UC Riverside

Landscape descriptions are textual products of subjective experiences in a landscape. In this dissertation I make use of both literary landscape descriptions for the purpose of understanding both what people in late antique Gaul thought about their landscapes and how they experienced and interacted with their landscapes. I propose that the landscape within which an author lived and wrote shapes the author’s experiences by imposing natural limits on the author’s actions and thus the author’s written works. There are three elements in this proposal: 1) landscape; 2) a person, i.e., the author; 3) the written works produced by the author. The physical properties of the landscape define the range of possible human action. The physical properties also impose limitations. Therefore, landscape shapes and constrains the human activity within it. Historical landscapes are accessible to modern historians through the study of modern topography, archeology, and, to a lesser extent, paleoclimate data. This body of archeological and scientific knowledge provides insight into the physical world inhabited by late antique authors, which allows a partial reconstruction of historic landscapes that shaped the lives of late antique authors. In this dissertation, one author and his relationship to his landscape is analyzed in each chapter, including Palladius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Avitus of Vienne, and the anonymous hagiographer of the Life of the Jura Fathers. By identifying the natural limits set by a local landscape on each author and how the author responded to those limits, it is possible to determine how each author mentally organized his landscape. Therefore, for each author analyzed I answer two questions: First, how did an author’s landscape impact the author’s literary works through the author’s experience in it? Second, how did each author mentally organize and interpret his landscape? The answers to these questions tell us how an author thought about and interpreted the landscape in which he lived. Even though the direct objects of my study are literary sources and historical landscapes, the primary subjects of my study are people, late antique authors whose literary works have survived.