Axing the Forest, Taming the Pagan: Transforming Landscape and Converting People, between Environment and Representation
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Deforestation is a paradoxical gesture: viewed in an anthropocentric light, it contributes to the civilizing of uncouth nature, transforming earth’s surface for human domestication, however, the destructive reality of deforestation’s long-term environmental consequences and the destruction of entire ecosystems has impressed itself upon even the staunchest industrialists today. Premodern Europe was radically shaped by deforestation, especially following the massive clearings spanning the 11th–13th centuries. Shaping landscape was distinctively linked with practical needs in these centuries, but also with ideals and ideas. One of these was to create a divinely designed earth, a locus amoenus. In such a (biblical) conception many metaphorical images related the reality of landscaping to religious, moral, or social tropes: the disposable tree became the medium through which humanity understood itself and its earthly place. Thus, one popular image depicted righteous (Christian) mankind as a fruiting, branching tree, while the wicked (heretics and pagans of all kinds) were withered and corrupt and therefore pruned. Hence, axing vegetation came to be associated, at least since the early Middle Ages, with the taming of all kinds of populations who would not conform to the established religious, moral, or social order. This contribution examines deforestation as a transformative act, profoundly impacting cultural topographies of social groups, and simultaneously thematized in texts and images as a vector of social and religious conversion. I take as a starting point an episode of deforestation from St. Martin’s life, frequently represented in the central Middle Ages, to highlight dynamics likening the felled tree’s body to a pagan body, tamed and converted into a “raw material” for a new Christian edifice. In this endeavor, I also wish to extend the usual purview to medieval contexts outside of Christendom to emphasize similitude and dissimilitude in the cultural use of deforestation and silviculture within religious conversion. |