terra deserta (13. 673)

Mid-grade curious as to why the descriptor wilderness was likewise applied to the deserts spaces of the Bible and to our more conventional understanding of untamed forests, we found this excerpt from a new book by Cal Flyn on the savage landscape rather inexhaustibly fascinating. Though these habitats might seem poles apart—with only spirtual challenges lurking in the former, medieval monks in the Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire solidified parallels between the tribulations of the prophets, the desert mothers and fathers, and the rewilding of vast swaths of land in Provence, Bretagne, Burgundy and Transylvania and other former colonies saw a sharp decline in population and many villages, villas and fortifications abandoned along with fallow fields that allowed the return of the forest primeval. Returning from the brink of extinction, with attendant lore and literature surrounding the liminal woodlands at the edge of cultivation and urbanisation became an allegory for the trepidation of earlier time out of mind, causing a stark rebellion against the encroachment of the undomesticated with commiserate suspicion for its denizens both human and non-human, transmogrifying contemporary fears of famine and pestilence to remote dwellers, bears and werewolves, though counter-narratives also prevailed with the ancient masonry of ruins repurposed as churches and city walls.