should not take up as much land as hitherto. Instead, agritech, should take over, claims rewilder enthusiasts.

Accordingly, supporters are pleased that rewilding plays an official role in the British Government’s policy to reform farming subsidies making room for large-scale projects which might include rewilding. Also, the new policy requiring entrepreneurs to enhance the biodiversity on their building projects with 10% or pay a premium for local or national projects will involve rewilding projects carried out on more marginal lands.

A snapshot of 58 rewilded sites, show that one quarter are carried out as large projects, while the remaining three quarters are on public land often taking the character of community project and engaging local people in bettering their natural surroundings.

Large projects included the Knepp Estate.  Another large project in the north is Wilder Doddington at the Elizabethan manor Doddington Estate with more than 250.000 visitors enjoying glamping or shopping at the cafes. Launched as a 400-year project, the plan is to letting nature recover while letting people connect to nature and the sturdy Lincoln Red Cattle and the Hungarian Mangalitza pigs (so-called Wollen Pigs) which are charged with the mission to further the natural ecosystems.

However, Rewilding Britain is not just working on dry land. New important projects include the creation of the “Arran Seabed Trust”, establishing the first no-take zone in Lamlash Bay on the West Coast of Scotland. Another recent project supported by Rewilding Britain is the creation of a healthy marine ecosystem at Sussex Bay, an extensive seascape that encompasses 160 km. The project aims to restore kelp beds, oyster beds and saltmarsh and bringing together scientists and too local groups along the shore. The project links up to the Weald to Waves project aiming to connect the ancient High Weald landscape with the coast.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Isobel Wright, Graham Warnes and Luca Mao at Wilder Duddington © Duddington Estate

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After WW2, the green revolution paved the way for making Europe self-sufficient regarding food. Helped by the EU, this industrialisation increased global production by introducing high-yielding varieties and streamlined animal production systems. Though highly efficient, the shift also caused widespread deterioration of biodiversity, degrading soils, lowering the groundwater tables, increasing salinisation and deforestation, and introducing a regime of pesticides. Further, widespread rural inequalities lead to migration out of the countryside and, in the last decades, widespread abandonment of marginal lands. The disappearance of traditional knowledge of agricultural systems, such as in the transhumance in the Mediterranean and the bocage systems in France, should be added to this list. Although not all agricultural landscapes today look like Mecklenburg in Northern Germany with its vast agro-industrial landscapes featuring fields up to 100 ha, or the “Zone Agroindustrielle” east of Paris, the devastation of the cultural landscapes has been widespread.

This development has also been the case in Spain. Nevertheless, the Iberian peninsula is still home to five of the EU’s seven internationally recognised “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems”, so-called GIAHS, a system set up by FAO in 2002. The Iberian Peninsula was recently surveyed with the GIAHS model to recognise further agroecosystems worth preserving as intangible heritage. The criteria are food and livelihood security, agro-biodiversity, local and traditional knowledge systems, distinctive cultural values, and specific features of landscapes and seascapes. By developing these criteria and utilising GIS, the Spanish authorities have pinpointed fifty potential sites worth protecting.

Significant are the sites belonging to 56% of the farmland in Spain known as “dehesas” (and in Portugal as “montados”). Half of this typical landscape in the southwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula is found in the northern part of Andalusia in the Sierra de Aracena y Picos de Aroche stretching north of the Guadalquivir from Huelva, Seville, Cordoba, and Baeza. Originally covered by woods hosting gall, cork and holm oaks, this landscape was cleared to make way for the dehesas. As well as grazing livestock, mostly cows and fighting bulls, the dehesas – or defences, originally meaning a reserved pasture – were and are used for the production of cork, firewood, and charcoal, as well as grazing. Some of the villages flanking the dehesas date back to prehistoric times, while others owe their existence to the out-migration of the Muslim population after the Reconquista and the slow Castilian repopulation. Most villages grew up around fortress-like churches or hilltop castles constructed to deter the Portuguese to the west and the Nasrid kingdom at Grenada to the east.

As it stands today, the dehesa-landscape was the immediate result of the Castillian conquest, when the Muslim population gradually migrated from leaving an abandoned landscape where natural ecosystems were allowed to take over. For a short while, much of the the landscape was used for activities such as hunting, fishing, and beekeeping. Only gradually did the exploitation of the landscape characterised by “modern” dehesas – that is, enclosed pasturelands – take over after the final conquest of the Nasrid kingdom and the population growth following the wars and plagues, which marred the 14th and 15th centuries.

Although it is believed the system with dehesas existed in Roman, Byzantine and later Islamic times, the present-day version thus dates to the period of repopulation, which occurred in the later Middle Ages. Their main function was to serve as more or less common, more or less privately owned pastures for drought cattle. One common feature was the active prohibition against pigs and poultry accused of uprooting the ground and fouling the water. However, the dehesas were not just used for drought cattle. Sometimes, dehesas were enclosed and used for regular cattle ranging by larger landowners and the cities located along the Guadalquivir.

Today, these dehesas are recognised by the EU as farmlands with a “High Natural and Cultural Value”, implying these agroforestry systems also score high on biodiversity. Protected as a specific EU habitat, much of the landscape featuring the dehesas is recognised as Natura 2000.

Two Forms of Conservation Policies

However, the question remains how to preserve this unique cultural landscape and/or its nature best? And further: is it worth protecting the dehesa-landscape from a biodiversity perspective?

One system set up by the Spanish authorities is the identification of the belt as a network of Protected Natural Areas, parts of which – as said – have also been designated Natura 2000. However, this system is challenged by the abandonment by people of the traditional sylva–pastoral landscape, with an accompanying shift from pigs to poultry, horses, and olive groves, but also furthering the encroaching scrub and forest.

Another option, though, is inducing forest expansion together with more or less active rewilding, returning to the “Reconquista” landscape with its natural barriers of Mediterranean wild forests used as open nature reserves and hunting grounds. This is, to some degree, the policy adopted by the National Parks spread along the Northern border of Andalusia. Apparently, these parks struggle to integrate the abandoned farmland into their natural range without losing the distinctive fauna and flora characteristic of the dehesas.

These two policies and options have been claimed to represent two adverse methods of conservation where the cultural and natural landscapes are set apart and not allowed to mingle, thus establishing what in the literature has been termed a “cultural severance”.

“The progressive degradation and marginalisation of the rural landscape and the associated deterioration of environmental and social conditions are factors correlated with the increasing land abandonment of smallholder farming over the past decades”, writes Villodre et al. in a recent article (Villodre 2023)”, on behalf of the cultural-landscape-faction. They posit that “among the main arguments against rewilding are the loss of valuable cultural landscapes and high nature value farming systems, the decrease in landscape heterogeneity or the negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem Services”. In a project led by the University of Extremadura and carried out together with stakeholders, plans have been laid to enrich the grassland of the dehesas by bettering the regeneration of trees and the sowing of fodder crops.

Opposed to this, the Nature-landscape-faction argues for a type of (passive) rewilding, letting the abandoned details being swallowed by the wilder natural landscape dominating the sierras.

One example of such a more integrated landscape is the UNESCO Global Geopark – the Sierra Norte de Sevilla Natural Park – characterised by rich and diversified nature. This is a landscape of gently rolling hills clad in dense evergreen oaks, which covers 177.000 ha and is very sparsely populated. However, a third of the park is still taken up with dehesas, where pigs continue to graze. Thus, the dehesas borders a rich landscape of wilder nature inhabited by boars, deer, otters, badgers, wolves, polecats, and wild cats, while overflown with eagles, griffons, black vultures, black storks, red kites, and eagle owls. Also, the landscape is teeming with a significant population of endangered butterflies. Thus, in a situation where the wild nature of Europe is endangered, the preservation of large tracts of abandoned dehesas should seem an unnecessary luxury. When all is said and done, a dehesa is an enclosed pasture more or less extensively exploited for grazing and coppice. The upholding of a dehesa, thus, does not depend on the next-door neighbouring dehesas. As opposed to this, wild nature needs large tracts of undisturbed land where animals and plants can roam. Why, then, should we preserve and protect the dehesas?

Arguably, however, the dehesas sustain high levels of biodiversity if kept under an adequate management regime. This is the main conclusion of a meta-survey carried out in 2022 (Rodríguez-Rojo 2022). In general, the dehesas, with their intermediate tree covers, scrub patches, and natural microclimates, offer a varied and beneficial home to a wide variety of species thriving in a mosaic landscape. However, if the management becomes too proactive – for instance, removing dead tree stumps and clearing shrubs, the advantages tend to disappear. “Small-scale features and natural microhabitats such as traditional stone walls, canopy shrubs, piles of pruning debris, or temporary watercourses have been shown to contribute substantially to the biodiversity of macroinvertebrates, reptiles, and small mammals, writes Rodríguez-Rojo et al. (2022)

On a more detailed level, other studies of the dehesas considered as low-input farming agroforestry systems have shown that, taken as a whole, the dehesas do feature significant numbers of species and rich biodiversity. However, systematically measuring flora and fauna on nine general habitat categories inside dehesas from wood pastures to water bodies, it was shown that abundance and species richness varied widely and that the proportion of shared species was low among the different micro-habitats. The most important conclusion was that the high diversity of the dehesas depended on the coexistence within the farms of habitats, which, although marginal, seemed to harbour a disproportionally high number of species compared to the small areas out of the whole which they occupied. This might mean that it is, in fact, not the dehesas as such, but rather the wilder fringes which support their value as natural reserves. (Moreno et al. 2016). In short: heterogeneity seems to be the key to the high biodiversity attached to the dehesas.

Another study has also demonstrated this conclusion carried out in 2020 when a group of scientists published an index on how to evaluate threatened biodiversity (Diaz 2020). Lucky for us, they applied their model to the forests of Andalusia comprising the following habitats: Oak forests, other forests, shrubland, grassland and dehesas. The method employed consisted of selecting threatened species according to the official regional red list and evaluating their status according to a weighted index of differences in threat status, sensitivity to disturbance, and their functional role. The final list included 224 species: 81 plants, 76 birds, 31 mammals, 22 anthropods, six reptiles, five amphibians, and three molluscs. Fine-scale maps covering 43,864 km2 were then plotted with the biodiversity index calculated for each threatened species registered. Based on this, the scientists found that the dehesas averaged a conservation value of only 80-150. Albeit more than the oak forest (40-100) and the other forests (50-110), the best results were found in shrubland and grassland bordering the dehesas and yielding 200-250.

From Passive to Active Rewilding

Pondering the diverse habitats– dehesas, grasslands, shrublands and forests –  it appears they each contribute and have a role to play. However, the quality of biodiversity seems to be attached less to the different habitats and rather the mixture of the different intermingling zones in the sierras – with wilder nature in the inner hills and mountains bordered by semi-open shrub- and grassland, which in their turn is adjoined by the dehesas and the traditional silvopastoral farms on the gently sloping countryside reaching down to the banks of the river and its tributaries. To name one example, the griffon vultures are best served in a semi-open landscape filled with carrion from both wild deer and livestock, while reforestation or monocultures like olive groves hinder their survival in the sierras.

Perhaps, the real solution is to accept that returning to an actively rewilded landscape might solve the problem. What we do know is that the forestry landscape of the sierras in the Southwestern Iberian Peninsula before the neolithic revolution consisted of the fluctuating landscape where wild roaming animals – aurochs, wild horses, boars and numerous top predators such as lions, wolves, bears and lynx roamed the terrain, slowly opening up the woodland to turn it into a semi-open grassland much like the traditional dehesas looked like before they were fenced in, and claimed as private property.

However, advancing active rewilding will involve the traditional Spanish farmers abandoning their role as custodians of the cultural landscape of their dehesas, agroforestry farms, and famed products. On the other hand, though, they may gain a new and less stressful role as custodians of the wild nature currently reclaiming the sierras of Southern Spain.

Unfortunately, as long as agribusinesses and lobbyists support the discourse on cultural landscapes as part of the national heritage, this may not happen, despite the vested interests in nature tourism and the economics of climate adaptation, which should lead the way.

SOURCES:

Prioritising conservation actions towards the sustainability of the dehesa by integrating the demands of society
By Carlos Parra-López, Samir Sayadi, Guillermo Garcia-Garcia, Saker Ben Abdallah, and Carmen Carmona-Torres
In: Agricultural Systems (2023), Vol 206.

Characterization of potential Spanish territories for creating a national network associated with the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems
By Cintya Elizabeth Manrique Anticona, Jos´é Luis Yagüe Blanco, and Isabel Cristina Pascual Castano.
In: Land Use Policy (2023) vol 131.

Origin, Typology and Evolution of the Dehesas in the south of the Iberian Peninsula during the Late Middle Ages (13th to 15th Centuries AD)
By Maria Antonia Carmona Ruiz
In: Landscapes and Resources in the Bronze Age of Southern Spain. RessourcenKulturen(2022) vol 17 (pp. 135-144.

Exploring the causes of high biodiversity of Iberian dehesas: the importance of wood pastures and marginal habitats
By Gerardo Moreno, Guillermo Gonzalez-Bornay, Fernando Pulido, María Lourdes Lopez-Diaz, Manuel Bertomeu, Enrique Juárez & Mario Diaz
In: Agroforestry Systems (2016) vol 90, pp 87-105

Which Factors Favour Biodiversity in Iberian Dehesas?
by Maria Pilar Rodríguez-Rojo, Sonia Roig, Celia López-Carrasco, María Manuela Redondo García, and Daniel Sánchez-Mata
In: Sustainability (2022) Vol 14 no 4

Abandonment and management in Spanish dehesa systems: Effects on soil features and plant species richness and composition
By Reyes Tárrega, Leonor Calvo, Ángela Taboada, Sergio García-Tejero, and Elena Marcos
In: Forest Ecology and Management (2009) 257(2):731-738

The perception of tourism sustainability by stakeholders. The case study of the “Sierra de Aracena y Picos de Aroche” Nature Park, “Sierra Norte de Sevilla” Nature Park and “Sierra de Hornachuelos” Nature Park (Andalusia, Spain)
By María Bahamonde-Rodríguez, F. Javier García-Delgado, and Giedrė Šadeikaitė
In: Land( 2022), vol 11

Land use and land cover dynamics in the dehesa of Sierra Morena Biosphere Reserve (Sierra Norte de Sevilla Natural Park, Spain), 1956-2007
By Juan Manuel Mancilla-Leytón, Antonio Puerto-Marchena and Ángel Martín-Vicente
In: Madera bosques (2017) vol.23 no.2

A comprehensive index for threatened biodiversity valuation
By Mario Díaz, Elena D. Concepción, José L. Oviedo, Alejandro Caparrós, Begoña Á. Farizo, and Pablo Campos
In: Ecological Indicators (2020) Vol 108

Willingness to accept for rewilding farmland in environmentally sensitive areas
By Rubén Granado-Díaz, Anastasio J. Villanueva, and José A. Gómez-Limón
In: Land Use Policy (2022) Vol 116

The post Rewilding or Landscape Conservation in Andalusia? appeared first on Wilder Europe.

In 2050 the world is expected to be carbon neutral. However, this technical effort is insufficient to keep temperatures from overstepping 1.5 °C. We also need to find ways to sequester vast amounts of the carbon emitted in the last 250 years. Hence, the UN also calls for removing an additional 500-1000 Gt of atmospheric CO2 already let loose and storing it on the planet between now and 2100 (equivalent to 7-14 Gt CO2 per year). To put this in perspective, the world’s forests already sequester 7.6 Gt per year. The need and obligation to enhance our current level of sequestration mean that we might have to double up the capacity of our forests.

One way to achieve this goal is by doubling the area of forests, meadows and extensive grasslands as of now! Another is to “animate the carbon cycle” and harvest an additional sequestration of an average of 6.5 Gt C worldwide.

While turning carbon neutral takes time and costs CO2 on the way when building windmill parks or nuclear installations, the beauty of the forest solution is that it might be orchestrated overnight. We just have to stop using considerable tracts to grow feed for animals and instead rewild them. Simply put,  we may just set the action in motion by planting mixed forests, reclaiming the waterways, and letting large herbivores loose.

The Case for EU

In the EU, one opportunity is offered by the widespread agricultural abandonment suffered on marginal lands and a proposed shift towards wildlife ranching. In the EU 2020, 40 % of the total land is actively managed by farmers. To this should be added 15%, which is already either not worked or entirely abandoned. Furthermore, an additional 3 % of the total agricultural land in the EU is projected to be abandoned before 2030, adding 10 to 20 mill ha to this pool. As much of this land is farmed to feed animals, the only consequence will be the need to shift the European diet from north to south towards a more wholesome Mediterranean version (more vegetables and less meat).

Rewilding Mediterranean Rangelands

Much of this abandoned farmland lies in Southern and Eastern Europe (with Spain expected to suffer the most due to climate changes and desertification).

Although large wild herbivores and carnivores were traditionally abundant in the Mediterranean landscapes, the Roman Empire led to a near-complete extermination opening up for domesticated livestock to fill the niche in most of Western Europe. Until the dissolution of the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal, these more traditional agricultural systems continued to favour extensive forms of pastoral production, including the care for extensive and semi-feral livestock, such as the large flocks of wild horses in Galicia and Northern Portugal, which used to roam there. Also, transhumance had a role to play in terms of biodiversity, disseminating seeds across vast stretches of land and regions . However, after entering the EU, large-scale industrialised farming was furthered, leading to the abandonment of more marginal lands, thus emptying the landscapes of animals and people. One consequence has been the more widespread and intense wildfires releasing copious amounts of carbon as well as causing severe losses of human lives and property.

What is needed?

• A courageous new policy adopting an active trophic rewilding policy
• A new ethos regarding nature conservation – from protection to ecosystem restoration
• An increased supply of animals – the need to develop ambitious and international breeding programmes of “pools” of wild animals stemming from free-range flocks
• Reorientation of subsidies from production to ecosystem restoration

The Return of the Ice Age?

One of the questions raised by the rewilding movement is whether this paradigm implies a return to long-bygone landscapes or whether the project is future-oriented. Without a doubt, the latter is the case as rewilding foremost works to reconstitute and reconstruct robust self-regulating ecosystems where nature and the remains of our threatened biodiversity may once more flourish.

However, the question is not mute. We shall never return to any world that was. Nevertheless, we may still use history to inspire us to imagine what kind of landscapes we might encounter in the future, if rewilding became a dominant and preferred paradigm – as should be the case because of its climatic advantages. Might it be a version of the Pleistocene landscape before, during, and immediately after the Last Ice Age? Or – as is it more likely – might a version of the Early Medieval Landscape be the next vision forEuropean Nature?

To ponder this question, we must explore some aspects of what took place in nature and landscape during and after the Roman Empire.

A Return of the Early Medieval Landscape?

“There is a third kind, consisting of animals called URI. These are a little below the elephant’s in size and have the appearance, colour, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. With much effort, the Germans hound them into pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise and practice this kind of hunting. Those who have slain the greatest number of them and can produce their horns publicly to serve as evidence receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can the animals be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, to bind the tips with silver that they may be used as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments. ”
(Caesar De Bello Gallico, chapter XXVIII)

The period of megafauna was undoubtedly the Pleistocene, which ended 11.700 years ago. It included aurochs, wild boars, giant deer, elephants and massive predators. This assembly of animals roamed the Mediterranean when food for herbivorous animals was widely available in the forests along coastlines and rivers whose estuaries, marshes and lagoons would serve as grazing for these large animals. Although extinction began long before the Roman Empire flourished, the Mediterranean forests’ destruction followed in the Roman Army’s footsteps with its insatiable need for energy, metal, building resources, timber for shipbuilding, animals for entertainment and leather for shoes. In this connection, hides from the “Urus” – the auroch – were especially sought after. Thus, a riot broke out among the Frisians, who were obliged to pay their taxes in hides, when the Roman governor in AD 28 suddenly demanded hides from aurochses. The Frisians, who could not meet these demands, suffered forced requisitions of cattle, confiscations of land and enslavement of the families of defaulters, which eventually led to rebellion an mass slaughter.

Thus, judging by Caesar, the Romans not only demanded their hides as tribute, they also tried to domesticate the aurochses. And even though Caesar denied the feasibility, we may judge by the size of Roman cattle that they probably succeeded again and again in mingling domesticated cattle with the grand wild beasts roaming the ancient landscape.

However, these breeding programs fell apart after the Fall of the Roman Empire, leaving the Early Medieval People in a wilder landscape with their small and insignificant animals. At the same time, the diminished flocks of aurochses retreated to the peripheries of Eastern Europe to become extinct as a distinct wild variety in the 16th – 18th century. We do know, however, that more or less semi-feral cattle and horses continued to roam the landscapes. (Hence, it never involved much ingenuity to back breed a passable version of the aurochs as part of the so-called Taurus Project).

To sum up, most European peasants in the Early Middle Ages moved through a vastly different and much more animated landscape than ours, in which wild horses and aurochses mingled freely with semi-feral flocks of cattle and horses. Once again, Europe was home to a much more extensive pastoral economy. Granted, the large areas of the loess landscape in present-day Eastern France and Western Germany continued to be farmed intensively. Incidentally, this landscape became the core of the Carolingian world and the recreation of the West Roman Empire in 800, when Charlemagne was crowned in Rome. However, the traditional pre-Roman agricultural system was once again dominant on the peripheries. 

How should we imagine this landscape? At its core was one or more independent semi-pastoral peasant holdings consisting of intensively cultivated fields near the farm, surrounded by more or less extensively used pastoral grounds – meadows, grazing forests and more remote wildernesses. We know, this landscape came about in the sixth century following tumultuous climatic and political upheavals, widespread cooling in the north and the devastation caused by the Justinian plague. And we know the next four to five hundred years gave the European nature and landscape a much-needed breathing space following the intense overexploitation caused by the Roman Imperial army and administration. 

Perhaps, we might be inspired by these events?

Karen Schousboe

SELECTED SOURCES

Abandoned Farmland: Past Failures or future opportunities for Europe’s Green Deal? A Baltic case-study
By Kristine Valujeva, Mariana Debernardini, Elizabeth K. Freed, Aleksejs Nipers, and Rogier P.O. Schulte
In: Environmental Science & Policy (2022) Vol 128, pp 175-184

Addressing challenges for large-scale trophic rewilding
By Deli Saavedra, Néstor Fernández, and Jens-Christian Svenning
In: Journal for Nature Conservation (2023) Vol 73, 26382, p. 2)

Animating the Carbon Cycle: How Wildlife Conservation Can Be a Key to Mitigate Climate Change
Oswald J. Schmitz and Magnus Sylvén
In: Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development (2023) Vol 65, No 3, pp 5-17

Dynamics of rural landscapes in Marginal Areas of Northern Spain: Past, Present, and Future
José Antonio González Díaz, Rafael Celaya, Felipe Fernández García, Koldo Osoro, Rocío Rosa García
In: Land Degradation and Development.
(2019) Volume 30, Issue2, pp. 141-150

Grasslands and scrublands in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula: Silvopastoral systems and nature conservation
By Fransisco Javier Silva-Pando, Maria José Rozados Lorenzo & María Pilar González Hernández
In: Pasture Landscapes and Nature Conservation. By Bernd Redecker, Werner Härdtle, Peter Finck, Uwe Riecken, Eckhard Schröder
Springer Verlag 2002

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Ed. by P. R. Shukla et al.
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New Perspectives on the Medieval ‘Agricultural Revolution’. Crop, Stock and Furrow.
By Helena Hamerow and Mark McKerracher
Liverpool University Press 2022
Open Access

Trade-offs between passive and trophic rewilding for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
By Andrew J. Tanentzap a, Georgia Daykin a 1, Thea Fennell a 1, Ella Hearne a 1, Matthew Wilkinson b, Peter D. Carey a, Ben A. Woodcock c, Matthew
In: Biological Conservation (2023) Vol 281

The post Rewilding – the Natural Climate Solution appeared first on Wilder Europe.

Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages
Michael Bintley and Kate Franklin
Routledge 2024

Popular representations of the Middle Ages tend to veer, sometimes wildly, between depicting medieval people as setting the foundations for the enslavement of the natural world or representing them as being deeply attuned to the rhythms and complexities of the environments they inhabited.

Inevitably, as this book aims to show, matters were much more complicated, and varied across time, space, society, gender, languages, and cultures to extents that are impossible to encapsulate in a soundbite. Thus, ather than studying ‘nature’ in the Middle Ages, the book instead examines the spaces that people constructed through soil, stone, and song; water and wasteland; plants and animals; and timber, textiles, and texts, which in turn made up the medieval world.

The new book considers some of the many landscapes and environments that medieval people and their cultures created, manipulated, and exploited to different extents, both in the physical realm and in the mind’s eye. These relationships between realms real and imagined, were complex and closely interrelated. The things people encountered in the physical world around them played a significant part in determining what they wrote about them in texts, and how they depicted them in other works of art.

Likewise, the text emphasises a definition of environment that focuses on ‘living with’, inviting readers to think about the more-than-human worlds that medieval people depended on, cared for, constructed, and damaged. Bringing together a wide range of primary source material, including evidence from texts, material culture, and visual arts, the book reflects the diversity of landscapes and human responses to them throughout the course of this period and considers the role that these medieval worlds have played in shaping the modern, both physically and culturally.

Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages is intended as a comprehensive introduction and resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students in medieval studies and history, offering interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational insights into this period of immense change and innovation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael Bintley is Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. He is author of Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (2015) and Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture (2020).

Kate Franklin is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Co-PI of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, a collaborative archaeological research project focused on the layered material worlds of Vayots Dzor, Armenia. Kate is author of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia (2021).

READ ALSO:

FURTHER READING

Medieval Landscapes – Two Points of View

The Frightening Landscape in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages

The Medieval Landscape as a Pastoral Christian Cosmos

The post Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages appeared first on Wilder Europe.

The River Sélune is an 86 km long river in the Manche department in Normandy and drains more than 1000 km2. It has its outspring near Saint-Cyr-du-Bailleul and empties into the bay of Mont Saint-Michel near Avranches. Until the free flow was hampered at the beginning of the 20th century, the countryside featured the typical agricultural scene of Northern France with rolling hills and hedgerows galore – the bocage landscape.

In a description from 1858, we read that the river landscape used to “abound in woods mingled with partial clearances of well-cultivated corn-land, through the midst of which winds the river, flashing in glittering pools until expanding into a broad estuary it meets the sea, which borders the horizon”. La Manche was and is a rural area where the dominant agricultural system is mixed between dairy, seasonal pasture, and the growing of fodder and grain. Although the traditional hedgerows have been largely dismantled, the remains may still be found in the landscape.

Thus, the river would eventually flow into Europe’s largest tidal basin by meandering through the hilly landscape, the deep gorges and the hinterland forests. With the rivers Sée and the Couesnon, the Sélune would become part of a wide marshy delta of considerable ecological significance.

However, since 1914 and 1927, the Sélune’s free flow has been hampered by two of the largest hydroelectric dams in Europe.

Background

Since time immemorial, people have settled on higher ground, yet near lakes, rivers and estuary landscapes. Collecting water for people and animals was always a significant consideration. Later, the use of running water for operating mills and transporting goods and people came in handy. Further, the intensive use of rivers for irrigation was known from prehistory, as was the redirection of water for constructing canals, moats or fishing dams. Finally, the fertile deltas and marshy forelands would entice people to settle on the hilly promontories.

Nevertheless, the scale of redirection and control of rivers by constructing single dams, reservoirs or cascading water flows in the 20th century took the regulation of our watercourses to a new level. Today, less than a third of the world’s largest watercourses flow freely. A recent survey (Habel 2020) reckons that more than 50% of the world’s large rivers have “lost their hydromorphological and ecological continuity”.

However, although dam projections continue, major initiatives primarily seek to demolish them and restore river courses to their former glory. In the EU, the European Water Framework Directive issued in 2000 has acted as a prompt in this direction. While some countries – for instance, Denmark – have hesitated to fulfil their obligation, others, such as France, have taken a more active stance.

The Demolition of the Dams

One such project was the plan from 2009 to demolish the two large dams at the river Sélune in Normandy. The two dams erected at the beginning of the 20th century had radically changed the landscape and the ecology. However, when the government 2009 decided to dismantle the two dams, the main argument was to allow salmon to – once again – spawn upriver. Considered to be the third-best French river in terms of “Salmon Potential”, the Sélune is a classified river for Atlantic salmon, sea trout, brown trout, European eel, pike, sea lamprey and river lamprey. More precisely, the argument was not to restore the entire riverine landscape to its former glory as a robust ecosystem. Instead, the argument was to further the local economy by restoring the river as a rich playground for European anglers. Although the vision was presented as an idea of “rewilding” or “re-naturalising” the river, the aim was minimal. Soon, the local inhabitants came to see the projected dismantling of the dams as primarily intended to further the upper-class anglers as opposed to the local fishermen, who built huts on the lakesides and used to fish in the lakes created by the dams. Most of all, though, they came to feel deprived of their “landscape.

La Paysage – The Landscape

Soon, the restoration project was met with a vocal local opposition focusing on this structural divergence. At the centre was the idea of what “the landscape” – in French, la Paysage – the Sélune was and should be. Together with the concept of “Terroir”, this idea of a “Paysage” continues to play a significant part in the history of the mentality of modern France; as was apparently the case along the banks of the river Sélune.

To understand the conflict, we thus have to note that the people living along the river and next to the lakes did not envisage their landscape as particularly unique. On the contrary, insofar as they had thought about it, their landscape was considered ordinary as opposed to the landscape in the Bay of Mont-St-Michel. Unlike this tourist trap, the upstream and hinterland landscapes were not considered particularly important. Hence, many informants believed that removing the dams and the lakes would gender a bland and banal landscape of “nothingness” of mud and invasive plants. Vocally, they feared living in a “dead” and “empty” landscape in the future. This position was voiced to counter the initial arguments for the demolition of the dams, namely the rewilding of the river in its former glory.

At this point, local officials entered the fray with an “official” alternative. According to local planners, the new valley should be turned into a zone of tranquillity and a “leisure valley”. No longer arguing for a “nature reserve” or “sanctuary”, the valley should rather offer a haven for outdoor tourism. One concern often voiced in interviews and talks was the official fear of the potential overgrowing of the landscape leading to the disappearance of “open views”. Thus, while the local inhabitants feared becoming “homeless”, the planners envisaged a gardened and controlled future of modernity filled with tourism income. As opposed to this position, those carrying out the physical dismantling of the dams (the Normandy Water Agency) argued together with NGOs to “make the river wild once again”, albeit primarily meaning letting the salmon spawn upriver. Unfortunately, we now know their vision was lost to the “outdoor tourism paradigm”.

Different Interests

Soon, the nearly vertical slopes along the riverbed were expropriated by planners and sports enthusiasts of a different ilk. Trails for mountain bikers and runners were built into the slopes offering new and splendid challenges. At the same time, anglers entered the fray reconstructing the riverbeds to lure the salmon and other lesser fish swimming up the river, while the planners sought to accommodate the kayaking people and mitigate the conflicts between the different kinds of outdoor tourists. Also, the planning of events began to feed the imagination of the local managers.

To some extent, these interventions were hampered by another group, the farmers, who likewise tried to appropriate the land, adopting it (if possible) for grazing purposes (both seasonal and year-round) while working the relatively flat and fertile fields alongside the new riverine banks. One fear they voiced was that the new vegetation would soon spring up and hinder cultivation. Also, some farmers were anxious that the “weeds” the naturalists passively let burst forward would spread into their cultivated fields. Some farmers complained that controlling these pests was impossible, even when using pesticides. As farmers had abandoned 10-15% of their land since 1980, their concerns were carefully registered by the local administration and allowed to curtail the passive rewilding otherwise envisioned.

Finally, the hunters experienced a setback. Formerly, the wild boars had been held back on the northern side of the river by the dams or lakes. Now, the new landscape allowed the animals to swim across the river, exploring the farming land and forests to the south and making the hunting grounds less easy to exploit.

Missed opportunity?

While the “Wild West” takeover of the riverside for sports and entertainment began, the practicalities of emptying the lakes and rebuilding the riverbeds and slopes used up the energy of the engineers and conservationists. In practice, this led to a period of passive rewilding, and after 2017 a mosaic of new plant communities colonised the banks and wetlands. Although “agricultural” species dominated, a rich and diversified pool of species did come about. According to the biologists studying the riparian assemblages of plants which cropped up along the restored riverbanks, they differed markedly from the “older” riparian landscapes of the tributaries. This passive restoration led to the conclusion that it would create a mosaic landscape offering up different profiles of plant communities in the riverine landscape.

However, a discussion about the consequences of the continuing eutrophication appears not to have been raised. Consequently, the environmental restoration remains unfinished, and as yet, the future of the drained space – 200 ha in all – has not yet been decided.The question thus remains: to what uses should this new landscape be put? Agriculture, mountain biking, hiking, or kayaking? Or should it be rewilded and turned into a new habitat for wildlife?

National Controversy

Then again, the battle on the dams at Sélune may seem local but are, in fact, part of a broader national controversy fought over the embattled nature, the natural heritage of water mills, fishing wears and ancient property rights.

This story reaches back into Antiquity when watermills became a crucial technological innovation brought to the Roman provinces to be adopted widely in the successor-kingdoms. By the 7th century, water mills had been established in most of Western Europe, reaching into Ireland, and in Carolingian sources, references became legio. Two hundred fifty years later, Doomsday Book from 1086 counted more than 6500 in England. Most of these mills came with a weir creating dams, precious fish waters and a privileged status for the miller and his family. The importance of these visual and economically essential elements in the local landscapes is witnessed by the 100.000 mills and weirs built in the French landscape in the 18th century.

Around these millponds, a particular lifestyle and culture developed, part of which was local food featuring specialities such as bream, bass, carp, catfish, pike etc. In the 20th century, many of these mills were turned into riverside cafés which later metamorphosed into luxurious Michelin-starred hotels serving delicacies from the terroir. In short: they were fabricated as a treasured part of the heritagescape favoured by the privileged middle class. No wonder the Greens chose the free migration of salmon as one of their symbolic “fights”. Thus, a “Salmon Plan” was one of the first acts passed by the new French Ministry for Environment in 1971. Naturally, the dam owners took the bait, and battle commenced.

With the adoption of the European Water Framework Directive from 2000 into French law in 2004, the restoration of French Rivers to good ecological status became obligatory. This implied the restoration of “the free streamflow”, leading to a free and unhindered circulation of fish species and sediments. In practice, the removal of all old fish weirs – and the great dams at Sélune – impeding the migratory fish were the next logical step. Now, the fight was taken to another level, with a line drawn between on one hand the traditionalists with their local economic interests, and on the other hand the ecologists. The result was the formation of numerous factions and associations publishing reviews, monitoring laws, recruiting local people, and organising hearings, meetings and moratoriums.

At Sélune, these initiatives successfully drew out the dam demolition from 2009 to 2017. In the end, the lack of success led to the final shapeshifting of the anti-movement, now focusing on the “undemocratic and technocratic” decision-making process, which they believed undermined local interests and destroyed “la France profonde” with its heritage and landscapes. Vitriolising the debate, this new force occasionally even took to semi-violent harassment of local technicians and managers. Even regular violent attacks were orchestrated, leading to widespread fear of these opponents and their “attitudes”. This may have delayed and compromised the “achievement of environmental quality objectives”, wrote Barroud (2017).

Likely, this is the real reason why the ecological arguments for the demolition of the dams were subsumed by politicians beneath a version of a leisurely landscape filled with sports. And why the rewilded Sélune has been reduced to a late modern dream of a Parks & Recreation venue.

The Sélune River may once again flow freely. And yet, it has so far not turned into the fluid transient landscape nor the “natural backwater”, we may dream of. On the contrary, it remain a seasoned battleground for different stakeholders, upping the ante against the proposed EU Nature Restoration Law.

Karen Schousboe

SOURCES:

Biodiversité végétale précoce de cinq affluents de la Sélune dans la vallée renaturée de Vezin (Normandie)
By Charlotte Ravot, Didier Le Coeur, Simon Dufoir; Ivan Bernez.
In: Naturae (2021) Vol 26, pp.351-361.

Dam and reservoir removal projects: a mix of social‐ecological trends and cost‐cutting attitudes
By Michal Habel, Karl Mechkin, Krescencja Podgorska, Marius Saunes, Zygmunt Babiński, Sergey Chalov, Damian Absalon, Zbigniew Podgórski & Krystian Obolewski
In: Nature Scientific Reports (2020) 10:19210. Open Source.

Ecological restoration of the Selune River. Understanding ecological restoration mechanisms following dam’s removal
INRA 2018

Entre désir de nature et peur de l’abandon : quelles attentes paysagères après l’arasement des barrages hydroélectriques de la Sélune?
By Marie-Anne Germaine, Ludovic Drapier, Laurent Lespez, Marie-Jo Menozzi et Olivier Thomas
In: Projets de Paysage. Revue scientifique sur la conception et l’aménagement de l’espace (2019) vol 20.

New Sélune River (Normandy, France) margins following large dam removal: ecological restoration perspectives considering the successional vegetation dynamics of alluvial deposits
By C. Ravot, M. Laslier L. Muller L. Hubert-Moy , S. Dufour and L Bernez
I. S. Rivers (2018)

Removing Mill Weirs in France: The Structure and Dynamics of an Environmental Controversy
By Regis Barraud
In: Water-Alternatives (2017) Vol 10 No 3

The Failure of the Largest Project to Dismantle Hydroelectric Dams in Europe? (Sélune River, France, 2009-2017)
By Marie-Anne Germaine and Laurent Lespez
In: Water Alternatives (2017) Vol 10, no 3

The post The River Sélune – Restoration of an Ancient Landscape? appeared first on Wilder Europe.

But still nearer to the dawn and the abode of Eurus, in the flowering bosom of the earth lies a region upon which the sun, still mild in its first rising shines lovingly, for its fire is in its first age, and has no power to harm. There, a tempered heat and a favouring climate impregnate the soil with glowers and rich greenery. This little retreat harbours the scents, produces the spices, contains the riches and delights of all the regions of the world. This little retreat harbours the scents, produces the spices, contains the riches and delights of all the world. In this soil ginger grows… The crocus pales beside the purple hyacinth, and the scent of mace competes with the shoots of cassia. Amid the flourishing wilderness strays a winding stream, continually shifting its cours, rippling over the roots of trees and agitated by pebbles, the swift water is borne murmuring along. In this well-watered and richly coloured retreat, I believe, the first man dwelt as a guest – but too brief a time for a guest. Nature created this grove with affectionate care; elsewhere the wilderness sprang up at random.
(From: Bernardus Silvestris: cosmographia, verse 317 ff. Translated by Nigel Palmer 1994)

The essential source to grasp the Christian approach towards nature is Genesis, which came in two Biblical versions – the Priestly and the Yahwist accounts, with the former recounting the story of the creation of the world and the latter focusing on Adam and Eve and The Fall of Man.

Of these two approaches, the Yawist account of the history of Adam and Eve (Gen., II –III) fired up the imagination in the first millennium, while the Priestly account of the creation of the world (Gen., I, 1 -27) became more prominent in the 11th century to peak in the 12th and 13th centuries. This shift in theological priorities coalesced with the 12th-century Renaissance, the growth of academic institutions and the early pursuit of scientific studies.

Late Antiquity and Early Christianity

As usual, thinkers and learned people in the Early Middle Ages took their point of departure in the inherited wisdom from Antiquity. The primary input came from Empedocles via Plato and Aristoteles and was “scientific” in that it focused on the interplay between the four elements: Earth, water, air, and fire. Later, Aristoteles added the fifth aether. The world in Antiquity was created and continuously recreated from these ingredients. In the writings of Plato, another common denominator was the Demiurge: The Craftsman, Opifex, or Artifex, who forged the world. Plato argued in Timaeus that creation was an emanation based on pre-existing ideas that proceeded from the pre-existent, chaotic and eternal “matter” to become the four elements.

However, the Christian cosmogeny differed from these Platonic and Aristotelian models in so far as Christian thinking was obliged to ponder the text – Genesis. To some extent, Plato was more straightforward to accommodate than Aristoteles with his studies of the physical realities of the world. Yet both foundered upon closer Christian inspection. Filtered through this Christian lens, creation was obliged to be considered a process which took place ex nihilo, “out of nothing”. Also and according to Scripture, recreation would occur as for-ordained in Revelation. Further, the transcendent God speaking (the Word of God) performed this creation and recreation. Thus, while early Christian thinkers leaned towards Neo-Platonism more than Aristotelian thought, they were nevertheless more interested in explicating Genesis than aligning this text with the thinking of pagan philosophers.

The early tradition

In the 1st century AD, Jewish philosophers such as Philon of Alexandria pondered the conundrum concerning “ex nihilo”. Later, in the fourth century, Basileus the Great and St. Ambrose wrote theological exegetical works to explain how the world came into being. At the same time, Basileus expounded the text of Genesis in nine Lenten sermons in Greek – later translated by Eustathius – and St. Ambrose wrote the first poetic rendition of an Hexaemeron in Latin, a written exposé concerning the biblical narrative in Genesis. Later, St. Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede built on these texts in their commentaries. Curiously, the Greek title of the genre, Haxaemeron – or the six-day’s work – was kept. The Latin equivalent – De operibus sex dierum was never in common use.

The Vienna Genesis

A common denominator for these texts was the focus placed on the Yahwist version of Genesis, emphasising the creation of mankind and what followed. As opposed to this, the story of the creation of the physical world – the light and darkness, heaven and earth, sea and land, plants and animals- was largely ignored.

One of the earliest illuminated manuscripts solely touching upon Genesis, the Vienna Genesis from the 6th century, is an exemplary illustration of how the story of Adam and Eve was placed in the foreground. The Greek manuscript must be characterised as Byzantine. The preserved part opens with the creation of Adam and Eve, the Fall, and the Expulsion. Another, albeit only fragmentarily preserved manuscript, The Cotton Genesis, is complicated to compare since it was burnt to ashes in the Cotton-fire, and only a few fragments are preserved. Furthermore, these two manuscripts appear to be unique. A corresponding type of manuscript has not been found in Latin.

As opposed to this, the West favoured manuscripts paraphrasing Genesis, but in the vernacular. An early example is the so-called Caedmonian or “Old English Genesis” in the Bodelian (Bodelian Library,ms Junius 11). Other examples are the Millstatt Genesis in Old Middle High German (Kärntner Landesarchic, MS 6/19), The Second Wiener Genesis (Österichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod, 2721) and finally, the Egerton Genesis in the British Library (MS Egerton 1894). Apart from the late Egerton Genesis, the focus in these texts was on the narrative of Adam and Eve; as was the case in the great Carolingian Bibles such as the ‘Moutier-Grandval Bible (BL, Add MS 10546), The Vivian Bible (BnF, Lat. 1), The Bamberg Bible (The Staatliche Bibliothek, Msc. Bibl. 1), and Charles the Bald’s Bible (the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura). Behind the frontispieces of these manuscripts lies a tradition where the story of the Creation begins with the forming and enlivening of Adam and ends with Abel’s murder.

The Creation of the World

In the 11th century, however, the Priestly version of Genesis superseded the Yahwist, emphasising the actual creation of the natural world. One result was an explosion in the “new” genre of the Hexaemeron. Scholars have registered more than 200 different hexamera, most of which can be dated to the 12th or early 13th century when Aristotle was rediscovered, and the scientific exploration of the physical world became the talk of the town in academic circles at the burgeoning universities. It seems as if all the great philosophers and theologians in the 12th and 13th centuries participated in a hexameral community. Among many, Adelard of Bath, William of Conches, Hugh of Amiens, and Thierry of Chartres might be mentioned. The latter’s work inspired Peter Abelard, when Heloise asked for such a text to inspire her congregation of nuns at the Paraclete (The Expositio in Hexaemeron). Other famous examples were the Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, the prosimetrum De Planctu Naturae by Alan de Lille (ca. 1160-1170) and the Architrenius of John of Hauville from c. 1184-85. A late example is the Hexaemeron of the Dane, Anders Sunesøn, writing in Paris and Lund ca. 1200. However, just as many may be mentioned demonstrating the proliferation of the fashion.

One of the central questions raised by this literature was how to grapple with the historicity of Genesis, so to speak, “the Truth of What Happened”. Increasingly, Genesis should not be understood as a neoplatonic or allegorical text but as a scientific and literal text. At this point, the 12th-century scientists and theologians (as said) became profoundly inspired by Aristoteles, which meant that following the initial creation ex nihilo, a manifestation of a force of nature, the “vis naturae”, entered the equation. In general, all had to agree that what happened during the six days of creation was the manifestation of God’s Will. However, when God had established the nature of things, the forces of nature were believed to keep the wheels running. And what’s more, out of this “plasma”, even new forms of beings and animals might come into being. For instance, Abelard wrote of how mules must be considered a new animal and how the phoenix might be reborn out of flames. However, the different writers of hexaemera did not agree on when this “vis” became operable – when creatio stopped, and generatio took over. Thus, Christian de Thierry thought the “vis” worked its way after the first day, while Abelard was more reticent. On the other hand, the latter wrote polemically on the physical determinism of the astrologers, as did Anders Sunesøn. Definitely, the jury was still out.

In the first half of the 12th century, these questions led to vitriolic debates among the “old” and the “new” theologians concerning the status which should be given to this “vis”. The problem was that with this new perspective, the creative force of science came afore to the detriment of the role of God and humans – thus challenging the need for redemption and salvation, and – not least – the church’s central role. If nature ruled the roast, the question was, which role played humans? This question was central to the great schismatic debates between Pierre Abelard and the old theologians in 1120 at Soissons, when in the end, he was obliged to throw his book into the flames.

The art of creation 1000–1200

With Chartres and Paris as the intellectual hotspots, an intellectual war raged among a group of people reaching from north to south. Later, at the end of the 13th century, the more public pictorial and artistic framing of the story of Genesis came to reflect this debate, spreading the idea among the common man that Adam and Eve did not just live through their Creation, Fall, and Expulsion. Simply put, setting the scene led to a popular reimagination of the landscape as Paradise.

Evidence of this was uncovered in 1999 when an art historian, C. Rudolph, published a preliminary inventory of illuminations in Biblical manuscripts. While only seven extant images telling the Priestly version of Genesis can be counted in the 11th century, this grew to 61 in the 12th century and 233 from the 13th century. Also, these many illuminations came from France, Germany, England, Italy and elsewhere. And some of these images did indeed create a new and more scientific approach towards Genesis, such as the one presented in the so-called Caedmonian from c. 1000, which shows the creation of the earth on a double page (pages 6 and 7).  However, the endless fascination of the story of Adam and Eve did not falter. It continued to dominate in early wall paintings, such as those preserved in Hardham in Sussex, England, and Råsted Church in Jutland, Denmark, both from the early 12th century. However, at the end of the Middle Ages, the foreshortened motifs of these murals were expanded into pictorial cycles, such as the one from Fjanefjord in Denmark, depicting the creation of the physical world, the story of Adam and Eve and ending with Judgement Day (ca. 1500).

One of the early pictorial cycles containing this double or triple set of motifs may be found on the south portal of the Cathedral in Uppsala in Sweden, from the end of the 13th century. After a fire in 1204, the Cathedral was moved to a new location, where building began in 1272 in the French Gothic style. We know the design was supervised by a French master builder, Étienne de Bonneuil, who was invited to Uppsala according to a promissory from 1287. The frieze on top of the south portal dates from this time and shows in six roundels the creation ex nihilo leading up to the creation of Adam and Eve. Below, friezes set into the sides of the portal tell the story of the Fall and the Expulsion. Here, we find one of the earliest pictorial renditions of the more “scientific” part of Genesis, which grabbed the attention of the intellectual elite in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The 12th-century Renaissance and the reinvention of natural beauty

Out of the Hexaemera grew another genre, the cosmographies or natural histories of the high Middle Ages. One of these early works is the Cosmographia from ca. 1150 by Bernardus Silvestris, who wrote a poem about nature pleading with Noys – the divine providence – to foster a more well-ordered and pleasing form of chaos. In the first book, the megacosmos, Silvestrus told us how the hierarchies of angels, the heavens and the world’s disposition took place and what this world looked like before man entered the equation in the second book. Part of this natural world is a collection of 118 lines listing no less than 126 plants, echoing the Nature of Things by Lucretius, the Natural History of Pliny, the Etymology of Isidore and other lexicographic works of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. This catalogue of plants gives us a hint of how the natural world was viewed.

According to Silvestris, plants could be divided into three parts: the forest’s trees, the fruit-bearing trees and the aromatic trees as they might be found in their natural habitats. Further, among the trees listed were a number of thorny bushes, perhaps reflecting the natural landscape around the Loire. After the description of the trees followed a catalogue presenting the herbs leading to the description of Paradise quoted above, thus mixing the genres – the scientific report and the poetic rendition of the locus amoenus, the pleasance par excellence (Curtius 1953).

Although Silvestris’ work is not a full-blown Natural History such as those compiled by Albertus Magnus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus a hundred years later, it offers us a vivid picture of the Christian landscape, which he and his contemporaries saw when looking through the tinted glasses of the texts in his library. With him, we envision a remote wilderness barely commanding comments serving as background to a bucolic idyl offering running water, a pleasant climate and a well-stocked medicinal cabinet.

In this perspective, humans were recruited as partners of God, participating in upholding the earth as a microcosm of the Divine universe. By ploughing, sowing, and harvesting the land and tending to the forests, the meadows, and fishing waters, the natural and formed world became the symbol of the reclaimed Paradise, the locus amoenus (the beautiful place as venerated by in Antiquity by Theocritus, Vergil, and later Horace and Servius).

Thus, in a letter to the King of Cyprus from 1267, Thomas Aquinas wrote about where to build a city. “The site should claim the inhabitants by its beauty”(1), he wrote in 1267, adding that the best setting for beauty would be running waters through meadows and surrounded by forests, mountains, and groves.

Finally, it should be mentioned how this rediscovery also included the creation of deer parks and gardens as places for pleasure. The idea of these loci amoeni feasted on the antique poets and was widely adopted in the Middle Ages.

The Locus Horribilus and the sacralisation of the countryside

In classical literature, the untamed wilderness did not figure prominently. The Romans considered the wilds a place for harvesting ferocious predators or feral people for performances intended to stage the death and destruction of precisely this wilderness. While hunting in a Northern pre-Christian context was considered an animistic or shamanic movement through a continuum of more or less cultivated wild spaces, the Romans, copying the Greeks, considered wild animals as totems of the Gods (the owl of Minerva or the peacock of Juno). Foremost, though, they considered these animals to be either domesticated or obliterated. Some “monsters” existed, such as the Pan (faun), the Silenus (satyr), the Pegasus and the Basilisk. However, the medieval phantasies of dragons and other terrifying monsters were not a particularly prominent part of the very civilised world of the Mediterranean.

Not so in the Christian world, where Jesus followed in the footsteps of Elias and famously spent 40 days in the desert among the wild animals. Here, the prophets and saints lived in the mountains, caves and wastelands in Late Antiquity. Later, the impassable forests were added to the list in the Middle Ages. These were known as the loci horribiles, where saintly men were meant to brave the wilderness of the monsters, demons, ferocious predators and their own hearts. “And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes”, claimed Isaiah (Isaiah 35.7, KJV). The advice was adamant. Those places were not only designed as temptations. Rather, the vast wildernesses were intended to be conquered, inhabited and cultivated, in short civilised. Numerous large monastic institutions founded throughout Europe and in the early and high Middle Ages were at their core the “invention” of a wayward hermit and saint.

In the High Middle Ages, however, the Cistercians entered this project with singular gusto and a renewed fanaticism establishing abbeys in rural hinterlands. These Cistercian foundations were known for their economic drive. As such, they became the crucibles for new agricultural technologies, such as hydraulic engineering. Surrounded by broad fields, irrigated meadows, running canals and managed forests with roaming studs of horses, the Cistercian Abbeys became favourite darlings of the European royal families, and even royal mausoleums such as the Alcobaça Monastery in Portugal. At the end of the 13th century, the Cistercian houses numbered more than 500 and might be found from Trondheim in the north of Norway (Tautra Abbey) to Sicily (the Vallebona). Vallebona means the “good valley”.

The Sacred Sites

However, in the interstices between the pagan (Germanic and Norse) ideas of landscapes and the Roman and Christian civilised and well-ordered cities, villas, villages and monasteries fell a multitude of so-called sacred sites. Marked out in the terrains by trees, springs, groves or islands – they constituted more or less vaguely remembered places where Heaven and Earth were destined to meet. As such, they were either desecrated or confiscated for Christian purposes by hermits or local religious people bent on converting the populace. Marked out by chapels, altars, crosses and later crucifixes, they often retained the spiritual connotations of whatever religious fervour was associated with the place. Also, these places were often staged as the endpoint of pilgrimages. Sought by pilgrims flocking to experience the mystique and spiritual enthusiasm attributed to the site led to the construction of the wider European network of paths leading to salvation.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Quoted in: Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, By Clarence Glacken. London 1967, p. 270

SOURCES:

European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
By Ernest Curtius
Princeton University Press 1953

Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West
By M. D. Chenu. (Ed. and trans. J. Taylor and L. K. Little)
Chicago University Press, 1968

Hic Homo Formatur: The Genesis Frontispieces of the Carolingian Bibles
By Herbert L. Kessler
In: The Art Bulletin (1971), Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1971), pp. 143-160

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By Nigel F. Palmer.
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Ed by John Howe and Michael Wolfe
University Press of Florida 1996

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By Conrad Rudolph
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The Place of Nature in Twelfth-Century Spirituality
By Sara Ritchey
First published: 09 July 2009

Authority and Imitation. A Study of the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris
By Mark Kauntze
Series: Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, Volume: 47
Brill 2014

The post The Medieval Landscape as a Pastoral Christian Cosmos appeared first on Wilder Europe.

For most of the Middle Ages, natural forces spelled numerous disasters in the form of floods, water erosions, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms and droughts. In this perspective, landscapes were experienced as constantly shifting, feeding a sense of awe and fright among people suffering at the visible hand of the invisible God, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans [1].

While the Roman landscape in Antiquity had been considered an orderly construction with a peaceful centre – the villa surrounded by civilisation – the landscape of the Early Middle Ages in Northern Europe was univocally sensed as a scary place into which Christian athletes and ascetic monks might seek to find solace amid empty wildernesses, deserts, caves or among wild beasts in the arenas. Later, we may even find their ancestors battling dragons while trying to reclaim a final resting place [2].

We get a sense of this pervading idea of constantly shifting baselines in the writings of the Venerable Bede (672-735) in his famous description of the sparrow, which finds a brief moment of solace in the warm hall during winter.

Thereafter, another of the king’s chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added: “The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So, this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before, we know nothing at all. Therefore, if this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.” By Divine prompting, the other elders and king’s counsellors spoke to the same effect [3].

The Landscape in Beowulf

Another take on this “frightening” landscape may be found in the 7th-century poem Beowulf, where descriptions point out the liminal character of the outlying landscape.

At the centre is the civilised built compound featuring a grand mead hall, Heorot [4]. Attached to this dwelling are the living quarters of the king and queen and likely other buildings such as stables, a baking house and a smithy. Access to this settlement is a stone-paved road leading from the shore to the hall. In between lies the “land” through which the shoreguard guides them. The text says that Heorot shine “ofer landa fela” v. 311 (over many lands). Further, this land is bordered, fitted with a “landgemycu, literally “land-boundaries” (v. 209b) located at the cliffs – the “brimclifu, or the “beorgas steape” Later, we are told that the monster Grendel is a “mære maercstapa” – a renowned transgressor or borderliner (literally one who steps over the mark).

Three other words in the Beowulf-text expand on this cosmos with a dwelling surrounded by land and bordering on the sea.

One is -hlið, which is usually translated as (steep)slope. The word is also found in Old Norse (Old Icelandic: hlið, Danish and Norwegian: li(d). Further, the suffix may be found in a series of placenames all over Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England and denotes a hill or mountainside ending abruptly in a hollow or dead ground at the foot. In the poem, Grendel emerges from a misthleuðum, a damp and spooky hollow of mist. After he is fatally wounded, the monster returns to his fenleoðu, the hole in the marshes, fens. Another topographic word, -hop, also feeds our imagination with its connotation of a place outside the well-ordered world. In Beowulf, we meet the suffix as in fen-hop, an enclosure in the fens or marshes, also known in Kent and Essex. The etymology is probably “hof”, an enclosed “farm”, or “dwelling”; a fen-hop likely refers to a dwelling on higher ground in the marshes. Possibly, it means the same as a wharf, the artificial mounds erected in the marshes by Frisians. Indeed, “remote and secret” outliers in the landscape. Finally, a third topographic word, gelad, also touches upon this watery, marshy landscape. In old English, the word refers to a course, a way, a lode, a watercourse or simply a water crossing. We may imagine that the fen-gelad and the uncuð gelad in Beowulf mean difficult water crossings in the marshy fens.

To sum up: the world of Beowulf seems to consist of a sea, a marshy and misty foreland filled with monsters and challenging to traverse, and – finally – ending in a hollow beneath a steep cliff. On top of this overhang, a paved road leads inland (through the land) to Heorot, the shining hall of Hrodgar.

The layout of this land reminds us of the cosmology of the Norse people, as do other settlements.

Gudme – Cosmology in the Landscape

In Scandinavia, several places are called Gudme, Gudum, Gudsbjerg, Gudhjem (Gudhem), or Gudumlund. Meaning “the home, the mountain or the forest of God”, such places are known from both Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

In Funen in Denmark, in the Lundenborg area, a central place from the Late Roman Iron Age was excavated 9n the 1980s and 90s, documenting how people perhaps planned the location to be a visual rendition of the Germanic cosmology. At the centre of a large settlement estimated to consist of 40-50 farms lay a great hall, unique for its times as to its size and construction. In and outside the hall, more than ten hoards have been excavated consisting of Roman gold and silver coins, golden neck- and armrings, and the finished product, bracteates and other golden jewellery revealing Gudme’s character as a ceremonial and ritualised centre recasting and repurposing imported golden objects to prestige gifts visualising the cosmology and beliefs of the people living at or travelling to Gudme. Part of this cosmology is marked out by the three hills located to the north, south and west of Gudme, Gudbjerg, Albjerg and Galbjerg, meaning, respectively, the hill of the gods, the hill of the shrine and (likely)the hill of sacrifice (of galtr = boars) or enchantments (galdr). To the west was Gudme lake, fed from local springs. From northeast to southwest Gudme and its main burial ground was skirted by the river Tange, and to the east lay Lundeborg with its sheltered landing place, the gate to the Home of the Gods.

Perhaps, Gudme was a reimagination of Asgaard, a symbolically invested site mirroring the fabled “home of the Gods”? Featuring Idavoll – the high ground – with its hallowed centre with the great hall and the additional buildings, it may have mirrored Gladsheim with Hlidskjalf (Odin’s high seat), Vingolf reserved for the women, and Vallhall reserved for the (slain) warriors. Also, the smith, with his central work, cut out transforming ingots to bracteates were located at the centre. At the back to the west would have been Urd’s and Mimer’s Wells, while the entrance to the compound would have been through the burial ground along Tange Å to the southeast. May this have been understood as Niflheim or Hel? Anyway, the entrance into the “Home of the Gods”, Gudme, is believed to have passed through here from Utgard (Lundagaard) – the equivalent of the outer world of Grendel and his mother.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Lien (the hlið) bordering the foreland and the shore at Slettestrand on the Jammerbugt in Denmark © Schousboe 2021

NOTES:

[1] The expression was introduced by the German Theologian, Rudolph Otto (1869-1937), to describe a basic concept in the phenomenology of religion, that is the awe-inspiring discovery of the numinous.

[2] This fate was part of the so-called translation of St. James from Jerusalem to Santiago. After his decapitation in AD44 in Jerusalem, the story was told in the 9^th century that the Apostle was returned to Galicia on a rudderless boat. After reaching land, his apostles had to fight a dragon, tame a herd of wild oxen and overcome a local king bent on destroying them and their cargo. Luckily the bridge broke down between the king’s wilderness and the civilised resting-place they found under the “Marbled Arches”. See Translating the Relics of St. James. From Jerusalem to Compostela. Ed. By Antón Pazós. Routledge 2017.

[3] Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Book 2.13 (ed. Lapidge, SC 489, 364). Translation:
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, A Revised translation with Introduction, Life, and Notes by A. M. Sellar. London, George Bell & Sons, 1907.

[4] The “Beowulf”-Poet’s Vision of Heorot. By Karl P. Wentersdorf (2007). In: Studies in Philology, Vol. 104, No. 4 pp. 409-426

SOURCES

Scandinavian ‘Central Places’ in a Cosmological Setting
By Lotte Hedeager
In: Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods. Papers from the 52nd Sachsensymposium, Lund, August 2001

Gudme-Lundeborg on Funen as a model for northern Europe?
By Lars Jørgensen, Copenhagen
The Gudme-Gudhem Phenomenon: papers presented at a workshop organized by the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA), Schleswig, April 26th and 27th, 2010 / [ed] O. Grimm & A. Pesch, Neumünster: Wachholtz , 2011

Gudme on Funen: a central sanctuary with cosmic symbolism?
By Olof Sundqvist
IN: The Gudme-Gudhem Phenomenon: papers presented at a workshop organized by the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA), Schleswig, April 26th and 27th, 2010
Neumünster: Wachholtz , 2011, p. 63-76

The post The Frightening Landscape in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages appeared first on Wilder Europe.

In a geopolitical sense, Europe was and is a peculiar appendix. Turning a physical map of the Northern hemisphere upside down, we cannot fail to see the peculiar promontory which Europe constitutes. As a mushrooming appendix, it crowns Eurasia, the largest continental landmass on earth. Traditionally and for historical reasons, we are used to considering Europe a continent. Nonetheless, this is, at best, an approximation fabricating the idea that Europe is something apart. Moreover, we lose the ability to see its basic geographical properties, which form a genuinely watery seascape.

To the South, surrounded by the Caspian, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and to the North, The Baltic, the North and the Norwegian Seas, Europe sort of falls into the Atlantic Ocean. Finis terrae west of Lisboa is often considered the westernmost outcrop. However, similar places are located up and down the western coastline, such as the cliff called Finisterra west of Santiago de Compostela, where pilgrims throw their walking sticks into the foaming seas at the exact spot where some believe the remains of St. James landed in his coffin on his rudderless boat. Alternatively, we may point to Land’s End pushing into the Cornwallis Sea from Penwith or the cliffs at Dingle Bay in Ireland. All of these places are truly awe-inspiring. Yet, when we stand on these high cliffs, we are aware of a despairing feeling: we have nowhere further to run. At least, it must have felt like that for some of those wandering people in the Early Middle Ages, who were constantly on the lookout for a place to forge a better future than that offered as slaves to the constant influx of people pulsating through the great steppes of the Eurasian hinterland stretching from China to the Hungarian Plains.

We know from the study of historical languages that on these rocky coasts or marshy islets in the tidal wetlands, the olden people sought refuge – Norse, Frisian, British, Gaelic, Breton, Basque and Galician languages formerly spoken widely, came to be preserved as smaller or larger linguistic pockets in these landscapes bordering the Atlantic Seascapes. Here, they are still revered and (occasionally) spoken. One of these languages – Norse – even became the official language in Scandinavia when “cut” off from its common proto-Germanic roots.

Land relief in Europe shows great variation within relatively small areas. To the south hilly uplands coalesce with more mountainous landscapes which move upwards into the Apennines, the Pyrenees, and the Carpathians, circling the Alps to enter the broad, lower-lying northern plains and the fertile belt of loess. An arc of hilly and mountainous uplands also exists along the north-western seaboard, beginning in southwestern Ireland, continuing through Scotland, and up along the fjord-cut spine of Norway and Sweden.

However, each region or territory contains their own complex features with reliefs, plateaus, and river valleys petering out into deltas bordered by tidal shores and marshy fenlands. In general, the geology of Europe is multifarious and complex and exhibits a wide variety of vistas, from the volcanic landscape of Iceland to the deep Russian forests, the rolling plains of Hungary and the river delta of the Danube feeding the Black Sea.

One of the enduring and distinctive qualities of the different European people was their seafaring traditions and seaworthy capabilities. Evolved through centuries, they went by water on rivers, hugging coastlines or sailing out to conquer their neighbours. Forests and mountains would block and create borders, while water would unite.

Historically, this complex and constantly shifting physio-geographical landscape fostered a multivariate background for numerous people staking out a life and a living which eventually would be different from that of their neighbours in the next valley.

The history of Europe is the history of this nearly unfathomable diversity.

READ MORE:

Medieval Landscapes – Two Points of View

The post Medieval Europe in a Physiographical Sense appeared first on Wilder Europe.

Medieval landscapes may be perceived in numerous ways, such as, for instance:

• Geophysical landscapes (how did geography and climate set limits and create opportunities)
• historical landscapes (how did they physically shift through time)
• settled landscapes (how were they settled)
• inhabited landscapes (how were they lived in)
• farmed landscapes (how were they fenced, tilled, harvested and exploited)
• conquered landscapes (how were they subdued and exploited)
• landscapes of pilgrimages, migrations, or exile (how were landscapes set in motion)
• spiritual landscapes (how were landscapes imbued with sacrality)- and many more

Whichever way, we approach these landscapes – or reconstructions thereof – we have to remember that medieval ways of imagining landscapes differed fundamentally from ours.

We tend to think of landscapes as a given — something which is “there” and which we pass through on our way from here to hither. Occasionally, we may meet a changed sense of rhythm, discovering a tree newly felled by a storm or a brook meandering through a new hollow. Or we detect a new project or development on the cusp of being carried out. However, these shifts and modifications do not change that for modern and urbanised people, a landscape is a “thing” – a background, a stage set, a backdrop; something, through which we pass.

Such was seldom the case with medieval landscapes. The reason being that most people would spend most of their life in the open – herding cattle or sheep, tilling the fields, fishing in the rivers, walking to mill or market, going on a pilgrimage or to war, or simply just bivouacking as homeless people somewhere in the great outdoors. Anyone who has ever been out and about for more extended periods of time will know that suddenly, the landscape comes alive, shimmering and shifting with sights, sounds, smells, savours and stings. Here, the surroundings move. We should remember that in the Middle Ages most people were obliged to spend most of their lifetime outdoors.

However, delving into the meaning of such words as landscape and pagus, subtle differences might be detected. While the Germanic and Northern word vividly show the idea of landscapes as something constantly forged out of the great wilderness, the Mediterranean people moved into a more settled landscape, the pagus. At least, the elite envisioned it so.

Two Ideas about Landscape

Thus, the word landscape is impregnated with the etymologies of” land” and” shape”. Both words derive from Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ + *(s)keb via Proto-Germanic, From *landą +‎ *-skapiz, that is *landaskapiz m . As such, the word is found in all modern-day Germanic “languages”, such as English, German, Frisian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Correspondingly, it may be found in any of these languages’ pre-runners such as Gothic, Old English, Frisian, Saxon, Dutch, High German, and Norse. Remarkably, also, the word seems to more or less mean the same throughout north-western Europe, where landscape means the form the land takes when shaped or wrought in a certain way according to the ideas circulated by people dealing with their land and its outer fringes in the process of becoming.

Intriguingly, though, the corresponding Latin word (with its Romanesque derivations) “pagus” has a more fixed meaning. Derived from Proto-Italic *pāgos, from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂ǵ- – “to fasten, fix”, thus perhaps “a space with fixed boundaries” – it does not involve the idea of land as something which may in any sense be wild or untamed. Rather, this word designates the already formed or shaped landscape, belonging to a “civitas”. Hence, pagus means district, province, region, area, countryside, territory – or simply village. Accordingly, in medieval Latin texts, pagus would foremost mean a settled landscape with hamlets and villages lying outside the city, while a smaller part thereof might be termed pagellus (a wapentake or a hundred) – or just about any delineated inhabited countryside. Derived from this are expressions such as “In Pago Austrasiorum” or “In Pago Allemanorum”, which is the land of the ethnic groups, in this case the Austrasians or Allemans. In classical Latin, Paganus would be a person living there, a rustic or rural person, in short, a peasant (same linguistic root). By derivation, “paganus” also came to mean “pagan”, an unlettered and accordingly heathen or uncivilised (unchristian) person. By the way, such pagans or peasants were best kept at a distance; hence “pago” might also mean a fence erected to protect tilled acres or vineyards – or the boundary between the wild north and the civilised south.

What we “see” here are two different medieval takes on any land – something which is in the process of being created, crafted or taken under the wings of less than sedentary people, as opposed to an already well-structured and organised piece of land consisting of a civilised centre and a somewhat rougher periphery. Lurking outside would be nature and wilderness.

Keeping this in mind, to explore any medieval “landscape” or “pagus” in Northern versus Southern Europe is to investigate the “ideas” or “thinking” behind the specific form which a landscape might take in various locations and corners of Europe and at any time between AD 500-1500. Hence, it stands to reason any overview will be sketchy.

Wishing to unlock how people in the Middle Ages regarded the landscapes in which they lived or moved around, we may proceed in three different ways: one is to study the philosophy and thinking exposed by medieval theologians, philosophers and cartographers who largely inherited the classical idea of what a “pagus” might mean. Another is to delve into the poetic and artistic renditions of landscapes presented in literature and figurative art inside wider Europe, in different contexts and different languages. A third possibility is to “read” the traces of the medieval landscapes as formed by people as they moved through the landscapes and set their mark, “authoring” and “ordering” their surroundings.

SOURCES:

Inventing Medieval Landscapes. Senses of Place in Western Europe.
Ed by John Howe and Michael Wolfe
University Press of Florida 2002

Life in Medieval Landscapes: People and Places in the Middle Ages
By Sam Turner and Bob Silvester
Windgather 2011

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