‘Where the Wild Things Are’: The Medieval Augustinian Order’s Perception of Nature between Tree Lore and Environmental History

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how medieval woodlands around Augustinian convents could convey messages of power. In the thirteenth century, the papacy threatened the Augustinian friars with suppression on the grounds of their ‘lack of antiquity’. Previous scholarship showed that, in reaction to this, the friars developed a fictive past in which they claimed to have been founded by St Augustine. This article shifts attention away from human agencies to the environment. It argues that natural landscapes, most prominently woodlands, were key resources which could be used as powerful assets when asserting the antiquity of the Order. The two cornerstones of this investigation are a cluster of hermitages around Siena with a sacred ilex forest, the claimed dwelling place of the eremitical predecessors of the Augustinian friars, and the convent of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, erected on the locus of an ‘evil walnut tree’ above the tomb of Nero. This study examines how these key spiritual centres used woodlands to display antiquity and prestige. Further attention is paid to convents on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea to show how the sea could be perceived as equivalent to the forest. A close analysis reveals that Augustinian convents were often situated in a liminal position framed between the urban fabric and natural landscapes, such as the forest and the sea. This article thus illuminates how, in a similar way to secular rulers and their palaces, the Augustinian friars used the natural environment in strategic ways to enhance the power of their convents.