Once the frightful wastelands and hiding places of beasts, [but] now the most delightful habitations of men

     "We find something of this idea [that 'Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country is equivalent to an act of Creation'] recurring in the European Middle Ages, when religious orders moved into forests or wastes and turned them into cultivated land.  It was claimed on behalf of these monasteries in Carolingian times that they brought it about that 'Horridae quondam solitudines ferarum nunc amoenissima diversiora hominum'."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 336, citing Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian shore (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1967), 117, citing (apparently) sec. V of the Præfatio to Acta sanctorum ordinis S. Benedicti ... : saeculum tertium / collegit domnus Lucas d'Archery congregationis Sancti Mauri monarchus ; ac cum eo edidit D. Joannes Mabillon eiusdem congregationis ... ; pars prima (Venetiis : apud Sebastianum Coleti & Josephum Bettinelli, 1734), xxi:

horridæ quondam solitudines & latibula ferarum : nunc hominum amœnissima diversoria, . . .

For diversiora, read deversoria < deversorius, -a, -um.