44 - Monastic Landscapes

Summary

What kind of physical landscapes did particular monastic orders prefer for the locations of their communities? How did some religious communities create places of isolation in which to settle? How did monasteries create infrastructure, such as diverted waterways, to make it possible to inhabit a chosen space? How did monks and nuns imagine their relationship to the natural environment around them? What can we infer about the policy of rulers, or the relationship of monasteries to centers of power, from the lands donated to a given community or order? These are some of the many varied questions that animate the study of medieval monastic landscapes, a field of inquiry that emerged in 1955 with the publication of William George Hoskins’s groundbreaking monograph, The Making of the English Landscape, and that has since developed its own methodology within the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, history, and archaeology. This chapter offers an introduction to the analytical instruments and methods of research on monastic landscapes of the high Middle Ages.