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).

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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

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Werewolves in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. Between the Monster and the Man
By Minjie Su
Brepols 2023

ABSTRACT:

At the heart of any story of metamorphosis or shapeshifting lies the issue of identity, and the tales of the werewolf (lit. ‘man-wolf’) is just as much about the wolf as about the man. What are the constituents of the human in general? What symbolic significance do they hold? How do they differ for different types of human persons? How would it affect the individual if one or more of these elements were to be subtracted?

Focusing on a select group of Old Norse-Icelandic (were)wolf narratives – the Vǫlsunga saga, Gibbons saga, Sigrgarðs saga frækna, Sigrgarðs saga ok Valbrands, Ála Flekks saga, Úlfhams rímur, Tiodielis saga, Jóns saga leikara, and, on the Norwegian side, Bisclaretz ljóð and a short episode in Konungs skuggsjá this insightful book sets out to answer these questions by exploring how these texts understood and conceptualized what it meant to be human. At the heart of this investigation are five factors key to the werewolf existence or experience —skin, clothing, food, landscape, and purpose — and these are innovatively examined through a cross-disciplinary approach that carefully teases apart the interaction between two polarizations: the external and social, and the interior and psychological. 

Through this approach, the volume presents a comprehensive new look at the werewolf not only as a supernatural creature and a literary motif, but also as a metaphor that bears on the relationship between human and non-human, between Self and Other. Moreover, this approach makes it possible to situate the Old Norse texts into a broader intellectual discourse that extends beyond medieval Iceland and Norway.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

    Werewolves in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature

    Werewolves in the Franco-Latin Tradition

    Texts in Focus

    Goals and Structure

Chapter 1: Þeir fóru í hamina 

The Werewolf’s Skin

    The Skin’s Position in Werewolf Literature

    The Skin’s Position in the Appearance-Essence Binary

    The Skin of the Old Norse-Icelandic Werewolves

    Ála flekks saga: A Case Study

    From lupus to leprosus

Chapter 2: Klæddr eða Nokkuiðr

The Werewolf’s Clothing and the She-Wolf

    The Clothes–Body Dynamics: The Man-Wolf

    The Clothes–Body Dynamics: The Metaphorical She-Wolf

    Dress: Definition, Classification, Function

    From Naked to Clothed: The Knight

    From Clothed to Naked: The Lady

Chapter 3: Et ek þeirra hold

The Werewolf’s Food and Food Taboo

    What and How Does a Wolf Eat?

    Food and Taboo: What Werewolf Does or Does not Eat

    Tabooed Food and Tabooed Sex: The She-Wolf’s Appetite

    The Scale of the Werewolf’s (Possible) Food: The Acceptable

    The Point of No Return: Human and Horse Flesh

Chapter 4: Á skóg með hryggðum

The Werewolf’s Landscape and Mindscape

    Theories and Tools: The Foundation

    Mapping the Werewolf’s Mindscape: An Overview

    Úlfhams rímur: A Tale of Generations

    Úlfhams rímur: Dark Land, Dark Mind

Chapter 5: From Monstratus to Monstrare

The Werewolf’s Purpose

    Classification of the Characters

    (Were)wolf as Learner: monstratus

    The Disguised Hero as Learner/monstratus, or the Werewolf’s Pupil

    Wolf as Teacher: monstrare

    The Konungs skuggsjá Werewolves: The Foundations

    The Konungs skuggsjá Werewolves: Teaching (of) the wolf

Conclusion

What Can We Learn from the Wolf?

FEATURED PHOTO:

Drawing of the Ramsund carving from c. 1030, illustrating the Völsunga saga on a rock in Sweden. Source: Wikipedia

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The Wolf and the Vargr in Early Medieval Scandinavia

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Ecclesiastical Landscapes in Medieval Europe: An Archaeological Perspective
Ed. by José C. Sánchez-Pardo, Emmet H. Marron, and Maria Crîngaci Ţiplic.
Archeopress 2020

When was the parish system created? Why did churches uniformly come to be located inside cemeteries? How did monasteries and different monastic orders come to explore their spatial surroundings? These are only some of the questions, which are raised in an important new book published by Archeopress.

Medieval churches and monasteries are some of our best preserved and most thoroughly studied medieval structures. Numerous excavations and art historical surveys have provided a vast and literally bottomless resource of articles, books, and visual imagery as to the architecture, spatial organisation, ornamental embellishments, soundscapes and emotionality of the heart of the Christian Church.
Less studied, though, has been how these Christian buildings “influenced – and were influenced by their surrounding landscapes in physical, economic, political and symbolic terms.”

A new book edited by three historians and archaeologists from Spain, Ireland, and Romania aims to explore this new and exciting field, which has hitherto played a more peripheral role.

By presenting case studies from across eastern and western medieval Europe, Ecclesiastical Landscapes in Medieval Europe aims to start a Europe-wide debate on the variety of relations and contexts between ecclesiastical buildings and their surrounding landscapes between the 5th and 15th centuries AD.

The book contains 16 papers dealing with 11 very diverse regions: Transylvania, Western Bohemia, Switzerland, Tuscany, the Po Valley, Central Spain, Galicia, England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Ireland. One of the more specific goals has been to overcome the often tacit idea that East and central Europe differs from that of the Western and Northern parts. Unfortunately, though, Scandinavia, Germany and France lack from the collection.

One of the more interesting questions, which are explored here, is the role, which changing social structures and new elites and episcopacies came to play in the transition from the earliest pantheons in urban cemeteries to patrimonial churches next to the manorial centres. But also the significant role which the new monasteries came to play in terms of invigorating the countryside as a Christian – sometimes paradisiac – landscape, such as may have been encapsulated in the Cistercian foundations of the 12th and 13th centuries. In connection with this one of the contributors, James Bond, provides a whole new set of observations on the changes to horticulture and monastic gardens. At the same time, Marco Panato offers the reader an inroad into the sacred wilderness of the Veneto region. Finally, the management and manipulation of water resources play a significant role in the contribution of monasteries in Transylvania.

This book is a welcome contribution to the current focus on landscapes as an essential part of the medieval world. As modern historians, we have difficulty imagining both the closeness of medieval communities, and the human need to transgress the boundaries to trade as well as to seek spiritual consolation. Also, we tend to forget the nearly superhuman effort, it took to erect churches, dig a grave, or plant and nurture an orchard.

This book offers a welcome input to this imaginative effort, which we have to muster whenever we try to visualise the lives of our medieval ancestors. Also, it sets the spotlight on the diversity of histories from different parts of medieval Europe.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Towards an Archaeological Study of Medieval Ecclesiastical Landscapes in Europe – José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, Emmet H. Marron and Maria Crîngaci Țiplic

FIRST PART: ECCLESIASTICAL TOPOGRAPHIES

1. Lesser Churches, Kin-groups and Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Archaeological Evidence from Corcu Duibne, Ireland – Tomás Ó Carragáin

2. By Land and Sea: Medieval Places and Ways of Faith in the Isle of Man – Andrew Johnson

3. The Late Antique Ecclesiastical Settlement of Los Hitos and the Rural Landscapes of the Visigoth Capital (Toledo, Spain) – Isabel Sánchez Ramos and Jorge Morín de Pablos

4. Landscapes of Christianisation. The Emergence and Evolution of Church Power in the Tuscan Countryside During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages – Gabriele Castiglia, Stefano Bertoldi and Cristina Menghini

5. Christianization and Transformation of Religious Landscape in (West) Bohemia – Martin Čechura

6. The Rise of the Parish System in Transylvania as Reflected by the Archaeological Discoveries – Maria Crîngaci Țiplic

7. Architectural Interferences in Medieval Transylvania (13th–15th Centuries): the Archaeology of Orthodox Churches in a Catholic Landscape – Daniela Marcu Istrate

8. The Archaeology of Romanesque Churches in Transylvania (11th–13th Centuries) – Ioan Marian Țiplic and Maria Crîngaci Țiplic

SECOND PART: MONASTIC LANDSCAPES

9. Monastic Landscapes in the Isle of Man: Ad 1100 to 1540 – Peter Davey

10. On the Edge: Excavations at Whitefriars, Perth, 2014-2017 – Derek Hall

11. Cistercian Rievaulx Abbey and the ‘Transformation’ of King Henry II’s Wasteland – Freya Horsfield

12. Evolution, Innovation and Symbolism in Medieval Monastic Gardens – James Bond

13. Ecclesiastical Landscapes in early Medieval Galicia: Physical and Symbolic Transformations – José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo and Marco V. García Quintela

14. Stone Building in the Alps: Müstair Monastery in its Landscape Context – Sophie Hüglin and Patrick Cassitti

15. Rural Monasteries and Wilderness in Carolingian Northern Italy: Forest, Water and Ecclesiastical Landscapes – Marco Panato

16. Similarities and Differences of a Benedictine and a Cistercian Abbey as Reflected in the Landscape. Beginnings for a Comparative Approach – Ünige Bencze

Karen Schousboe

FEATURED PHOTO:

Los Hitos, Orgaz, Toledo © Archeología Medieval

READ MORE:

Santa Mariña de Augas Santas

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