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Ellen Arnold is a medieval historian at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her research area is the early and central Middle Ages, with a particular interest in medieval Germany and the Low Countries. She investigates the ways that medieval people incorporated nature and the environment into both their everyday life and into their cultural imagination. Her forthcoming book, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes, explores the ways that monastic communities told stories about both wilderness and domesticated nature, and how those stories became part of their historical and environmental imagination. Before coming to Ohio Wesleyan, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and at Macalester College, after receiving a PhD from the University of Minnesota. At the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies, she will be working on her second major project, a history of medieval views of rivers and water control.
RCC Research Project: Cultural and Religious Views of Rivers in the Middle Ages (pdf, 9 KB)
Film Interview with Ellen Arnold
Selected Publications:
- Negotiating the Landscape: Monastic Identity and Environmental Imagination in the Medieval Ardennes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, (forthcoming, December 2012).
- “An Introduction to Medieval Environmental History.” History Compass 6 no. 3 (2008): 898–916.
- “Engineering Miracles: Water Control, Conversion, and the Creation of a Religious Landscape in the Medieval Ardennes” in Environment and History 13 no. 4 (2007): 477–502.