The thesis of Negotiating the Landscape is that each monastery in the medieval West had its own local relationship with nature which was differentiated and complex—sometimes bucolic and sometimes conflictual. This relationship both shaped the natural world in which they lived out their religious and economic vocations and shaped their monastic identity. The author argues against the thesis of Lynn White that, sanctioned by the biblical mandate of Genesis 1:26, “Let them have dominion over the earth,” the monks sought to use and exploit nature. The author adds complexity to the theory of Jacques Le Goff and others that the monks saw the wilderness as a wild and dangerous wasteland representing their withdrawal from the world.

Using as a case study the histories of two Benedictine royal monasteries, Stavelot and Malmedy from the mid-seventh to the mid-twelfth centuries in the Ardennes forest (presently Belgium and Luxembourg), she describe how the monks carefully constructed a dynamic identity of withdrawal and engagement in relation to the cultural, ecclesial, and political forces around them including their natural environment. In a careful reading of her sources she shows in a micro story how the monks used the forests around them for their vocational identity but also carefully sustained them for the future. They were good stewards of the forests to which they withdrew where they harvested firewood and lumber and also raised pigs, sheep, and goats. In their environmental imagination the forests to which they withdrew served as a metaphor for everything beautiful and heavenly and everything which threatened them: storms, wild beasts—wolves and wild boars and human predators.

Arnold succeeds in her attempt to upset the long-standing view that the monastic relationship with nature was static and simple. She carefully does “environmental exegesis” (13–14) of monastic charters, property feuds, tax records, letters, miracle stories, and most prominently lives of saints (hagiographies) written by anonymous monks from the abbeys to construct arguments for their interests and causes. She also draws heavily on the monks’ secular classical sources, especially Vergil's Georgics. Her environmental exegesis which she employs as a method includes word studies on the many terms the monks used for “forest,” source analysis from secular genres and contemporary chronicles, but her best work is in the literary analysis of the hagiographical accounts.

Throughout the volume she is in dialogue with the current medieval scholarship not only on environmental history but also the economic and spiritual value of the theft and the translation of relics of the saints and “historical topography” (186) putting the scholarship of Patrick Geary and Amy Remensnyder and others into a richly textured historical account. She is much more interested in the cultural and spiritual issues of monastic identity and the environment than detailed economic analyses. In the exegesis of her selected sources to show the complexity of the monastic interaction with nature and their culture—especially royal and ecclesial power structures—she intentionally omits their profound biblical hermeneutic to privilege other available genres. This is laudable but biblical sources in their reading and liturgies also inspired their monastic identity and the dynamics of attraction and withdrawal exemplified by Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus and others who negotiated their landscapes as prototypes for the athletes she describes.

In addition to her careful and groundbreaking scholarship, the volume is a delightful historical mystery. When at times the reader feels the author is drifting into topics beyond her focus, one discovers in the epilogue that they are carefully placed clues along the way to show why Abbott Agilolf was murdered on Easter Sunday walking in the forest of the Ardennes. In the process of the account we learn when and why two hagiographies in defense of Malmedy's rights and claims were written in anachronistic settings that earlier scholars had written off as historical inaccuracies. A late eleventh-century account placed in the context of a victory by Charles Martel in defense of Malmedy is not a historical error but a deliberate “rewriting and recontextualization of sources” (216) to lay claim to imperial protection in its conflicts with the bishop of Cologne and twin-abbey Stavelot.

What we used to call “diplomatics” need not be dry painstaking analysis of historical documents. This book is beautifully written and artfully constructed displaying a credible historical imagination equal to the environmental imagination of her subjects. It is worthy of the natural beauty that it describes and a model to be emulated by students of history and others who want to tell micro stories that provide richness and density to the generalizations that historians draw. As Arnold points out, enormous political and ecclesial changes like the Investiture Controversy and within monasticism the Cistercian reforms, the Franciscan reevaluation of the theology of nature and money, and the Beguine movements changed the context for these Benedictine monasteries. In fact, a changing context is responsible for the two eleventh century hagiographical accounts that she interprets to reveal the monks’ identity and relationship to a landscape that is getting more crowded with monasteries, farmers, and a growing economy. She tells their stories with a sense of empathy and understanding which I commend. Arnold makes it clear that despite their conflicts with their landscapes as both natural and human enemies emerged from the forests, the monks also sourced and resourced the world around them. These monasteries were cultural and spiritual assets worthy of faithful and imaginative study.