The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary 1843845989, 9781843845980, 9781800103078

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The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages ISSN: 2399–3804 (Print) ISSN: 2399–3812 (Online)

Series Editor Michael D.J. Bintley Editorial Board Jennifer Neville Aleks Pluskowski Gillian Rudd Questions of nature, the environment and sustainability are increasingly important areas of scholarly enquiry in various fields. This exciting new series aims to provide a forum for new work throughout the medieval period broadly defined (c.400–1500), covering literature, history, archaeology and other allied disciplines in the humanities. Topics may range from studies of landscape to interaction with humans, from representations of ‘nature’ in art to ecology, ecotheory, ecofeminism and ecocriticism; monographs and collections of essays are equally welcome. Proposals or enquiries may be sent directly to the series editor or to the publisher at the addresses given below. Dr Michael D.J. Bintley, Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF

Previously published: 1: The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles, Corinne Dale 2: Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations, Michael J. Warren 3: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, Britton Elliot Brooks

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Liz Herbert McAvoy

D. S. Brewer

© Liz Herbert McAvoy 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Liz Herbert McAvoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 598 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 80010 307 8 (ePDF) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover: Temptation, in Ms Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF Fr 19. Reproduced with permission BnF. Design: Toni Michelle

For my granddaughter Liliwen Chung Ting Yau and my grandson Gwilym Chung Yin Yau … fel rhosyn Saron, fel lili’r dyffrynnoedd …

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction: Gardens, Landscape and the Human Imaginary

1

1. Out of Eden: The Framing of Eve

25

2. Une communion inimitable: Material Garden Hermeneutics in the Work of the Women of Mechelen, Herrad of Hohenbourg and Hildegard of Bingen

77

3. Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn: An Arboreal Imaginary of Flourishing

141

4. Relocating Mechthild’s Garden Hermeneutics: The Middle English Poem Pearl

195

5. ‘Straitened on Every Side’: Susanna’s Garden Dilemma

261

Afterword: The Garden Hermeneutic in the Age of COVID-19

333

Bibliography

337

Index

361

ILLUSTRATIONS Plates appear between pages 194 and 195. Plate 1

St Gall Map (ninth century), Codex Sangallensis 1092, f.r. By permission of the Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen.

Plate 2

Reconstruction of the St Gall monastic precinct by J. Rudolf Rahn in Geschichte der Bildenden Künste in der Schweiz. Von den Ältesten Zeiten bis zum Schlusse des Mittelalters (Zürich 1876). Image in the public domain.

Plate 3

The Birth of Eve, Bible Moralisée. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex 2554, fol. 1r (detail). Courtesy of the Austrian National Library.

Plate 4

Besloten hofje, Mechelen (Malines), Belgium. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

Plate 5

Simone dei Crocefissi, ‘Il Sogno della Madonna’. By permission of the Ministry for Wellbeing and Cultural Activity and Tourism: Photographic Archive of the Estensi Gallery. Photography by Carlo Vannini.

Plate 6

The Dreamer and the Pearl-Maiden. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.X, fol. 42. © British Library Board

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

N

o book ever emerges from a vacuum, a maxim that is particularly true of this one. Instead, it is the product of many years of intellectual and, sometimes, less formal thought, debate and discussion concerning the gendered implications of enclosure, whether in the Middle Ages or in more contemporary times. While my earlier work focused on the gendered dynamics of a specifically anchoritic enclosure and the productive environment it often generated for women, my more recent interests have veered to the ways in which enclosed gardens and their pervasive hermeneutic sets offered up similarly conflicting – and often equally provocative and productive – modi operandi for women within medieval contexts. My thanks, therefore, go to all those scholars who have come before me, too numerous to enumerate here, who have helped to generate many of the questions that lie behind this book. Nevertheless, there are some whom I must name and thank, such has been their input into this project’s successful completion. Firstly, Trish Skinner, for many coffee breaks and animated suppers when we discussed the type of issues covered in this book and began to formulate a viable research project together – one that was to receive Leverhulme Trust funding and ran between 2015 and 2017. I am also grateful to Trish and to Theresa Tyers for their committed and enthusiastic contributions to the project as research assistants, and for the various fine publications they too produced and co-produced under its aegis, again funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Sincere thanks are therefore due to the Trust for backing the project, for its help and advice along the way, and for making these publications – including this present book – possible. Thanks are also due to the former College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University for granting me an additional sabbatical to continue work on this book. Without that precious time, it would still be in the making. I am also indebted to Kathryn Maud, who

Acknowledgements

did such an excellent job of covering my teaching and administrative duties while I was on study leave, and to Roberta Magnani for her leadership and her willingness to embrace additional duties while I was away. Similarly, I owe an enormous debt to my valued colleague and friend, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Swansea University during the last phases of this book, for whose careful readings, advice and discussions I am particularly grateful. I am also deeply indebted to my dear friend and colleague, Catherine Innes-Parker, who died suddenly in September 2019. The many years of enthusiastic support we shared for each other’s work and for the many discussions enjoyed in different parts of the world, usually over a bottle of wine, sometimes more, on all those things we held in common also form an important part of the framework supporting this book. Her legacy is felt on every page and she is sorely missed. Additionally, widespread thanks go to my PhD student and research assistant, Ruth Worgan, for her diligent and committed help in the closing stages of this book. Again, without her energetic and enthusiastic contribution to practical issues such as proof-reading and bibliographic compilation, this book would have been much longer in the making. Thanks, Ruth, for your energy and for your infectious good humour. Gratitude is also due to my other research students, Kathryn Loveridge, Maria Zygogianni and Emily Payton, along with all those MA students who have opted for my classes on the medieval hortus conclusus since their inception in 2017. Their acute interest in all aspects of medieval gender, sexuality, gardens and other forms of enclosure has also helped to shape some of the thinking behind this book. As ever, my deep gratitude is due to Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer for the enthusiasm with which she has always supported my work and for her belief in my projects and methodologies. As ever, it is both a pleasure and privilege to work with such an empathetic, well-informed and utterly professional editor who always somehow manages to ease the painful road towards publication. My final thanks, of course, go to my family, who have lived with this particular book for a considerable time – and with the various xii

Acknowledgements

highs and lows that any such production brings with it. Regular supplies of coffee and wine have generally done the trick and I am grateful to them all for their continued support and interest in what I do. This has made all the difference. Since embarking on this book, too, I have been blessed, first with a granddaughter, Liliwen, and, more recently, with a grandson, Gwilym, both of whom have lit up the present in ways I could never have imagined and who bring joy every day in infinite ways. This book, therefore, is for them. May they always flourish as a garden.

xiii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BL

British Library

CCCM

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis

EETS

Early English Text Society

MED

Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath and S. M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1956–)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

o.s.

Original Series

PG

Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Graeca, ed. J-P. Migne, 161 vols (Paris, 1857–66)

PL

Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Latina, ed. J-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris 1844–64)

TEAMS

The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages

Introduction: Gardens, Landscape and the Human Imaginary … metaphors on vegetation course everywhere through human speech and form the hidden scaffold that supports the whole of its imaginary.1

I

n the early summer of 2016, a report commissioned by the National Gardens Scheme on the links frequently posited between gardens and human health was published in Britain. Its author, David Buck, presented this report’s intention as making an important contribution to ‘the understanding, assessment and development of the links between gardens, gardening and health’, adding that it was also purposed at demonstrating how ‘gardens and gardening can make a strong contribution to keeping us well and independent’.2 One of the report’s primary recommendations was that local governments work to ensure the sustainability of civic green spaces so that they may ‘continue to deliver positive health benefits’ on an equitable basis, particularly for those who may not have access to such spaces in a private capacity.3 This work, moreover, brings together much of what we have suspected but which has frequently remained unproven: as humans we are far more dependent on the so-called ‘natural’ world around us and its cyclical changeability than we have come to imagine. Indeed, considered within a time of a desperate climate emergency when the givens of that ‘natural’ world are being upended by human denial of its own global impact, the need to understand the importance 1 2

3

Rudolph Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener, trans. Henry Martin (New York: McPherson & Co., 2006), p. 12. David Buck, Gardens and Health: Implications for Policy and Practice. Report funded by The King’s Trust (2016), here at p. 2. Available online at: https:// www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/gardens-and-health. Accessed 16 April 2020. Buck, Gardens and Health, p. 2.

Introduction

of horticultural landscapes and their role within the human imaginary realm is, perhaps, even more pressing than ever. For the purposes of this volume, my use of the term ‘imaginary’ follows the accepted Lacanian view of the world and human responses to it, as refracted through image and imagination rather than through the actual conditions of existence (the ‘real’). It operates according to the premise, moreover, that, under patriarchy, such a constructed imaginary is both phallic and masculine, forming a hegemonic system of understanding that has traditionally rendered its expression (the ‘symbolic’) as male-dominated and ultimately comprehensible only via the male gaze. Post-Lacanian analysis goes further, suggesting that the patriarchal imaginary is ultimately dependent upon the feminine (and other subordinates) for its hegemony, rendering the possibility of a female imaginary within such cultural contexts all but impossible.4 The ‘natural world’ adheres closely to this subordinated category, having been essentialised as ‘feminine’ within traditional patriarchal thought. Thus, it has been rendered very difficult to wrest back the experiences it offers in service of a more female-coded imaginary and its symbolic realm. However, as Rudolph Borchardt pointed out in his 1938 philosophical meditation on the meaning of gardens and gardening within the human imaginary (as quoted as the epigraph to this introduction), the proliferation of vegetal metaphor within human language demonstrates a far closer affinity between the ‘real’ conditions of our experience as humans and those of the plant world than has ever been fully acknowledged. While this present study would largely concur with Borchardt’s stance here, what is ultimately at stake with such a position for a specifically feminist inquiry is perhaps best summed up by his later observation (and using an appropriately medieval metaphor himself), ‘The human soul has always known itself to be more related to the flower than 4

For an excellent study of such post-Lacanian feminist philosophy, focusing specifically on Luce Irigaray (on whom I draw extensively in this study, amongst others) as one of its most prolific exponents, see Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). For a detailed examination of Lacan’s interest in the medieval period and its imaginaries, see Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

2

Introduction

the animal’ and, as a stand-in for the feminine, the correlation is perennial because this exemplary floral vegetal world ‘makes a gift’ of itself.5 While providing a helpful starting point for this present investigation into the ways in which gardens – and enclosed gardens, in particular – play out in terms of gender and power within the religious imaginary of the Middle Ages, aspects of Borchardt’s stance are nevertheless somewhat problematic. At the forefront of his conceptualisation, for example, is the idea of a natural world (inevitably a ‘she’) set apart from the human as discrete entity, an ‘other’ realm that can ‘gift’ the human its flowers, medicines, aesthetics – and, as we have seen, its linguistic figurations. Within this framework, then, the natural world, like women, is there to be plundered and exploited in order to facilitate, maintain and aestheticise the power structures of patriarchal thinking. More recent philosophical studies of the interrelation between human culture and the natural world, however, have established no such lines of division between self, other and the ‘natural’ environment, preferring instead to point out that humans form only a connected part of the world around them, which they nevertheless seek to appropriate and control as their subordinate ‘other’. Such interrelational philosophies suggest, moreover, that without a balanced symbiotic intra- (rather than inter-) action, human survival within the world in which it is imbricated is not ultimately possible. Luce Irigaray, for example, writing in dialogue with Michael Marder, has argued that, since we have chosen to live in a culture that favours what she terms ‘brightness and visible productions’ over the ‘secret process of the living’, the former has led to the scorning of the latter: that is to say we have come to devalue or ignore the invisible processes of growth, fecundity and reproduction that take place ‘in the darkness of the soil’ and that have long been associated with the feminine. As a result, what we are then left with is a life that ‘little by little, vanishes – ours, that of the planet, and that of all living beings that inhabit it’.6 Marder agrees with this standpoint, responding to Iriga5 6

Borchardt, Passionate Gardener, p. 12. Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 39 and p. 40.

3

Introduction

ray’s assertions with his own intra-active and entangled conception of the plant–human nexus: ‘For too long’, he tells us, ‘our psychic and physical dwelling places have been constructed in such a way as to separate us from the threatening outside world, until we cut ourselves off almost completely and lost touch with it.’7 Both philosophers, therefore, consider the loss of detailed perception of the micro- and macro-dynamics of the natural world, a loss exhibited especially in the west as symptomatic of a desperate culture that is ultimately ‘forgetful of life’ and thus in a constant process of exiling itself from it. Moreover, again for both philosophers, such a ‘forgetting’ has hardly been driven by a gender-neutral impetus. As Marder also asserts: ‘The ideal, disembodied presumably gender-neutral (though actually masculine) protagonist of metaphysics has not ceased to pronounce his fraudulent hoc est corpus meum upon encountering anything and anyone in his environs’.8 Here, Marder points towards the historical tendency of male intellectual thought to masquerade as the universal, and male exegesis of cultural grand narratives to stand in for ‘truth’. Marder also draws upon a process famously identified by Jacques Derrida as having long consolidated into the ‘old and enormous root’ of western patriarchal ‘phallogocentric’ discourse, using a metaphor that will recur frequently in this present study as a figure of the master’s language.9 For Derrida, moreover, the hegemony of this phallogocentric old root is neither an ‘accident’ nor a ‘mistake’, and it is crucial that we must take it into account on the level of language as the basis of signification itself. The idea of the ‘phallogocentric’ thus unites the primacy of the phallus as a provider of meaning with the way in which that meaning is articulated and consolidated, ultimately combining them as the ‘law’ [logos]. As such, the ‘old root’ is the primary provider of our understanding of 7 8

9

Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, p. 120. Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, p. 124. Here Marder is alluding to the origins of the mock Latin term hocus pocus, that was derived from the words spoken during the consecration of the host in the Catholic Mass. He joins with Irigaray in pointing towards the entire foundation of the western cultural imaginary as a parodic fake. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au delà (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980).

4

Introduction

the verbal ‘logic’ of consciousness and identity. Indeed, for Derrida too, this phallocentric root is, in turn, fed and nurtured by the sub/ abjecting (burying?) of women and other ‘others’ in the service of the master’s discourse.10 Within such narratives, the natural world, into which women are subsumed as part of their use-value, is there to be dominated and overcome, put to work in the service of the demi-god and his universalised masculine epistemologies. It is within such a gendered epistemological context that the ubiquitous image of the enclosed garden takes shape within the Middle Ages, a critique of which, as it manifests in its religious contexts specifically, lies at the heart of this present study. As I shall argue, patriarchally-inflected grand narratives of garden-dwelling within the medieval Christian imaginary are based on ubiquitous anxieties regarding human exile from what Bracha L. Ettinger has identified as its ‘matrixial’ origins. For Ettinger, the matrixial constitutes a post-Lacanian transsubjective dimension that underpins all being, traversing both the conscious and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible, the articulable and the inarticulable as well as the material and the ineffable.11 More simplistically, the term ‘matrixial’ can also refer to the pre-subjective universal experience of womb-dwelling common to all humanity, and my own use of the term in this study nods in both these directions. Within these contexts, then, such grand narratives of garden dwelling within the Christian imaginary both set the scene for necrophilic wish-fulfilment fantasies of return from exile in the next life, and yet offer up via the fissures in their phantasmagoric logic opportunities for ideologically resistant, female-coded counter-narratives based on the type of flourishing and vegetal becoming identified by Irigaray and Marder in their work. As Irigaray has claimed elsewhere about women’s subordination within Christian theological discourse and their resultant lack of access to a (female) transcendence of and for itself – even (or especially) via Mary, who ultimately is always already mother of God rather than attaining godhood herself: ‘Woman’s not becoming God 10 Derrida, La Carte Postale, p. 509. 11 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

5

Introduction

is a loss for herself and for the community …. As divinity and goddess of and for man, we are deprived of our own ends and means.’12 Here Irigaray establishes that, within patriarchal grand narrative, human transcendence – becoming – is only available to men and is therefore coded male; women, instead, have to fulfil the role of facilitator of that transcendence as mediatrices for a male becoming-divine, while always already occupying the role of subordinate ‘other’ in the process. As such, they must be harnessed to the master and signified by and within male discourse in order to guarantee for men the possibility of a return from exile. As I shall argue in the study that follows, such a process within the medieval imaginary is most frequently represented by the image of a lost garden which, within the male medieval imaginary, is an ‘archi-ancient’ origin-entity, but one that is also ‘forever future’.13 It is redolent with gender dynamics and a place where human becoming, longing and desire are both performed and frustrated. How this conception is worked with and against within a range of medieval literary texts provides the main focus of this book.

Gardens and their Grand Narrative Origins But why should enclosed gardens occupy such a primary position within the medieval imaginary? What makes the idea and image of an original, ‘cosmic garden’ – impaired and then lost forever by the over-demanding and ‘radically deficient’ responses of humankind – run so deep within our cultural history?14 We in the west have been long invested in an Eden gifted to a man, with a woman also gifted as his helpmeet. We have also been long conversant with that 12 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 71. Julia Kristeva has argued in similar vein in her ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1886), pp. 160–86. 13 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, p. 72. 14 This term is taken from a thoughtful examination of the origins and metaphor of garden imagery within the Christian tradition, focusing, in particular, on Genesis, Deuteronomy and The Song of Songs, by B. Green, ‘Biblical Metaphor: The Cosmic Garden Heritage’, Acta Theologica 34.1 (2014), 52–67 (here at 57).

6

Introduction

woman’s failure to understand the hegemony of patriarchal law and with the resultant exiling of both man and woman from the pleasures and security of the original home forever – at least in this life. Indeed, the consequences of this exile, that have assisted in the cultural construction of binary gender opposition ever since within the western imaginary, underpin much of what I have to discuss in this book and it is, thus, inevitably with Eden that it begins. The idea of the cosmic garden of origins, however, is not unique to the western Christian tradition. On the contrary, we must bear in mind that it raises its head in myriad cultural contexts world-wide, and, in many cases, is an equally gendered space in which a male protagonist is exiled as a result of female intervention (or, sometimes, lack of it).15 The Garden of the Hesperides as the goddess Hera’s locale in Greek mythology may readily come to mind here. Unique to this garden was a grove of golden apples thought to offer immortality to anybody who consumed one. Like Eden, too, it housed a prowling, sleepless serpent in the form of the dragon, Laon, placed protectively at the garden gate to deter all intruders. Indeed, it was an apple stolen from this garden by the goddess of strife, Eris, that led eventually to the Trojan war fought ostensibly over the troublesome Helen. And, as in the Christian foundation narrative, the threat of the serpent-dragon within the garden was dispelled by an all-conquering male hero – in this case Hercules – as he set about ‘rescuing’ the golden apples from their garden enclosure.16 Similarly, as far back as the third millennium BCE, this time in ancient Mesopotamia, deeply resonant episodes involving a goddess within a cosmic garden and the attempts of a hero to attain immortality, accrued to the foundational Epic of Gilgamesh, written 15 For a detailed study of the figuration of gardens in a wide range of ancient cultural contexts, see Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency, ed. Michel Conan (Dumbarton Oaks: Harvard University Press, 2007). For an example of another form of gendering within garden contexts, see, in particular, the account of how during the Heian period in Japan (784–1185), during periods of feasting, women would be responsible for beating out the garden soil with their feet, whilst singing and circling the living quarters. See Michel Vieillard-Baron, ‘Religious and Lay Rituals in Japanese Gardens during the Heian Period (784–1185)’, in Gardens and Landscapes, ed. Conan, pp. 57–66 (pp. 59–60). 16 See, for example, Encyclopedia of Ancient Deities, ed. Charles Russell Coulter and Patricia Turner (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).

7

Introduction

on tablets of stone and later discovered in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.17 Here again we have a mythical garden taking up centre-stage, with the intransigent vine-goddess, Siduri, at its heart. Within this garden, the eponymous hero’s failed travails to counter the inevitability of death by being refused the elixir of life by the goddess, echo the same type of post-Edenic trials undertaken by Adam and Eve, as I examine in depth in the first chapter of this present study. In all three cases, a woman’s voice, actions or lack of action ultimately presage the hero’s downfall. A radical deficiency to recognise the primacy of the matrixial feminine within the world’s garden life cycles is fundamental to all these narratives, as are compensatory demands on the part of the hero for immortality. In turn, these generate a male-dominated imaginary that repeatedly attempts to tread the path back to a cosmic garden space that is also the space of the (m)other or (M)other, and one that is forever illusive and allusive. For B. Green, the roots of such conceptualisation within Judaeo-Christian contexts can be best understood via an anthropological consideration of how metaphor is constructed as a means of articulating the ineffable. When viewed through this lens, Green argues, the emergence of an all-powerful male deity cast in the likeness of the intensely patriarchal households of Old Testamental Israel testifies to ‘a hierarchical and patriarchal culture exposed as a key player in the articulation of the divine viewpoint’.18 As such, the cosmic originary drama, with its domestic deceptions, accusations and scapegoating of subordinates, is not imposed from above as some predetermined divine order, but from below, with the world of the male-dominated household becoming ‘the only optic for appropriating the language’.19 For Green, with the 17 The Epic of Gilgamesh, ed. and trans. N. K. Sandars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). 18 Green, ‘Biblical Metaphor’, p. 55. 19 Green, ‘Biblical Metaphor’, p. 55. However, as Green reminds us, the ‘household’ was not a nuclear entity, as we imagine it to be in more contemporary times. Instead, it was far more diverse, populated by ‘men and women – parents, elders, and offspring, by animals and plants, by deity and ancestors, by slave and free, all seen as working in a particular way for productive survival’ and all thus providing material for the construction of divine metaphor (‘Biblical Metaphor’, p. 58).

8

Introduction

material gardens of such households being such important spaces for withdrawal, relaxation and protection, as well as functional spaces for the successful flourishing of plants, it is inevitable that fear of the garden’s loss would come to haunt the imaginary of all those cultures that depended upon its efficacy, support and solace. Indeed, to see this metaphorical construction working in practice, we need look no further than the origins of the term ‘paradise’, the etymology of which lies in the Persian term pairidaeza meaning precisely a ‘walled garden’ or ‘enclosure’. As Teresa McLean points out, such enclosures, filled with shady plant life and running water, had long been common topographical features throughout the Middle East, were brought eventually to Europe via Sicily by the Normans, and subsequently became part of the architecture of many Romanesque monastic churches.20 By retaining the term ‘paradise’ for these small enclosed gardens when attached to such churches, the monastic foundations could also partake in the synonymy between these paradisal spaces and the Christian Paradise itself. There, they could imagine its recapture from exile within this life as a precursor to the next. I discuss these issues further in the first chapter of this study.

When Patriarchal Grand Narrative Is Not Enough There were, then, both metaphysical and physical reasons for the importance and recurrence of the walled garden within these ultimately interconnected cultural imaginaries of origins, as well as motivations for the gendered hierarchies within which they were implicated and which they helped to perpetuate. Nevertheless, these do not provide fullsome enough explanations for the longevity of the legacies of these early grand narratives – both within medieval culture and our own. They may answer the ‘how’ question to some extent, but they do not in themselves in any way answer the ‘why’.

20 See Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981, repr. 2014), p. 16.

9

Introduction

If we are to probe the reasons for the ubiquity of the walled garden within the medieval imaginary, then we have to turn in other directions to ask our questions – for example to another biblical garden, seemingly out of kilter with Eden but closely allied to the possibility of its recapture and certainly treated as a response to Edenic problematics in the Middle Ages: the garden of The Song of Songs. This text and its horticultural poetics haunt most of the texts examined in this present study, its garden a locus subject to the most extraordinary levels of metaphorisation within both Christian and Judaic patriarchal tradition. Here, the topography of the garden at the heart of the Song resonates loudly with the poem’s overarching focus on the poetics of spousal passion. We encounter, for example, vaginal ‘clefts in the rock’ and ‘hollow places of the wall’ where the object of the Bridegroom’s desire, the ‘dove’, is concealed.21 That object, moreover, is further eroticised in terms of the hidden spaces of the Bride’s body as the Song’s poetics equate it with the fecundity of the garden: ‘thy breasts shall be as the clusters of the vine and the odour of thy mouth like apples’, the Bridegroom tells her.22 Elsewhere, the Bridegroom completes this conflation between his lover and the garden of their lovemaking by famously naming her as ‘a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up’.23 Within the erotics of this poem, therefore, the plentiful fecundity of the lovers’ garden and the body of the equally fecund Bride collapse into one another to form a single locus for the flourishing of a desired and desiring self, something also of considerable concern to this present study. In the words of the Bride to her Bridegroom: ‘Let us get up early to the vineyards, let us see if the vineyard flourish, if the flowers be ready to bring forth fruits, if the pomegranates flourish: there will I give thee my breasts.’24 In this text too, then, we also find a conglomeration of prevalent images associated with human origin stories: a garden of plenty; a woman’s body in and as that garden; fruits that, like that body, are produced to be consumed – or not, as the case may be. 21 22 23 24

Song of Songs 2:14. Song of Songs 7:8. Song of Songs 4:12. Song of Songs 7:2.

10

Introduction

As I discuss later in this book, the insistent erotics of the Song, redolent with celebratory poetics of transcendent female sexuality, were, of course, too hot to handle within western male exegetical contexts and, as a result, were subject to generations of increasingly insistent allegorisation (that is to say, masculine discursive appropriation), with the Bridegroom cast as Christ and the Bride as Ecclesia, Mary or the human soul in the formation of a fundamental part of Christianity’s grand narrative.25 As Green points out, however, as a biblical text, the Song is, in fact, a great anomaly, in that it is wholly devoid of any allusion to God, whose presence is replaced by ‘the distinctive role assigned to the female and the feminine’ in the poem.26 That feminine, moreover, is continually subject to veiled threats – desertion of the Bride by her husband, for example, or the shady antipathies of her brothers and ‘shadowy sentries’ – that nevertheless fail to encroach upon the lived experience of the lovers. As such, for Green, it is a text that ultimately teaches its readers ‘[h]ow to live well in that particular garden’, which is also the locus of reciprocal love, respect and empathy for the ‘other’.27 In many ways, therefore, the garden of the Song is a rare example of a biblical matrixial space – but one that came to be allegorised out of its own intersubjectivity and shaped into a grand narrative far more in keeping with the relentless supremacy of the culturally-accredited masculine. To acknowledge it as a matrixial text, moreover, is not only to acknowledge the woman as an equal protagonist in the cosmic drama but also to recognise in her and her body the actual locus of human origins. As Irigaray has asserted of the female body’s relation to origins, it is ‘our first nourishing earth, first waters, first envelopes, where the child was whole’.28

25 On this process of allegorisation, see Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of my Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 26 Green, ‘Biblical Metaphor’, p. 64. 27 Green, ‘Biblical Metaphor’, p. 64. 28 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, in The Irigaray Reader, trans. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, various repr.), pp. 34–46 (p. 39).

11

Introduction

For Irigaray, then, the womb is the originary garden, both in its fleshly being and in its matrixial intersubjectivity. Nor is this the essentialist stance that has sometimes been levied against Irigaray’s work: instead, she draws on the universal given that human life emerges from bodies with wombs, culturally a female-coded phenomenon whatever the sex or gender identity attached to those bodies, and always already part of every human’s first becoming.29 The loss of that garden home, therefore, is universal, although, for Irigaray, its loss is felt more keenly by men as they ultimately exclude themselves further, via their ‘between-men’ discourse, from the type of flourishing and care that the garden-as-womb nexus makes available, even after the child’s birth. As a result, men and their discourse are forever exiled from origins, scapegoating women as reification of the lost maternal/matrixial and seeking to bring back that reification under their control. In so doing, again according to Irigaray, a woman’s jouissance is appropriated in the process and redirected towards shoring up the patriarchal phantasmagorical substitutes of power and domination. As we shall see, this attempt at substitution pits the gendered discourses of flourishing and the necrophilic against one another within the cultural imaginary in an endless cycle of disharmony that is visible and prevalent to the present day.

Approaches, Methodologies and the Language of Landscape Irigaray’s psychoanalytical and philosophical approaches to the grand narratives that pepper our histories have proved exceptionally important to this present study, which seeks to understand the location and relentless suppression of a female imaginary in the Middle Ages, one that is co-opted to the service of a dominant hermeneutics recast in the frame of male exegetical discourse. They also prove particularly enlightening for recognising the fissures that open up when that discourse breaches its own limits, when 29 The issue of transgender birthing and/or queer experiences of motherhood are beyond the remit of this present study, although the material under scrutiny certainly stands up in many places to such important queer approaches.

12

Introduction

it becomes excessive and begins to undermine its own logic and authority, when female-coded poetics move into mainstream and when those poetics are deployed both by women writers themselves and some male authors who, in Irigaray’s words, have learnt to ‘speak woman’ in ways that make strange the master narrative.30 Besides the more obvious deployments – her essay on the feminine fluidity of mystical discourse, ‘La Mystérique’, for example – Irigaray’s more recent work, such as that undertaken with Marder cited above, and her writings on the appropriation of female ‘becoming’, have also been particularly helpful in providing a lens with which to think back through established grand-narrative hegemony. In this capacity, Irigaray’s conception of a female ‘efflorescence’ as articulated in her Elemental Passions offers a powerful and agential alternative to the traditional woman-as-flower-to-be-plucked or woman-as-gift discourses that have, as mentioned at the start of this introduction, beset cultural femininity as a deemed substitute for the natural world within patriarchal thought. Also important has been Irigaray’s poetic lamentation for the stifling of female bodily discourse and its concomitant route to transcendence under patriarchy (configured in Irigaray’s terms as the loss of both ‘Her’ and ‘her’) in her more recent In the Beginning, She Was.31 Indeed, in a section summarising such loss, Irigaray’s analysis enters into a powerfully compelling dialogue with medieval conceptions of women as wet and cold beings always carrying the potential to become ‘dried up’ by an imbalance of the ‘feminine’ configuration of bodily humours of which she is constituted: The natural origin, the maternal origin, has more connection to the fluid and to the tactile than to the apparent, to the visible. It has thus been confused with the darkness – good or bad depending on whether this origin was experienced in a positive or negative way. However, that may be, it remained removed from the sight, from the light of Western reason. And this was accompanied by nostalgia,

30 Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 191–202 (p. 191). 31 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); and In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

13

Introduction hatred, contempt, at the very least by fear, tinged with reverence or rejection – sentiments equally tied, subsequently, to god(s).32

For Irigaray, the invisible workings interior and anterior to the female body, its fluids, mucosity, cyclical rhythms and its ‘tolerated’ ability to grow another human inside itself, to be one with that interior in a silent process of intersubjective matrixiality, provide a paradigm for what is at stake with the lost garden within patriarchal grand-narrative thinking: that is to say, the fact that ‘it has been confused with a state of nature that man should learn to dominate’.33 With women remaining the closest to ideas of the lost garden, therefore, their potential to create an illusion at least of its recapture has to be harnessed and policed under patriarchy. As such, the ‘good’ woman (that is to say feminised, desexualised and silenced) has long been both fetishised and elevated as a shield to hide what is ultimately at stake – the loss of the original garden, permanent exile from it and the resultant need to turn to a male-god redeemer who will eventually carry man-in-his-ownimage ‘home’. The persistence of such dynamics within the Christian imaginary has also been investigated at some length by Grace Jantzen, whose work has again proved intrinsic to this present study.34 Building on the position of Irigaray, Jantzen has posited the productiveness of a new philosophy of religion, with the relentless necrophilics of Christian grand narrative being reshaped instead by a feminist philosophy of flourishing. In particular, Jantzen joins Irigaray in laying down the possibility of the emergence of a suppressed female-coded imaginary that would illuminate the ways in which the impetus behind traditional Christian theology has been a war against evil from which humanity is ultimately ‘rescued’ by a young, male, all-conquering but eventually self-sacrificing hero-god. According to Jantzen, such rescue, moreover, results in an aspired-to 32 Irigaray, In the Beginning, pp. 104–5. 33 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 105. 34 Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Of particular importance to this present study is her chapter, ‘They Shall Flourish Like a Garden’, pp. 156–70.

14

Introduction

male-coded transcendence made possible not in this life but in the longed-for afterlife and thus one that rejects any sense of human joy and flourishing for and of itself in the here-and-now. For Jantzen, too, such a philosophy, based on the scapegoated original ‘sin’ of a woman, and requiring ultimate deliverance by a man, ‘exposes its necrophilic imaginary and concomitant misogyny’.35 However, the bringing about of a significant ‘shift’ in this imaginary, based on alternative – but traditionally subordinated – biblical discourses of maternity, natality and flourishing, can serve to expose the ways in which such female-coded philosophies in fact constitute ‘the unacknowledged foundation of “salvation” in the western theological text’.36 In other words, from Genesis to the Book of Revelation, the connection between these female-coded philosophies and the salvific has been all but ignored. Moreover, as Jantzen is also at pains to point out, biblical discourses of natality, flourishing and care are everywhere as prevalent as their necrophilic counterparts, but have been largely elided from the master narrative, or else have been derogated as feminine and thus rendered subordinate. What Jantzen calls for, therefore, is for the production of a new philosophy, based, not on salvific heroic rescue, but on the recognition that all human beings have ‘a natural inner capacity and dynamic to draw on inner resources and interconnection with one another in the web of life, and hav[e] the potential to develop into great fruitfulness’. As a result, she argues, ‘the metaphor of flourishing would lead instead to an idea of the divine source and ground, an imminent divine incarnated within us and between us.’37 For Jantzen, too, such a revisiting of discursive biblical priorities within the grand narrative and the rearranging of the hierarchies would thus have a revolutionising effect upon traditional binary gender relations, disrupting the hegemony of masculine dominance once and for all within both the western imaginary and the symbolic realm that articulates it. With the natal, the fecund and flourishing having long been coded feminine and overly-emotive within western philosophico-religious thought, a recognition of the universality of these concepts to 35 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 156. 36 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 157. 37 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 161.

15

Introduction

all life (immaterial of the level of the individual’s local experience of them) could prompt a new imaginary in which all humans could flourish, regardless of their sex or gender. In other words, a (re) turn to these models long denigrated within patriarchal culture and limited to self-sacrificial ideas of the maternal, may result in an opportunity for human flourishing to be genuinely effected within a world shared with and by all living organisms. Such theoretical calls, then, offer many new ways of opening up medieval texts for further scrutiny as they help to refocus our eyes away from an acculturated seeing from the perspective of a universalising male gaze. Such new focal positionings within the texts under scrutiny here also present their readers with some kind of enclosed garden space to work with, never equivalent or consistent but collected in this present study under what may at first appear as the loosely defined aegis of the hortus conclusus. From close study of these representations, however, it soon becomes clear that the walled garden of the medieval imaginary was anything but a clearly defined space, although it was infinitely recognisable in all its manifestations. Indeed, the very concept of the hortus conclusus sparked a whole range of disparate meanings and image-patterns that could be deployed visually and conceptually in myriad contexts for myriad exegetical purposes. Whether a physical space for the growing of medicinal herbs, or a space for pleasurable relaxation, or constructed to signify a lost Eden or the garden of the Song of Songs, it becomes clear that the hortus conclusus was, to borrow Foucault’s terminology, a ‘heterotopia par excellence’: that is to say its place within culture and its imaginary realm renders it a multi-valent and multi-visual space that tends to haunt the imaginary while never really coming to rest in any one shape, form or meaning.38 As such, like its feminine credentials, the always already unruly garden often spills out of those physical boundaries that seek to define and contain it, thus bearing the capacity to disrupt the confidence and surety of its own construction. In short, in the texts under consideration here, every construction and mediation 38 Michel Foucault, trans. Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 22–7.

16

Introduction

of the enclosed garden articulates something both same and other: it speaks of materiality and immateriality; what we can see and not see; what we know and what we are yet to know; and, most of all, it articulates who we are, who we think we are and who we aspire to be. While Borchardt presented his gardens as offering a complex conglomeration of metaphor, other philosophical viewpoints also present both gardens and wider landscapes as able to articulate what spoken language cannot. Anne Whiston Spirn’s The Language of Landscape, for example, recognises in made and unmade landscapes a ‘dwelling and tongue’ that posits them as ‘first human texts’. For Spirn, moreover, landscape as a ‘scene of life, cultivated construction, carrier of meaning’, is language and a thus a ‘habitat of mind’.39 This ‘text’ or ‘habitat’, however, is no tabula rasa to be filled with a between-men discourse. Instead, as Spirn posits, ‘it has no silence to be filled, no blank page’ and thus, in its own ontological wholeness and constant becoming, opens up the opportunity for a diverse array of ‘readers’ to respond and communicate with it in equally diverse ways. For Spirn, too, narratives of landscape are never linear, but always cyclical, fluid and resistant to monologic imposition. In her words, ‘in landscape, dialogues have already begun before a new author enters the conversation’.40 Read in this way, the dialogic medieval hortus conclusus therefore provides a slippery site for disruption of the hegemony of patriarchal imposition of meaning and a place where a more productive and often playful female-coded philosophy of flourishing can be established in its place. Equally useful to this present study is the work of Robert Pogue Harrison, specifically his Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, tellingly dedicated ‘To Eve and her daughters’. In this philosophical musing on the fundamental place of enclosed gardens within the human sense of selfhood and identity, Harrison sets up his store early with an uncompromising assertion that ‘human gardens, however self-enclosed their world may be, invariably take their 39 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 15 and p. 16. 40 Spirn, Language of Landscape, p. 40.

17

Introduction

stand in history, if only as a counterforce to history’s deleterious forces’.41 Like Jantzen, Harrison views the flourishing of gardens as fundamentally predicated upon the female-coded notion of ‘care’ and thus offering a site capable of disrupting the necrophilic belief-systems and modi operandi that masquerade as the ‘natural’ and universal. But those gardens have first to be removed from the systems of meaning that constitute their walls and become subject to other meanings and enclosures that are more permeable and form part of the growing, nurturing and becoming inherent to life itself. As Harrison reminds us: What holds true for the soil – that you must give it more than you take away – also holds true for nations, institutions, marriage, friendship, education, in short for human culture as a whole, which comes into being and maintains itself in time only as long as its cultivators overgive of themselves.42

Indeed, for Harrison, gardens long precede agriculture as a primary mode of cultivation and provide a model for human culture itself; in fact, ‘gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose’.43

The hortus conclusus: Scholarship and the Chapters Such a premise of gardens comprising a ‘poetic’ language suppressed and elided within patriarchal impositions of a necrophilic ideology upon the meanings it attempts to express is therefore fundamental to this present study, which seeks to unearth the ways in which a selection of medieval religious texts offer resistance to such patriarchal hegemony and succeed – if sometimes only momentarily – to present other ways of knowing. In turn, these other ways of knowing anticipate many of our own ecological and feminist concerns in the twenty-first century. Indeed, although there has been a plethora of often magnificent essays and some full-length books on

41 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. x. 42 Harrison, Gardens, p. 33. 43 Harrison, Gardens, p. 40.

18

Introduction

the materiality of medieval gardens,44 there has been no single study to date on the complex meanings attached to them from a philosophico-literary perspective, least of all one that offers a sustained feminist investigation of their place within the medieval imaginary as refracted through contemporary theories of gender and ‘vegetal being’ (to borrow Irigaray’s and Marder’s term).45 While a start was made in 2008 by Sara Ritchey, whose article entitled ‘Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination’ addresses the position taken up by trees within the religious imagination of the late Middle Ages, it does not extend to analysis of gardens and 44 Existing literature on medieval gardens includes, for example, McLean, Medieval English Gardens; Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), which collects together thirteen useful essays on medieval gardens set within a number of different contexts, including the medicinal, social, historical, art-historical and biblical; The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture, ed. John Dixon Hunt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), offering a wider look at Italian and Italianate gardens and their representation from the Middle Ages through to contemporary times; Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007), presenting an historically inflected global survey of the development of sacred gardens within a wide variety of cultural contexts; Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle and Alain Touwaide (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), which examines the role of medicinal plants in medieval science, art and culture; and, the more popular treatment, replete with images and manuscript illustrations, of Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). For a more recent set of important interventions based on a range of multi-disciplinary approaches, see The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain: Enclosure and Transformation, c. 1200–1750, ed. Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). 45 There has been a flurry in recent years of ecocritical and other environmentally inflected studies of medieval literary texts, however, although none of these focuses specifically on religious texts and the Christian imaginary. See, for example: Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), which offers a careful and insightful introduction to what Rudd terms the ‘green reading’ of late medieval literary texts, although the focus is primarily on romance and romance-associated works. See also Albrecht Classen, The Forest in Medieval German Literature: Ecocritical Readings from a Historical Perspective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), focusing on works from medieval German territories; and Water in Medieval Literature: An Ecocritical Reading (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). See also Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), conceived of as a ‘lively conversation’ constructed between contributors interested in those heterogenous ecologies within which humankind is – and always has been – entangled, using medieval literature as case studies.

19

Introduction

their hermeneutics of enclosure.46 Nevertheless, it has proved to be a solid starting-point for my own investigations, some of which also focus on trees and the arboreal logic they articulate in medieval texts. Additionally, although other feminist studies have been proffered in the context of more secular writings – medieval romance, for example,47 especially the deeply canonical (albeit often contentious) Roman de la Rose – my own concern is far more with the insistent underpinning forged by the enclosed garden within the religious imaginary specifically. Indeed, my primary interests lie in questions of how the hortus conclusus operates within the entangled intersectionality of gender, faith, belief, horticulture, ecology and the sacred, particularly the specific interventions made by women authors and/or female-coded writings from the twelfth to the late fourteenth century.48 Nor is my approach strictly chronological, preferring instead to adopt a more spiral and conceptual trajectory, in keeping with its 46 Sara Ritchey, ‘Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8.1 (2008), 64–82. 47 See the brief essay by Arlyn Diamond, ‘Meeting Grounds: Gardens in Middle English Romance’, in The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, ed. Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjevic and Judith Weiss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 125–38. Here, Diamond deals only with those romance pleasure gardens associated with the nobility and the concept of gentilesse. Similarly, E. Jane Burns’s important overview of late twentieth-century feminist critique of the idea and practices of courtly love omits to discuss gardens as the location for courtly love par excellence: see her ‘Courtly Love: Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition’, Signs 27.1 (2001), 23–57. Also important as an overview is Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Medieval Feminist Criticism’, in A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gill Plain and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 11–26, which covers the Romance of the Rose in the context of Christine de Pizan’s ‘literary criticism’ of it. For a more detailed feminist critique of the same text, see Sarah Kay, ‘Women’s Body of Knowledge: Epistemology and Misogyny in the Romance of the Rose’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 211–35. 48 See, however, the feminist interventions made by the contributors to the special issue, ‘The Medieval hortus conclusus: Revisiting the Pleasure Garden’, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal for Gender and Sexuality 50.1 (2014), especially my own contributions: ‘Introduction: The Medieval hortus conclusus: Revisiting the Pleasure Garden’, pp. 5–10, and ‘“Flourish like a garden”: Pain, Purgatory and Salvation in the Writing of Medieval Religious Woman’, pp. 33–60. As an important backdrop to this present study, see also the contribution to the same volume by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ‘The Virgin in the hortus conclusus: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul’, pp. 11–32.

20

Introduction

attempt to avoid a linear logic that insists upon the type of phallic teleology that this study’s argumentation aims ultimately to counter and disrupt. As such, in terms of its texts, it begins and ends in the mid to late fourteenth century, framed by the reimagined gardens of two biblical women who frequently troubled the religious imaginary: Eve and Susanna. In between, it takes in several centres of female literary productivity and communality operating between the twelfth and late fourteenth centuries, sounding out the connections and resonances between the garden hermeneutics with which they engage and which, so I shall argue, re-emerge in the late-fourteenth-century poem, Pearl. As a place to begin such a study, then, Eden, as an underpinning for all such writings, is entirely apposite, with its provision of a staple garden image set that dominated the cultural imaginary throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The first chapter therefore concerns itself with what has traditionally been at stake in Eden’s continual reiterations, both medieval and contemporary. During the high to late Middle Ages, apocryphal stories concerning the biblically undocumented minutiae of the post-Eden lives of Adam and Eve conglomerated into a body of work known as the ‘Adam Books’, within which the fall of the protoplasts was keenly documented and their afterlives imbued with varying levels of psychological realism and understanding. One such re-telling in Middle English verse is found in the famous Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS 19.2.1), dating from the mid fourteenth century. Here we find a treatment that is particularly sympathetic of Eve and supportive of her responses to the world she finds outside of Eden’s enclosing walls. In this discussion, I argue that such responses, based on insights into her own maternal destiny and the acknowledged matrixial origins of her many children, allow her a glimpsed-at agency that is positively presented. This, moreover, is an agency that is also self-actualising in terms of its potential to generate an intersubjectivity as Eve immerses herself in her role as mother of a line that will lead ultimately to salvation, and as author of the first written text. My second chapter sets out to demonstrate how this fourteenth-century treatment of Eden and its aftermath was not an 21

Introduction

unusual product of a changing epistemological climate, as some critics have claimed. Indeed, we only have to turn to the realm of medieval female mysticism and its offshoot hermeneutics of gardens, greenness and flourishing evidenced from much earlier times to see how such recuperations were far from rare. Beginning with the recent intervention of Julia Kristeva, whose fascination with some unique collages of garden-like artefacts originating in the nunnery of Mechelen in the Low Countries in the fourteenth century led to her complex and deeply meditative appraisal of the meanings attached to these intricate productions, known as horti conclusi. Taking the form of framed assemblages made out of precious stones, textiles and small relics, these artefacts provide a useful starting point for this chapter’s wider examination of the role played by garden hermeneutics in religious women’s productivity. Of particular interest here are the magnificent Hortus Deliciarum, a complex florilegium compiled by the German abbess Herrad of Hohenbourg and her nuns in the twelfth century, and the famous visionary text, Scivias, produced by Herrad’s near-contemporary, Hildegard of Bingen, at the female community of Rupertsberg during the same period. As this chapter demonstrates, these three productions within all-female religious environments escape the type of fetishisation or denigration of femininity discussed above, aligning themselves instead – and in strangely prescient ways – with Jantzen’s notion of a female-coded philosophy of flourishing that can override the necrophilic impulses of the type of phallogocentric grand narrative the nuns would have inherited in their learning practices, and which remained so prevalent elsewhere outside the nunnery walls. Chapter three casts the lens of flourishing versus the necrophilic more widely, as it turns its attention to the mystical gardens envisioned at the Saxon nunnery of Helfta at the end of the thirteenth century, specifically in the collaborative writings that emerged from that setting, traditionally attributed to Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn who had lived there since early childhood. The Legatus Divinae Pietatis and Liber Specialis Gratiae of Gertrude and Mechthild respectively are redolent with images of greenness, vegetation, flowers and flourishing, animating many of the same 22

Introduction

concepts developed by Hildegard in ways that are both haptic and ineffable. While Gertrude and Mechthild, like the wider Helfta community, were clearly fully versed in orthodox scientia, theologia and the arts, nevertheless, their absorption of them into their own alchemical literary processes helped to produce and reflect an oasis of female intellectual flourishing that often proved deeply resistant to the phallogocentric tenets of the epistemologies they too had inherited. The interactive communion and dialogue clearly evidenced in their writings provided a shared image-base drawn insistently from the natural world that, in turn, produced some of the most extraordinary and lyrical female-coded re-visionings of phallocratic grand narrative witnessed in the Middle Ages. Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber also features heavily in my fourth chapter, this time as a posited source for the late fourteenth-century Middle English poem, Pearl. Long understood as a female-coded text, even if we do not know the sex of its original author, I argue for strong resonances between Pearl and the Liber, not only realised by means of a shared image set, but also by the intentionality and direction of the protracted and insistent garden hermeneutics they also share. Whereas most critical analysis has posited some kind of Dantean influence upon the Middle English poem, I suggest its insistence upon a flourishing femininity, absolutely integrated within both deity and the natural world and presented as the primary route to an intersubjective transcendence through union with the divine, bears more than a passing affinity with the unities Mechthild forges with her visionary Christ. With Mechthild’s text long having been circulating in Europe – and almost certainly having reached England in some shape or form by the time Pearl was in production – I ultimately argue for the dialogue between these two texts as reflective of a new cultural confidence in feminine modes of spirituality as means toward encountering – and comprehending – the concept of divine love. My final chapter picks up the mantle laid down in chapter one with its focus returning to biblical retellings – this time reworkings of the story of Susanna and the Elders in Daniel 13. Sweeping through repeated appropriation by generations of male exegetes, I demonstrate the ways in which, like that of Eve, Susanna’s 23

Introduction

grand-narrative body is always already associated with her garden and the sexual licentiousness that lurks beneath its (and her) beauty and fruitfulness. Although presented as a paradigmatically good woman, nevertheless male orchestrations of Susanna’s dilemma in the garden consistently bend to the particular agendas of their retellers, frequently providing subtexts to warn against the dangerous sexuality of even the most chaste woman, Susanna included. In the case of female-authored or female-coded retellings, however, consistently we find an elaborated-upon garden full of flourishing vegetal life that is prepared to speak fully in Susanna’s defence, drowning out as it does so the necrophilic posturings of the dangerous Elders and the prominence of the prophet Daniel and his heroic salvific ‘rescue’. As such, this chapter completes the spiral of analysis, not just in terms of the textual trajectories followed but also in terms of the theoretical travels undertaken to illuminate the texts and their flourishing offshoots. It is hoped, therefore, that this study opens up an equally fruitful pathway for furthering our understanding of the ways in which feminist appraisal, allied to those nascent vegetal, horticultural, flourishing and efflorescent hermeneutics that accrue to it, may double back, helix-like, to create an intensified dialogue between such an approach and the type of medieval texts under scrutiny here – and many that are not. Finally, it is also hoped that the prescient proto-feminist ecological hermeneutics of those texts I have included in this study will continue to reach out across the centuries to help us make sense of the worlds and those often bewildering imaginaries in which we find ourselves entangled de bono and de malo today.

24

1 Out of Eden: The Framing of Eve It is good to read texts that are the bearers of an unconscious completely indifferent to laws, even if the law always recaptures the wild unconscious.1

I

n her assessment of the type of cultural unconscious integral to textual construction and its transmission – particularly patriarchal ‘grand-narrative’ texts such as the Book of Genesis that explicitly lay down both law and Logos – Hélène Cixous points towards the possibility for disruption of their hegemony by admitting the potentiality of a fruitful ‘reading-against-the-grain’ that, momentarily at least, can open up a fissure within the textual edifice and its ascribed ‘meanings’. In turn, such an ‘undisciplined’ reading, especially that invited by the syntactically anarchic ‘poetic text’, is ‘indifferent’ to that hegemony and ‘wild’ in its refusal to be interpellated by it. This, she claims, is because women’s relation to the body, the natal and the maternal, whether culturally assigned in its meanings or not, allows for a greater ‘capacity for other [and] experience of nonnegative change’. For Cixous, therefore, a woman has a greater capacity to access the ‘internal’ pleasure of a text’s inherent otherness by approaching it tangentially, rather than be governed by its prescribed meaning, because, ‘[whether] virtually or actually mothers, women do after all have an experience of the inside’.2 In other words, the enclosing walls of an apparently hegemonic culture and its laws, as embedded in that culture’s grand-narrative texts, are nothing but social products, and, in some instances, are able to be fractured and breached from the inside 1 2

Hélène Cixous, ‘The Author in Truth’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 136–81 (p. 152). Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 155.

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

by the text’s insistence on the swirling becoming of a feminine pleasure that resists the traditionally static (phallic) binaries that seek to govern it from the outside. However, as Cixous establishes in the extract quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, the unruly feminine with which this breach is associated (regardless of the gender of a text’s author) is always ultimately ‘recaptured’ by a male imaginary so as to reassert the established social order. As Cixous asserts, ‘the [feminine poetic] text struggles endlessly against the movement of [male] appropriation, which, even in its most innocent guises, is fatally destructive.’3 In this chapter, I aim to investigate the usefulness of such claims, first by drawing upon a range of such theoretical positionings with which to underpin my subsequent examination of some compelling reconfigurations of the garden of the Fall – both medieval and contemporary – and to establish a framework that will be fundamental to this entire study. I will then move on to a discussion of a range of biblical gardens associated with women in order to place Eden in its gendered context, following which I will offer close readings of a startlingly revisionist late medieval verse retelling of the Genesis narrative that also ‘struggles endlessly’ with and against reappropriation into master narrative. In so doing, I aim to demonstrate the perspicacity of the Cixousian position concerning the law-ofthe-Father and its possible disruption by means of those feminine poetics embedded within representations of the medieval walled garden, but also that law’s ability to rein back in those excesses generated by momentary release of the (feminine) unconscious. This Cixousian position on the textual unconscious and its cultural appropriation is supported by Edward W. Soja, who has posited such inside–outside spatiality as ‘simultaneously … a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life’.4 For Soja, moreover, spatiality is something necessarily reified by what he terms the ‘illusion of opaqueness’, with its framing, construction and performativity serving to conceal how

3 4

Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 155. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 7.

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‘human geographies become filled with politics and ideology’.5 In other words, within human culture, the abstract idea of space becomes solidified, a ‘thing’ enclosed by naming, definition and discourse, a ‘place’ within which those power-plays that underpin all human interaction, are, like the proverbial Emperor’s clothes, imprinted and written into being. Crucially, however, those processes remain at the same time utterly invisible. In the words of Dean MacCannell, writing about the power structures embedded within the spaces of constructed landscapes in particular: ‘real or absolute power … transcends consciousness, refuses to be named “power” or anything else, subsumes cause and effect, and operates without ever revealing itself.’6 For MacCannell, therefore, invisible power sources and their effects become naturalised like a garden and are ultimately productive of what we can term ‘a landscape of the mind’.7 In turn, this psychic horticultural landscape carries deep within its core what Jacques Derrida has identified (using a suitably apt metaphor also adopted by MacCannell, and one that will recur throughout this present book) as the ‘enormous and old root which must be accounted for’.8 Here, Derrida’s ‘old root’ refers to the same relentless phallogocentrism as critiqued by Cixous, one that has long insisted on defining the ‘truth’ of traceable origins (of humanity, of discourse, of writing etc.), constructed and performed via traditional, ‘rational’, linear, wall-like narratives of history and philosophy.9 Indeed, elsewhere in his attempts at ‘deracinating’ – or uprooting – such narratives to uncover their phallogocentric 5 6 7 8 9

Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 7 and p. 6. Dean MacCannell, ‘Landscaping and the Unconscious’, in The Meaning of Gardens, ed. Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 94–101 (p. 94). This is to adapt a term coined by Irit Rogoff in her Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), where she refers to human culture as reflecting a ‘geography of the mind’ (p. 97). Jacques Derrida, ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, Yale French Studies 52 (1975), 31–113 (96, n. 33). By ‘phallogocentric’, Derrida refers to the dependency of language and its authority to articulate the ‘truth’ of the world and its history upon phallic premises of linear logic and ‘coming to a point’. As such, for Derrida and other poststructuralist philosophers, male dominance/domination has long been built into language itself, something which he argues is ‘neither an accident nor a speculative mistake’ (‘Purveyor’, p. 96, n. 33).

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agendas and politicised spaces, Derrida identifies this ‘enormous and old root’ as nothing but ‘a concealment of the origin’ – the actual ‘origin’ of us all being, of course, both maternal and culturally feminine.10 Mindful of Derrida’s vegetal trope, MacCannell asserts of his own task of investigating the power structures of spaces within landscape that there is nowhere better than the garden and the language used to describe it for an unearthing of the unequal workings of language, power and their naturalisation.11 In this sense, the garden – and particularly the walled garden with all that its lithic enclosing connotes – provides us with an alternative ‘grammar’ of a fecund ‘inside’ that is non-linear and cyclical, that allows for the deracination of phallogocentric structures and those texts that aim to promote and simultaneously conceal them. As suggested above, in this first chapter I wish to pursue and unpick some of these complex issues by examining the ways in which such gendered power dynamics play out in medieval representations of Eden as the original hortus conclusus that haunts all others, particularly those disruptive ‘deracinations’ undertaken in apocryphal retellings of the Fall and the exile of Adam and Eve that became so popular during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a time, of course, when the image of the walled garden was also making its concerted presence felt in other religious contexts as well as within courtly milieux.12 As I will argue, in such retellings and reconfigurations, the hierarchic gender dynamics long associated with ‘the enormous and old root’ of the male-appropriated walled garden of grand narrative, as expounded by generations of male exegetes, are frequently destabilised to reveal a narrative 10 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 93. 11 MacCannell, ‘Landscaping and the Unconscious’, p. 95. For a detailed and extended study of the tropological importance of the root within human imagination, see Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). I will engage more fully with Wampole’s work later in this study. 12 For an overview of this development, see Victoria Larson, ‘A Rose Blooms in the Winter: The Tradition of the Hortus Conclusus and its Signficance as Devotional Emblem’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 52.4 (2013), 303–12. See also Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981, repr. 2014), especially chapters 4 and 5, pp. 120–71.

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that bears beneath the level of its own narration ‘an unconscious completely indifferent to laws’, to return to the words of Cixous, quoted above. In fact, to adapt MacCannell’s perspective further, non-canonical texts such as those found in this apocryphon of the Fall provide a most fertile and productive ‘digging place’ for an unearthing – undoing, even – of the phallocratic enterprise and for a witnessing of a hermeneutics of natality, nurture and flourishing – long associated with female spirituality – emerging in its place.13 However, it also provides a locus where we might also witness the reining in of that hermeneutic set and its reappropriation by, and eventual reintegration into, that phallocratic law.

Eden and its Deceptive Veils As also mentioned in the introduction to this study, the history of the medieval walled garden as a primary cultural phenomenon in the west has been well documented. However, its multiple and multivalent meanings as part of a continually evolving human imaginary less so – and its importance to the emergence of an expressly proto-female imaginary not at all. Frequently associated with Eden as the original paradisal ‘home’, the walled garden drew its topography initially from the largely functional model of the Persian pairidaeza, with its areas of shade created by planted trees and its four-square structure formed from two crossed waterways. By the Middle Ages, such a model had come to dominate depictions of Eden, ever reinforced by what Cixous has identified as the foundational ‘Bildungsroman’ account of the first garden’s creation by God in Genesis 2:10.14 And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning: wherein he placed man whom he had formed. And the Lord God brought forth of the ground all manner of trees, fair to 13 The issue of female flourishing as primary hermeneutic of female-authored mystical and other religious texts will be examined in later chapters of this present study. 14 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 148. I discuss Cixous’ reading of the Edenic narrative in greater detail below.

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Arriving in the west via the Byzantine Church, this model of the hortus conclusus inevitably found an expression in the cloister gardens of monastic institutions, built primarily to recapture a vision of a pre-Fall Eden within the enclosed monastic precinct.15 Such ‘paradises’ were multi-purposed, offering shade and quiet spaces for contemplation, prayer and relaxation, whilst also providing ideological reconstruction of humanity’s ‘original’ home and easing the pain of exile from it. As such, its visibility made manifest the possibility of a triumphant return from that exile to our original garden home. The famous – and unique – ninth-century plan of the gardens of the Benedictine monastery of St Gall in Switzerland contained two such ‘paradises’, laid out within the extensive horticultural geography surrounding the central abbey church. Along with a designated ‘physic’ garden close to the infirmary, an orchard that doubled as a cemetery, the two semi-circular ‘paradises’ plotted at either end of the abbey building were to be planted with flowers for their symbolic and olfactory associations and offer a place for prayer en plein air.16 This is in spite of the fact that the Order’s founder, Saint Benedict (d. 547), whilst recognising in his Rule the practicalities of cultivating a monastic garden for food, medicines and other necessities, nevertheless remained a little ambivalent about the potential joys of a monastic garden: monks should ensure not only to enclose their gardens within the precinct but should also remember to cast their eyes downwards with humility at all times, even when working in that garden, in memory of the fact that they are inherently

15 On monastic gardens, see McLean, Medieval English Gardens, pp. 13–58 (for Benedictine gardens specifically, see pp. 23–36). See also Paul Meyvaert, ‘The Medieval Monastic Garden’, in Medieval Gardens, ed. MacDougall, pp. 25–53. 16 As well as the two ‘paradises’ and other generic garden spaces (one most likely an orchard), the plan includes a physic garden situated next to the infirmary (see Plates 1 and 2). See also McLean, Medieval English Gardens, pp. 16–18.

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sinful beings.17 For Benedict, drawing on an ubiquitous trope, the garden was always already a place of tension, tainted by Eve and our human fall into original sin. It was, moreover, the brazen ‘looking’ of the woman, Eve, that caused her to succumb to the forbidden fruit of knowledge and take the unwitting man down with her as she did so. As one early thirteenth-century English writer reminds his audience of enclosed holy women occupying the new ‘Eden’ of their anchoritic cells: ‘Eue þi moder leop efter hire ehnen, from þe ehe to þe eappel, from þe eappel i Parais dun to þer eorðe, from þe eorðe to helle’ [‘Your mother Eve leapt after her eyes, from the eye to the apple, from the apple in Paradise down to the earth, from the earth to hell’].18 For Benedict and for others, therefore, the pleasures of sight and taste within the enclosed monastic garden were bound up inextricably with the ‘memory’ of feminine (and therefore feminising) weakness and transgression – and, ultimately, the fear of sexuality, exile from the garden and separation from a male God – that lay buried beside the ‘old root’ of the phallocratic discourse. The likelihood is, therefore, that the St Gall plan presents us with a ninth-century fixed ideal of the monastic garden that was never fully realised – nor ever meant to be – providing us ultimately with a paradigm for the type of constructed ‘historical’ representation identified by Soja as a ‘social product’: here, a wish-fulfilment trap and, therefore, ‘carceral’ in more ways than one. According to Soja, such carcerality (that is to say, the walling-in of what is termed ‘history’ by rigid, unquestioned discourse), has only ever served to reify, reduce, stagnate and silence the often vibrant, fluid, cyclical, dynamic and articulate processes that lie hidden beneath, within and outside. The walls of historical discourse aim to fix 17 See Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. Cardinal Gasquet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925; repr. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), chapter VI, p. 16. Benedict also suggests the gardens should be enclosed to prevent the monks from having to leave the monastic precincts, something ‘in no wise expedient for their souls’ (chapter LXVI, p. 54). 18 Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, 2 vols, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 325/326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), I. 2, p. 22. The translation is taken from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). The page numbers are the same in each instance.

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these processes in their place, so to speak.19 In terms of the walled garden of Eden, therefore, its carcerality lies not in its walls in the physical sense but in its increasingly bounded discourse of origins that were ontologically male: this was a place constructed for the first man by a male God (God ‘planted’ paradise and ‘placed’ Adam within it) and which laid the ground, in the most literal sense, for that first man’s subsequent transformation into the most unlikely first mother as he gives birth to Eve from his opened, vaginal sidewound.20 At a stroke, from the onset of Christian history, then, both the natal and the maternal are appropriated into this ideal (and idealising) androcentric scenario of origins, morphing into a male imaginary intent on maintaining its own carceral fallacies. Within this discursively fixed and enclosed space, it follows that male generativity is deemed essential, life-giving, God-like and transcendent; in contrast, female birth-giving, as it emerges in the post-Fall context, is fleshly, abject and death-associated. Any female claim upon origins is buried in the earth of Eden next to the old phallocratic root that emerges from the dust, literally providing its ‘food for thought’. Thus the body of the ‘real’ mother is harnessed to the service of male genealogy and forever placed within its thrall (‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power’).21 As Irigaray has recognised in more recent times, from this carceral position of male self-imposed exile from maternal origins there is no return: man has, indeed, become ‘a prisoner of his own productions’, rendered watertight by means 19 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 1. 20 Genesis 2:22–3 famously reads: ‘[T]he Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.’ In some medieval iconographic depictions, Adam is represented literally as birthing Eve from the wound in his side, with obvious reference to Christ’s birthing of Ecclesia through his wounded side during the crucifixion (see Plate 3). These two typological representations are sometimes brought together. See, for example, the image allying Eve’s birth from Adam’s side to the birth of Ecclesia from Christ’s side in Vienna Codex 2554, f. 2v, a Bible Moralisée of c. 1225, the illuminated medallions from which have been published in Gerald B. Guest, Bible Moralisée: Vienna, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 2554, Manuscripts in Miniature 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992). 21 This is the moment of God’s punishment of Eve recorded in Genesis 3:16.

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of his own discourse – what she terms ‘the discourse between men’.22 Thus, both the discursive walls surrounding the Eden of the Genesis account and those framing the St Gall map remain inviolate, whilst at the same time haunted by the inaccessibility of a lost ‘maternal’ realm where the placental ‘tree of life’ still flourishes but from which humanity is enforcedly exiled. Again, like Cixous, Irigaray identifies that this male-imposed exile from the natal-maternal amounts to nothing less than a failure by patriarchal thinking to recognise female desire as the de facto source: that is to say, the ‘paradisal’ matrixial beginnings of us all: Cut off from her – or Her – men withdraw from themselves. They wander deprived of vigor, of energy. Animated by a mechanism as arbitrary as language, they learn with a master how to adapt themselves to it … This apprenticeship is supposed to make them men. Instead, it exiles them from themselves – and from her or Her, to whom they no longer listen, they have never spoken.23

Here Irigaray also recognises the extensive and elaborate narratives constructed by androcentric religions and philosophies that have allowed men to cut themselves off from the realm of the maternal via a discourse of mastery. Instead, she argues, they must superimpose and substitute their own imaginary – a world of their own imaginings – in an arbitrary attempt at ‘making’ their own world through discourse.

Biblical Women and their Gardens The figuration of a woman housed at the centre of an enclosed garden, of course, is not just restricted to Eve and Eden. Another such manifestation of the urge to control the maternal feminine through discourse was the medieval obsession with the Virgin Mary as ‘second Eve’, whose selfless devotion to the conditions of her chaste motherhood served to redeem the untrammelled desires 22 Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 40. Cixous also recognises this as ‘absolute discourse’ in her discussion of Eden in ‘Author in Truth’, p. 151. Cixous’s stance on Eden is discussed in more detail below. 23 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 51.

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of the first Eve and thus offer the possibility of redemption for all women by the elimination of desire. Such a theological typology that offered a mirroring of Mary and Eve was likely initiated by Saint Irenaeus (d. 202) in the second century who pitted the obedience of the former against the disobedience of the latter;24 but it is, perhaps, better summed up by the anonymous lyricist of a highly popular eighth- or ninth-century Latin hymn which plays with the palindrome ‘Eva’ and ‘Ave’ in a way which would become commonplace as the cult of Mary rose to ascendance from the twelfth century onwards: Sumens illud Ave Gabrielis ore, Funda nos in pace Mutans nomen Evae. [Receiving that Ave from the lips of Gabriel, establish us in peace, changing Eva’s name.]25

Within this configuration, that depends upon a playful reversal of the lexical components of both Eve’s and Mary’s naming by the Logos, Mary’s acceptance of the angel’s ‘Ave Maria’ at the moment of the Annunciation was seen to reverse – literally – the effects of Eve’s damning rejection of that Logos. However, to achieve this, Mary’s female fertility – her flourishing – had to be appropriated discursively into that Logos and rendered subject to what Soja terms the ‘deceptive ideological veils’ that he claims reify and 24 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses [Against Heresies], PG 7, cols 437–1224, 3.22.4. Here, Irenaeus claims, ‘[F]rom Mary to Eve … thus also it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary’. 25 The Penguin Book of Latin Verse, ed. Frederick Brittain (London: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 129. The literature on representation of the Virgin in the medieval period is considerable, but see, for example, Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Teresa P. Reed, Shadows of Mary: Reading the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2010); and Brian K. Reynolds, Gateway to Heaven: Marian Doctrine and the Devotion, Image and Typology in the Patristic and Medieval Periods, 2 vols (New York: New City Press, 2012). For a discussion of the Virgin as a product of ‘between-men’ discourse, see Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 160–86. I will examine Kristeva’s work on the Virgin and her relation to gardens further in the following chapter.

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obscure both cultural and personal disempowerments, as well as practices of gender and racial domination.26 In representations of Mary, therefore, it is no coincidence that the veils are rendered both literal and figurative, taking on exceptional meaning as they speak of both the power invested in her by the male imaginary and a disempowerment masquerading as passively-inflected agency. Nor is it coincidental that both Mary and Eve find themselves placed within the walled garden, that, like Mary’s veil, is also subject to fantasies of male imaginings regarding controlled and contained female bodies needing to be incarcerated, regulated and ‘protected’. Indeed, in a lengthy discussion of the role played by the Virgin in western religious contexts, Julia Kristeva identifies the same discursive constructs that attempt to position an appropriated maternal and natal at the heart of a religious system and which can only find room for a woman if her fleshly sexuality is removed and/or projected onto another (an Other) – in this case Eve and, ultimately, all women. Thus, for Kristeva, not only is the ‘maternal’ Virgin ‘the fantasy … of a lost territory’, she is also ‘the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized’.27 Within these terms, whilst Eve embodies the relinquished power and abjection of the maternal, the Virgin remains a fantasy of maternal power and its origins made safe by its falling subject to the Law of the Father and the discursive ‘walls’ constructed by that Law. Read in this way, it is of no surprise that, in popular medieval representations of the Virgin, these walls and their laws are literalised by means of her ubiquitous enclosure within the man-made hortus conclusus. There, both veiled and silent, she is permitted to occupy the appropriate ‘safe’ space. There, ultimately, her maternal fecundity and her fruitfulness, now well under lock and key, are able to be contained and ‘written in stone’. And, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us in another lithic context: ‘Stone speaks across the centuries whilst its human companions come and go.’28 As we shall see, it is both stone and its speaking that help to produce the 26 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 5. 27 Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 161. 28 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 135–6.

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ultimate grand narrative and pass it on as ‘truth’ within a patriarchal imaginary realm. Such a visibly bounded space as Mary’s walled garden is, therefore, mimetic: within patriarchal perception of the hortus conclusus as safe space in which to contain its origins, the woman at its centre is, in fact, its captive, whether seemingly autonomous Virgin Mother, or sub-/ab-jected Eve. These horti conclusi therefore confirm what Robert Pogue Harrison has asserted about gardens more generally: ‘they embody an affirmation, declare their human authorship, invite recognition, and call for a response’. For Harrison, too, however, such gardens also ‘represent speech-acts’ that enter into dialogue with, and sometimes challenge the hegemony of the cultural imaginary.29 Within the medieval Christian imaginary specifically, Eden provides a myriad of such cultural conversations: always already deeply troubled – and troubling – Eden articulates a state of exile and abandonment for which the feminine, and women as its ready embodiment, ultimately become cultural scapegoats. Thus, the trope of the fecund-but-sealed-up woman in the walled garden served a dual purpose within the medieval imaginary: there she could be safely ‘unearthed’, brought into being and shaped via a ‘discourse between men’, and yet be safely stored – reburied, as it were – for future use as ideological tool. This perspective plays out elsewhere in other biblical contexts, never more so than in medieval exegetical treatments of the garden of the Song of Songs, on the surface of it a strange, hauntingly beautiful and seemingly anomalous biblical book detailing erotic union between a bride and her groom and dating back to at least the third millennium BCE. Within medieval thought, however, it was widely believed to have been written by Solomon, since he is identified in the poem as its Bridegroom on four occasions.30 By the Middle 29 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 45. 30 Commentators have long been divided about whether this is supposed to be understood literally, although the poem is still known by many as The Song of Solomon because of the bridegroom’s identification as Solomon in Song 1:4; 3:7; 3:9; and 3:11. J. Cheryl Exum, however, believes this to be merely a ‘literary fiction’ or ‘guise’, a function of the text’s poetics, in Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), p. 140 and p.

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Ages, this poem, foregrounding female desire, fertility and fecundity expressed within a garden setting, had been systematically allegorised and re-allegorised out of all recognition by countless generations of male exegetes, with the Bride recast variously as Synagogue, Ecclesia, the Virgin, redeemed Eve, the human soul and, sometimes, Christ himself. Indeed, it is the poet’s concerted conflation of the Bride in this poem with the love-garden from which she and her lover speak their words of sexual passion (‘My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up’)31 that helped to produce the hortus conclusus as the most insistent of gendered medieval spaces, deployed variously to configure ideals of chastity and transcendence, sexual passion and sin. Moreover, the Song’s origins as secular love poem would ultimately be subsumed into what E. Ann Matter has termed ‘the forest of allegory’ that constituted both Jewish and Christian tamings of its relentless erotics, so much so that it readily found its way into medieval religious canonicity, as well as, in some shape or form, into the wider secular literary culture of the period.32 However, from the earliest times of Christian history, the ‘difficult’ celebration of human sexuality that constitutes the poem proved to be a point of considerable tension. For example, according to Origen (d. c. 254), one of the first Christian commentators on the book, its content presents ‘non parum discriminis periculique’ [no small difficulty and danger].33 Such ‘difficulty’ was clearly based on attempts at reconciling the poem’s erotic tenor with a wider spiritual ethos central to Christian belief. We see this writ large in the detailed commentary on the Song of Songs authored by Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) in the twelfth century, within which he famously declared to his monastic audience in response to the Bridegroom’s erotic depictions of the Bride in Song 1:9 (‘Thy cheeks are beautiful as the turtle-dove, thy neck as jewels’): ‘Vide autem ne carnaliter cogites coloratam carnis 141. For two important studies on the Song in western tradition, see Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of my Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 31 Song of Songs 4:2. 32 Matter, Voice of my Beloved, p. 52. 33 Origen, In Canticum Canticorum, PG 13, cols 62–198 (col. 63). My translation.

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putredinem’ [‘You must not give an earth-bound meaning to this coloring of the corruptible flesh’].34 Elsewhere, too, Bernard shies away from any foregrounding of female sexual desire present within the Song by suggesting that such representations are nothing but ‘word-play’ on the part of the author and that any sense of the literal should be deemed merely a distraction from their ‘true’ and ‘spiritual’ meaning: Hic litteralis lusus. Quidni dixerim lusum? Quid enim serium habet litterae series? Ne auditu quidem dignum quod toris sonat, si non intus adiuvet Spiritus infirmitatem intelligentiae nostrae. [This is a word-play. Why shouldn’t I call it a play? For where is the seriousness in these words? The external sound is not worth hearing unless the Spirit within helps our weak understanding.]35

From the time of Origen, therefore, within the Christian imaginary the poem’s heady poetics of sexuality, fecundity and flourishing within a richly flowering garden were read consistently by means of concerted allegoresis: that is to say, a ‘between-men’ discourse in which the Bridegroom was transformed into husband-hero-Christ and his desiring Bride into wife-Mary-Ecclesia-human soul longing for union with God. Such exegetical gymnastics, moreover, by the high Middle Ages, would ultimately result in the hero-husband-Christ giving birth to the Church and humanity, Adam-like, through his vaginal wounded side.36

34 Bernard wrote two exegetical works on the Song: Brevis Commentario in Cantica, PL 184, cols 407–36; and Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (the better known of his treatments), in Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercientes, 1957–8). All references will be taken from this latter edition, with the modern English translations taken from Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, 4 vols, Cistercian Fathers Series (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), cited by volume and page number in parenthesis after the Latin reference (here Sermo XL.1 (2, p. 199). Matter considers Bernard’s contribution to medieval understandings of the Song in Voice of my Beloved, pp. 123–33. For a full-length study of Bernard’s constructions of gender identity in his commentaries on the Song, see Line Cecilie Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Also useful is the wider overview offered by Matter, The Voice of my Beloved. 35 Bernard, Sermo LXI.2 (3, p. 141). 36 See note 20, above.

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While clearly entranced by the feminine poetics of flourishing, generation and fecundity that saturate the poem and render the lovers’ garden a new pre-Fall Eden, again exegetes such as Bernard consistently overwrote such hermeneutics with an inherited allegorical poetics, ultimately appropriating, reshaping and re-manoeuvring them back into the masculine between-men discourse of traditional exegesis, recapturing them for the Logos and its grand narrative, as it were. In sermon 85, for example, taking as his text the extract from Song 3:1 in which the Bride expresses her desire for her husband (‘In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth’), Bernard’s reading of this expression of female sexual desire recasts the Bride as the human soul yearning for God. In turn, that yearning is articulated in terms of a patriarchically endorsed heterosexual desire that overshadows even the love of a mother for her children: Et quidem laeta in prole mater: sed in amplexibus sponsi laetior. Cara pignora filiorum: sed oscula plus delectant. Bonum est salutare multos: excedere autem, et cum Verbo esse, multo jucundius. [A mother is happy in her child; a bride is even happier in her bridegroom’s embrace. The children are dear, they are the pledge of his love, but his kisses give her greater pleasure. It is good to save many souls, but there is far more pleasure in going aside to be with the Word.]37

Elsewhere, Bernard follows tradition in reading the Bride in the garden in terms of the Virgin Mary, whose pristine, fruitful womb nourished the unborn Christ – the Word – and who, as obedient sponsa Christi and sealed-up mater Christi within (and as) her own hortus conclusus, received suitable reward in heaven by being crowned by her son as its queen. Commenting in Sermon 45 on the response of the bridegroom in Song 4:1 (‘How beautiful art thou, my love, how beautiful art thou! Thy eyes are doves’ eyes’), for example, Bernard explains it in terms of God’s love for the Virgin: ‘et ideo concupivit Rex decorum ejus, quia humilitatem innocentiae sociavit’ [‘the king desired her loveliness because she joined

37 Bernard, Sermo LXXXV.13 (4, p. 209).

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humility to innocence’].38 Mary, of course, does not have to choose between her son and his father because they are one and the same: instead of embodying a jouissance formed from her own desire, as we see in the case of an un- or de-allegorised Bride, she is appropriated into a controllable and suitably policed idea of a femininity that is then reshaped within the shadow of the phallus. Indeed, Bernard himself claims as much when he resolves the tensions of the Song’s hortus conclusus by appropriating the text unequivocably for the Logos: ‘Sit itaque hortus simplex ac plena historia …. Est historia hortus’ [‘Let the garden, then, represent the plain, unadorned, historical sense of Scripture …. History therefore is a garden’].39 Indeed, here Bernard’s assessment resonates loudly with the observations of Borchardt in more recent times, who has asserted of the garden’s perennial presence within the western imaginary: The garden stands at precisely the center of this tension and displaces itself … toward nature or creativity. This is the deepest reason for which the human being dreams that our origins lie in a garden, and that the garden is the place in which we achieve enlightenment; this is why we hope to find redemption in a garden, and why we look for solace there.40

Borchardt’s words here may go some way in explaining the prevalence of women in their gardens within biblical representation, with all of them except for the Virgin deemed at some point to be dangerous or resistant to the patriarchal order. Bathsheba, wife of Urias, for example, who was inadvertently spied upon by the Hebrew King David whilst she was bathing in her own home, had, by the Middle Ages, transmogrified into a conscious seducer washing herself seductively within an enclosed garden setting.41 Such was her allure, the Bible tells us, that David chose to deploy 38 Bernard, Sermo XLV.2 (3, p. 233). 39 Bernard, Sermo XXIII.4–5 (2, p. 28). 40 Borchardt, Passionate Gardener, p. 33. 41 Samuel 11:1–27. On this biblical episode, see, for example, Sara M. Koenig, Bathsheba Survives (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2018); and Anne Rudolff Stanton, ‘From Eve to Bathsheba and Beyond: Motherhood in the Queen Mary Psalter’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 172–89.

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Urias to the front-line of battle, ensuring his death so as to secure his own possession of Bathsheba.42 Nevertheless, within medieval imagination it was Bathsheba who was made to carry the burden of blame for David’s sin and relegated to the ranks of sinful Eve in order to preserve the reputation of David as grand-narrative Psalmist and, ultimately, forefather of Christ. As the author of the thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, makes clear when warning his audience, ‘Bersabee, þurh þet ha unwreah hire i Dauiðes sihðe, ha dude him sunegin on hire, se hali king as he wes’ [‘Bathsheba, by undressing herself in David’s sight, caused him to sin with her, even though he was a holy king’].43 Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the similarly married Susanna, wrongly accused of adultery by two lascivious Elders after they had been watching her bathe in the garden of her own home, narrowly escapes a stoning for her presumed-upon guilt (a story I return to focus on in detail in chapter five of this present study).44 So, too, the Old Testament queen, Jezebel, was thrown to her death and eaten by dogs as punishment for arranging the murder of her neighbour and appropriating his enclosed vineyard to provide a herb garden 42 The Old Testament account does not mention a garden but by the Middle Ages, Bathsheba was almost ubiquitously depicted as bathing naked in a luscious garden. For a discussion of this and other garden-associated women, see, for example, Kahren Jones Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delight: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); and Wayne Craven, ‘The Iconography of the David and Bathsheba Cycle at the Cathedral of Auxerre’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34. 3 (1975), 236–7. As Craven asserts, Augustine associates Bathsheba with the Bride in the Song of Songs, referred to as ‘a fountain sealed up’ by the poem’s supposed author (and Bathsheba’s son), Solomon (236). It may well be this correlation that brought about the popular depiction of Bathsheba as bathing in a garden. For longer studies on this popular representation see, for example, Monika Anne Walker-Vadillo, Bathsheba in Late Medieval French Manuscript Illumination: Innocent Object of Desire or Agent of Sin? (New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). For a discussion of medieval responses to Solomon’s supposed authorship of the Song of Songs, see Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 25–7, 29–32, 54–5 and 91–2. 43 Ancrene Wisse, I. 2. 101–3, p. 22. 44 Daniel 13:1–65. Again, iconographic depictions of this episode were increasingly popular in the Middle Ages and early modern period, becoming increasingly lavish and sexualised in their representations. See, for example, Dan W. Clanton, The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The Story of Susanna and its Renaissance Interpretations (New York and London: T. and T. Clarke, 2006).

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for her husband, Achab.45 In the New Testament, too, such dangers and tensions are also made manifest: for example, in the garden setting of Mary Magdalene’s meeting with the risen Christ in John 20: 17. Here the presence of the former prostitute in the garden not only demonstrates the possibility of human redemption by showing how a ‘bad woman’ becomes good, but also reminds us of the excess that must be expunged before she is allowed to morph into a carefully shaped ‘apostle to the apostles’, be granted (re)entry into the garden and assimilate herself into their between-men discourse.46 Even so, she is still forbidden from touching Christ. As Barbara Baert astutely recognises, writing in terms of this episode’s prolific medieval iconography: ‘The iconographic history of Noli me tangere is situated within the contraposto of feminine desire and masculine prohibition.’47 In all these cases, then, there is an inherent tension in the woman’s close association with the potential excesses of her walled garden and the need, whether de malo or de bono, for her body to provide a script to remind the reader of the danger of those excesses if left unwalled and unpoliced. Each of these biblical women therefore is shaped into a useful tool for the construction of the grand narrative, her female sexuality feeding the ‘old root’ of that narrative and guaranteeing its hegemonic effects. Indeed, 45 Kings 21:15–23. 46 John 20:17. The representation of Mary Magdalene in the garden of the Resurrection is extremely common in medieval and early modern iconography, but she is also associated with the walled garden in her unredeemed state in the Digby Mary Magdalene play, where she lies indolently awaiting her next lover: ‘I will restyn in þis erbyr/ Amons thes bamys precyus of prysse,/ Tyll som lover wol apere,/ That me is wont to hales and kysse.’ See The Digby Plays, ed. Donald L. Baker, John Murphy and Louis B. Hall, Jr., EETS o.s. 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 24–95 (p. 76). Like Ancrene Wisse’s Bathsheba, the Digby play explicitly suggests that Mary Magdalene displays her body deliberately to seduce the ‘innocent’ male passer-by. Both her pre- and post-redemption states, therefore, ally her to the environment of the enclosed garden. For a full-length study of representations of Mary Magdalene in the Middle Ages, see, for example, Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993); and Antti Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library and Related Documents (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1996). 47 Barbara Baert, ‘Touching with the Gaze: A Visual Analysis of the Noli me tangere’, in Noli me tangere. Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images. Exhibition catalogue for the exhibition by the same name, Maurits Sabbe Library, University of Leuven, 23 February–30 April (2006), pp. 43–52 (p. 44).

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MacCannell again reminds us of what is actually at stake here when he writes: ‘The reason we must keep others out of our gardens is that there is a body buried next to the “enormous old root”, specifically the remains of … a kind of feminine sexuality that might flourish outside of domestic relationships.’48 For MacCannell, then, the place of the garden of origins in the human imaginary, particularly the garden housing a woman at its centre – whether that is the Garden of Eden, the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs or the gardens we find in other biblical contexts – is the place where a once revered and powerful articulation of female sexual agency lies buried within a patriarchal culture that has long needed to harness that power to sustain its own primary narcissism. In the estimation of Irigaray, writing in the same context: ‘the world that man has built to supplant his adhesion to the maternal world …, against participation in her world, has become a screen, even a weapon, which intervenes between the masculine subject and himself.’ For Irigaray, too, this has led to man’s self-enclosure within a redefined garden of his own making, so that ‘[h]e is not only sheltered but also enclosed by his (L)logos, becoming a prisoner of his own productions’.49 It is therefore to one such medieval ‘production’ focusing on the lost Edenic garden and the buried ‘body’ of female sexuality, that I will turn later in this chapter.

Disinterring the ‘Wild Unconscious’ in the Patriarchal Text Before doing so, however, first the question to be addressed remains: what happens within the garden when the body of the woman feeding the ‘old root’ is disinterred, when she is listened to, when she tells her own story, when the ‘wild unconscious’ escapes from the garden – and the text? A disruptive re-reading – and rewriting – of the ‘old stories’ of our cultural formation in the West that allows for just such a disinterment has long formed part of a feminist strategy to re-collect, re-call and re-member the past in 48 MacCannell, ‘Landscaping and the Unconscious’, p. 96. 49 Irigaray, In the Beginning, pp. 150–1.

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ways that challenge, rather than uphold, patriarchal sensibilities as the main stake-holders in the hegemony of our formative texts. Indeed, in her examination of such strategies, Liedeke Plate has argued that ‘such rewriting of a classic text from an alternative perspective intervenes in the production of cultural memory. It affects the way we read and understand these texts, and it transforms the way we remember them.’50 Whilst Plate’s insightful study focuses primarily on twentieth-century women’s extended rewriting of patriarchal texts – including some of the biblical texts mentioned above – it is also entirely apposite to the type of medieval re-reading and re-writing ‘against the grain’ with which much of this present book is concerned: and especially those concerted rewritings of the Edenic narrative which, again to draw on Cixous’s words, can unearth ‘an unconscious completely indifferent to laws’.51 Indeed, the epistemological potential embedded within a re-reading of Eden is something that has not escaped the attention of other contemporary commentators, a number of whom have seized upon Genesis as the patriarchal ‘Ur-text’ in order to reconfigure its overly controlled garden hermeneutics in the service of a postmodernist/ feminist critique. In 1992, for example, the respected British human rights lawyer, Helena Kennedy, published her searing examination of the inequalities within the British legal system’s treatment of women, Eve Was Framed, arguing that such inequalities are in part based on an entrenched bias against women, steered to a large degree by those religious and philosophical epistemologies of ontological carnality and weakness that have long underpinned western culture.52 In more recent times, in a work examining landscapes as places we construct and use to examine our deeply held fears and ambitions, Rebecca Solnit has also noted: ‘Eve and the serpent must 50 Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 7. Here, Plate asserts that contemporary women’s fictional rewriting of aspects of male-driven grand narratives as ‘a feminist concept in the critical arena, the cultural imaginary and the literary marketplace’ (p. 4). As I argue in this present book, such acts of literary recuperation by the reassembling of the ‘evidence’ from the past, was also a powerful proto-feminist statement during the Middle Ages. 51 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 152. 52 Helena Kennedy, Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992, various repr.).

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have conversed at greater length than Genesis records. That the most crucial conversation in Judeo-Christian theology is between a woman and a beast suggests that the voices that count are not always those of the fathers.’53 Continuing with this reassessment, Solnit also suggests that Eve’s talking and eating with the serpent constituted ‘an intellectual and corporal exchange with her surroundings’ as well as a ‘willingness to take in the new and risky’.54 Indeed, for Paul W. Kahn, writing in similar vein, Eve’s temptation and her speech-act are inseparable: Eve ‘becomes an individual when speech opens a range of choices’, adding as an observation, ‘This is the sense in which dialogue creates the subject’.55 Here the work of Kennedy, Solnit and Kahn offer correlates to the philosophical expositions of writers such as Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous operating in the last decades of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first, much of whose work has been aimed at deracinating those subtle workings of ancient religious and philosophical beliefs still imbricated invisibly in the here-and-now of our own lives: a theoretical unearthing that still seeks to make visible the body beside the phallogocentric ‘root’, so to speak. As suggested above, Kristeva’s early work on the Virgin is particularly important for an unpicking of the intricacies of the gradual and methodical construction of Mary as ideal m/other divorced from the ‘problems’ of the material flesh-and-blood body. It was, after all, Mary’s ‘feminine’ acquiescence to this divestment that ultimately won for her a place as Queen of Heaven: as Kristeva famously writes about this apotheosis, ‘it swallows up the goddesses and removes their necessity’.56 Such an analysis again chimes with the Cixousian notion of a law that always manages to ‘recapture the wild unconscious’ and keep the woman in her patriarchically assigned place, buried beside the old root.57 For Kristeva, like Cixous, within western culture the maternal body has long been regarded as a visible sign of a 53 Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), p. 7. 54 Solnit, As Eve Said, p. 7. 55 Paul. W. Kahn, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 40. 56 Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 185. 57 See again the quotation forming the epigraph to this present chapter.

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feminine jouissance – that is to say, the pleasurable excess that must at all costs be repressed and contained for the steady functioning of the patriarchal order. And, as I have already suggested, within the medieval imaginary and its texts, the construct of the walled garden enclosing the Virgin served this function very well. Elsewhere in her work, Kristeva turns her attention directly to Eve and the Creation, tracing in this grand narrative the symbolic origins of what she terms the ‘prerequisite’ for irreconcilable gender division within monotheistic systems, a division, moreover, that keeps the unity of those systems intact.58 For Kristeva, Eve’s birth from Adam’s side, her fall from grace, her temptation, the fulfilment of her desire, coalesce as a projection – a ‘supplement’ – that permits man’s perception of unity with his God – that is, his own transcendence based on self-denial and communal discipline – to remain inviolate and safely carceral. Meanwhile, Eve’s body, and that of Everywoman, takes the brunt of all that man has relinquished to forge such unity: desire, and pleasure-in-desire being the most urgent. Therefore, a woman is destined always to be the displaced ‘other’. In Kristeva’s words: [C]reate a supplement for what is lacking in this man who speaks to his god; and you have woman, who has no access to the word, but who appears as the pure desire to seize it, or as that which ensures the permanence of the divine paternal function for all humans: that is, the desire to continue the species.59

Thus, God’s words to Adam and Eve, ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it’,60 morph from blessing into curse upon the unleashing of the human desire that is projected onto Eve at the moment of the Fall. Within the same context, for Kristeva too, the dialectic of monotheistic unity and the line of patriarchal descent brings about a fixation on an eroticism nailed to the materiality of procreation – but this is an eroticism within which desire, now subject entirely to the Law, has no place unless directed towards God. Illicit desire is now the domain of the woman who has no access 58 Julia Kristeva, ‘About Chinese Women’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, various repr.), pp. 138–59. 59 Kristeva, ‘About Chinese Women’, p. 142. 60 Genesis 1:28.

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to that Law, except to be subject to it. Her flourishing within the garden therefore becomes defined by the necrophilic, patriarchal command (‘fill the earth and subdue it’). The earth is to be crushed and dominated in the service of patriarchal linearity. For Kristeva, like Solnit, the mythical relationship between Eve and the serpent epitomises this perennial equation: The serpent … is Adam’s repressed desire to transgress, that which he dares not carry out, and which is his shame. The sexual symbolism helps us understand that the serpent is that which, in God or Adam, remains beyond or outside the sublimation of the Word.61

Since both Eve and the serpent challenge the hegemony of the phallic Law invested in Adam, both must be subjugated and punished to bring them back in line with that male agency by disrupting their alliance and severing their collaboration (‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed’).62 Like Bernard of Clairvaux’s appropriative depiction of the Virgin, then, and like Jezebel and Mary Magdalene, Eve is made to believe, in Kristeva’s words, ‘she is (the phallus) even if she doesn’t have it’ and will waste her generative energies striving to possess it. This, for Kristeva, is the way in which social harmony, order, structure and production are maintained, whilst, in practice, the sexes are locked in eternal battle either side of an ‘abyss’, necessitating a ‘radiant’ masochistic display on the part of the woman ‘in order to be Queen’. For Kristeva, as we have seen, the Virgin Mary performs such a display par excellence, the embodied reward of compliance with the Law. Eve, however, remains the discarded supplement, ever striving for a phallus she is ultimately unable to possess. Thus, these two figures, Mary and Eve, are destined to embody the functioning of the symbolic order within which jouissance and other marginalised female discourse is ‘hidden and cloaked [dérobent et enrobent]’.63 No wonder that nakedness, veils, clothing and re-clothing become such central concepts in the iconographic representation of both women. 61 Kristeva, ‘About Chinese Women’, p. 143. 62 Genesis 3:15. 63 Kristeva, ‘About Chinese Women’, p. 144.

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Cixous also takes up with some enthusiasm the primal scene of Eden for re-analysis, this time in the context of the relation between what she terms the ‘libidinal economy’ and the Law, a contest that finds its way into all texts that ‘revisit the place where one gambles to win or lose life’.64 For Cixous, the interchange between Eve and the serpent in the garden is about pleasure, desire and its inexplicably forbidden status under the Law (‘of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat’),65 in spite of the fact that the garden was explicitly constructed by God for Adam as a ‘paradise of pleasure’.66 The paradise God has in mind, however, is actually characterised by its stasis and sterility: until the serpent makes its appearance, nothing happens. Thus, it is established as the ‘ground’ for a stand-off between what Cixous terms ‘the two puppets: the word of the Law … and the Apple’. This contest begins in full sight of the first woman, who is offered the apple as a ‘fruit-not-to’ whilst begging her investigation of its interior.67 Ultimately, for Cixous, Eve’s countering of the Law by eating the apple relays to us, not the heinousness of disobedience and primal sin, but that desire for ‘the inside’ and its investigation are indeed ‘positive’ (‘And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat’).68 This positivity, however, has to be concealed by a jealous God/Law lest the excess of pleasure, of jouissance, ruin the integrity, order – and stasis – of his creative impulse. Eve’s fearless negotiation of the inside of the apple, therefore, animates a gendered relation to the ‘interior’ because of its maternal, natal and matrixial associations, ultimately encoding as feminine this ‘experience of the capacity for other, an experience of nonnegative change brought about by the other’, also quoted above.69 As Cixous concludes with a flourish, turning a cultural minus into a plus: ‘Losing oneself is such a joy …’.70 An even more spirited defence of Eve is taken up by Harrison in his assessment of the raw deal patriarchal narrative has meted 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 148–9. Genesis 2:16. Genesis 2:15. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 151. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 153; Genesis 3:6. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 155. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 152.

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out to the ‘mother of humanity’ within western tradition.71 Here, as mentioned above, Harrison develops the concept of the garden as a ‘speech act’ in an examination of the evidence of the Genesis narrative from the perspective of a ‘dialogue’ between garden and woman, recognising ultimately that God fell into his own trap by ‘endowing Eve with the potential for natality’.72 Indeed, like Cixous, Harrison reads Eve’s transgression as a maternal act that served to transform Eden, as the sterile ‘garden of ennui’, into the fecundity of a world of natality and mortality, adding, ‘If death is the price one pays for fruitfulness, so be it.’73 For Harrison, there is much to be learned from what the garden can articulate to whoever chooses to listen with care (in all senses of the word) to its interior dialogues, and Eden is more articulate than most in this capacity. If the apple for Cixous articulates women’s relation to knowledge of the ‘interior’, for Harrison (who draws upon popular medieval representation of the apple as a pomegranate), ‘It took the pomegranate to give depth to her [Eve’s] perception.’ Moreover, Eve’s ingestion of the fruit’s seeds rendered Eve, not Adam, ‘a seminal creature with natural affinities to the humic depths where plant life first takes root’.74 And here, suddenly, via a re-configured and re-constructed Eden, we are offered a means of unearthing the body of the woman buried next to Derrida’s ‘old root’ and of seeing her afresh in new and illuminating ways. We must, however, read her quickly since, in keeping with Cixous’s perception quoted above, the ‘wild unconscious’ she represents will always already be recaptured and reburied by the all-consuming Law of the Father.

Adam and Eve: the ‘Apocrophon’ Such strategies of re-viewing the grand Edenic narrative are not restricted to contemporary theoretical enterprises and re-writings, however; they very much formed part of a medieval – and, 71 Harrison, Gardens. 72 Harrison, Gardens, p. 15. 73 Harrison, Gardens, p. 19. 74 Harrison, Gardens, p. 21.

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on occasion, early modern – enterprise, too. Perhaps most familiar to us in the latter context is the re-envisioning forged by John Milton in his Paradise Lost, where he realises a strong and compelling psychology for the primary protagonists of the original grand narrative, taking them out of Eden and into the struggle of their post-Fall lives. Milton’s treatment, in turn, was stimulated in part by the type of retellings that proliferated throughout the Middle Ages, drawn from a wide range of early apocryphal material. Here we find a similar predilection for animating and individualising the narrative’s main protagonists and for nuancing traditional discourses surrounding the post-Eden legacy. With such extra-canonical accounts having been subject to concerted suppression during the time of the Reformation, the extent to which Milton may have had access to this early and/or medieval material is uncertain;75 but imaginative re-enactments of Eden, the Fall and its immediate aftermath drawn from treatments of the apocryphon were certainly still current in some post-Reformation contexts. For example, two prose treatises, based on much earlier medieval redactions, are dated 1559 and 1610 and both bear the name of the owner, Simon Forman (d. 1611).76 Forman was a ‘notorious’ alchemist and astronomer, whose possession of these texts within this post-Reformation English context has led Brian Murdoch and Jacqueline Tasioulas to claim a special significance (‘it is significant that there should be such copies of the English version of the apocryphon at all at this period’). While they do not elucidate upon what this ‘significance’ may have been, they do posit that preservation may merely have been a result of ‘antiquarian spirit’.77 Whatever the case, such 75 Milton’s possible use of this medieval material was first suggested by Watson Kirkconnell in his The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952; repr. New York: Gordian, 1967). This view was supported by M. D. Johnson whose translation of the Latin version of the Life of Adam and Eve was published in The Old Testament Pseudepigraphia, ed. J. H. Charlesworth, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 249–95. 76 These are preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 6909 (formerly Ashmole 802), fols. 9r–48r; and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 7419 (formerly Ashmole 244), fol. 187r–v. 77 The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, ed. Brian Murdoch and J. A. Tasioulas (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), ‘Introduction’, p. 23. All references to the Life of Adam and the Canticum de Creatione, two such apocryphal texts

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‘significance’ is augmented by the fact that reimagined Edenic narratives also formed an inherent part of some English and Cornish mystery play cycles still being performed in the sixteenth century and beyond. Foremost amongst these, perhaps, was the Cornish play, Gwreans an Bys [The Creation of the World], extant in one seventeenth-century manuscript but believed to date from an earlier drama prompt book.78 This play examines the afterlives of Adam and Eve, again with some dramatic and psychological realism, but also incorporates a manifestation of the type of queer heterochronic temporalities discussed by Carolyn Dinshaw in other medieval literary contexts. Here, Dinshaw writes of the propensity of many medieval texts to deploy ‘asynchrony as a motif that demonstrates the constant presence of other kinds of time in the now’.79 And, of course, any text dealing with both grand-narrative origins and the ways in which that grand narrative plays out in the now (whenever and whatever that now may be), like the Gwreans an Bys, insists upon the relevance of the ‘divine time’ of the Genesis narrative as operating in the here-and-now – in this case the ‘now’ of the dramatic performance. Indeed, in a recent assessment of this play’s temporal displacements, Daisy Black places such temporal slippage into historical context in a way that may shed further light upon the survival of the Edenic apocryphon’s vestiges during the same period: [T]he play … has had the misfortune to slip between the evermore critically fragile late medieval / early modern period divide—is it to be examined as an example of post-reformation religious drama, or discussed below, will be taken from this edition. On Simon Forman, see also Brian Murdoch, The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations of the Vitae Adae et Evae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 103. For a detailed account of Simon Forman’s life, death and influence, see Judith Cook, Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician (London: Vintage, 2002). 78 For a critical edition and modern English translation of this play, see The Creacion of the World: A Critical Edition and Translation, ed. and trans. Paula Nessus (London: Garland, 1983). Brian Murdoch discusses the dating of this text in some detail in ‘Creation, Fall and After in the Cornish “Gwreans an Bys”: Some Comments on a Late Medieval Mystery Play’, Studi Medievali 29.2 (1988), 685–705. Several later copies of the text also survive. 79 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 43.

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In her wider examination, Black also contends that the drama ‘participates in an attempt not only to preserve the languages and devotional practices of the past, but to recognise their ability to release meaning for future generations’.81 Such released ‘meaning’ for Black, moreover, is both gendered and disruptive, ultimately challenging Eden’s carcerality and witnessing the over-spilling of its unconscious excesses to release new and sometimes challenging reconfigurations of the grand narrative itself. Whilst Black reads this type of over-spillage within a post-medieval and post-Catholic context, if we turn to specifically medieval reworkings of Genesis’s most fundamental narrative, we see similar disruptive energies at play. The so-called ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ form a highly complex amalgam of extra-canonical texts that began to emerge soon after the death of Christ and which found widespread popularity throughout the Middle Ages. These books, loosely categorised as the ‘Adam Books’, elucidated imaginatively upon the very sparse biblical detail offered about the post-Eden lives of the protoplasts, Adam and Eve, and were attested to in both eastern and western Christian contexts, appearing in languages as diverse as Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Byzantine, Slavonic, Hebrew, Romanian, Ethiopic, Syriac and Greek. Indeed, particularly popular on the western fringes of Europe – in English, Cornish, Welsh and Irish contexts, for example – were versions that included accounts of Adam and Eve attempting to return to Eden by undertaking a series of self-denying penances to pacify an angered God, including the metrical version I examine in some depth below.82 80 Daisy Black, ‘Time of the Tree: Returning to Eden of the Fall in the Cornish Creation of the World’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 50.1 (2014), 61–89 (63). 81 Black, ‘Time of the Tree’, 898. 82 For a detailed account of the deep complexity of these traditions, see Murdoch, Apocryphal Adam and Eve. Also useful is the introduction to Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, pp. 1–28. Murdoch discusses the Welsh tradition of prose translations in Apocryphal Adam and Eve, pp. 120–31 and the Cornish tradition on pp. 131–6. Mary E. B. Halford discusses the manuscript

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The earliest work within this tradition is thought to have been an obscure Greek text from the first century named the Apocalypsis Mosis, with its Latin translation appearing some time later as the Vita Adae et Evae.83 Unfortunately, the Latin manuscript traditions do not go back any earlier than the eighth century and extant copies are frequently coincidental with – or even postdate – those myriad vernacular translations and adaptations which were based upon the earlier Latin texts.84 Nor was the Vita ever a coherent, monolithic text, as Murdoch and Tasioulas have pointed out.85 Instead, it comprised a ‘fluid collection of elements’ from a range of early treatments focusing on the Fall and the imagined miseries of Adam and Eve as they attempt to undertake penance and build a life outside Eden after their exile from their original garden home.86 This textual instability is further compounded by the fact that, in some manuscripts, the story itself accrued other legends in its retellings. From the eleventh century onwards, for example, elements from the legend of the Holy Rood combined with the Vita elements to produce an even longer, more embellished narrative that finished at the crucifixion itself. Within this tradition, seeds from the Tree of Life in Eden were acquired by Adam and Eve’s son, Seth, and planted beside Adam’s grave – or, in a second metrical version discussed briefly at the end of this chapter, in his mouth – and were destined to grow into the tree felled for the cross of the crucifixion.87 The traditions that this apocryphon incorporates, then, are multiple, variable and unstable, belying the validity of the term ‘text’ in any modern sense. Indeed, this

tradition in, ‘The Apocryphal Vita Adae et Evae: Some Comments on the Manuscript Tradition’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 82.4 (1981), 417–27. For an overview of the development of legends of the true cross, often appended to such accounts (and discussed further below), see Esther Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 83 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, p. 8. The Latin text, in a range of forms, is extant in nearly 100 manuscripts and early prints (p. 13). 84 Murdoch, Apocryphal Adam and Eve, pp. 13–14. 85 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, p. vii and p. 8. 86 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, pp. 8–9. 87 This is the Canticum de Creatione, edited by Murdoch and Tasioulas alongside the Auchinleck Life of Adam in Apocryphal Lives, pp. 65–98.

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is something that one of the first modern commentators on this apocryphon observed when he wrote: [E]ditors of medieval Latin texts are usually more concerned with establishing an original text than with giving all the readings, and those readings which are obviously corrupt are often neglected. But in many cases it is precisely these ‘corrupt’ readings which are of value, since they throw light on passages in versions in a vernacular which would otherwise remain obscure.88

When discussing ‘the’ Latin Vita, therefore, we are better off thinking of it as the ‘Vita tradition’ since, even more so than for most medieval texts, the complex and multiple traditions recorded in the myriad of extant manuscripts, along with their ‘corruptions’, resist all attempts at definitive carceral classification: in spite of a number of attempts at pinning these down, apologia and caveats regularly punctuate the study of the tradition and its manuscripts to this day. As I shall argue, the intensely macaronic nature of the textual traditions – particularly the multifaceted, multilingual, multi-genre vernacular traditions – renders the ‘texts’ themselves too slippery, labile and fluid ever to have been ‘written in stone’ (in both senses), as the narratives under scrutiny here claim themselves to have been.89 Instead, in these Edenic retellings, everything becomes more complex, more nuanced, more heterochronic – and thus filled with more creative potential for disruption, slippage and unearthing. In spite of such instability, common to all treatments is a revolving of the narrative around the spectral lost garden and the imagined aftermath of that seemingly calamitous loss. Also ubiquitous is the exiled protoplasts’ drive to construct another, far more functional (one could follow Harrison and say useful), garden outside Eden’s walls, this time one that is not delimiting and enclosed and which they have to work at to maintain. Indeed, as Kahn has posited in his discussion of the links between Eden and the perception of evil 88 A. C. Dunstan, ‘The Middle English Canticum de creation and the Latin via Adae et Evae’, Anglia 55 (1931), 431–2 (432). 89 Most traditions claim a linear transmission, within which the lives of Adam and Eve were inscribed on stone tablets by their son, Seth. Thus, they were able to survive the flood, were found by Solomon and handed down by him to the later patriarchs.

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in the West, ‘Had Adam and Eve chosen instead to eat of the tree of life, there would be nothing to say. Nothing would have changed. There would be only the timeless replication of the species.’90 Here, Kahn’s assessment resonates loudly with Harrison’s vision of Eden as the ‘garden of ennui’, a ‘moodless’ enclosure where, ultimately ‘care had no place’ and where there is nothing to do.91 As we shall see, the story becomes much more interesting, more full of care and, thus, more human, when Eden is lost to the protoplasts as a result of Eve’s desire and they are forced to devise their own ways of surviving its loss. Such an imperative to re-envisage the post-Eden lives of Eve and Adam as active and meaningful reveals itself clearly within the multifarious textual traditions I have just been discussing: like flourishing gardens that have jettisoned the ‘moodlessness’ of the original garden of grand narrative, they become active florilegia – that is to say acquisitive and dynamic reworkings that uncover the flowery offerings of a cultural subconscious emerging from the ‘body’ of the woman buried by the ‘old root’ of phallogocentric thought.92 In turn, this female body channels its personal garden hermeneutic into visions of fertility, productivity and growth, all qualities promised but always already absented within the Edenic realm of ‘ennui’. As such, this apocryphal tradition’s releasing of such hermeneutic potential, especially in its Middle English manifestations, ultimately provides a freshly articulated garden ‘speech act’, or what Spirn terms ‘a continuum of meaning’.93 Entangled and complex rather than linear and ‘straightforward’, such a continuum allows the unconscious of Eden to spill out and reveal the freshly unearthed body of the woman long buried beside the old root within the dense soil of the Edenic imaginary. The extent to which she can remain unearthed, unenclosed and visible, however, is something with which the remainder of this chapter will be concerned. 90 Kahn, Out of Eden, p. 48. 91 Harrison, Gardens, p. 15 and p. 20. 92 I discuss the implications of the term florilegium to the hermeneutics of the enclosed garden more fully in chapter two. 93 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 24.

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The Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve Copies of the Latin Vita Adae et Evae of medieval English provenance survive in twenty manuscripts or more and, like the wider textual tradition, form part of an intricate and complex process of dissemination.94 Most versions within the longstanding Latin tradition have a number of aspects in common, despite the instability of construction, content and circulation. Adam and Eve’s fall within the garden is dealt with, frequently canonically and in passing, along with their exile and attempts at finding food. Also documented is their self-determined undertaking of penance in the cold waters of the rivers Jordan and Tigris, as are episodes delineating their subsequent separation and the birth of three sons, Cain, Abel and Seth. Following Cain’s murder of Abel, the birth of many more children and Adam’s succumbing to illness, the texts also recount Seth’s attempts to recover from the Garden the elixir of eternal life to save him from the death to which he has been condemned by his former act of disobedience. Most versions also recount the death of both Adam and Eve, and, as mentioned above, how Seth sets about recording their lives on tablets of stone, combined as a fixed exemplum for posterity.95 All of these paradigms also reappear in the vernacular translations, along with a range of modifications, additions and embellishments. Within Middle English manifestations, in particular, there are some significant changes wrought that demonstrate the extent to which such a narrative could be honed and accommodated to local environments and readerships.96 For example, there is some evidence to suggest that there may have been a Lollard-inflected copy in the 94 For a detailed account of the English tradition, influence and dissemination, see Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, pp. 7–25. 95 Murdoch provides a more detailed description of what he terms the ‘all-purpose epitome’ of the Latin narrative tradition in Apocryphal Adam and Eve, pp. 20–2. 96 Beside the work undertaken by Murdoch and Tasioulas in their edition, the most recent study of the English manuscript tradition, particularly the copy in Edinburgh, NLS, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (the ‘Auchinleck Manuscript’), has been Cathy A. Hume, ‘The Auchinleck Adam and Eve: An Exemplary Family Story’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (York: York Medieval Press, 2016), pp. 36–51.

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early sixteenth century and, as we have also seen, redacted versions of the text certainly seem to have aligned with alchemical and astronomical interests in the seventeenth century.97 Clearly, these concerted and repeated retellings – appropriations, even – of this most formative and carceral grand narrative serve to demonstrate the ways in which that narrative ultimately fails to control its own excess, producing continually reinvented protoplasts who, resisting the passive intransigence of what Soja defines as ‘a universalized and edenic nature prancing about in a spaceless and timeless world’,98 instead insist upon their own vulnerable humanity (and its recording) as the ultimate route to transcendence. Such vulnerability, too, is demonstrated primarily through the body of Eve, whose visceral pain at being cast out into the world extends far beyond the hunger and cold she shares with Adam; instead, it becomes inseparable from the excessive pains she is subject to in childbirth, and, in one case, a pregnancy extended from nine to twelve months.99 In these texts, therefore, the full pain of becoming human is led by the pain of being female. Indeed, much of the affective and emotional realism of the depictions of such humanity is imbricated in the subjectivisation of Eve, who, far from falling victim to her own excess as patriarchal scapegoat, is ultimately activated by it. In fact, it is Eve who leads Adam for better or for worse to break the stasis of Eden, to understand the clear futility of their shared attempts at penance, and recognise the implications of an unrecorded existence. Such a female-coded textual position of daring to be vulnerable-in-action, daring to release the excess, is particularly relevant 97 The possibility of a Lollard-interpolated text has been posited by R. M. Wilson in 1952, based on passing reference to a text discussing the exiling of Adam and Eve from Eden in the possession of Thomas Mann, who was burned at the stake in Smithfield in 1518 for mobilising Lollard dissent in south-east England. See A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York 1509–1558 (London: Hambleton, 1982), p. 8. John Foxe records this as having taken place in 1519: see John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ed. T. Pratt, 2 vols (New York: Borradaile, 1829), vol. 1, p. 515. 98 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 122. In much of the Latin Vita tradition, Eve continues to shoulder much of the blame for the loss of Eden, whereas it is a shared enterprise that is minimised within the English vernacular tradition. 99 Murdoch, Apocryphal Adam and Eve, p. 93.

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to the two extant Middle English verse re-tellings: the Auchinleck Life of Adam and the Canticum de Creatione. Indeed, instead of a dominant and clearly identifiable between-men discourse in these renditions, we find a discourse that resonates loudly with what Cixous has termed ‘the femininity of a text [which] can hardly let itself be reined in or corralled’. As Cixous also asks about such texts: ‘Who will put the outside behind walls?’100 In reading these rewritings, therefore, situated as they are outside of Eden’s walls, it is certainly possible to observe an extraordinary unreining (in) of Eve; however, in keeping with the premonitions of Cixous articulated at the start of this chapter, what we also observe is a rapid re-corralling of Eve’s released excess – a ‘recaptur[ing] of the wild unconscious’ – as she is hauled back in to fit once more the carceral frame of the original grand narrative, as we shall see. As mentioned, Middle English versions of the story survive in both verse and prose, with the two primary verse renditions discussed here appearing to have come from different poetic sources – although whether they were written in Latin or the vernacular remains unclear.101 Both are also dated to the fourteenth century.102 For purposes of this present discussion, it is to the metrical treatment found in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1 – better known as the Auchinleck Manuscript – that I will turn, not only because of the prestigious nature of the compilation of which it forms a part but also because of the often original and unique treatment of the material found in this particular version of the Life.103 The Auchinleck manuscript dates from the 1330s, in Susanna Fein’s words a ‘massive compendium’ now consisting of thirty-three parchment folios, fourteen stubs and ten fragmentary

100 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 57. 101 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, p. 23. 102 The various prose versions are more closely interlinked and date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Murdoch deals with this English tradition in detail in Apocryphal Adam and Eve, pp. 77–119. See also Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, pp. 19–28. 103 I will consider the implications of some of these unique treatments and departures below, but see also Murdoch, Apocryphal Adam and Eve, pp. 80–4.

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folios.104 In its original condition, the manuscript stretched to fifty-two gatherings, although five of those are now missing. As it stands today, the manuscript contains forty-four texts (although a likely series of religious texts are missing at the front of the manuscript), of which twenty-three are either unattested elsewhere, or else unique to this manuscript. Cathy Hume has identified the manuscript as one that was likely ‘bespoke’, compiled to reflect the personal preferences and household needs of whoever it was who commissioned it. She also points out that all the biblical literature contained within it, including a life of Mary Magdalene, the lives of Saint Margaret and Saint Katherine (which immediately follow the Life of Adam and Eve), and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, is very ‘family oriented’ and the heroines provide particular exemplarity for an audience of young women.105 Indeed, she regards the Life as unique within the apocryphal tradition in its joining with the other religious texts in telling a story that is both positive and entertaining and which would have been thoroughly enjoyed by a family – and women in particular – responding to the family of Adam and Eve as ‘loving, supportive, pious and doctrinally knowledgeable’.106 Such a reading has strong resonance with what I wish to argue about this text: that it tantalisingly unearths the body of the woman buried within the soil of traditional phallogocentric grand narrative, gives her momentary voice, before reclaiming her to shore up and feed that narrative’s usual hegemonic constraints. Such a process is reflected also within the manuscript’s materiality. At some stage in the manuscript’s history, the series of miniature illustrations heading up many of the texts were removed, leaving large lacunae that have impaired the integrity of the texts on the reverse side of the relevant folios. Like many of the Auchinleck 104 For a description of the manuscript, see Fein’s introduction to The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (York: York Medieval Press, 2016), pp. 1–10, here at p. 4. I am indebted to Fein’s introduction in this present section. 105 Cathy Hume, ‘The Auchinleck Adam and Eve’, in Auchinleck Manuscript, ed. Fein, pp. 36–51 (p. 36, p. 37 and p. 50). As Hume also reminds us, Saint Margaret was the patron saint of childbirth and Saint Katherine the patron saint of breast-feeding (p. 49). 106 Hume, ‘Auchinleck Adam and Eve’, p. 37.

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texts, therefore, aspects of the Life are incomplete and irrecuperable, having also lost up to 120 of its opening lines (which probably dealt with the fall of Lucifer) and a further 170 lines as Eve’s childbirth narrative begins, due to a missing folio.107 As such, the Auchinleck text’s historical instability is matched in material terms, with such incompleteness offering a challenge to any sense of textual authority or hegemony. Both materially and narratively such lacunae thus offer a paradigm for our understanding of the possible unearthing of the text’s cultural unconscious that, momentarily, at least, is transparent and readable through the normally opaque membrane of the L/law. It also offers a paradigm, however, for how the ‘gaps’ of history have been traditionally filled in by masculinist ideas of what must ‘surely’ have constituted that history. To this end, the Auchinleck Life opens in media res, attempting to establish its patriarchal credentials via a between-men conversation about masculine power.108 Here, the former angel ‘Liȝtbern þat is now Lucifer’ resists attempts by the archangel Michael to prevent him from usurping the throne of God while the latter is in paradise creating his ‘men of mold’.109 Sitting in God’s seat of power, Liȝtbern announces his ambitions thus: ‘Ichil … be more m[aister] þan he!’,110 while Michael protests ineffectually about this breaking of the Law: ‘þou art inobedient’, he protests to Liȝtbern.111 When God returns from paradise in what will become a characteristically ‘alto late’ fashion and demands angelic worship of Adam and Eve as his latest productions, he orders Liȝtbern to ‘loke to his fet’ in shame for his pride and presumption, before ejecting him from heaven along with all his many followers.112 From then onwards, as Satan, Liȝtbern is never again allowed a glimpse of the heavenly realm; instead his gaze – and his body – are directed downwards into hell. The reprisal 107 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, p. 37 and p. 49. 108 As mentioned above, the first 120 lines or so are missing, offering further instability to the text. 109 All quotations from the Auckinleck Life of Adam and Eve will be taken from the Murdoch and Tasioulas edition cited above, referenced as Life and line number. 110 Life, lines 17–18. 111 Life, line 10. 112 Life, line 15 and line 32.

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of the Law is immediate, swift and permanent: lasting seven days and seven nights, heaven empties itself of a rebellion reconfigured as ‘pride þat was in hem liȝt’.113 Thus, the ontology of sin is established as preceding the Fall and, for the first time, an ‘outside’ is pitted against a hegemonic ‘inside’ that is to be forever ring-fenced in protection of the Law. While in most retellings, it is Adam’s and Eve’s ejection from Eden where ‘the series of “you-shall-not-enter” begins’,114 in this text, the proscriptive initiation begins in heaven where the futile ‘pride’ of the between-men attempt at usurpation is ultimately foregrounded as a pre-Fall heavenly ontology. With pride having been ‘liȝt’ in and by ‘Liȝtbern’ – and in the absence of a supposedly divine omniscience – the implication is of a flawed God also inflected by pride within a flawed realm. Indeed, this text’s God fails to contain his subjects even whilst creating more of them. As the Life takes pains to emphasise: ‘Þus in heuen pride bigan’;115 and, indeed, later, it will go so far as to associate this sin with the power of the throne itself: ‘Of alle sinnes, pride is king’.116 In the Life, heaven is therefore established early on as an uncertain space where the defining moment of the unpredictable can – and does – happen and where insubordination, pride and disobedience are not only male-coded but male-ontological. Whilst God is absent creating the world, the heavenly realm’s once contained excesses spill over to make it similarly ontologically unreliable, so much so that it provides a primary reason for the creation of a strictly regulated and bounded Eden of stasis within which nothing happens and where the Law intends to shape and control all. But even this is a cursory (one might say futile) edict in this text, as the author skims over the bare basics of the early Genesis narrative: ‘He forbade Adam an appel-tre, / Þat he ne schold of liif no lim / No frout þereof nim’.117 Such bluntness in expounding the most significant moment in Christian history resonates indeed with the equally blunt appraisal of Cixous when she claims: ‘There is an apple, Life, line 47. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 152. Life, line 25. Life, line 64. See also lines 59–60: ‘In heuen pride first began / In angel, ar it cam in man.’ 117 Life, lines 72–4. 113 114 115 116

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and straightaway there is a law’. For Cixous, too, ‘[Eve] receives the most hermetic message there is, the absolute discourse’.118 However, in this text, the ‘absolute discourse’ is the between-men discourse of God and Adam, cast in the likeness of that recently sustained between God and Liȝtbern. For Eve, this discourse is not absolute: its male-coded proscription, once more inviting the pride of presumption, bears no relation to the environment of plenty in which Eve has found herself. Instead of complying, therefore, she interrogates the (il)logicality of being denied a single fruit when otherwise permitted so many, pointing out to Adam: … do as ich þe rede And it schal be þe best ded Þat euer ȝete þou dest ywis. Ete of þe appel þat her is And þou schalt be, wiþouten lesing, Also wise of alle þing As he þat it þe forbade It schuld nouȝt comen in þine hed.119

Here the denial of knowledge, of the wisdom of being – of how to become – is laid bare by the casual rhyming of ‘forbade’ and ‘hed’ in Eve’s words to Adam. For Eve, that Adam was created in God’s image and yet is to be denied this divine attribute of knowledge, carries neither logic nor truth. Indeed, such a proscription constitutes a form of betrayal. Conversely, the logicality and wisdom of Eve’s own reasoning is not only emphasised by the repetition of the apparently throw-away affirmations ‘wiþouten lesing’ and ‘ywis’, but also by the clearly intentional rhyming of ‘ywis’ with the term ‘wis’ three lines later. This pairing of terms through the poem’s rhyming scheme sets up an even greater conflation between what Eve’s ‘wisdom’ already knows to be the case and the type of knowledge she will be party to after the Fall. In this text, therefore, Eve is radically separated from the birth of sin, first by the author’s explicit attribution of its inception to ‘Liȝtbern’ and, second, by the fact she already appears to possess knowledge of what they have been denied even before she bites the apple: a 118 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 151. 119 Life, lines 93–100.

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subjectivity of becoming through experience. As such, from the start, this text offers rich opportunities for a re-reading of the Genesis narrative and a new interrogation of it as ‘the oldest book of dreams’ that offers some deeply productive disruption of its otherwise gendered hegemonies.120 Such a potential for disruption is further exacerbated in the text by the fact that, as suggested above, its God is never omnipresent; in fact, he undertakes a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing in an attempt to impose what amounts to a simulated – or mimetic – omnipresence upon both heaven and Eden (and, later the world outside its walls), carving up and delineating his dominions by means of continual absences and presences, while failing ultimately to maintain control of any of them. Indeed, as we have seen, the instant he removes himself from heaven to create the world, Liȝtbern moves in to fill the hiatus. Moreover, the resultant vulnerability of his throne (his ‘see’) is linked homonymically to his lack of anticipation of any usurpation: he demonstrates an inability to ‘see’ this possible consequence.121 Similarly, when God returns to Eden after dealing with the ejection of Liȝtbern and his followers, he discovers the apple has already been eaten, the Law has been contravened and Adam is hiding naked in the garden. It would appear, therefore, that God finds himself unable to be in the right place at the right time and unable to maintain the stability of his Law. In addition, there is no consistency about how God manifests himself in the text: sometimes it is as God-the-Father but more often it is as Christ-the-Son. For example, it is as Christ that he returns to heaven to find Liȝtbern in his place (‘swete Jhesus þat was wis / Was comen out of paradis / To heuen’);122 and it is as Christ that he returns to Eden to confront and reprimand Adam (‘Þan seyd swete Jhesus: / “Adam, Adam, why destow þus?”’).123 In commenting on this interchangeability, Murdoch and Tasioulas consider it nothing more than a reflection of the orthodox conception of theological 120 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 152. 121 MED s.v. se (2); and sen (1). See also the glossary entry for se, see, sen in Lives, p. 150. 122 Life, lines 27–9. 123 Life, line 115.

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interchangeability between the three persons of the Trinity, thus offering hints of future redemption for the protoplasts. They also suggest the epithet swete used to describe Jesus in this instance permits his questioning to be a symbol of grace and the offering of Adam the chance to repent.124 However, the use of the term wis in conjunction with it resonates loudly with Eve’s ywis and the wise subjectivity she promises to Adam if he were to share the fruit with her, thus linking all three in a humanity that is destined to suffer for its knowledge, but which will be redeemed by the wisdom of a woman (Mary) and the female flesh of her son, Christ. As Sarah McNamer has persuasively argued, by the late fourteenth century, Christic vulnerability – we could say instability – was already recognised as decidedly female-coded in its cultural associations. Thus, a changeable and unstable Christ formed part of what she terms a ‘vernacular ethic … insistently gendered as feminine’, one which was founded upon the ontology of a female-body-in-flux and its maternal associations.125 While there is no evidence at this point in the text that God-the-Father or God-the-Son ‘feel[s] like a woman’126 (on the contrary, God is described as wrathful and vengeful on multiple occasions even when manifestating as the doctrinally merciful Christ),127 he is nevertheless subject to the feminising effects of unstable representation – to being here, there and nowhere instead of everywhere – as he strives simultaneously to bring his angels to heel and his humanity into being. Here we have a God attempting, like Eve, to ‘have it all’, perhaps. The ultimate effect of all this is a sudden and extraordinary unearthing from the ‘soil’ of this text the ‘body’ of Eve as the woman, long buried beside the ‘old root’ of traditional grand narrative. For Kristeva, as for MacCannell, such unearthings offer us a glimpse at ‘the influx 124 Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, note on lines 65–138, p. 101. 125 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010). For a development of this association, see chapter 6, 150–73 (p. 173). For another important discussion of Christ as unstable entity, see Robert Mills, ‘Jesus as Monster’, in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 28–54. 126 McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 7. 127 See, for example, ‘wreþþest’ (line 11); ‘awreke’ (line 124);

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of the semiotic’ and allow also for a remodelling or modification of the text’s symbolic order.128 This is, perhaps, well represented in the Life by an interpolation wholly unique to this text. In writing of the instability of God’s kingdom through the inception of pride, the author again makes playful use of the word se(e), this time as a referent for the ebbing and flowing ‘sea’ and its domination by the ever-changing ‘femininity’ of the waxing and waning moon that ultimately stand as witnesses: For þe mone bar him [Liȝtbern] wittnesse, It wexeþ and waineþ more and lesse; Þe se, þurth vertu of Godes miȝt, Ebbeþ and flouweþ day and niȝt. Þis tvay no habbe neuer rest, Noiþer bi est no bi west.129

Here, the moon and sea reveal themselves as feminine testimonials to a logic of flux that is not monolithic, fixed, phallic; but, in its moving, ebbing and flowing, is feminine, fluid and labile. It is always already a becoming. For Kristeva, this type of logos-shattering energy of fluctuation ‘is particularly evident in poetic language since, for there to be a transgression of the symbolic, there must be an irruption of the drives in the universal signifying order, that of “natural” language which binds together the social unit’.130 These ‘feminine’ drives based on fluidity, change and renewal tend to become focused upon desire, natality and the maternal, and, like the unconscious, erupt periodically into the text via lacunae in the latter to offer challenge to the intransigence of the Law. As such, the sea and the moon in this text provide one such eruption, ultimately recuperating instability from its position as feminine weakness and paving the way for a reconfigured ethics of Eden for which it stands witness. Thus, when the gates of the garden burst open at the moment of exile-escape, and the protoplasts leave its narrow, walled confines to head towards life (and ‘the’ Life, as we shall see), 128 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 62; MacCannell, ‘Landscaping and the Unconscious’, p. 96. 129 Life, lines 53–8. 130 Kristeva, Revolution, p. 62.

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the narrative voice responds with pity and compassion (‘It was pite to heren her mon’) in the face of an ‘awreke’ (vengeful) Christ who ‘steyȝed oȝain in to heuen’ to lick his wounds.131 As mentioned above, the seduction scene in Eden is glossed over fairly quickly, adding to this downplaying of female culpability: for example, it moves on quickly to prioritise Adam’s responsibility for the actions of Eve (‘þurth þe fendes entisement / He brak Godes comandment’)132 rather than blaming Eve’s own weakness, which, as we have also seen, has already been recast as an ontological and female-coded wisdom. Indeed, almost before the sounds of the gates clanging shut behind the exiled protoplasts cease, Eve begins to demonstrate a self-knowledge that will always elude Adam as he attempts to cling on to the between-men discourse he once shared with God. While he begins to construct his own ‘laws’ to emulate the ones he has broken, Eve’s new self-knowledge allows her to contest them. This is first exemplified by Eve’s resistance to Adam’s clearly futile suggestion that God will surely forgive them if they undergo forty days and nights standing up to their necks in the rivers Jordan and Tigris as penance (‘we miȝten his loue gete / Þan wolde he send ous mete’).133 Responding with decidely more realism and acknowledging with self-awareness their clear human frailties (which have become ever more evident as each hunger-stricken and shelterless day passes), in an interchange again unique to the Auchinleck Life, Eve posits a reluctance to undertake this trial-by-water since, if she failed to complete it, then they would incur from God further wrath: ‘Ȝif mi penance wer ybroke, Þan wold God ben awroke And be wroþer þan he is.’134

The repetition of awroke and wroþer in the construction of this halfrhyme draws particular emphasis to the ongoing issue of God’s anger 131 Life, line 138, line 124 and line 126. Hume also argues that the ‘deeply emotive’ responses of Adam and Eve to their predicament ultimately encourages strong identification with them by the audience: ‘Auchinleck Adam and Eve’, p. 43. 132 Life, lines 68–9 (my emphasis). 133 Life, lines 197–8. 134 Life, lines 203–5.

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and its identification by a woman who has clearly already learned the wider implications of the intransigent Law of the Father. It is, after all, this Law that has already torn her away from her garden home just as she was beginning to aspire to her own becoming. While I concur with Hume’s argument that the couple’s dynamics have been reconfigured in this text to establish a strong partnership between them, that partnership is often one-sided and configured along traditional patriarchal lines.135 Eve’s exile, however, has rendered her particularly pragmatic, self-aware and compassionate. Her drive is to adapt to the brave new world, work it and flourish within it, compromise. Adam, on the other hand has absorbed the unrelenting Law-of-the-Father well, turning remorse and compassion for self into a self-harm that bears no relation to such flourishing. His words to Eve insisting upon such penance thus resonate loudly with Irigaray’s conception of the lost origins buried within between-men discourse, or Derrida’s female body feeding the old phallogocentric root. As Irigaray claims: ‘This origin has been lost, forgotten. It is absent from the words pronounced, exchanged with peers. Their meaning serves more to regulate a survival than to support a growth proper to life.’136 Eve’s drive is, indeed, to find a ‘growth proper to life’ and, in the absence of a compassionate God-of-Love and a husband still set on upholding the Law, she sees nothing for it but to take that role upon herself if she and Adam are to rebuild a life outside of Eden. For example, in the face of the intense hunger and the lack of shelter brought about by their exile, Eve’s impulse is to sacrifice herself for love of Adam, to allow him to be received back into God’s grace and to take responsibility for the fall upon herself: ‘Allas, Adam, for hunger we dye! Alle þe sorwe þat þou art inne, Certes, alle it is for mi sinne. Adam, ich biseke þe, Sle me, ȝif þi wille be For, were ich out of Godes siȝt,

135 Hume, ‘Auchinleck Adam and Eve’, p. 45. 136 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 87.

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On another occasion, too, as Adam lies dying of illness, Eve falls to her knees, praying to Jesus that she may take all Adam’s suffering upon herself (‘Lord, ich biseche þe / Adams sorwe put in me’).138 Far from confirming her own culturally-assigned grand-narrative role as scapegoat for evil, however, and in spite of her acknowledgment of ‘mi sinne’, here the author has Eve embody a Christic love so lacking elsewhere in this text, underscoring the enormity of God’s absence by its futile invocation via prayer. On both occasions, Eve offers a poignant lesson in the type of female-focused compassio Christ will engender and embody at the crucifixion. Like her, he will need to be resilient and compassionate; he will need to put himself in the place of the other. Thus, in this text, the imitatio is that of an imitatio Evae that will ultimately be performed by Christ at the crucifixion, rather than its reverse. Moreover, these lessons taught by Eve – of action and resilience, of love’s meaning and expression, of putting oneself in the place of the other, of the role of desire within human love and compassion – are ones which are learned and distilled outside of Eden where her freedom from the ‘absolute law’ enables her to flourish ‘proper to life’. In this text, therefore, it is, the animated female-coded supplement to the inanimate male-coded Eden of the Law that becomes the central tenet of the Christian message, taken from Eve’s example as she refuses burial by the Logos and disrupts the phallogocentricity of the grand narrative. Such a supplement and its unearthing throws into relief the construction of a vengeful male God who, in this text at least, bears none of the defining qualities of a flourishing proper to life himself.

137 Life, lines 152–9. 138 Life, lines 383–4.

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Recapturing the Wild Unconscious As the poem moves towards its conclusion, however, there is a perceptible shift, heralding a highly conscious change of register that begins to rein in this supplemental discourse and its extraordinary representation. With Adam gone and God still silent, Eve’s final role as she confronts her own approaching death is nevertheless still vocal: in a final poetic outpouring, she warns her many children to take heed from her example, morphing – Christlike, once again – into the visionary teacher of humankind who has built a new type of Eden from her own maternal and matrixial labour and its ability to produce an unbreakable, selfless love in the face of God’s ‘wretþe‘: Þo Eue, wise sche schuld dye, Sche cleped forþ hir progenie, Boþe þe ȝonger and þe eldre, Hir childer and hir childer childre, And sayd, þat alle mieten here: ‘Þo ich and Adam, mi fere, Breken Godes comandment, Anon his wretþe was ysent On ous and on our progenie, And þerefore merci ȝe schul crie, And boþe bi day and eke bi niȝt oþ penaunce bi al ȝour miȝt!’139

As they listen intently, Eve appears to take full control of her own history and orders it to be recorded on tablets of stone by her son, Seth, as a testament for the future, once more setting up Christ as a vengeful God needing to be appeased: ‘þat þo þat be now ȝong childre Mai it see, and her elder, And oþer, þat here be bore. Hou we han wrouȝt here bifore, Þat þai mowe taken ensaumple of ous And amenden oȝain Jhesus’.140

139 Life, lines 601–12. 140 Life, lines 627–32.

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Within this text, therefore, not only is the first recorded history related by a woman, but that same woman becomes the originator of writing itself – and, of course, that includes the Auchinleck Life, descended from the original tablets of stone.141 Moreover, this woman’s productivity – the flourishing offspring of her body and the knowledge relayed by her female voice – is pitted one final time against the intransigent vengefulness of Christ, with the latter again found wanting. But then comes the rift as the maternal unconscious begins to encounter its own reburial. Rather than the voice of the mother ringing down the generations as Eve willed it, the remainder of her final speech shifts awkwardly, revealing a suppression-in-process as her voice is incrementally supplanted by a Logos that the text has her increasingly ventriloquise. Within this process, moreover, the discourse is transferred from one of female compassio and generativity to male-coded punishment: ‘Ich command þe, on mi blisceing, Þat þi fader liif be write And min also, eueri smite, Fro þe bigining of his liif, Þat he was maked, and ich, his wiif, And hou we were filed wiþ sinne, And what sorwe whe han liued inne, And in whiche maner þat þou seye Redilich wiþ þine eiȝe Pi fader soule to pine sent, For he brak Godes comandment’.142

While Eve begins her final act as the first woman teacher, as her lesson moves on, instead of a female voice redolent with the authority of maternal experientia in full flow, we witness the inexorable incursion of the phallogocentric Law fixated on sin, punishment, pain and sorrow, with abjection supplanting subjecthood and productivity. 141 This premise was first posited by Eric Jager in ‘Did Eve Invent Writing? Script and the Fall in the Adam Book’, Studies in Philology 93.3 (1996), 229–50. I also discussed this in the ‘Afterword’ to Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 235–7. 142 Life, lines 614–24.

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Eve may begin by offering her children her own maternal blessing, but her speech-act ends in enforced ventriloquism, fragmenting as it returns to the forlorn hope of Christ’s benevolent intervention. Having ‘kneled adoun and bad hir bede’,143 she is met only with the usual silence and, instead of divine compassion, the loss of the world’s first mother has to be responded to by a compassionate humanity in a world-wide outpouring of lamentation expressed by all Eve’s descendants. It is only at this point that God intervenes – and then only by proxy. Angered by such worldly expression of grief, God now sends his messenger to curtail this excess of emotion and order its reining in and subjection to the Law: ‘Doleþ sex dayes and namore’, the angel orders them, ‘þe seuenday rest of ȝour sorwe’.144 Any memorialising of Eve as loving and self-sacrificial mother of humanity and model for a maternal Christ is to be fleeting and finite, it seems, and, from this point in the text, Eve is all but forgotten. As Seth begins to write, it is Adam’s story to which he turns, rather than Eve’s (‘Seþ anon riȝt bigan / Of Adam, þat was þe forme man’), and the only time she is mentioned from then on is merely in passing as Adam’s ‘wiif’.145 In this way, Seth writes his mother out of ‘his’ narrative, literally taking up the patriarchal position and perspective as he scripts the story for posterity (‘Riȝt in þilke selue stede / Þer Adam was won to bide his bede’).146 Seth’s story, moreover, will be patriarchically verified by the words of ‘wisemen [who] er þis han yseyd’,147 demonstrating the arbitrary processes whereby a female-orchestrated history is brought into line with men in their own image – and to serve their own cultural interests. In Irigaray’s terms, it is therefore a narrative ‘no longer animated with her life’ (re)created ‘through opposition, conflict, even hatred’ whilst it still ‘claims to arbitrate in a neutral way’ (‘wisemen … han yseyd’).148 As the text accelerates towards its end, therefore, such ‘neutrality’ takes on the force of neutering as Eve is erased from view, buried beneath the avalanche of traditional 143 Life, line 635. 144 Life, lines 656–6. 145 Life, lines 634–5; and lines 676, 682, 723. 146 Life, lines 683–4. 147 Life, line 686. 148 Irigaray, In the Beginning, pp. 86–7.

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patriarchal genealogy into which the final lines of the text collapse. The ‘wise men er þis’ morph into Noah, Jonah and Solomon (‘þat was air of Dauid lond’), the latter of whom finds the stone tablets long after ‘Noes flod was go’.149 Although illiterate, nevertheless Solomon receives the grace from God to read and interpret the account, building a temple eventually, again ‘in þis same stede / Adam was wont to bid his bede’.150 As such, Solomon supplants both Adam and Seth as the genealogical tree ascends towards Christ at its apex, overwriting the tree of knowledge as the source of Eve’s maternal power and earthly flourishing with the Tree of Life and its promise of male-coded transcendence.151 Indeed, such an epistemological shift from ‘her’ to ‘him’ is rendered all the more explicit in the only other remaining metrical version of this text in English, the Canticum de Creatione, a text that testifies to having been translated from Latin into English in 1375 and edited alongside the Auchinleck Life by Murdoch and Tasioulas, as mentioned above.152 In this text, we find an episode entirely absent from the Life, but which finds its origins in the traditions surrounding the legend of the Holy Rood and recorded, amongst others, by Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) in his Legenda Aurea.153 Within this tradition, Seth is accorded three seeds from the Tree of Life rescued from Eden, which are subsequently ‘planted’ under Adam’s tongue as part of the burial rite performed upon him by Eve upon his death. The resultant trees, growing literally 149 Life, line 693 and line 691. 150 Life, lines 706–8 and lines 715–16. 151 The logic of the male-coded genealogical tree is something I address in chapter four of this study. 152 Canticum de Creatione in Apocryphal Lives, ed. Murdoch and Tasioulas, pp. 63–98 (here at lines 1185–6). 153 Jacobus recounts this legend in his ‘De invention santae crucis’, which records the apocryphal history of the cross, from the Tree of Life in Paradise to Golgotha. See Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta ad Optimorum Librorum Fidem (Lipsiae: Impensi Librariae Arnoldianae, 1801), pp. 303–11. For a modern English translation, see Jacobus de Voragine, ‘The Finding of the Holy Cross’, in The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 277–83. For a detailed study of this legend from an art-historical perspective, see Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image, trans. Lee Preedy (Leiden: Brill, 2004), especially pp. 289–349.

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out of Adam’s mouth so the Canticum poet tells us, ‘[t]okeneþ þe holy trenite’.154 Moreover, these same trees provide the wood for Moses’s staff; generate the inspiration for David’s psalms; produce the beams for Solomon’s temple; lead to the first Christian martyrdom; are worshipped by a passing sybil and are hewn, ultimately, for the crucifixion.155 As such, they also serve to (re)structure the grand narrative itself. These trees, moreover, growing where Adam lay buried for nearly ‘two þousand ȝere’, are characterised by their permanent greenness (‘Bote alwey stoden liche grene’), not in any way subject to the cyclical laws of nature.156 Far from flourishing, they are, instead, phallic, stiff, static, repeatedly referred to in the text as ȝerdis – a word in Middle English frequently associated with the male genitalia. Other common uses of the term, however, signify variously some kind of land enclosure; the branch of a genealogical tree; an instrument for inflicting pain; a metaphor for moral rectitude; a measurement of land, all adding to the phallic male-coded charge with which the term is freighted.157 Indeed, if, as Harrison has asserted, Eve was the first human to be rendered a ‘seminal creature’ (in Harrison’s terms, because of the seeds of the forbidden fruit having taken up residence on her inside, as we have seen above), and if Eve, as a result, is the one with ‘natural affinities to the humic depths where plant life first takes root’,158 in the Canticum she is usurped and then reburied: just as in the recording of the protoplast’s lives, the planting and growth of seeds become a ‘between-men’ activity. As in the Auchinleck Life, therefore, in this text the woman once more takes up her assigned position beside the Derridean ‘old root’ of phallogocentric discourse whose growth feeds the masculine – in this case the newly seminal Adam. In this way, it is the man’s, rather than the woman’s, humic transformation that produces the tree (both literal and genealogical) which,

154 Canticum, line 968. 155 Canticum, lines 973–1160. I focus on the ubiquitous image of the tree in chapters three, four and five of this present study. 156 Canticum, line 964. 157 MED, s.v. ȝerd (1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 5). See Canticum, lines 967; 975; 981; 989; 993; 1001; 1007. 158 Harrison, Gardens, p. 21.

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devoid of all mothers (even Mary in this version of the story), leads to the crucifixion itself: … of the karnelis speke we, In Adames moth þat were set, Þe3 woxen alle þre wiþouten wronge Ech of an elne longe Sone wiþouten let. As þe3 stoden in erthe þere, Almost two þousand ȝere.159

This permanently-green tree as testator to Adam’s life story thus takes on the role of the writing-in-stone that we saw in the Auchinleck Life, producing a visible phallogocentric text that grows from Adam’s testimony (his ‘tongue’) into both physical and genealogical tree. In turn, both trees will ultimately lead to the salvific moment of the crucifixion as a between-men epiphany.160

Conclusion In both metrical versions, Eve’s actual burial alongside Adam following her own death literalises her Derridean role as the ‘buried woman’ feeding the phallologic ‘tree’ with her decomposing body, her invisibility and her silencing. In the case of the Life, while Eve’s former agency and innovation would, no doubt, have reminded the newly literate audience of the Auchinleck manuscript of the abilities of women also to present as readers, agents, writers and teachers, it would remind them in no uncertain terms that, even with these concessions, they were always already subject to an intransigent law, a ‘cultural schema’ or ‘the fable from which we never escape’.161 159 Canticum, lines 956–62. 160 For a discussion of the late medieval tradition of the genealogical tree stretching from Eden to Calvary, and its appropriation as a symbol of religious community, see Sara Ritchey, ‘Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8.1 (2008), 64–82, cited in my introduction above, p. 20, note 46. I deal with the gendered associations of the concept of ‘arborescence’, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray, Marder and others, in chapters three and four. 161 Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 155.

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In Cixousian terms, then, the female-coded ‘wild unconscious’ that this text momentarily releases is soon reined back from the brink, recaptured by the law in order to salvage an otherwise endangered patriarchal order. Nevertheless, there were times and places in the Middle Ages where women did succeed in formulating their own ‘fables’ outside of otherwise hegemonic patriarchal dictates – that is to say, where they managed to forge a more permanent unearthing of their own bodies from beside the old patriarchal root and rewrite religious history – and that was in those visionary works emerging from many of the nunneries of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Moreover, the need for such works as powerful female-coded reconfigurations of accepted grand narrative, often cast through a lens of horticultural hermeneutics, is testified to by their widespread distribution and popularity throughout Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. It is therefore to such writings and other material productions that I now turn.

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2 Une communion inimitable: Material Garden Hermeneutics in the Work of the Women of Mechelen, Herrad of Hohenbourg and Hildegard of Bingen [I]l existe une communion inimitable de la femme et la fleur. Image de la fécondité et du sexe, certes, la fleur suggère l’énigme de cycles naturels, le ravissement de la vie, le mystère de la graine, mais aussi la belle fanaison, et encore l’invisible coopération de la racine, la sève, la tige et la feuille. [There exists an inimitable communion between the woman and the flower. As an image of the sex’s fecundity, certainly, the flower suggests the enigma of natural cycles, life’s rapture, the mystery inherent to the seed, but also the beautiful wilting, and again the invisible cooperation between the root, the sap, the stalk and the leaf.]1

T

he synergy Julia Kristeva proposes here in this extract between women and the dynamics of fecundity resounds loudly with much of what I wish to investigate in the second chapter of this study, re-invoking also the Edenic materiality of the hortus conclusus examined in the previous chapter. As we have seen, in Eden’s reworkings in the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve the matrixial impulses of Eve, released only after her exile from the ‘sterile’ garden, reshape the linear directionality of the entire Edenic narrative, producing instead more fruitful, cyclical processes – of gestation, birth, life, death and rebirth – before being reined back in by an enclosing ventriloquised Logos. Within this moment of ventriloquism, to coin 1

Julia Kristeva, ‘Le bonheur des Béguines’, in Le Jardin clos de l’âme: L’Imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du sud, depuis le 13e siècle, ed. Paul Vandenbroek (Brussels: Martial et Snoeck, 1994), pp. 167–75 (p. 172). The translation is my own.

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a phrase from Irigaray, ‘life freezes in the expectation of a better beyond’.2 The reworked narrative ultimately returns, therefore, to the stasis of ‘ennui’ identified by Harrison in his appraisal of Eden’s primary position within western thought. Thereafter, Eve undergoes a literal and figurative reburial, feeding the ‘old root’ of the phallologic enterprise (in this case, Adam, his seeds and their productivity) in the usual ways. The route to – and root of – ‘salvation’ within Christian tradition, then, will spring unequivocally from Adam’s seed and body; the reconstituted Logos sprouts from his tongue and those of the patriarchs as the grand narrative obliterating Eve’s flourishing unfolds. As such, for a second time, it is Adam’s body that gives birth, whilst Eve’s is reduced to the mere ‘soil’ needed to nourish the phallic Logos-tree Adam engenders. For ever afterwards, Eve becomes primarily associated with the root of all evil within Christian grand narrative, rather than with the seeds of life; and the flower (incidentally entirely absent from the Genesis Eden), will be appropriated and reconstituted as apt representation of Mary as a redemptive ‘new Eve’.3 In this chapter, I move on to examine the ways in which three diverse groups of medieval holy women, dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, were ultimately successful in showing a determined resistance to both appropriation and male ventriloquism in their own writings and other material productions, however. By unpacking Kristeva’s analysis of the connection between women and garden hermeneutics a little further and applying it to those writings and artefacts under scrutiny, I shall argue that, via their joyful use of a female-coded hermeneutics of unruly, flourishing gardens and exploitation of the communion inimitable they provide, such women-authored works offered their audiences new ways of seeing, responding to and participating in retold and reworked sacred histories that resist entirely the elision of the feminine subject-position from their discourses.

2 3

Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 91–2. For a full-length study of the origins of the concept of ‘evil’ and Eve’s role within that, see Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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Kristeva’s femme et la fleur: Acknowledging the Matrixial and the Natal Kristeva’s correlation between la femme et la fleur and, later in the cited extract, between la femme and la graine, acknowledges the feminine materiality written out of the Edenic narrative and the erasure that brought it to such stasis: there can be neither fruit nor seed without flower; there can be no flourishing without the matrixial and the natal to initiate it, no life without Eve. For Kristeva, however, a woman’s perception of the world, such as that glimpsed at in the Life, can still be unearthed from its phallogocentric framings and appropriations – if we know where and how to look. One such locale is the realm of poetic language with its abilities to unseat the security of prescribed logic and its linear syntax. Such an unseating reveals cracks in the surface of the text, allowing the semiotics of what Kristeva terms the ‘pre-thetic’ to filter through via the rhythms and pulsations of the de-regulated structures of meaning. For Kristeva, these pre-thetic energies or pulsations originate in what she terms the chora, a prelinguistic and, therefore, prediscursive space with affinities to Ettinger’s trans-subjective matrixial,4 where an invisible, unidentifiable, communion and intra-action (again another invisible cooperation) between mother and unborn child flourishes, only to be severed, first with the cutting of the cord, and then by the entry into language and, therefore, into culture.5 This pre-natal realm thus remains for Kristeva one of the few places where being, unemcumbered by the symbolic, is able to embrace a becoming outside the male symbolic order and from where its semiotic traces may fleetingly be recaptured within poetry and the unconscious. Attempting to articulate this in a deeply poetic text based on her own experiences of pregnancy and birthing, and running parallel to her more philosophically conventional essay, ‘Stabat Mater’, Kristeva writes of the ‘moment’ of conception and becoming thus: 4 5

See my discussion on p. 5 above. Julia Kristeva discusses the dynamics of the chora at length in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). See, for example: ‘[T]he chora cannot be unified by a Meaning, which, by contrast, is initiated by a thesis, constituting, as we shall see, a break.’ (p. 36).

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This syntactically and grammatically insouciant description of non-being becoming being within its pre-thetic uterine setting is pitted against the ‘logical’ critique in ‘Stabat Mater’ of Christianity’s urgent construction of Mary-as-thesis (that is to say, as Virgin Mother) in response to a fundamental resistance within patriarchal societies to acknowledge the matrixial/natal as the origin of all. Instead, this Marian construction celebrates what Kristeva terms the fantasy of ‘Maternality’, a cultural reification of the matrixial and the natal through which Christianity is ultimately refracted. In turn this contrasts with – and yet is also tied to – a far more ‘ambivalent’ concept of a maternal that is ‘bound to the species’ and which ‘contemporary codes’ of symbolic ordering have always failed to tame.7 As such, the flesh-and-blood mother collapses into a ‘Maternality’ that is nothing less than a dream-scape concept of the maternal set up within patriarchal thinking to compensate for a ‘lost territory’ and thus offering the type of perpetual fantasies of regained plenitude displayed by the sealed-up Virgin in her equally sealed-up hortus conclusus.8 In this sense, the enclosed garden looms large within the medieval imaginary as both the material and imaginary space within which that ‘lost territory’ can offer the illusion of its recapture. Kristeva’s parallel text therefore attempts to perform in language the gulf between the two, a gulf that not even a shared lexis can easily bridge: as Kristeva acknowledges, the effort to articulate as and in language the wordless rhythms 6 7

8

Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 160–86 (162). Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, pp. 161–2. Here, Kristeva has been subject to some criticism for perpetuating essentialist notions of the ‘wild’ or ‘untameable’ feminine (see the work of Elizabeth James, for example, ‘Hysterical (Hi)stories of Art’, Oxford Art Journal 18.1 (1995), 143–7, discussed further in note 13 below). However, her notion of the pre-discursive chora moves the concept away from the binaries within which language attempts to capture it. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 161.

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and pulsations of the chora ‘is an ordeal of discourse, like love’.9 In other words, only the inadequacies of the ‘old root’ discourse are at her disposal – although, for Kristeva, poetic language and the syntactic disruption it involves get closest to some kind of recuperation. For Kristeva, too, with the chora providing a paradigm for shared forms of being, this is ultimately a poetics in which we are all steeped, whatever our gender identities, but which we learn to forget as we are subsumed into a dominant male symbolic order that collapses into a false sense of the universal. Besides poetic language, however, the only other place in the history of the west where glimpses of fused, shared being sometimes emerge, Kristeva suggests, is in female mysticism, within which the usual rule-laden language is also rendered redundant, although it may become available ‘only to a person who assumes himself [sic] as “maternal”’.10 What Kristeva is acknowledging here is the fundamental ‘femaleness’ – regardless of the gender of the person experiencing it – of the direct mystical encounter with the deity and its ability to provide access to a female/feminine imaginary of fertile productivity operating outside the established male symbolic order. Indeed, as I shall argue in this chapter and the next, such a female imaginary was one often accessed, embraced and embellished by a plethora of enclosed holy women during the Middle Ages – some visionary, others not – and its expression via horticultural imagery and aesthetics emerged as a powerful hermeneutic tool in the texts and other material artefacts such women produced.11 The resultant imaginary arising from such works, 9 Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 162. 10 Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 162. 11 The ‘femininity’ inherent to the mystical text has again been theorised by Kristeva in ‘Stabat Mater’. Perhaps even more explicit than Kristeva on the potential inclusivity of such ‘feminine’ experience, however, is Luce Irigaray in her essay, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 191–202, also cited in my main introduction. Here, like Kristeva, Irigaray admits the possibility of some men being able to follow a women’s lead into visionary insight, understanding and mystical enunciation – if they learn to ‘speak woman’. Also important is the work of Amy Hollywood on the attraction generated by medieval mysticism to many twentieth-century French intellectuals (including Irigaray) in Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See, in particular,

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moreover, is also closely connected to the type of communion … de la femme et la fleur, as quoted at the start of this chapter. Indeed, I argue that such an entanglement of woman, flower and garden, when produced by women themselves, carries the potential to constitute another choric site that absorbs into itself both a maternal and matrixial that escapes the strictures of patriarchal enclosure. This materialises nowhere more illuminatingly than in religious women’s multiple and diverse treatments of the hortus conclusus, whose (often elided) natural rhythms and cycles, pulsations and silences, changes, enigmas and excesses they adopt in their works, both as hermeneutic and methodology. The choric potential of this site, however, is only released when framed by a female or feminised gaze or worked by female fingers. Only then can the dynamic, daring poetics of fluidity and flux be deployed and celebrated as an alternative route towards a divine transcendence that encompasses the feminine, rather than excludes it.

The Semiotic chora and Women’s Material Production The particular ways in which the poetics of the hortus conclusus impact upon the mystical text and other forms of medieval women’s material production have failed to receive concerted attention, in spite of Kristeva’s own examination of its hermeneutic potentialities. Indeed, as I shall argue, the enclosed garden’s insistent poetics of a flourishing driven by fecundity, nurture, care and its correlate, love, not only provided medieval holy women a central lexis for her analysis of Irigaray’s essay, pp. 187–210. Also important are analyses of Julian of Norwich’s use of hermeneutics of maternity and birthing in relation to God. See, for example, Sarah McNamer, ‘The Exploratory Image: God as Mother in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love’, Mystics Quarterly 15.1 (1989), pp. 21–8; Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (New York and London: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 142–67; Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), especially pp. 64–95; and ‘“ For we be double of God’s making’: Writing, Gender and the Body in Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 166–80.

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their articulation of mystical encounter and transcendence but also carved out a discursive space in which to develop it. Moreover, unlike those of Eden and the Song of Songs, the gardens envisioned in their own encounters were not ones of male appropriation and exegetical framing, but choric spaces where a female imaginary could be accessed and where the energies of the matrixial could inhabit their ‘proper place’. Such a proper place for female productivity, both intellectual and material, was, moreover, very often facilitated by the type of intense female homosociality that characterised the nunneries out of which much of this production sprang. It was frequently further enhanced by exceptional and inspiring female leadership bold enough to encourage strong cultures and traditions of learning along with intellectual innovation cast through a female lens, as we shall see.12 Before turning to two such examples from the twelfth century, I wish first to examine further Kristeva’s fascination with a late medieval example of such garden hermeneutics in play from the southern Low Countries, and how the communion de la femme et la fleur found there can fruitfully be used as a lens through which to view the earlier material.

The Nuns of Mechelen and their Horti Conclusi Perhaps one of the most unusual, visual and arresting articulations of the hortus conclusus as a choric space – and one I wish to take as an initial case-study here – is found within a late medieval Low Countries context. Here, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (although originating possibly over a century earlier) many of the region’s nunneries bore witness to the production of unique art works made by the enclosed sisters and known as horti conclusi (or, in Dutch, Besloten Hofjies).13 Indeed, these artefacts had largely 12 For a study of female intellectual leadership in the Middle Ages, see the essays collected in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Kirby-Fulton, Katie Anne-Marie Bugyis and John Van Engen (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020). 13 See Plate 4. It is likely that the production of these artefacts began in the fourteenth century as much smaller productions made primarily out of paper, for which see Barbara Baert, ‘Echoes of Liminal Spaces: Revisiting the Late

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been ignored by art historians until recent times, but their recent scrutiny by twenty-first-century feminist scholars in recent years not only prompted Kristeva’s thesis of a woman-flower communion, but also, as I argue in this chapter, are productive of a new lens through which to view the various treatments of gardens in the earlier texts I wish to focus on later in this chapter and the next. The Augustinian institution of the Hospital Sisters in Mechelen (Malines, now a municipality in the region of Antwerp) seems to have been particularly productive in terms of these artworks, with seven examples having survived to the present day. Whilst not walled gardens in the traditional sense, these artefacts constituted representational ‘garden’ collages, what Barbara Baert terms ‘a unique form of “mixed media” art’ produced using a wide range of materials such as silver jewellery, wax medallions and small relics in the form of stone and bone fragments, all wrapped in colourful fine textiles such as silk and then embellished with silk flowers, silk thread, semi-precious stones, including pearls.14 Sometimes Mediaeval “Enclosed Gardens” of the Low Countries (A Hermeneutical Contribution to Chthonic Artistic Expressions)’, Annual of the Antwerp Royal Museum (2012), 9–45 (p. 10, n. 2). One of the first commentators on the Horti Conclusi was Camille Poupeye, ‘Les jardins clos et leurs rapports avec la sculpture Malinoise’, Bulletin du Cercle archéologique, littéraire et artistique de Malines 22 (1912), 50–114. More recent appraisal has been undertaken by Paul Vandenbroeck and other contributors (including Baert, Kristeva and Irigaray) in Le jardin clos de l’âme, cited at the start of this chapter. See also the wider work of Baert on the Horti Conclusi, most recently her ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries (Fifteenth Century Onwards). Gender, Textile, and the Intimate Space as Horticulture’, Textile, Cloth and Culture 15.1 (2017), 2–33, where she offers a detailed account of these artefacts along with a psychoanalytically-inflected analysis of their cultural implications. As Baert points out, too, sometimes these artefacts were commissioned and used by the local laity (p. 4). She discusses the etymology of the Dutch term and its associations on p. 6. For a critique of the use of psychoanalysis as a means of ‘understanding’ these artefacts, see James, ‘Hysterical (Hi)stories of Art’. In her uncompromising criticism of the essays included in the 1994 volume on the Horti edited by Vandenbroeck, James presents psychoanalysis, especially as deployed in this series of essays, as a universalising discourse or obfuscating methodology. However, as these essays assert, the unconscious is also a product of history in all its senses (and that includes both history and hystery). For an historicist and cultural-materialist analysis of the Mechelen artefacts, along with colour illustrations, see Alison Pearson, ‘Sensory Piety as Social Intervention in a Mechelen Besloten Hofje’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9.2 (2017), 1–42. 14 Baert, ‘Echoes’, pp. 8–9.

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incorporating painted panels that seem to have been commissioned outside the nunnery and then mounted in wooden frames,15 each of these artefacts ‘resembles a fragrant garden, enclosed within a hedge, and filled with a variety of objects and material remnants that lie hidden in a proliferation of artificial flowers and vegetation’.16 These sacred garden reconstructions were made and tended over by generations of women within the nunneries that produced and preserved them and there is evidence to suggest they were still being worked on up until the early twentieth century.17 Always inviting the onlooker to enter them ‘like a garden’ (and thus drawing inspiration from the Song of Songs 5:1 (‘Let my beloved come into his garden’), the ‘makers’ of these artefacts were clearly aiming to invoke the same type of fertile garden dynamics identified in my previous chapter – but this time indoors, within cloistered spaces and in visually representational and material terms rather than through conventional, scripted or spoken language. As such, the seemingly unstructured multiplicity that constituted these artefacts was able to articulate these nuns’ creative approaches to their personal and shared spiritualities in ways that spoken language could not. Sporting the appearance of order and containment by their careful placing and subsequent enclosure within boxed frames for display, protection and portability, these ‘gardens’ were also enclosed from within – by representations of walls, hedges and other forms of decorative ‘garden’ containments. Such an artistic schema therefore produced a type of mise en abîme, enclosures within enclosures with the potential to fade out to the infinite; and, as Carmel Bendon Davis has suggested, such a conceptualisation is absolutely appropriate as a means of understanding the multiple spatial and temporal frames of the mystical experience and its transference into text.18 The same can thus be said of the multiple ‘vanishing points’ of the Horti Conclusi, which articulated not only the ability of a 15 16 17 18

Pearson argues this for some of the extant artefacts in ‘Sensory Piety’. Baert, ‘Echoes’, p. 8. Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 3. Carmel Bendon Davis, Mysticism and Space: Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), p. 6.

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temporally-displaced paradise to be rehoused and re-performed in the here-and-now of a female monastic setting, but of a paradise which could shift and change as every generation of nuns remembered/re-membered, envisioned and occupied it in different ways. In the words of Paul Vandenbroeck, the Horti Conclusi were productive of a ‘synaesthetic rite and a vanishing point contracting in the direction of an imageless unconscious’;19 while for Barbara Baert, they formed ‘a memory box over the generations of religious women’, being also a ‘pars pro toto for the community’s spirituality, collective history and prospectus’.20 Thus, far from being simple devotional objects made by medieval nuns with time on their hands and thus unworthy of scholarly attention,21 the Horti Conclusi are complex diachronic female utterances, mises en abîmes both dilatory and poetic and lying outside the formal syntactical constraints of the spoken word – in Baert’s terms an écriture and in Kristeva’s an eruption of the choric semiotic.22 In their complex symbolism, therefore, including the repetitive trope of a background element made up of repetitive ‘lozenge’ patterns in which the ‘flowers’ appear to be ‘planted’ (again, in Baert’s terms, a ‘vulvatic pictogram’),23 these works operate through an insistence upon a repetition and reiteration, expansion, lacuna, allusion and illusion that could ultimately prove infinite and uncontained – in spite of the borders of their boxes. Indeed, as one of the world’s most ancient symbols, the lozenge presents another type of mise en abîme, and, for Baert, ‘th[is] endless repetition of the diamond or uterus … shares the notion of “becoming” with this 19 Paul Vandenbroeck, Azzetta: Berbervrouwen en hun kunst (Ghent: Ludion, 2000), p. 107 (cited in Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 16). 20 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 11. 21 Pearson argues for collaboration on these artefacts between contemplative nuns and the artisan workshops of the city, rather than sole production within the nunneries themselves. However, she also acknowledges that what we know about these Horti Conclusi may change as they undergo further restoration (‘Sensory Piety’, p. 36). 22 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 19. Here Baert associates the Horti Conclusi with the concept of ‘l’écriture féminine’, not ‘writing’ at all in the conventional sense, but a semiotic articulation of a shared (choric) imaginary realm that identifies itself as specifically female. This clearly chimes with Kristeva’s concept of the chora, cited above. 23 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 19.

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vulvatic pictogram’.24 Thus, in many of these artefacts, this infinite ‘vulvatic’ background provides apt representation of the feminine ‘soil’ in which the garden itself is planted. As Baert also asserts, within these Horti Conclusi ‘feminine spirituality is veiled and sublimated into an intimate and highly personalised topos of love, with the flowers serving as a mysteriously concealed catalyst.’25 As such, these creations reclaim the vulvatic, the uterine and the abject, providing a visually poetic iteration of the choric link between la femme et la fleur within an otherwise suppressed female imaginary. Whilst offering the idea of the random, the wild and the uncontrolled (as do actual gardens that need constant attention to maintain an order), they also present the (female) onlooker with another form of ‘structuring’, this time of the ‘drives’ and the reciprocity that produce a never-ending spousal love-relationship with Christ, and with the natural world of his immanence. This, moreover, is in full keeping with the cyclical and inexorable – although often unpredictable – ‘structuring’ of the seasons and those other environmental shifts in which the seasons and their cyclical changes are embedded. Indeed, the Horti Conclusi work comfortably with change and changeability, rather than attempting to dominate, order and control them, recalling the observation of Borchardt, who suggests: ‘The plant – and the flower first of all – accepts no instructions on the measure of its rights within the human soul’, adding, ‘The plant’s hegemony is limitless, and how 24 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 19. Here, Baert’s reading chimes with other studies of vulvic representation – Christ’s wound, for example – in late medieval iconography. Although Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out such representation, she has also foreclosed its clearly sexual associations, preferring to read vulvic imagery as ‘fertility and decay’: see her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 182. Karma Lochrie, however, has contested such foreclosure, suggesting that such a conceptualisation cancels the polysemy of Christ’s wound as a site for the expression of female sexuality: see her ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 180–200 (p. 189). For a detailed and convincing account of the vulvic associations of Christ’s wounds, see Amy Hollywood, ‘That Glorious Slit: Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ’s Side Wound’, in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture, ed. Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 105–25. 25 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 7.

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most creatively to come to terms with such a power is left to the human imagination.’26 Thus, for Borchardt and, perhaps, for the Mechelen women (and Kristeva too), it is the enclosed garden with its multiple female encodings that shape the human imagination, at the same time as that imagination considers itself to be shaping that very garden. In the context of what I am arguing here, however, it is not the relatively superficial concept of imagination that is at stake, with all its grand-narrative and patriarchal connotations, but the development and release of a female imaginary itself in the production and maintenance of these artefacts. Of importance both synchronically and diachronically to the Mechelen women’s view of sacred landscape, the Horti Conclusi extended permissions to the nuns to shape and interpret that landscape themselves via a fertile and productive garden hermeneutics that manifested materially under the workings of their own fingers. Indeed, for Baert, paraphrasing the perspective of Paul Vandenbroeck, this pictorial language constitutes not only ‘corporeal art and textile, performative expression and ritual intervention’ but also ‘the aesthetics whereby the body constitutes the pulsating underlayer (as a formal unconscious)’.27 For Baert, and for Vandenbroeck, moreover, as material location, material representation and locus of a beating unconscious, ‘The garden is a place where these transpositions can take place unimpededly.’28 For Kristeva, it is an ‘art féminin ancestral’ [ancestral feminine art] where women ‘se reconnaissent dans cet univers fragile, fier et mortel, comme s’il leur renvoyait leur proper image avec, en plus, la promesse de la repousse à la saison prochaine, une résurrection’ [recognise themselves in this fragile universe, proud and mortal, as if they were

26 Rudolph Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener, trans. Henry Martin (New York: McPherson and Co., 2006), p. 29. 27 Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘The Energetics of An Unknowable Body: The Sacred and the Aniconic-Sublime in Early Modern Religious Culture’, in Backlit Heaven: Power and Devotion in the Archdiocese Mechelen, ed. Paul Vandenbroeck and Gerard Rooijakkers (Tielt: Lannoo, 2009), pp. 174–204 (p. 178), as cited by Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 32. 28 Baert, ‘Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens’, p. 33.

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seeing their own image with, what is more, the promise of sprouting growth at the next season, a resurrection].29 This type of alchemical interaction between representational ‘gardens’, their female makers in Mechelen and the unconscious ultimately provides us with an illuminating lens through which to examine the ways in which such female-coded ‘ancestral art’, with its embedded and immanent garden hermeneutics, emerges within much earlier material productions by women in Europe, this time during the twelfth century. Here, in the form of writing and illustration rather than collage and crafting, we see again une communion inimitable de la femme et la fleur that offers access to a previously under-explored facet of the religious imaginary of medieval holy women.

A Woman’s Garden of Delights: the Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenbourg Although not documented as part of twelfth- or thirteenth-century female production, in many ways the Horti Conclusi of the later medieval Low Countries nunneries did find earlier expression in European female monastic contexts, particularly in some of the female institutions of northern Germany. Here, we find similar visionary and material manifestations of the type of communion de la femme et la fleur that was so intrinsic to the production of the Mechelen artefacts. Indeed, concerted and protracted attempts at wresting a religious imaginary away from traditional phallogocentric theological orthodoxy by deploying the female-coded poetics of the hortus conclusus are visible in the two female-authored texts dating from the twelfth century to which I now turn: the writing of religious contemporaries, Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196) and Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179). Both women were abbesses of independent nunneries exercising their creativity within all-female contexts, and, similarly, both drew heavily upon the type of garden hermeneutics I have been discussing above, although in 29 Kristeva, ‘Le Bonheur des Beguines’, p. 173. My translation.

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very different ways and for different audiences. Whilst Herrad’s work, like that of the nuns of Mechelen, appears to have been produced for, and restricted to, the convent and its all-female community, Hildegard’s work soon breached the convent’s walls, reaching widespread circulation and fame, even in her own day. What these women have in common, however, is that their work is deeply dependent upon representations of the natural world, with female-coded gardens forming a particularly important part of their narrative, textual and intellectual strategies of exegesis and authorisation. Here again, as we saw in the Auchinleck Life, discussed in chapter one, and the ‘vulvatic’ enclosed gardens discussed above, we find an unearthing of the body of the woman from the phallogocentric discourse besides which it has been buried and the transformation of that discourse into a female imaginary realm made manifest by the women themselves. The Hortus Deliciarum [Garden of Delights] was a lengthy work produced by Herrad and her canonesses at the independent Augustinian nunnery of Hohenbourg, Alsace, during the last quarter of the twelfth century.30 A large and extensive manuscript, impressive in its own materiality, it extended to 323 folios of text and image recounting an elaborate and comprehensive Christian history from the Creation to the Apocalypse. While only a small proportion of the content appears to have been original to Herrad, the majority of the manuscript’s texts and images were based upon extracts drawn by Herrad from earlier, theological works, some readily identifiable and others not, written by an extensive array of exclusively male authors ranging from the Church Fathers to theologians and 30 The original manuscript, now lost, has been partially reconstructed according to nineteenth-century copies and transcriptions under the editorial direction of Rosalie Green: see Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff and Michael Curschmann, with contributions by T. Julian Brown and Kenneth Levey, 2 vols (London: Warburg Institute/University of London; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979). The reconstruction was facilitated largely by the work of Christian Moritz Engelhardt, who had published on the manuscript as early as 1812. His monograph of 1818 included transcriptions of the poems and a list of German glosses, along with a whole range of reproduced colour images copied from the manuscript. For a more detailed account of the studies undertaken before the loss of the manuscript, see Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol. 2.

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exegetes contemporary to the manuscript’s production at the end of the twelfth century. Thus, in the words of Danielle B. Joyner, the Hortus comprised a ‘veritable feast of visual and textual quotations’31 arranged in such a way as to represent the entire Christian history as a garden of intellectual and visual delectation. In many ways, then, the Hortus could be read in the same terms as the patrilinear genealogy re-established at the end of the Auchinleck Life discussed in chapter one, where the garden hermeneutics are both created by, and yet cede to, the relentless pressure of a male line of intellectual ascent from Adam to Christ to the Apostles and Church Fathers – and beyond.32 In one of the only other full-length studies of the Hortus in recent years, Fiona J. Griffiths rightly recognises the Hortus as an ‘extraordinary monument to the spiritual and intellectual culture of a female monastic community’.33 However, she also reads Herrad as ‘a woman who was not “feminine”’ and asserts that her role as author/compiler ultimately ‘challenges the construction of medieval religious women in much recent scholarship as having experienced God primarily within a separate, feminised sphere of affective spirituality’.34 Griffiths goes further, arguing: ‘Herrad was an active participant in the very textual culture that is often deemed responsible for relegating women to positions of marginality and inferiority during the time.’35 While I agree that Herrad’s work engages with an apparently hegemonic male tradition and does not in any way reflect the type of affective spirituality that Sarah McNamer claims was both a feminised and female-focused form of devotion emerging in medieval Latin contexts during the 31 Danielle B. Joyner, Painting the Hortus Deliciarum: Medieval Women, Wisdom and Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 3. 32 For a helpful overview of many of those authors on whom Herrad drew, see Carolyn Meussig, ‘Learning and Mentoring in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard of Bingen and Herrad of Landsberg’, in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Meussig (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000), pp. 87–104. See, in particular, pp. 96–7. For a more comprehensive listing of sources beneath each entry in the manuscript reconstruction, see Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al. 33 Fiona J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 1. 34 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 223. 35 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 13.

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same period,36 it is important to point out that Herrad was not a visionary in the accepted sense of the term (as were Hildegard and the two women discussed in my next chapter, Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn, for example). Nor does engagement within a community of male discourse necessarily preclude a woman writer from disrupting that culture from within, especially if her endeavour is undertaken deliberately and self-consciously, as seems to have happened at Hohenbourg. Although it remains true that Herrad was working within a different set of parameters from her later monastic sisters – her work was clearly driven by the need for the same type of female theological education akin to that received by men within a culture of church reform – in her work she nevertheless managed to forge an intense relationship with all forms of learning, creativity and intellectual endeavour that entirely resisted being curtailed by Herrad’s having been born a woman.37 While not asserting her femininity de bono or de malo as Hildegard did, for example, nevertheless Herrad is clearly aware of the type of communion possible between a woman and her enclosed ‘garden of delights’ that does not necessarily by-pass male discourse but confidently draws upon absolute familiarity with it, in order to harness and reshape it as a flowery garden of delights in service of a woman-only audience.38 In this sense, the Hortus forms a neat fit with Plate’s conception of women’s rewriting of patriarchal discourses as ‘archive-bound in its concern with reference memory [but] also concerned with the much more elusive circulating memory, engaging with stories as they are remembered and as they circulate in the domain of active, communicative cultural memory’.39 I argue it was just such a rich combination of ‘archival’ memory and ‘communicative cultural memory’ that led to the production of the elaborate and ultimately unique manuscript titled the Hortus Deliciarum by

36 McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 1 and pp. 58–85. 37 For an account of the Hortus in the context of church reform, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 56–72. 38 As Griffiths points out, the book was never copied and does not seem to have been known outside Hohenbourg until the Renaissance period (Hortus, p. 2). 39 Plate, Transforming Memories, p. 165.

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its original producer, as female religiosity began to feel the impact of widespread church reform.40 The Hortus Deliciarum was clearly an exceptional manuscript, so much so that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century male scholars tended to attribute it not to Hohenbourg but to one or other of the nearby male scriptoria which, so they claimed, possessed far more capabilities for producing such a ‘masterpiece’.41 This assessment chimed with more widespread scholarly refusal to believe it could be the work of a woman, based upon what Joyner refers to as ‘avuncular biases’ regarding female productivity in the Middle Ages as well as at the time of their writing.42 Such attitudes were further enhanced by the fact that the manuscript itself had been destroyed during the sacking of the Strasbourg library during the Prussian siege in August 1870,43 and scholars ever since have had to rely upon a series of what have proved to be invaluable antiquarian studies of the manuscript undertaken before its destruction that have allowed for its comprehensive reconstruction, now available to scholars in quasi-facsimile format.44 As Joyner points out, however, that reconstruction, produced for ‘transparency and clarity’ and missing more than half the images and a third of the text, can only ever be anodyne in comparison with the manuscript’s original polychromic magnificence, and therefore necessitating ‘[i]magination and eye squinting [to] evoke a chimera of the manuscript’s original splendor’.45 As I have asserted in the previous chapter and elsewhere, however, any reading of female-authored works from the Middle Ages requires some element of ‘eye squinting’ (or, to 40 Griffiths points out that Herrad’s enterprise challenges the widely held assumption that monastic women’s number and education suffered in the light of the separation of men and women into discrete institutions in the light of the Gregorian reforms (Garden of Delights, pp. 10–12). This point is also made in a more recent discussion by Elizabeth Monroe, ‘Dangerous Passages and Spiritual Redemption in the Hortus Deliciarum’, in Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 39–74. 41 See, for example, Albert Marignan, Étude sur le manuscript de l’Hortus deliciarum (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1910), pp. 3–4. 42 Joyner, Painting the Hortus deliciarum, p. 2. 43 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 1. 44 See note 30 above. 45 Joyner, Painting the Hortus deliciarum, p. 2.

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repeat Cixous’s concept, a feminine knowing how to read ‘with my eyes closed’),46 and it is just such a reading practice that reaps the highest rewards when scrutinising this unavoidably flattened out version of the original Hohenbourg manuscript, with its tantalising image sequences and eclectic textual extracts from male auctores, sometimes unattributable to any recognisable source.47 The Hortus was made up of more than 1100 extracts of varying lengths, interspersed with large, colourful illustrations, as mentioned, and with its overarching organisational principle being ostensibly a teleological grand narrative of salvational history told largely via the extracts of a host of Latin commentators, with some additions by Herrad herself (who is, significantly, the only female contributor to the book in the form of a number of introductory poems directly attributed to her). What remains singular about the manuscript, therefore, is that it was produced by a woman in collaboration with other women for the sole use of those women within a single monastic location and, as mentioned above, appears never to have been copied or circulated outside of that context.48 As Griffiths argues, it was likely conceived as a means of offering the Hohenbourg nuns a comprehensive theological education which could more than rival that being received at the cathedrals and universities of Europe by their male precursors and contemporaries.49 In Griffiths’s estimation, too, this manuscript’s mode of production, with a woman guiding it and her nuns operating as both scribes and illustrators, distinguished Herrad significantly from other women writers of her day, who were, so she argues, often dependent upon male mediation of, and scribal input into, their writing.50 In developing this distinction she argues: 46 Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 35. For a longer discussion of this form of disruptive reading of medieval texts, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), Chapter 4, pp. 113–46. 47 Joyner discusses this element of source attribution, and lack of it, in Painting the Hortus deliciarum, pp. 3–7. 48 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 2. 49 Grifitths, Garden of Delights, p. 6. See also Meussig, ‘Learning and Mentoring’. 50 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 6. Elsewhere, too, Griffiths asserts that women writers from double communities were ‘practically and theoretically

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Here, Griffiths sets up a binary which, perhaps, the work itself does not entirely sustain, however: first because devotional ‘femininity’ can be – and was – produced and performed in myriad ways other than via the manifestation of direct ‘affect’; and, second, because, at least according to the claims of McNamer, what came to be known as ‘affective piety’ was at this point only in its infancy.52 Indeed, as McNamer also argues, the history of devotion should be considered as an aspect of the history of emotion ‘rather than the other way around’.53 Therefore, while I agree with Griffiths’s stance that Herrad was operating within a distinctly elite and masculinist literary tradition – and thus drawing upon a distinctly male imaginary when she compiled the Hortus Deliciarum – I am less certain about her assertion that ‘there is little that marks the Hortus as particularly a “woman’s book”’.54 In fact, Griffiths seems to be a little unsure of this herself, since elsewhere she does identify it as ‘uniquely a woman’s book’,55 ultimately devoting her own book’s conclusion to this question.56 In many ways, then, this ambiguity (both of the Hortus and Griffiths’s response to it) reflects the ambiguity which we have come to recognise as inherent to medieval women’s writing more widely and which, as suggested, not only warrants a reading ‘with the eyes closed’ but also, at the very least, an ‘element of eye-squinting’. Medieval women’s writing, moreover, has proved itself to be more than happy to draw upon whatever traditions are made subordinate to male authority’, suggesting too that the writing of women even as renowned as Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Shönau (d. 1164/5), ‘may well have been calculated to satisfy a male audience’ (p. 21). 51 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 7–8. 52 McNamer, Affective Meditation, especially chapter 2, pp. 58–85. 53 McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 7. 54 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 7. 55 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 2. 56 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 212–23.

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available to it before proceeding to make it its own.57 Indeed, the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman author, Marie de France (fl. c. 1180) asserts as much in the prologue to her collection of Breton Lais, articulating both her knowledge of grand-narrative Latin literary teleology as well as more folkloric secular traditions: Custume fu as anciëns, ceo testimonie Preciëns, es livres que jadis faiseient assez oscurement diseient pur cels ki a venir esteient e ki apendre les deveient, que peüssent gloser la letre e de lur sen le surplus metre. Li philesophe le saveient, e par els meïsme entendeient, cum plus trespassereit de tens, plus serreient sutil de sens … Pur ceo començai a penser d’alkune bone estoire faire e de Latin en Romanz traire; mais ne me fust guaires de pris: itant s’en sunt altre entremis. Des lais pensai qu’oïz aveie. [It was customary for the ancients, in the books they wrote (Priscian testifies to this), to express themselves very obscurely so that those in later generations, who had to learn them, could provide a gloss for the text and put the finishing touches to their meaning. Men of learning were aware of this and their experience had taught them that the more time they spent studying texts the more subtle would be their understanding of them …. For this reason I began to think of working on some good story and translating a Latin text into French, but this would scarcely have been worthwhile, for others have undertaken a similar task. So I thought of lays.]58 57 This has been argued concertedly by contributors to A History of British Women’s Writing, Vol. 1: 700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 58 Marie de France, ‘Prolog’, in Lais de Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900), lines 9–33. The translation is taken from Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 41.

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Marie, moreover, also identifies this acquisitive literary practice in horticultural terms: for her, like Herrad, intellectual literary endeavour is a form of ‘blossom’-collection and when received well by its readership ‘its flowers are in full bloom’.59 Such sentiments, of course, ultimately blur the conceptual lines between parallel male and female literary cultures that only rarely converge. Therefore, while Griffiths is correct that the Hortus’ text and images cannot be read within the paradigms we have often come to associate with medieval women’s writing and while I also concur that the book forms a significant witness to the often ignored front-line role occupied by women within wider medieval intellectual history, I also suggest that the Hortus provides an important early example of a learned medieval woman overseeing the manoeuvring of literary tradition in order to articulate an imaginary realm that is not wholly assimilated into that of male tradition – or, in Derridean terms, one that is not entirely bent out of shape or buried beside the phallologocentric ‘old root’. Indeed, one of the many splendours of this remarkable work is that we do not have to look far – albeit sometimes with eyes asquint – to witness an attempt to reshape the intellectual male symbolic to reflect the responses of those women engaging with it at Hohenbourg and to produce a work aptly suited to the specific requirements and desires of that community. As discussed below, even the work’s title, in this act of naming imposed by Herrad herself, points towards such a conscious reshaping as part of a female-coded hermeneutic process. To examine the work in terms of a simple binary, therefore, is to overlook the nuance of how, very often, women were drivers – and re-shapers – of those cultures they inherited and inhabited in order to carve out a place within them. And, as Plate again reminds us about women’s rewriting of classic grand-narrative texts: ‘It intervenes in the production of cultural memory [and] affects the way we read and understand these texts.’60

59 Marie de France, Lais, p. 41. 60 Plate, Transforming Memories, p. 7.

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Flowers, Fertility and the Author as Gardener in Herrad’s hortus conclusus The title Hortus Deliciarum constitutes an act of female naming that resists the prevalent culture of authorial anonymity or, in the case of women, self-effacement. On folio 1v there appears the inscription, Incipit Ortus deliciarum, in quo collectis floribus scripturarum assidue jocundetur turmula adolescentularum [Here begins the Garden of Delights, in which the troop of little maidens may be constantly delighted by the collected flowers of scripture].61 Here Herrad playfully associates the work with the increasingly popular image of the maiden in the rose garden, a motif which was soon to become immortalised in medieval romance tales such as the thirteenth-century Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (d. 1240) and Jean de Meun (d. 1305), and which would also become a permanent fixture within the cultural imaginary in the form of representations of the Virgin locked in her hortus conclusus, as mentioned earlier.62 However, Herrad’s chosen title also identifies the work as a florilegium, that is a work made up of extracts and inserts from other, secondary, works (very often those of the Church Fathers and later exegetes) to create a separate entity within which they were combined into a new narrative form. Indeed, the Latin etymology of the term (flos + legere) points towards both content and methodology, something Herrad takes care to exploit from the beginning in her identification of such exegetical pickings as ‘flowers’.63 As Herrad is keen to point out in her prologue quoted below, carefully chosen texts were gleaned and replanted within new contexts to create a personal narrative driven by new pragmatics and aesthetics of cohesion, and enclosed within the binding ‘walls’ of her garden-book. In many ways, therefore, in Herrad’s production of the Hortus we again witness a type of rebuilding of Eden by a woman who not only remodels the history of salvation according to her own textual 61 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., fol. 1v (p. 4). 62 On this, see chapter one, p. 55, above. 63 The term originates from flos [flower] and legere [to gather], forming a Latin-based equivalent to the Greek-based term, anthology, from ᾰ̓́νθος (anthos [flower]) and logios (λόγιος [collection]).

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and imagistic choices, but who also puts her name to this new act of creation. Again, to coin the words of Plate, such an endeavour forms ‘a technology of re-production and re-presentation … that works to preserve culture – even as it, inevitably, perhaps, transforms it in the process.’64 Griffiths, however, disagrees on this issue, considering the term florilegium as ultimately belying the book’s skill, intricacy and organisational strategies. As she argues: ‘florilegium … suggest[s] anthologizing but not necessarily reflection or careful organization’, and is a term, therefore that ‘minimize[s] Herrad’s achievement’.65 I would suggest, however, that, because of its horticultural etymology, the term florilegium is actually a suitably complex and multi-faceted metaphor, imbricated not only with deep and inescapable connotations of a flourishing garden landscape (the Latin verb florere, ‘to flourish’, bears the same etymological roots as flora, ‘flower’), but also with rich pickings and, more to the point, agency and hard labour, all exercised within that landscape. As Harrison has pointed out about such horticultural associations: ‘Gardens after all are never either merely literal or figurative but always both one and the other’,66 and (like the author of the florilegium-text) their makers ‘must continue to believe that “the best is in front of us”’.67 In other words, every gardener has to believe that each new garden will be the best yet. So too with the florilegium compiler, whose role is to encourage the best possible devotion to God and a future united with him in heaven. Herrad’s adherence to the florilegium methodology therefore establishes her as its ‘gardener’, as well as its creator, author and compiler, adding another biblically-approved identity to her established roles as Hohenbourg’s abbess and educator of its nuns.68 64 Plate, Transforming Memories, pp. 7–8. 65 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 16. 66 Harrison, Gardens, p. 143. 67 Harrison, Gardens, p. 37. 68 The nun as gardener for Christ is an image that recurs in the writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn in the thirteenth century, for which see my next chapter. The issue of ‘flourishing’ as a female-coded theological hermeneutic, as discussed briefly in the introduction to this study, will also be dealt with in more detail in chapter three, below.

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Such ‘gardening’, moreover, takes place within a series of enclosed, private spaces – monastic, intellectual, textual and ‘horticultural’ – with its primary aim to bring about an intellectual flourishing that foregrounds growth, nurture and care as fundamental to the educational tool Herrad is here providing for her nuns as the work’s only readers.69 Thus, in the same way as the women would without doubt have enjoyed the monastic gardens attached to Hohenbourg and the views across the spectacular valley where the nunnery was located, so too they were able to enter, help produce and maintain the equally material Hortus Deliciarum whenever called upon to do so.70 In Herrad’s hands, therefore, all of these connotations and more are brought to bear upon her text and its construction by her naming of it as a garden, something that she amplifies by the assertive prologue she includes on folio 1v. Taking the form of a letter to her nuns, this prologue is worth quoting in full: Herrat, gratia Dei Hohenburgensis ecclesie abbatissa licet indigna dulcissimis Christi virginibus in eadem ecclesia quasi in Christi vinea Domini fideliter laborantibus, graciam et gloriam, quam dabit Dominus. Sanctitati vestre insinuo, quod hunc librum qui intitulatur Hortus deliciarum ex diversis sacre et philosophice scripture floribus quasi apicula Deo inspirante comportavi et ad laudem et honorem Christi et Ecclesie, causaque dilectionis vestre quasi in unum mellifluum favum compaginavi. Quapropter in ipso libro oportet vos sedulo gratum querere pastum et mellitis stillicidiis animum reficere lassum, ut sponsi blandiciis semper occupate et spiritualibus deliciis saginate transitoria secure percurratis et eterna felici jucunditate possideatis, meque per varias maris semitas periculose gradientem fructuosis orationibus vestris a terrenis affectibus mitigatam una vobiscum in amorem dilecti vestri sursum trahatis. Amen. [Herrad, by the grace of God, abbess, although unworthy, of the church of Hohenbourg, to the sweetest virgins of Christ faithfully working at Hohenbourg as though in the vineyard of the Lord

69 For an elaboration on the teaching potential of the Hortus within the Hohenbourg nunnery, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 160–3 and pp. 168–78. 70 The nunnery was situated in a dramatic position on the summit of Mount Sainte-Odile, offering panoramic views across the mountains and valleys, for a discussion of which, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 136–7. That Herrad had this landscape in mind is suggested by her famous depiction of her community and its environs on fols. 322v–323r, discussed in more detail below.

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Material Garden Hermeneutics Christ, be grace and glory, that the Lord will give. I make it known to your holiness, that, like a little bee inspired by God, I collected from the various flowers of sacred Scripture and philosophic writings this book, which is called the Hortus deliciarum, and I brought it together to the praise and honor of Christ and the church and for the sake of your love as if into a single sweet honeycomb. Therefore, in this very book, you ought diligently to seek pleasing food and to refresh your exhausted soul with its honeyed dewdrops, so that, always possessed by the charms of the Bridegroom and fattened on spiritual delights, you may safely hurry over ephemeral things to possess the things that last forever in happiness and pleasure. And now as I pass dangerously through the various pathways of the sea, I ask that you may redeem me with your fruitful prayers from earthly passions and draw me upwards, together with you, into the affection of your beloved. Amen.]71

Here Herrad makes clear the extent – and the thoughtfulness – of her enterprise: she has been ‘inspired’; like a gardener working in God’s vineyard, she has ‘collected’; the extracts are scriptural and philosophic; they have been ‘brought together’ as a single entity; they are not ‘ephemeral’ but will ‘last forever’; compiling them has been ‘dangerous’, for which she needs the prayers of the sisters. This has been labour intensive, but with aim and direction, exactly like gardening: far from the ‘minimising’ endeavour of a directionless miscellany, Herrad’s prologue presents the work specifically as a ‘garden book’, a florilegium, in all its labyrinthine multiplicity, through which, as Elizabeth Monroe has suggested, ‘the reader is compelled … to create her own imaginative journey through its pages’ (or, in terms of its own garden hermeneutic, its ‘pathways’).72 Thus, Herrad asserts herself unequivocally the ‘maker’ of her own ‘garden’, referring to herself by name and insisting from the start upon the first-person singular form of the verb: insinuo [I make it known …]. As mentioned above, Griffiths identifies this as part of Herrad’s strategy of writing within a long tradition of male authorship. However, it echoes far more resonantly, perhaps, with the voices of other medieval women who are insistent upon 71 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol. 1, fol. 1v (p. 4). For the English translation, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 233. 72 Monroe, ‘Dangerous Passages’, p. 53.

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their own authorial subjectivity. Again, Marie de France comes to mind and, much later, Christine de Pizan (d. c. 1430), both of whom are equally insistent upon taking up a first-person position as the authors of their own narratives: ‘Jo, Marie’, proclaims Marie in the prologue to her Espurgatoire S. Patrice; ‘Je, Christine’, announces Christine.73 Both women, too, were operating within male spheres of influence but, like Herrad, nevertheless insisted upon a namecheck that categorically identified them as women – and, moreover, as women writers. Indeed, rather than insinuating themselves into a male literary tradition and hoping to be accepted, all three women saw fit to announce their own versions of authorship, their own rights to literary authority and thus their own ability to write in the same – or different – ways as their male precursors and contemporaries. For Herrad, moreover, it is clear from her prologue that the only male figure with whose approval she is actually concerned, is the heavenly Bridegroom, Christ, with all other worldly concerns being transitoria – that is to say, mere ephemera. Herrad’s reference to the Bridegroom’s ‘charms’ [‘sponsi blandiciis’] in her prologue also serves to reinforce the garden hermeneutics of the text she has already established, situating the Hortus firmly within the frame of the Song of Songs and its feminine poetics of flourishing and plenitude. Indeed, the hortus deliciarum from which Herrad drew her title was frequently used as an expressive alternative to the more common hortus conclusus as a means of symbolising the Church, the New Jerusalem and the human soul, as configured within popular exegeses of the Song. Arguably, too, the descriptor deliciarum is more redolent of the type of excess or jouissance discussed in the previous chapter, one allied 73 Marie de France, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: A Poem by Marie de France, ed. and trans. Michael Curley (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), line 2297. For a discussion of Marie’s authorial agency in this context, see Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 39–62 (here at p. 58). Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. IX (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 28. For an essay discussing Christine’s identifying with her female subject in this poem, see Kevin Brownlee, ‘Structures of Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’, in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki (New York and London: Norton, 1997), pp. 371–90.

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to the feminine and which collapses the garden’s fecundity into that of the Bride as she unites with her Bridegroom, as we have seen. Thus, Herrad’s own offering of horticultural fecundity as bride of Christ herself, is not only the garden-book, but, as we saw with the nuns of Mechelen, herself as its maker and gardener. Through title and content, therefore, Herrad establishes her book as a sacred, flourishing and enclosed ‘garden’ space, female-coded and private, a place of joyful pleasures where she and her nuns can reside and experience a heterochronic overlaying of past, present and future, surrounded by the ‘flowers’ of the divinely-inspired text planted and nurtured there by them – all in an ultimate Kristevan display of the type of communion de la femme et la fleur discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

Herrad as the ‘Bee’ of God Unlike the words of Eve at the end of the Life, Herrad’s reworking of salvation history does not amount to ventriloquism of the Law, in spite of its assiduous use of compilation. This refusal to ventriloquise in spite of her diligent copying of male-authored extracts, moreover, is established by their words-as-flowers being placed within and framed by a female-constructed ‘garden’. Via a selective re-iteration based on personal choice, allied to extensive and frequently highly individualistic illustration cycles, Herrad’s agency as female exegete operating amongst other women en communion is also maintained.74 These garden hermeneutics are extended by Herrad’s similar identification of the book as a ‘single sweet honeycomb’, referencing, of course, the deeply sensual and material pleasures of the hortus conclusus in Song 4:1 (‘Thy lips, my spouse, are as a dropping honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue’) and 5:1 (‘I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse … I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey’). In an image that brings together both bride and gardener, Herrad then 74 A protracted discussion of the illustrations within the Hortus is beyond the scope of this chapter but for the most comprehensive treatment to date, see Joyner, Painting the Hortus Deliciarum.

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proceeds to depict herself as the diligent and productive ‘bee of God’ (‘apicula deo’), moving from flower to flower to extract its nourishing nectar.75 Here, Herrad is clearly both drawing upon, and exploiting, medieval conceptions regarding the bee as exemplar for hard ‘garden’ labour undertaken as part of a selfless productivity focused on others, rather than self, but was by no means the first writer to draw upon the symbolic potential of the bee to represent authorial diligence and the ideal of chastity. Indeed, Christianity had inherited the trope from Classical tradition and it was adopted most notably in the writings of Ambrose (d. 397), especially in his De virginibus; Aldhelm (d. 709) in his De virginitate; and Aelfric (d. 1010) in his Homilies.76 It is worth noting, too, that all three of these famous deployments of the image were at the hands of men who are known to have written some of their texts at the behest of enclosed women and that, in their writings, the bee was most often used as a symbol for Marian sexual and spiritual purity.77 In Herrad’s hands, however, the image becomes a unique and multifaceted trope that moves way beyond monastic chastity. Indeed, in her treatment it becomes all the more effective in its articulation of the same type of communion de la femme et la fleur of such importance to Kristeva in her analysis of the Horti Conclusi of Mechelen, as Herrad and her nuns diligently set about creating their own version of the hortus-as-collage (in this case, florilegium). The figure of the bee serves to position Herrad herself as an industrious and acquisitive author and is closely associated with the performative separation she posits between herself in that role (‘I’) and her nuns as recipients (‘you’) in her prologue. As ‘endangered’ and perhaps presumptuous ‘author’ of the work (or vulnerable builder of the ‘honeycomb’), moreover, she begs their prayers to support her in her enterprise. But there are also several other layers to this similitude. In the Middle Ages, bees were admired for their interdependent, communal living habits and were, moreover, important contributors to 75 For a detailed examination of this image, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 91–107. 76 Again, Griffiths examines this tradition in Garden of Delights, pp. 91–107. 77 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 92.

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the material concerns of the monastic life. Virtually all monasteries relied on bee-keeping to make themselves self-sufficient in terms of honey (used for both food and medicines) and beeswax. Indeed, as McLean points out, beeswax for high-quality candles of the type one might expect to find in monastic churches, abbeys and cathedrals was a far more precious commodity than honey for that very reason.78 The monastic hortus conclusus, therefore, provided the ideal environment for the central activity of bee-keeping, allowing the comparison between the hive and the monastic community to become an inevitable trope. There is no reason to believe that the situation would have been any different in twelfth-century Alsace. Indeed, the medieval bestiary, a literary genre enjoying much popularity during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, describes the bee and its apian community in startlingly similar terms to a monastic community.79 For example, the lavish Aberdeen bestiary (Aberdeen University Library, MS 24), dating from 1200, describes the bee thus: Sole apes in omni genere animantium communem in omnibus sobolem habent, unam omnes colunt mansionem, unius patrie clauduntur lumine in commune omnibus labor, communis cibus, communis operatio, communis usus et fructus est [et] communis volatus. [Bees alone among all the kinds of living things, raise their offspring communally, live in a single dwelling, are enclosed within a single homeland, and share their toil, their food, their tasks, the produce of their labour and their flight.]80

Physically, too, the honeycomb produced by the bees closely resembles the monastic architecture: Quid enim aliud favus, nisi quedam castrorum species. Denique ab his presepibus apium fucus arcetur. Que castra quadrata tamen 78 Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981, repr. 2014), p. 222. 79 For a discussion of the depiction of bees in the medieval bestiary, see Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 52–61. 80 The Aberdeen Bestiary, ‘de apibus’, fols. 63r–64v. Online facsimile, with transcription and translation at: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f63r. Accessed 2 March 2017.

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Moreover, because the bee was considered to reproduce asexually, the bestiaries frequently associated this insect with enclosed holy women – and ultimately with the Virgin Mary herself – again, bringing this creature back full circle to the hortus conclusus as its rightful abode and the Bride of the Song of Songs as its ultimate identity.82 As the Aberdeen bestiary also tells its readers: Communis omnibus generatio, integritas quoque corporis virginalis, omnibus communis et partus quoniam nec inter se ullo concubitu miscentur, nec libidine resolvuntur, nec partus quatiuntur doloribus et subito maximum filiorum examen emittunt. [Procreation is common to all [bees], as is the purity of their virginal body in the common process of birth, since this is achieved without intercourse or lust; they are not wracked by labour pains, yet they produce at once a great swarm of offspring.]83

The Aberdeen Bestiary therefore identifies the bee with the preEdenic Eve, redeemed by a post-incarnational Mary and her imitative holy-women daughters. It also configures the hive as a deeply communal, enclosed ‘monastic’ space within a garden where labour is shared with other bees in a climate of interdependence and communion. Here, its honeycomb comprises a series of identical living spaces (‘cellula’), enclosed within its wider walls, 81 Aberdeen Bestiary, fol. 64r. 82 Griffiths makes this observation in Garden of Delights, p. 92, examining the idea further on pp. 101–2 83 Aberdeen Bestiary, fol. 63v.

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which not only operate as a form of identity-production (it is a ‘single dwelling’ and ‘single homeland’) but also serve to keep out the unsuitable or uninitiated (‘the drones’). In the Middle Ages, too, as Mary Carruthers has pointed out, the term cellula was frequently used to refer to human memory,84 adding further layers to the Hortus’s role as a book of communal remembering as well as a form of identity production for Herrad and the nuns as its author-compilers. Often deployed as a synonym for thesaurus, another metaphorical term for the memory, the term cellula was suggestive of ‘storing up intangible things for salvation’,85 a concept embellished by the highly influential Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200), for whom the memory was a cellula deliciarum. Such a conceptualisation forges clear echoes of Herrad’s own understanding of the Hortus Deliciarum as a ‘book of memory’ – for herself and for her community – as well as prefiguring the hermeneutic schema of the Horti Conclusi of the Mechelen nuns. For Geoffrey, as Carruthers again points out, both enjoyment and ‘fun’ were key components to an active and effective memory. Memory and memorial practices, therefore, must be treated well – and be full of delights (‘deliciarum’).86 In this way, the cellulae of the memory, the cellae of the monastery, and the cellae of the honeycomb conflate with and within a ‘garden of delights’ to form part of an imaginary that reclaims Eden, the bride of the Song of Songs and the fecundity of Mary’s womb as valid, female-coded, ‘garden’ pathways towards female transcendence – all via the assiduous ‘gardening’ practices of the woman author or maker. It is little wonder, then, that the medieval bestiary tended to gender the bee female in the light of these entangled associations with fecundity, virginity, reproductivity and care, in spite of a frequent use of male pronouns to reference it. While the bee’s offspring were many, they were never ‘tainted’ by sex nor afflicted by the pains of labour and childbirth. As such, they were also never to be associated with the fallen female body but with Eve’s intact 84 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 2008), p. 40. 85 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 40. 86 Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 41 and p. 182.

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body before the fall. Both honeycomb and hive therefore are the locus of an exquisite memory – a hortus deliciarum – within which all that is good is able to be recaptured in a newly (re)constructed garden. As virginal ‘maker’ of her own book of memory and her own hortus deliciarum, Herrad thus reasserts her own gendered identity as a ‘bee’ gathering nectar, a gardener uprooting and transplanting flowers, and an author collecting textual extracts. In short, she insists on her role as author of her own book and its educational programme, and, by naming herself so assertively, renders that authorship and education as woman-driven and female-focused. As such, she never requires her ‘voice’ to dominate those of the male authors she has selected, but instead forges a methodology whereby they are made to ventriloquise hers. She also ensures, like the diligent gardener, that the ‘flowers’ of their words are all kept in the ‘proper place’ where they are planted (or transplanted). In this way, both the Hortus Deliciarum and the Horti Conclusi of the Low Countries can be read together as elaborate acts – and the material loci – of women’s personal and communal memory-making, a making that hinges on the female-coded concepts of gardens and their flourishing.

Philosophia and the Communal Scenes of Making and Reading While we are unable to recapture the Mechelen community or its ‘reading’ of the Horti Conclusi, and although we are also denied access to the original manuscript of the Hortus Deliciarum, nevertheless we know that these works were objects to be gazed upon as well as read and understood communally. Indeed, Griffiths’s description of the imagined scene of reading of the Hortus is equally applicable to both contexts as she envisages the women gathering around, poring over the book’s contents: The Hortus was a book that was intended for display within the community. The groups of women who gathered around it could examine its images, read and discuss its texts, explore the many

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In this context, we can envision the women in communion with the Hortus’ ‘flowers’, pointing to areas of curiosity or else arcane symbols, glosses, iterations, cross-references; how they discuss meanings, sources, implications; how they recite its poetry together and sing its hymns in unison. Above all, we can also imagine how they joy in what Herrad terms the book’s mellitis stillicidiis – ‘honey-dewed drops’ – flowery nectar that invokes a scene of pleasure and delight, safe in the knowledge it is specifically a woman’s scene and a woman’s delight. Such a conception of knowledge itself as inherently female is suggested by Herrad in her book by the foregrounding of the womanly figure of Philosophia as the epitome of her literary and compilational enterprise. In particular, towards the front of the book, on folio 32r, Herrad includes a full-page image of this figure sitting majestically within the temple, the seven liberal arts flowing as streams from her breasts.88 Moreover, this dominant depiction of Philosophia as a nurturing maternal figure is inserted just after the sections on the Fall and the Flood, pointing towards the ameliorating and ultimately redemptive possibilities offered by a female-associated knowledge (‘sapientia’). This is further compounded by the ubiquitous omission of the type of misogynistic condemnation of Eve that characterised many of the male-authored texts of the period – a silence that necessarily renders Eve’s own striving for knowledge in a far more positive light by aligning it, not with pride, presumption and disobedience, but with that of philosophy itself. And, as Herrad’s gloss to this image confirms,89 whilst knowledge is, in fact, a gift given by God (‘Omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est’), it is also something inextricably conjoined to a nurturing, rather than a fallen, femininity.90 87 Griffiths, Garden of Delights, p. 167. 88 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol 1, fol. 32r (p. 57). 89 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol 1, fol. 32r (p. 57). 90 In her God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Barbara Newman points out that the ambiguous figure of Sapientia was ripe for appropriation by male authors, coming to rest as Ecclesia and the Virgin Mary. However, as such, it

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Such representation, in its apparent mitigation of Eve’s culpability, is all the more remarkable at a time when there was considerable uncertainty within scholastic debate regarding the legitimacy of philosophy and the arts as paving a way to God. Indeed, according to some commentators, the musings of philosophy could actually impede knowledge of the divine.91 This pitting of traditional exegesis against the scholastic reasoning within the burgeoning universities reflected, in particular, a Cistercian opposition to such epistemological shifts, exemplified perfectly by the stance taken up by Bernard of Clairvaux, who famously repudiated the questioning of the younger Peter Abelard (d. 1142) regarding knowledge, grace and forgiveness. This was a set-to that came to a head at the Council of Sens in or around 1141.92 According to Bernard, much of Abelard’s teaching on grace, sin and forgiveness amounted to heresy, in that it diminished the overarching omnipotence of God, particularly in his re-imaginings of original sin. For Abelard, as Thomas Williams has suggested, reasoning dictated that a fully compassionate God could never withhold the healing power of grace, even if a subject were too immersed in original sin to respond to it.93 In the light of such current debates, therefore, Herrad’s foregrounding of a female-bodied Philosophia and allying her to the pathway to redemption paved by the Fall shows the type of confidence and daring that has been recognised by Newman, writing in the context of other contemporary holy women, when she claims: ‘These explorations led them [holy women] to challenge the limits of their devotion and at times, almost unwittingly, to question its very basis was also available for re-appropriation by female authors, for which Newman cites Hildegard of Bingen as her example (p. 205). 91 Saint Ambrose (d. 397), in particular, had been sceptical about the possibility of secular wisdom providing a means of access to God, as articulated in his de Virginitate XIV.92, where he comments on the story of the removal of Rachel’s cloak by the watchmen in Genesis 29. Without the cloak of philosophy, Ambrose tells his audience, Rachel is better able to approach God. 92 The heated conflict between Bernard and Abelard has been documented by Constant J. Mews in ‘The Council of Sens (1141): Abelard, Bernard, and the Fear of Social Upheaval’, Speculum 77.2 (2002), 342–82. 93 Thomas Williams, ‘Sin, Grace and Redemption in Abelard’, in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 258–78. I will discuss Abelard and his drawing on the biblical Susanna and her garden in chapter five of this study.

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– God’s sacrosanct right to punish.’94 Herrad’s strategic ‘planting’ of the ‘flowers’ of traditionally authoritative male commentators therefore shields her neatly from such accusations in a way that Abelard, vocal, exposed, contentious, was not able to achieve. It may even be that this precise debate is what Herrad is alluding to when she writes in her prologue of the ‘dangers’ of attempting to pass through ‘the various pathways of the sea’.95 Whilst appearing to handle traditional material in altogether orthodox ways, Herrad’s handling of the image of Philosophia would therefore suggest otherwise. Indeed, Michael Evans’s suggestion that her treatment comprises a ‘unique recension’ of traditional images of Philosophia rather proves the point I am making here.96 Whilst satisfying, on the one hand, a long tradition of orthodox representation of Philosophia that includes Boethius’ treatment, amongst others, on the other hand Herrad is deploying such a representation to articulate new ideas and to contribute to new debates. The result is that, for the women involved in the making and reading of the Hortus Deliciarum, it offers a re-voicing of Eden, a reconfiguration of God’s grace, a locale where the story is able to unfold once more as a scene of pleasure and animate a growth towards wisdom. Moreover, it is a scene orchestrated for women by women, whilst skilfully avoiding the type of overt threat to the Law that would necessitate proscription. This is, perhaps, made all the more evident in the book’s concluding image, spanning folios 322v and 323r and containing the entire history of the monastery. On the far left is depicted the moment of foundation, articulated in terms of the New Jerusalem whose walls are located on the Hohenbourg mountain, recognised in the text, as we have seen, as ‘sublime’ (‘id est sublimis’), painted in green and decked all about with foliage and waving fronds.97 Within the monastic walled garden attached to the citadel walls 94 Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 122. 95 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol. 1, fol. 1v (p. 4). 96 See Evans’s commentary on this image in Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol. 2, pp. 104–6 (here on p. 106). 97 Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green et al., vol. 1, fol. 322v and fol. 323r (pp. 345–6).

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are its founder, Saint Eticho, and his daughter, Hohenbourg’s first abbess, Odila. In turn, Odila is closely flanked by Herrad’s predecessor, the abbess Ralinda, standing beside her own grave. On the right-hand folio, gazing intently at this spectacle, are the head-andshoulder portraits of those fifty-eight women, some canonesses and other novices, who were living in the nunnery during the time of the book’s execution,98 each with her name carefully inscribed above her head. Moreover, each portrait, whilst identical in terms of style, clothing and gaze (the eyes of each are fixed on Eticho’s handing of the monastery keys to Odila), is nevertheless carefully individualised, giving a strong sense of the dynamics that make up the same-in-otherness of close communities, whether those communities be diachronically or synchronically imagined. Unlike the sisters, Herrad is depicted in full length, standing on the hillside beside the throng of women and holding a tall banner declaring her horticultural affiliations, which reads: O nivei flores dantes virtutis odores, Semper divina pausantes in theoria, Pulvere terreno contempto currite celo, Que nunc absconsum valeatis cernere sponsum. [O snow-white flowers giving forth the scent of virtue, Always resting in divine contemplation, Hasten to heaven, after despising earthly dust That you may be able to see the Bridegroom, who is now hidden.]99

Almost certainly written by Herrad herself, this brief poem and the image in which it is embedded bring together much of what I have been discussing here. The nuns’ communal reading of the ‘flowers’ picked and re-planted by Herrad have, in turn, rendered them ‘snow-white flowers’ themselves, via the ‘divine contemplation’ facilitated by Herrad’s choice of extracts. This, in turn, has perfected their identity as Brides of Christ, offering them the promise of reaching heaven to unite with their heavenly Bridegroom. 98 For a more detailed discussion of this image, see Griffiths, Garden of Delights, pp. 216–17. 99 Herrad, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Green, vol. 1, fol. 323r. The poem has been transcribed and translated by Griffiths in Garden of Delights, pp. 235–6.

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Moreover, this transformative reading will be available to future generations of nuns, building on the memories brought to it and contained within it and producing even more memories, both to overlay and underpin them. This image of origins, then, along with its glosses and its authorial poem, neatly sums up what Carruthers terms the ‘textures of metaphors’ that represent – and reproduce – the acquisitive processes of memory-formation: their retention and ‘ordered recollection’ actively collapse past, present and future into one another in a dynamic process concentrated on the now of the reading moment.100 Like the Mechelen Horti Conclusi, this is a magnificent artefact, created, not for the personal but for the communal – as teaching aid, item of contemplation, cellula of pleasurable delights and celebration of a constantly evolving communal memory configured in terms of a private and enclosed garden through which the women can ‘wander’ at will. As such, it is central to our understanding of the type of female imaginary that emerged also within other nunneries of medieval Europe in the twelfth century and overlays itself upon the grand narrative of Christian history in fertile reconception of its phallogocentric hegemony.

The Verdant Gardens of Hildegard of Bingen The visionary writings of Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), the so-called ‘Sybil of the Rhine’,101 also comprise dense and labyrinthine ‘textures of metaphors’ and many of them are equally reliant upon the type of poetics and exegetical hermeneutics of gardens I have been discussing above. Hildegard was founder and abbess of the women’s institution of Rupertsberg in 1147 in what is now 100 I borrow both these terms from Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 41–2. 101 The oft-quoted term, ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’, originated from a comment made in a letter of 1383 written by Henry of Langenstein, who described Hildegard as Theotonicorum Sibilla. For a discussion of this, see Sylvain Gouguenheim, La Sibylle du Rhin: Hildegarde de Bingen, abbesse et prophétésse rhenane (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), p. 182. Barbara Newman also alludes to this briefly in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, repr. 2008), p. 1.

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northern Germany, having first lived from the age of seven with a recluse named Jutta in an anchorhold attached to the Hirsau-affiliated monastery of Disibodenberg, and thereafter, for a short time in the monastery itself.102 The Benedictine abbey of Hirsau, as Ritchey recounts, had become a central force in the regulating of holy women in the German territories. Under such regulations, the monks of Hirsau, along with those other monasteries following their practices, had begun to incorporate women into their monastic structures, rendering those women, in Ritchey’s words, ‘part of their monastic self-perception’.103 The head of a women’s community living under such regulation was known as magistra, and, owing her obedience ultimately to the male abbot, was able to negotiate the identity of teacher and educator and thus able to promote the wider education of women.104 However, this reintegration of women into the male monastic holy life brought with it the usual anxieties regarding virginal purity, temptation and seduction and, in terms of space, therefore, the sexes were rigidly segregated. In Ritchey’s estimation, this was on one level deeply 102 For comprehensive treatments of Hildegard’s biography and work, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), as well as the collection of essays, Voice of the Living Light. See also Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen 1098–1179: A Visionary Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: A Woman of her Age (London: Headline Books, 2001); Kraft Kent, ‘The German Visionary: Hildegard of Bingen’, in Medieval Women Writers, ed. Katharina Wilson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 109–30; and Peter Dronke, ‘Hildegard of Bingen as Poetess and Dramatist’, in Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); the essays collected in Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays ed. Maud Burnett McInerney (New York: Garland, 1998); and, more recently, A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra M. Stoudt and George Ferzoco (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). For a modern English translation and study of the sources on the relationship between Jutta and Hildegard, see Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources, trans. Anna Silvas (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). 103 Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: The Recreation of the World in Later Medieval Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 27. 104 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 27. For a wider treatment of the Hirsau reform and its impact upon the holy women of the German territories, see Julie Hotchin, ‘Female Religious Life and the cura monialium in Hirsau Monasticism, 1080–1150’, in Listen, Daughter: The ‘Speculum virginum’ and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant Mews (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 59–83.

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proscriptive, but on another, it had the effect of shaping the identity of the ‘whole person’: here the holy woman took up occupancy of ‘a counterworld or other-space in which the enclosed individual gained a new identity separate from family, society and even the male spiritual directors who sought to condition and control their behaviour’.105 As we have already seen, Herrad of Hohenbourg and her canonesses, while clearly forming part of the reform agenda, were able to live a relatively independent life and forge an imaginary realm based on female-only spaces, minimal male policing, personal responses to Christian history and their own creative impulses.106 For Ritchey, such rich responses to the material world displayed by Herrad and her community – and particularly those connected to their monastic gardens – were absolutely integral to the type of reform being spear-headed by the Benedictines in the twelfth century,107 something which, no doubt, lay also beneath Herrad’s conception of the monastery as bee-hive and her wider use of the hortus deliciarum as her primary hermeneutic and organisational structure, as already discussed. Indeed, this offers another context in which to examine the shaping of alternative imaginary realms by enclosed women which, rather than rejecting patriarchal strictures and regulatory practices altogether, used them as springboards and strategies of protection behind which they were able to forge altogether more productive and, in some ways, liberating routes to intellectual fulfilment and independent identity-formation through visionary and literary transcendence. Unlike Herrad, Hildegard achieved considerable renown even in her own day: as superlative theologian and physician, spiritual leader, visionary and author, her writings reached a wide contemporary audience. Indeed, Newman, while likening Hildegard to 105 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 28. On this, see also Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, ‘Creating the Sacred Space Within: Enclosure as a Defining Feature in the Convent Life of Medieval Dominican Sisters (13th–15th C.)’, Viator 41.2 (2010), 301–16. Also useful on the production of gendered monastic space is Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 167–70. 106 Ritchey discusses Herrad’s work alongside Hildegard of Bingen’s in Holy Matter, pp. 78–90. 107 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 37.

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the so-called ‘prescholastics’ who, along with early twelfth-century thinkers such as Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) and Rupert of Deutz (d. c. 1129), ‘ran the gamut of Christian thought, offering a mélange of Biblical commentary, moral and spiritual teaching, and dogmatic instruction’, also places her within a more illuminating ‘vertical’ (or diachronic) framework based on what she terms the ‘sapiential tradition’. By this she means the type of Christian belief-system that focuses on divine Wisdom and its role within the themes of creation and redemption, and, as Newman also points out, within such systems, feminine imagery tends to predominate in representations of the Holy Spirit, the Church and the cosmos.108 In Newman’s assessment, too, in spite of what she also terms the ‘stunning originality’ of Hildegard’s copious writings109 – which range from visionary accounts, to medical works, prolific letter-writing, poetry and musical composition – Hildegard’s work was ultimately doctrinally orthodox, never straying too far from a ‘classic Benedictine approach to the spiritual life’.110 In this sense, Hildegard forms a clear correlate to Herrad, the sapiential work of both women demonstrating innovation, reworking and rewriting from a self-confessedly female perspective, whilst never entirely abandoning the bounds of doctrinal orthodoxy.111 Another way in which Hildegard’s work resonates with Herrad’s is in an increasingly adept use of the natural world – the enclosed garden in particular – as a primary tool and complex hermeneutic system with which to explicate the visionary insights to which, so 108 109 110 111

Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. xx. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. xxi. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. xxi. While there is no direct evidence of Hildegard’s influence upon Herrad – who does not include any named extracts from Hildegard’s already renowned writings – nevertheless Griffiths posits the possible influence of Hildegard’s first and best-known work, Scivias, upon the Hortus Deliciarum (Gardens of Delight, p. 14). Here she follows the suggestion first made by Joan Gibson, that various phrasings and motifs in Herrad’s work bear clear echoes of Hildegard’s writing, although more recent examinations are more sceptical. See Joan Gibson, ‘Herrad of Hohenbourg’, in A History of Women Philosophers, ed. Mary Ellen Waith, vol. 2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 85–95. Michael Embach is more hesitant, however in his chapter, ‘Hildegard of Bingen: A History of Reception’, in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Kienzle, Stoudt and Ferzoco, pp. 57–83. (p. 281).

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she tells us, she had been privy since the age of seven. However, whilst Herrad spoke from within the ‘garden’ of her own text, safely enclosed behind the deftly constructed walls and words of esteemed male exegetes, Hildegard was deeply outspoken and bold, a visionary who insisted on God as the source of her insights and proclamations – and her own body as their mere conduit. Such an assumed subject-position as empty vessel waiting to be filled with the words of God was one that would become common for women visionaries, especially those who committed their visionary encounters to written text, a strategy, moreover, that has now been well explored by contemporary scholarship. However, what has received very little attention before Ritchey’s excellent study, is the way in which the work of medieval religious women take as their own the rich hermeneutics provided by the enclosed garden not only to provide a vocabulary with which to articulate their visionary insights but also to posit an alternative imaginary in which renewal, growth and flourishing take up a primary position and place a spirituality identified with the ‘feminine’ at centre stage. In turn, such strategies would sometimes be seized upon by the churchmen of their day as offering a counterpoint to what they saw as the relentless corruption within what was a deeply masculinist and patriarchal Christian Church. So, when Hildegard writes to Bernard of Clairvaux about her visions, claiming to be the very tree growing from Adam’s mouth that we saw at the end of the last chapter (‘orta de radice surgente in Adam de suggestione diaboli, unde ipse erat exsul in peregrinum mundum’ [‘that tree rooted in Adam by the devil’s deceit which brought about his exile into this wayward world’]), and asking Bernard to be the one ‘erigens aborem’ [‘lifting up the tree’], Bernard responds by reassuring her, ‘Congratulamur gratie Dei, que in te est’ [‘We rejoice in the grace of God which is in you’], asking her also to intercede with God on his behalf.112 112 Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarum: Pars Prima I–XC and Pars Secvnda XCI– CCLR, CCCM, vol. XCI, ed. L. van Acker (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), here: Epistola I, p. 5 and Epistola IR, p. 6. The modern English translations of Hildegard’s correspondence are taken from The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baird (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 19 and p. 21. I discuss Hildegard’s use of tree imagery further below,

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As female authors, Herrad and Hildegard therefore position themselves differently, no doubt in part because of the particular origins of their source materials: whilst Herrad relies on her own ‘enclosing’ of God’s Word as ventriloquised and anatomised by male exegetes, Hildegard is herself that ‘enclosure’, a receptive vessel into which the Word can itself be poured. Indeed, as we have seen, Herrad’s authorial strategy is to assert unequivocal agency as ‘I, Herrad…’; in contrast, Hildegard famously and repeatedly seeks to erase her authorial agency, erudition and influence by means of a concerted use of the so-called ‘humility topos’ common to the works of both men and women throughout the Middle Ages, but particularly foregrounded in female-authored works. Qualifications such as ego paupercula feminea forma [‘I, a poor little figure of a woman’] everywhere abound, especially in the wide and varied correspondences into which Hildegard entered with other wellknown figures of the day, including: Pope Eugenius III, where she writes as ‘paupercula forma’ [‘a poor little woman’]; Elisabeth of Shönau, where she confesses to ‘pusillanimitate mentis’ [‘puniness of mind’]; and, as mentioned, Bernard of Clairvaux, to whom she apologises for being ‘plus quam misera in nomine femineo’ [‘more than wretched in my womanly condition’], ‘mobilis’ [‘unstable’] and able to communicate only in ‘loquor quasi dubitando’ [‘halting, unsure speech’]’.113 Wider discussion of Hildegard’s clearly disingenuous use of this topos and its exploitation of inherited notions of the imperfections of femininity lies beyond my wider scope, but her frequent use of it does show how this exploitation is able to work on a number of different levels.114 Firstly, it removes but see also the discussion in Heinrich Schipperges, Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos, trans. John Broadwin (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 1997), especially p. 84. 113 Hildegardis, Epistola II, p. 7; Epistola CCIR, p. 457; Epistola I, pp. 4–5 (Correspondence, p. 21, p. 105, and pp. 17–19). On Hildegard’s relationship with Elizabeth of Shönau, see Felix Heinzer, ‘Unequal Twins: Visionary Attitude and Monastic Culture in Elisabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen’, in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Kienzle, Stoudt and Ferzoco, pp. 85–108. 114 On this, see, however, Newman’s first chapter in Sister of Wisdom, pp. 1–41. See also Joan Ferrante’s useful essay, ‘Public Postures and Private Maneuvers: Roles Medieval Women Play’, in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 213–29 (especially pp. 221–4).

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the sense of agency from the writing and parries accusations of female presumptuousness, even before they are made. Secondly, it adheres to a wider pattern of self-deprecation not only common in the works of medieval women more generally, but also commonly adopted by the Church Fathers and other male exegetes in response to their extraction of the direct word of God from the Scriptures for appraisal, analysis and comment. Thirdly, it adds force to the intensity of Hildegard’s criticisms of the Church, for which she also became renowned: if God has chosen to direct his own criticisms of ecclesiastic corruption through a mere woman, why are his own prelates unable – or unwilling – to receive or respond to such criticism when they have been invested with the powers to do so? In having God speak from a position of utter humility on earth (that is to say the ‘vessel’ of a ‘poor’ woman’s body), rather than from the Heavenly Jerusalem, then the arrogant self-positioning of those members of the Church who come under attack is laid bare for all to see. Was not the Word itself embedded within the vessel of a simple girl who would eventually rise to the ranks of heaven as its Empress? Thus, Hildegard drew upon, and fully exploited, what Newman terms ‘a dialetic’ within which a poor, humble woman could be ‘exalted to miraculous heights’ – but only on condition that she remain ostensibly lowly and subservient. Indeed, so adept was Hildegard at this particular type of self-fashioning that, again in Newman’s words, she was seen as ‘a live epiphany of a truth that the social and even the religious establishment had done its best to suppress’.115

Scivias and the Powers of Abjection Hildegard’s first work – and one that remains her most famous – was Scivias,116 a book of visionary insights dictated to her by God 115 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 3. 116 All references to Hildegard’s Scivias will be taken from Santae Hildegardis Scivias sive Visionem ac Revelationem Libri Tres, PL 197, cols. 383–738, cited by Part, Vision and column. The modern English translations, unless otherwise stated, are taken from Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1990).

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and penned over the course of ten years with the help of her scribe, Volmar.117 From the beginning of this text, Hildegard adopts not so much a ‘modesty topos’ but a subject-position that Kristeva would recognise as ‘abject’, identifying herself not merely as a woman, but as one interpellated by a voice from heaven as ‘homo fragilis, et cinis cineris et putredo putredinis’ [‘fragile human, ashes of ashes, and filth of filth’].118 Here, Hildegard invokes both the theological orthodoxy of humankind’s origins in the earth and its fallen state, as laid down in Genesis (‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind’),119 by associating it with the type of abjection that Kristeva has identified as ‘a passion that uses the body for barter’. As Kristeva reminds us: It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.120

What links Hildegard’s position to this perception of the abject, therefore, is not just God’s identifying her as ‘filth’ but the fact that this filth is ontological, constituting a pollution of her bodily borders, whilst at the same time allowing that body to form a conduit for the Word that is dependent upon that very border-crossing for its articulation and expression. In Kristevan terms, the abject subject, ‘weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being’.121 Such abjection, then, in which Hildegard finds God within her, is a prerequisite for her becoming, in which she gives vent to his voice via those ecstasies predicated upon the ‘filth’ of her bodily abjection. As Hildegard also records in the Prologue to Scivias, abjection is his deliberate gift to her; she is the ‘hominem quem volui, et quem mirabiliter secundum quod mihi placuit excussi’ [‘the person whom I have chosen and whom I 117 Hildegard refers to Volmar, although not by name, as ‘hominis illius quem occulte … quaesieram et inveneram’ [‘of the man whom I had secretly sought and found’] in Scivias, PL 197, col. 385B (trans. Hart and Bishop p. 60). 118 Hildegard, Scivias, ‘Prefatio’, PL 197, col. 383A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 59). 119 Genesis 1:24. 120 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Louis S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 121 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 5 (original emphasis).

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have miraculously stricken as I willed’].122 Later God qualifies this, adding: ‘in venis carnis suae doluit: constrictum animum et sensum habens, atque multam passionem corporis sufferens’ [‘she suffers in her inmost being and in the veins of her flesh; she is distressed in mind and sense and endures great pain of body’].123 There is the intimation, therefore, that the critique of corruption within the Church underpinning this work of divine instruction is to be torn violently from a body which is always identified as female – indeed, needs to be female for full articulation of its divine insights – and which, because of its sapiential authority (in turn always associated with the apocalyptic) is allied to the abject through which those insights are channelled – and then strategically reinscribed upon the generic term homo.124 In effect, to adapt the words of Kristeva, Hildegard is at the border of her condition as a living being within a process where, mother-like, she ultimately gives birth to the Logos: as the divine voice instructs her: ‘Clama ergo et scribe sic’ [‘Cry out, therefore, and write thus!’]125 In the second vision of Book One of Scivias, Hildegard enters her stride as critic of the Church, denouncing all those who refuse to acknowledge God’s grace and who will not give up their ‘gloria superbientis nequitiae’ [‘flagrant filth of wanton wickedness’]126 and embrace the necessary humility. Returning to notions of the abject, this time she writes of an abjection without resolution for those who insist upon their own corrupt practices: haec in hora ultionis Dei velut terra conculcatur, et de superno judicio super eosdem impios cadet abjectio indignationis omnium quae sub coelo sunt, ita quod et Deo et hominibus molesti erunt …. Et cum hoc modo a Deo recedunt, solis inutilibus rebus comparantur, ita quod nec in Deo nec in hominibus quidquam boni facere vellent, de grano vitae in praevidente oculo inspectionis Dei abscisi. Quapropter et hujusmodi contritioni traduntur, qui in tepido sapore

122 Hildegard, Scivias, PL 197, ‘Prefatio’, col. 384B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 60). 123 Hildegard, Scivias, PL 197, col. 385A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 60). 124 As mentioned in note 90 above, Newman investigates the tradition of Sapientia in God and the Goddesses, pp. 190–244. 125 Hildegard, Scivias, ‘Prefatio’, PL 197, col. 386B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 61). 126 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.4, PL 197, col. 390A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 74).

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Hildegard’s conjoining here of desire, corruption and the abject is again apposite to Kristevan thought, in which the abject is always already able to destabilise the Law in the interests of a personal desire (‘the want on which any being … is founded’). As Kristeva explains: ‘The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.’128 Here, Kristeva points out that incessant cultural attempts at structuration of the drives within the human imaginary are always already undermined by the abject as their necessary culmination-point. As always already imbricated in those drives, even when they are prohibited or denied, the abject refuses subjection to the laws of structuration, instead following its own laws of inexorability that must be worked with – incorporated – rather than fought against. Kristeva, therefore, reads the abject in the same dialectic terms as does Hildegard: if abjection is not incorporated into an expression of humility in extremis it can never morph into a conduit for transcendence. For Hildegard, the model of female abjection cast from her own bodily experience, and overseen by God himself, reflects both self-annihilating degradation and the ability to reform, transcend and flourish by means of an abject which demands the utter relinquishment of subjectivity; moreover, this is a model taken from Eden itself (‘And he said: Let the earth bring forth the 127 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.4, PL 197, cols 390A–B (ed. Hart and Bishop, pp. 74–5). 128 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 15 and p. 5.

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green herb, and such as may seed’).129 Within this double configuration, God’s grace, as the ‘life-giving downpouring rain’ of the Holy Spirit, waters the ‘seed of life’ buried in the lowly earth which nevertheless allows it to germinate and flourish. So too, the abjected churchmen may flourish if they turn again their faces towards the heavens instead of worldly distractions. For Hildegard, this process of renewal and revival is, again, specifically feminine and cyclical, linked closely to her conception of women’s discursive association with the abject earth as also a fundamental part of God’s creation. Indeed, this is something she quickly establishes as she moves directly on to a protracted set of announcements regarding God’s position on human sexuality, marriage and procreation. Once more, she returns to the subject of filth and corruption, this time in terms of the menstruating woman; but, whilst acknowledging that the pains accompanying menstruation are part of God’s punishment of Eve for her Edenic transgression, nevertheless at the same time Hildegard offers a visionary response that displaces orthodox reactions of shame, disgust and contempt in favour of a deep compassion – and a compassion, moreover, commanded by God: se enim tunc mulier in dolore et in carcere positam videt: portionem scilicet doloris partus sui tangens, sed hoc tempus doloris in muliere non damno; quoniam illud Evae dedi quando in gustu pomi peccatum concepit, unde et mulier in hoc tempore in magno misericordiae subsidio levanda est; ipsa autem se contineat in absconso disciplinae. [At this time the woman is in pain and in prison, suffering a small portion of the pain of childbirth. I do not remit this time of pain for women, because I gave it to Eve when she conceived sin in the taste of the fruit; but therefore the woman should be cherished in this time with a great and healing tenderness. Let her contain herself in hidden knowledge.]130 129 Genesis 1:11. 130 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.20, PL 197, cols 397A–B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 83). The use of term absconsio is unusual but attested to from the eighth century as referring to a ‘place of concealment’: see the Revised Medieval Latin WordList from British and Irish Sources, ed. R. E. Latham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, various repr.), s.v. adscon/sio, p. 2. The fact that Hildegard uses it here in conjunction with the feminine noun disciplina suggests she is emphasising the femininity – and constructive alterity – of this abstruse ‘knowledge’

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Here Hildegard ventriloquises the type of deep and loving compassion for Eve shown by Adam (although never by God) in the Auchinleck Life, as discussed in the previous chapter. For Hildegard, a menstruating woman reflects ‘hidden knowledge’, by implication insight linked to abjection, but which apparent contradiction is resolved by means the generative potential (like the ‘filth’ of the garden’s soil) it also bears. Moreover, for Hildegard, too, a menstruating woman should never be excluded from attending church since she is already suffering in her bleeding, semi-abject state. A bleeding man, however, whether his blood-loss is from wounding or from illness, is deemed a pollutant and is not to be permitted to enter the church because, unless that man is Christ, it inheres with no generative potential.131 Thus, contrary to the usual Church teachings on menstruation, it is male rather than female blood that here bears the potential to pollute the sacred space – all the more so, since those women occupying the church at Rupertsberg are resolutely virginal and thus potentially clear of the stain of concupiscence and sexuality. Therefore, for Hildegard, the association between menstruation and ‘hidden knowledge’ takes on an element of the sacred, and it is a sacredness, moreover, that again works to cyclical bodily rhythms: not only those of the menstrual cycle, but also those pertaining to fertility, germination and growth within the natural world in response to God’s ‘downpouring’ love. Thus, when Kristeva writes elsewhere of the communion de la femme et la fleur, she could equally be writing of Hildegard’s work, particularly the latter’s reconfiguration of those nuns in her care as colourful flowers who, ‘suavissimus hortus estis in omnibus or ‘teaching’. A few lines earlier, she has used a grammatically neuter – and plural – term with which to refer to the womb: occultorum membrorum [literally, ‘of its secret members’, translated by Hart and Bishop as ‘the hidden parts’ (p. 83)]. While this may appear to be a coincidence of grammatical gender, see Newman’s Gods and the Goddesses, where she argues: ‘[F]emale personifications of Love (Caritas, Dame Amour, Minne) were often employed to represent the Godhead itself, whereas male personifications … seldom filled this role … Clearly we have to do with something more than grammar, something tantamount to a cultural demand for goddesses.’ (p. 37). Thus, in Hildegard’s work, it is clear that she toys with grammatical gender as part of the hermeneutic strategy of constructing a vindication of the female and the feminine. 131 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.20, PL 197, col. 397B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 83).

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ornamentis redolentes’ [‘are a garden adorned in sweetness’].132 In her assessment of this communion, dependent upon the synergies of l’énigme de cycles naturels and le mystère de la graine, Kristeva also acknowledges the role of the abject in this process: for this productive communion to function, the role of la belle fanaison must also be understood; that is to say the ‘beautiful wilting’ that forms part of the cycle of (re)productivity, as discussed earlier in the context of the Mechelen Horti Conclusi. Within the natural world, flowers must bloom, fade and die to ensure the production of seed, generation and futurity. So, too, the menses (also known as floures in Middle English)133 must ‘bloom’ and ‘fade’ in order to nurture the human ‘seed’ and generate new life. In turn, this speaks of the necessity of death (or quasi-death in the form of abjection), for the creation of life – an integration that was self-evident to Hildegard as an accomplished natural scientist, but also a concept commensurate with the basic tenets of Christian theology. Unlike the profane male bloodloss alluded to in this extract, menstrual blood-loss bears a ‘hidden knowledge’ that is not only gendered feminine but is also closely aligned to Christ’s sacrificial blood-loss on the cross as he strove from the position of the abject to bring about new life for humankind. As paupercula feminea forma, Hildegard’s textual performances of cyclical abjection that include illness, recovery and reintegration imbue her writings with their own ‘hidden knowledge’ to which she has been made privy by God’s grace. Thus an awareness and acceptance of her own belle fanaison proves to be a primary authorial ploy to render comprehensible what otherwise would remain beyond the realm of language. Returning to the Prologue, Hildegard confesses her call to writing: Sed ego … tamdiu non in pertinacia, sed in humilitatis officio scribere recusavi, quousque in lectum aegritudinis, flagello Dei depressa caderem, ita quod tandem multis infirmitatibus compulsa … manus 132 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13.7, PL 197, col. 732B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 528). Since scholarly consensus suggests that this final vision of Scivias comprises a series of poems and a type of morality play (although it is laid out as prose in the manuscript), Hart and Bishop have attempted to restore the sense of the verse in their modern English translations – which I have retained here. 133 MED, s.v. flour (6). See chapter five, p. 328, below, where I discuss this further in the context of The Pistil of Swete Susan.

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The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary ad scribendum apposui. Quod dum facerem, altam profunditatem expositionis librorum, ut praedixi, sentiens, viribusque receptis de aegritudine me erigens: vix opus istud decem annis consumans ad finem perduxi …. Et dixi et scripsi haec, non secundum adinventionem cordis mei aut ullius hominis, sed ut ea in coelestibus vidi, audivi et percepi per secreta mysteria Dei. [But I … refused to write for a long time … not with stubbornness, but in the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses … I set my hand to the writing. While I was doing it, I sensed, as I mentioned before, the deep profundity of scriptural exposition: and raising myself from my illness by the strength I received, I brought this work to a close – though just barely – in ten years … And I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God].134

Hildegard’s perception of those cyclical processes underpinning a flourishing life thus proves from the start to be fundamental to the provision of a primary hermeneutics from which her most renowned ‘natural’ imaginary is born and developed. Within this imaginary, the Word descends as viriditas – a greening force that is fertile, fecund and feminine. Such a conceptual framework is apparent, albeit in embryonic form, in Scivias, not least in the extensive pattern of images produced under the author’s instructions to create another level of narration to her visionary experiences and insights. It is to this text I will now turn before moving on to the most insistent use of the garden hermeneutic by Hildegard, as evidenced in the text’s final vision.

Viriditas and the Greening of God Hildegard’s conception of the viriditas of God appears to be unique, although there had been precedents in the earlier writing of Bernard Silvestris of Tours (d. c. 1148), whose best-known work, the Cosmographia, had produced an extraordinary protagonist in the form of Natura, a female goddess-figure whom he closely associated with 134 Hildegard, Scivias, ‘Prefatio’, PL 197, col. 386A–B (trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 60–1).

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the Holy Spirit.135 As Newman points out, this figure was deeply Platonic in origin and, as is the case within all Neoplatonic systems, in this text Natura embodies an equivalence between the eternal ‘Mind’ and the cosmic ‘Womb’, in keeping with the Neoplatonist leanings of some twelfth-century thought. If, as Newman also suggests, it is the deity who constitutes this Womb-mind as a stable entity and ontological ‘container’ of the abstract ‘Ideas’, then Natura presents herself as the material womb which is able to transform Ideas into matter by physically and visibly giving birth to them.136 While there are also strong resonances of this type of configuration within Hildegard’s work (although no evidence to suggest that she was familiar with Bernard Sylvestris’ recently completed work), I concur with Newman’s ultimate assessment that Hildegard actually shies away from this type of deific embodiment, always relating her own goddess-figures back to aspects of God himself as a vision of his ‘radical immanence’.137 Such immanence is more often exemplified, however, in terms of a ‘greening’ God articulated – and displayed – by widespread use of garden imagery as exegetical hermeneutic and precise lexical choice. These imagistic patterns take a variety of forms, moreover: from mere simile or metaphor, to synonym and antonym, to fully-fledged hermeneutic system – but they are invariably cast within a feminine system of configuration. For example, in the fifth vision of Scivias Book Two, in which Hildegard is privy to a vision of Ecclesia (‘floriditas in superna Sion, mater et flos rosarum et lilium convallium’ [‘the blossom of the celestial Zion, the mother and flower of roses and 135 For an overview of the use of a similar concept by the Church Fathers, see Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2006). Ritchey points out that Hildegard’s unique contribution lay in her adapting the concept from mere botanical usage and applying it to ‘the recreated world’ (Holy Matter, p. 68, n. 47). Newman also discusses this work in some detail in God and the Goddesses, pp. 51–89. As she suggests, Bernard Silvestris trod a fine line between the orthodox and heterodox with this depiction, eliciting some intense criticism of the attempt at what Newman terms, to ‘use goddess mythology to explore the conflict … between biblical literalism and cutting-edge scientific thought’ (p. 53). 136 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 64. 137 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 89.

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lilies of the valley’]),138 God depicts himself as a balsam tree, oozing the precious balsam that was to morph into the Christian community ‘ramos suos expandit’ [‘as the tree extends its branches’]. For God, this community is also commensurate with ‘amantissimi flores rosarum, et liliorum, qui sine humano opere in agro germinant’ [‘lovely flowers, roses and lilies, which grow in the fields without human labor].’139 Elsewhere in Scivias, the interdependence of body and soul is illuminated by a description with similar associations: here, the soul flows through the body in the same way as sap flows through the tree, producing a joint way-of-being by which ‘[p]er succum arbor viret et flores producit ac deinde fructum facit’ [‘[b]y the sap the tree grows green and produces flowers and then fruit’]. As Hildegard goes on to explain: ‘spiratio Spiritus sancti velut pluvia ipsum irrigat, et sic eum discretio velut bona temperies aeris ad perfectionem bonorum fructuum ducit’ [‘the breath of the Holy Spirit, like the rain, will water [the Christian], and so discernment, like the tempering of the air, will lead him to the perfection of good fruits’].140 For Hildegard, God is the greening of the natural world of which we, as humans, are an integral part; he flows through and by N/nature into our holistic selves, ‘greening’ us along with the natural world and thus enabling the production of the ‘flowers’ and ‘fruits’ that carry the potential to turn each one of us into a regained Eden. Hildegard’s wider treatment of Eden in Scivias also demonstrates this greening at work. Here, she presents it as the original hortus deliciarum, but, within the post-Fall context, one far more concerned with an active dynamics of viriditas and fecundity than reinstatement of the stasis of endless pleasure and perfection, as posited by Harrison in his work on Eden.141 Instead, Hildegard’s Eden is a place of process where abundance is the result of action and intra-action – which is by implication, immanent, ubiquitous, cyclical and

138 Hildegard, Scivias, 2.5, PL 197, col. 476B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 201). 139 Hildegard, Scivias, 2.5.13, PL 197, cols 484A–B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 209). 140 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.4.25, PL 197, col. 428B (trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 123– 4). 141 Harrison, Gardens. For a discussion of this in terms of Eden, see chapter one, pp. 48–9, above.

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perpetual: it blooms; it gives; it supplies; it oozes splendid aromas; it imbues the occupant with joy; it counters the intrusion of sin: Et paradisus est locus amoenitatis, qui floret, in viriditate florum, et herbarum, et deliciis omnium aromatum, repletus optimis odoribus, dotatusque in gaudio beatarum animarum, dans fertilissimam fecunditatem aridae terrae, qui fortissimam vim terrae tribuit, velut anima corpori praebet, quoniam paradisus in umbra et in perditione peccatorum non obscuratur. [But Paradise the place of delight, which blooms with the freshness of flowers and grass and the charms of spices, full of fine odors and dowered with the joy of blessed souls, giving invigorating moisture to the dry ground; it supplies strong force to the earth, as the soul gives strength to the body, for Paradise is not darkened by the shadow or the perdition of sinners.]142

As such, Hildegard’s Eden adheres closely to Spirn’s more recent observation of the active agency of landscape as ‘pragmatic, poetic, rhetorical, polemical’. Moreover, since landscape is always already ‘cultivated construction [and] carrier of meaning’, it necessarily constitutes a non-verbal ‘language’,143 similar to that encountered in the Horti Conclusi of the Low Countries and certainly one structured, not by syntax, but by the strange, arresting and enigmatic pictorial representations supplied by Hildegard to assist in the explication of her visions. Hildegard’s re-writing of Eden as the productive space of God’s viriditas continues in her treatment of Adam (and far less often, Eve). For example, in the second vision of Book 1 (on the Creation and the Fall), Hildegard, while acknowledging Eve’s seduction by the serpent, envisions her as lucentem – ‘shining’ – in her innocence and glowing like a lamp in her procreative potential, rather than as condemned for her desire and disobedience: ‘in eodem amoenitatis loco Evam innocentem animum habentem (quae de innocente Adam omnem multitudinem humani generis in praeordinatione Dei lucentem in suo corpore gestans sumpta fuerat)’ [‘in that place of delight [was] Eve – whose soul was innocent, for she had been 142 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.28, PL 197, cols 400A–B (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 86). 143 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 15.

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raised out of innocent Adam, bearing in her body the whole multitude of the human race, shining with God’s preordination’].144 Indeed, in the image accompanying this description in Scivias, Eve is not even embodied, depicted by Hildegard instead as an airy cloud full of stars emerging from the side of the sleeping Adam within the walled garden. Moreover, while Adam’s head lies within the dark representation of hellfire to the left of the image, Eve, as the breath of God – and as pure, greening spirit – wafts up towards the heavens (although the open mouth of the serpent lurks above her to intercept her progress).145 As Rebecca Garber points out, while Hildegard does on occasion set Mary and Eve in opposition to each other in Scivias, nevertheless: Hildegard’s representation of Eve and Mary remains more complex than a simple opposition. Within the illuminations and accompanying text of the Scivias … Hildegard represents the parallel nature of the two women …. [T]he compressions of the images and cryptic nature of Hildegard’s representations of Eve and Mary within them require extensive interpretive unpacking on the part of the reader.146

Thus, as Garber also confirms, ‘a symbolic image filled with light was the only means by which to represent Eve positively’.147 As part of this unpacking, it is important to note that, in spite of the betrayal of God by the protoplasts during the Fall, Hildegard 144 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.10, PL 197, cols 391D–392A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 77). Interestingly, the translation of this section by Bruce Hozeski in Hildegard von Bingen’s Mystical Visions (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Co.,1986), p. 18, suggests that it is Adam who is pregnant (‘Adam carried in his body the brightness necessary for all of the multitude of the human race’). Hildegard’s accompanying image of Eve as a cloud of stars being born from Adam’s side may have suggested this reading of the Latin to Hozeski, although the insertion of brackets by Migne in the PL version also directs the translation in this way. 145 MS Rupertsberg (Scivias Codex), fol. 4r. The original manuscript was lost during the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War. Various faithful copies were made, however, allowing us to access approximations to the original colour images. The sequence of images is available at: http://www. abtei-st-hildegard.de/?page_id=4721. Accessed 23 March 2017. Hozeski also includes monochrome images of the sequence in his translation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Mystical Visions, p. 12. 146 Rebecca Garber, ‘Where Is the Body? Images of Eve and Mary in the Scivias’, in Hildegard: A Book of Essays, ed. McInerney, pp. 103–32 (p. 106). 147 Garber, ‘Where Is the Body’, p. 123.

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tells us that this was ultimately fruitful in terms of the expulsion of Adam and Eve: ‘post ruinam hominis elevatae sunt plurimae virtutes in coelo fulgentes’ [‘for after humanity’s ruin many virtues arose to raise it up again’].148 Hildegard then goes on to narrate a parable concerning a ‘master’ who sets out to build a walled garden and employs experts to fill it full of the best plants. Likening the master to God, Hildegard tells of how a sheep falls into the garden’s lutum [‘filth’] which ‘in sua foeditate putruit [‘is putrefied in its foulness’].149 Nevertheless, because the sheep did not orchestrate its own fall and did not wish to fall, did not expect to fall, it was treated as ‘pretiosam margaritam in eamdem similitudinem habuit, quae perdita in multas sordes incidit’ [‘a precious pearl that slipped from him and fell into the mud’] and was drawn forth by the master who ‘de sorde in qua jacuerat, extractam ita expurgavit’ [‘drew it forth and purified it of the filth in which it had lain’].150 The hermeneutic conjunction of master, sheep and pearl have clear biblical overtones, of course, picked up overtly by Hildegard who relates the triad directly to God, Christ/humanity and Mary. But they also vividly prefigure similar treatments by Mechthild of Hackeborn at the end of the thirteenth century, and the Pearl-poet, writing at the end of the fourteenth century, whose work is equally steeped in the expressive poetics of the enclosed garden with its potential for abjection and transcendence and which I examine in subsequent chapters of this present study. As a result of this poetic conjunction, in which the filth of humanity is purified via the ‘pearl’ of the Virgin’s womb, the original garden likewise loses its stain, restored once more as a realm of sensory beauty and fruitful agency: potentia divinae majestatis omnem maculam totius contagionis ab eodem loco sequestrans eum ita sua claritate munivit, ne amodo ulla contrarietate tangeretur, ostendens etiam quod transgressio illa quae in eo facta fuerat quandoque clementer et misericorditer abolenda esset. [The Power of Divine Majesty took away every stain of contagion from the place and fortified it with His Glory … which showed that 148 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.31, PL 197, col. 401A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 88). 149 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.32, PL 197, col. 401D (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 88). 150 Hildegard, Scivas, 1.2.32, PL 197, col. 402C (trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 88–9).

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In many ways, then, if we return to the Kristevan correlation between femininity and the flowery garden, Eve’s moment of desire in Eden constitutes the belle fanaison that underpins all growth and fruitfulness, and which also constitutes a prerequisite for the ‘re-greening’ of humanity – its own viriditas – as it prepares itself for its triumphant return to God. It is, therefore, the location of homecoming where: ‘tandem absolutionem vinculorum suorum, sentient, ad requiem ereptae pervenientes’ [‘they feel the loosing of their bonds and are delivered into rest’].152 Viriditas is a concept that Hildegard uses in many other contexts, too, particularly in her depiction of feminine power that also forms a primary characteristic of the Godhead,153 what Newman refers to as ‘the vehemence and cosmic force of Ecclesia’s preaching’.154 In Hildegard’s universe, however, this green force is nevertheless associated with the nurturing properties of ‘mother’ Church. Indeed, in one self-representation, Hildegard represents herself as ‘materna viriditas’, the greening mother full of maternal vigour who breastfeeds the entire world.155 Here, her voice as materna ‘supra montes clamavit, ut colles et ligna se declinarent ac mamillas illius sugerent’ [‘rings out above the mountains that the hills and the woods might bow to suck her breasts’].156

151 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.26, PL 197, col. 399D (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 86). 152 Hildegard, Scivias, 1.2.7, PL 197, col. 391A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 76). 153 For an account of her use of ‘greening’ in the context of her medical works, see Victoria Sweet, ‘Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73.3 (1999), 381–403. 154 Newman, From Virile Woman, p. 233. 155 Hildegard, Epistola XXXIV, in Analecta sacra spicilegio solesmensi, vol. 8: Hildegardis Opera (Paris, 1882), p. 520. 156 Hildegard von Bingen: Lieder [Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum], ed. Pudentiana Barth, M-I. Ritscher, and Joseph Schmidt-Görg (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1969), p. 75, p. 159 and p. 294. For a more recent edition and facing-page translation, see Barbara Newman, Hildegard of Bingen: Symphonia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988, repr. 1998). For an indepth discussion of Hildegard’s music, see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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Greening and the Virtues in Hildegard’s ‘Symphony of the Blessed’ Such greening is also extended to most of Hildegard’s other feminine embodiments, both in Scivias and elsewhere. Ecclesia, Caritas and the Virtues, for example, are described in terms of flowers in flourishing gardens, decked out in clothes whose colours reflect their floral identities. The same can be said of Mary, who, alongside traditional images of the rose and the lily, is also ‘viridissima virga’ [‘the greenest virgin’] in whom everything blossoms and through whom all will be brought ‘in veriditate plena’ [‘to full greenness’] via the Incarnation.157 Perhaps Hildegard’s most important use of such hermeneutics, however, is to align her own nuns with this verdant Mary via their sharing of a similarly virginal status. For Hildegard, as Ritchey points out, viriditas and virginitas were not only semantically linked but also in practice in terms of God’s greening grace relayed to the world via Mary.158 The same can be said of Hildegard’s use of the term virga, with its allusion to the ‘flowering rod’ of Isaiah 11:1.159 Associated with the male genealogy of Christ, as presented to us in Matthew 1:1–24, Hildegard’s treatment also emulates that of the genealogy presented to us at the end of the Auckinleck Life and within which Christ’s matrilineal heritage from Eve to Mary is foregrounded.160 Indeed, Madeline Caviness has argued for an inherent matrilinearity and, indeed, matriarchy within the traditional image of the flowering rod that is resistant to the type of patriarchal appropriation discussed in my first chapter.161 In Scivias, Hildegard goes one step further, however, suggesting, via her interplay of virga, virgo, virginitas and viriditas, a veritas that posits the centrality 157 ‘O viridissima virga’, in Symphonia, ed. Newman, p. 126. 158 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 55. 159 ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root.’ 160 Life, lines 674–769. 161 Madeline Caviness, ‘Anchoress, Abbess and Queen: Donor and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?’, in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 105– 54.

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of Mary’s virginal body (and, by association, Hildegard’s own and those of her nuns) to the salvific drama. Nor is the term ‘salvific drama’ a figurative one. Hildegard’s first work, Scivias, ends with a thirteenth vision that takes the form of an embryonic symphony and proto-mystery play; or, in the words of Newman, ‘a concert’.162 In recounting this vision, which, as Hildegard asserts, embodies all of her previous visions, this drama incorporates multiple voices and sacred music, also of Hildegard’s own creation, and was likely written down for the nuns’ performance within the monastic setting. Clearly a precursor to more developed symphonic works known as the Symphonia and the Ordo virtutum (the latter providing another important play on the terms listed above), this visionary drama at the end of Scivias performs the ways in which the Virtues, ‘se exhortantium ad salutem populorum, quibus diabolicae insidiae repugnant’ [‘spurring one another on … secure the salvation of the peoples ensnared by the Devil’].163 The roles of the Virtues and other embodiments are clearly to be taken on by the nuns in the cloister: their voices and the music composed for their singing are, indeed, for Hildegard, the music of heaven: ‘Et sonus ille in laudibus de supernis gradibus in harmonia symphonizans’ [‘their song, like the voice of a multitude, making music in harmony praising the ranks of Heaven’].164 The text’s ranks of heaven include the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles and martyrs, confessors, the heavenly spirits, and, of course, Mary. All, however, whether male or female, are consistently cast as flowers in the garden of a reclaimed Eden, which, of course, at the moment of performance, is precisely the 162 Barbara Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Scivias, trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 9–53 (p. 43). It is likely that this vision also gave rise to Hildegard’s production of a full-length mystery play put to music known as the Ordo Virtutum, written for the nuns to perform within the cloister. Newman points out that by 1151 Hildegard had written both (Symphonia, p. 10). Discussion of the Symphonia and the Ordo is beyond the scope of this present chapter but, for an analysis of the greening and horticultural imagery prevalent in both see Ritchey, Holy Matter, pp. 55–90. For a most welcome full-length contemporary study of the Ordo, see Michael C. Gardiner, Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum: A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 163 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 729C (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 525). 164 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 729C (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 525).

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Rupertsberg cloister. Here, the patriarchs and prophets are ‘felices radices’ [‘happy roots’]; the apostles are the ‘cohors … floris virgae non spinatae’ [‘cohort of the [rod’s] thornless Flower’]; the martyrs are ‘flores rosarum’ [‘rose blossoms’].165 However, a special configuration is reserved for the virgins of the heavenly ranks (again by implication, the Rupertsberg nuns), who are ‘suavissimus hortus … in omnibus ornamentis redolente’ [‘a garden adorned in sweetness’], flowers flourishing within the ‘nobilissima viriditas’ [‘noble verdure’] of Christ.166 As Ritchey suggests of such performance of garden hermeneutics: ‘The virgins would “remember” by re-creating a garden in the cloister, endowing it with material presence through their performance of song.’167 Hildegard’s conception of the cloister as re-imagined Eden, however, is no passive by-product of her use of garden poetics. Indeed, in 1178, Hildegard’s mission to recreate Eden within her precincts was violently disrupted by the intervention of the Law in the form of an interdict forbidding the singing of the divine office at Rupertsberg. Hildegard had permitted the burial of a man within the monastic precincts who had undergone a former excommunication, an act of compassion that had deeply exercised the church and its representatives at Mainz, under whose jurisdiction Rupertsberg fell. In response, Hildegard drafted two letters to the prelates in which she expounds on the centrality of song not only to the restoration of the original pre-Fall Eden but also for the opening up of the doors of the heavenly kingdom itself, adding (as if that message was not direct enough): ‘Istud tempus tempus muliebre est, quia iustitia Dei debilis est’ [‘This time is a womanish time, because the dispensation of God’s justice is weak’].168 By implication, the male prelates, leaders of the Church as they are supposed to be, take their examples, not from the word of God, but as if from women as ontologically weak and emotional beings. As a result, these prelates are wholly unsuited for leadership. However, such a position is simultaneously undermined by Hildegard’s own strong 165 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, cols 731B–D (trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 526–7). 166 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 732B (trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 528). 167 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 65. 168 Hildegard, Epistola XXIII, pp. 65–6 (trans. Baird, p. 161).

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and confident leadership as abbess and magistra whose letters articulate the carefully constructed environment of women as housing the original paradisal home. By preventing these women from singing the Mass, the prelates have exiled them – and themselves – once more from their rightful space within the walls of paradise as part of the heavenly host: as Hildegard warns the prelate of Mainz: ‘Qui ergo ecclesie in canticis laudum Dei sine pondere certe rationis silentium imponunt, consortio angelicarum laudum in cele carebunt’ [‘those who, without just cause, impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises … will lose their place among the chorus of angels’].169 Within Hildegard’s visionary universe, then – and the verdant, symphonic world she daily (re)creates in the cloister with her nuns – ‘song incarnates deity’.170 Moreover, that incarnation is effected primarily through the nuns’ performative use of song, enabling the cloister to morph into a reconstructed Eden each time they raise their voices and where they can become, like Mary, both Bride and ‘clarus flos’ [‘glorious flower’].171 In effect, then, for Hildegard, like Herrad’s monastic bee, the virginal status of herself and her nuns divorces them entirely from being defined by the epithet ‘womanish’, as used by Hildegard herself to denigrate the patriarchs of Maintz and other seemingly ineffectual churchmen. On the contrary, it provides an intensely virtuous route to redemption, with the masculine etymology of the term being wholly subsumed into a new form of female masculinity which, disaggregated from the male body, can itself be seen as a female virtue able to teach religious men a thing or two. Indeed, at the conclusion of her first epistle to the prelate of Mainz, Hildegard claims for herself just such an identity: as ‘bellatrix’ [‘female warrior’], Hildegard’s virtue, unlike the prelate’s, manifests the justice of God.172 This is further played out in the final chapter’s depiction of the personified Virtues in Scivias, roles written for and enacted by the nuns within the cloister. Again, their power is depicted as coming 169 Hildegard, Epistola XXIII, p. 65 (trans. Baird, p. 161). 170 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 60. 171 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 730C (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 525). 172 Hildegard, Epistola XXIV, p. 66 (trans. Baird, p. 161).

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from their virginal ability to fight sin (‘Rex regum, in tuo praelio pugnamus’ [‘we wage war for [you] the King of Kings’]).173 However, as well as presenting as unashamed female warriors, their powerful femininity is extended to incorporate their other roles as God’s flowers and his Brides. As Humility informs them: ‘dilectissimae filiae, teneo vos in regali thalamo … sub arbore suscitavit vos Deus, unde in hoc tempore recordamini plantationis ejus’ [‘Beloved daughters, I keep you in the King’s wedding chamber … God raised you under His tree, so now remember your planting’].174 As such, the male-associated quality of virtue is deployed both theologically and ironically by Hildegard as she excises it from the male body and applies it to the female, feminising it in the process and associating it with the (grammatically feminine) viriditas that is God. Like Herrad, therefore, Hildegard constructs a female cellula in her monastic precincts within which ‘ardore virginalis pudoris, in amplexibus verborum florentis virgae’ [‘the ardor of virginal modesty embraced by the blossoming branch’] may bloom both in the cloister and in the verdancy of heaven. In so doing, she overlays traditional teachings of ontological human sin and perpetual exile brought about by the woman, Eve, with evidence of a female virtue that is also part of God’s veriditas. In turn, this causes Hildegard to cast herself ultimately as the materna viriditas: virago rather than vir, her job as ‘bellatrix’ is to battle against human and diabolic injustice.175 This double-edged barb hits its mark: the doubly gendered ‘warrior’ fights not only on God’s side against ontological injustice but also fights against the injustices doled out by the patriarchal world she inhabits. As Ritchey points out, Hildegard was never fully forgiven for abandoning the Disibodenberg institution to found her own at Rupertsberg.176 Hildegard’s adoption of the identity of female-warrior – bellatrix or virago – thus squares the semantic and conceptual circle of virgo, virga, virtutem, viriditas, veritas.177 In Hildegard’s cloister, an unique form of femininity is 173 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 733A (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 529). 174 Hildegard, Scivias, 3.13, PL 197, col. 733C (trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 530). 175 Hildegard, Epistola XXIV, p. 66 (trans Baird, p. 161). 176 Ritchey discusses this departure in Holy Matter at p. 58. 177 Indeed, Holsinger posits another layer to this, linking the term virga with the ‘staff’ of the musical notes on the scores produced by Hildegard (Music, Body

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generated which, far from offering a paradigm for the ‘womanish’ inadequacies of powerful men, forms instead a key aspect of the nurturing deity – with the cloister at Rupertsberg providing that deity with a verdant ‘natural’ home.

Conclusion All three ‘texts’ considered in this chapter construct their organising principle around the image and hermeneutic of the sacred hortus conclusus and all three, too, comprise similar configurations of material horti deliciarum: whether collage, book or cloister. Each in its own way, moreover, also embodies a communion inimitable de la femme et la fleur that resists the ultimate essentialising of gender in favour of depictions that are fluid, labile and multifunctional. Thus, all three texts speak not of the clichéd connection between women and the ‘chaos’ of the natural world that was – and is – often used as tool of denigration,178 but of a shared space – communion – lying outside the usual linguistic parameters (although still working with them) where ‘women’s work’, and the raised ‘symphonic’ voices embedded in that work, are productive of an alternative imaginary based on an ethics of growth and flourishing that, like the garden, is cyclical rather than linear in its own unfolding. In material terms, too, these spaces function as a far more literal communion – one born from both the synchronic and diachronic connections and interactions of women involved in making, remaking and maintaining them. Inherent to such cyclical process is the Kristevan notion of la belle fanaison, a concept also central to the productions of women striving for an expressive hermeneutics that encompasses making, ownership, use, fading, fraying, restoration outside of the usual constraints of the Law – and for those wishing to remain safe whilst operating within those usual constraints.

and Desire, pp. 123–4). See also Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 75. 178 This is a criticism often levelled at Kristeva’s work, particularly in terms of her conception of the chora and the pre-thetic. Again, see James, ‘Hysterical (Hi)stories of Art’.

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Thus, la belle fanaison in these texts forms part of the same flourishing cycle of being as identified by Eve in the Auchinleck Life examined in the previous chapter; and, as all the ‘texts’ or ‘gardens’ examined here also testify, is something in which we all share as humans, regardless of sex or gender identities. Yet, this remains a process to which the male imaginary remains resistant, no doubt because of its implications of lost phallic power, causing it to respond with proscription, prohibition and the crushing retribution of the Law. At Mechelen, Hohenbourg and Rupertsberg, however, we find communities of women able to acknowledge, work with and translate a phallic thinking into an endlessly cyclical and restorative belle fanaison via a poetics of an embodied flourishing established within all-women contexts. In turn, the harsh linearity of a forward-marching ‘history’ is disrupted by the bringing together of past, present and future within these different ‘garden’ locations to produce a vision of another modus vivendi, one which is also a memory of lost plenitude but which is simultaneously both a promise and enactment of recuperation: matrixial and fertile, ‘pregnant’ with flower, fruit, seed, death and regeneration, it speaks salvation history in ways that defy the restrictions of relentless patriarchal ordering, typology and genealogical appropriation. In my next chapter, I will consider how this verdant legacy again emerges over a generation later in the collaborative visionary writings of the Saxon nuns, Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn, operating within the learned nunnery of Helfta. Like Hildegard, both women had been pledged to the nunnery at an early age and their works, redolent with garden and other horticultural hermeneutics, were, also like Hildegard’s, destined to light up the northern European visionary landscape at the end of the thirteenth century in wholly unprecedented ways.

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3 Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn: An Arboreal Imaginary of Flourishing As a bridge between the Chthonic (the underworld) and the Uranic (the celestial), the tree whose roots bury themselves in the earth and whose branches reach toward the heavens, has a privileged place in the human imagination as a sort of communicating vessel between the terrestrial world and the godly firmament.1

H

errad, hildegard and the women of Mechelen were not alone in their recourse to a hermeneutics of flourishing gardens for the forging of their communal and literary identities within their respective enclosed environments. The late thirteenth century bore witness to other women in other geographical locations who strove in similar ways to undertake the same recuperative work and who, moreover, also recognised the potential of the hortus conclusus to provide a rich grammar and an expressive lexis for approximating on what they regarded as ultimately inexpressible, that is to say, their deeply personal – and intersubjective – visionary encounters with the divine love of God. In this chapter, I examine the collaborative visionary works of two such writers from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta: Gertrude the Great (d. 1302) and Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298). As I shall argue, in the visionary writings attributed to these women, such hermeneutics regularly collapse into deeply sexualised images as their writers grapple with the garden’s ontology of fertility and fecundity in order to uncover a suitable idiom to make their visionary insights into divine love understood. In order to unpack their complexity, I will draw upon a range of contemporary theories regarding 1

Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of Metaphor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 24.

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female divinity and existential flourishing, as espoused by Grace Jantzen and Luce Irigaray, and demonstrate the centrality of their premises to Gertrude’s and Mechthild’s conceptualisation of a holy woman’s own divinity. Like Herrad and Hildegard before them, both Gertrude and Mechthild lay down challenges to those traditional understandings of salvational history they inherited from the Church Fathers and other male commentators. In other words, instead of presenting a vision of human salvation solely predicated upon orthodox discourses of fall, punishment and redemption, they consistently draw upon alternative discourses, also theologically endorsed but predicated upon what Grace Jantzen has identified as ‘an imaginary of natality issuing in a symbolic of flourishing’.2 Moreover, these alternative discourses, like those utilised by Hildegard, are femalecoded and, as I shall argue in what follows, are closely allied to the authoritatively generative dynamics of the hortus conclusus and a redeemed – and redeeming – female body within. As Rosalynn Voaden has asserted of the activities of the Helfta nuns: ‘The sense of intellectual and moral authority which seems to have existed among the women at Helfta resulted in a mystical discourse incorporating two of the cardinal elements of their experience: membership in a community and biological femaleness.’3 However, in her own study of women’s ambivalent relation to divinity, Jantzen goes further, arguing that the once-positive associations between women, fecundity and flourishing have been all but eradicated by exegetical traditions long privileging the male body – and the domination of the phallus as its transcendent signifier. For Jantzen, these male/masculine signifiers have thus become the only producers of ‘real’ meaning within western cultures, forming a ‘reciprocal relationship’ between what she terms the ‘necrophilic’ Christian imaginary – that is to say, one obsessed with destruction

2 3

Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 157. Rosalynn Voaden, ‘All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta’, in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 72–91 (p. 73).

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and death – and the dominant male symbolic order.4 In turn, this mutually supportive relationship has produced exactly the same kind of ‘illusion of opaqueness’ (that is to say, hegemony) as posited by Soja and discussed at the start of chapter one.5 Commenting herself on such opaqueness, Jantzen claims that, rather than the fear and combatting of death, a female-coded discourse of flourishing is, in fact, the (unacknowledged) foundation of the theological concept of salvation within western Christian thought, pointing out, however, that the history of western Christendom has ‘fasten[ed] on the idiom of salvation rather than that of flourishing … and reinforces the necrophilic imaginary and its obsession with domination, mastery and death’.6 Here, Jantzen, recognises the body of the woman buried beside the Derridean ‘root’ deep within the soil of Christian grand narrative. That is to say, this narrative fails always to acknowledge its own origins as rooted, not in the body of Adam, the first father (or, as we have seen, mother-appropriation) or even the violence of the genealogically-endorsed self-sacrifice and death of the male hero, Christ, but in the flourishing associated with the natal and the maternal present in equal measure within biblical sources – the Book of Genesis included. In the words of Irigaray, upon whose work Jantzen draws for her own analysis and who, in many ways, has embarked upon a similar task of discursive recuperation in her recent work: ‘Men construct[ed] a world of their own on a forgetting, and even a contempt, of her. It would not be wise to remember what she represents for them – an inaccessible thing that it is advisable to renounce.’7 4

5 6 7

Jantzen deploys this term to define a discursive obsession with death and its glory – something she contends often masquerades as a cultural necrophobia, or fear of death. This is an issue she discusses in further detail in Becoming Divine, pp. 129–41. See above, pp. 26–7. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 157. Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 96. In her use of the terms ‘her’ and ‘Her’ in her study, Irigarary refers to women-in-culture and the divine-woman respectively. Her primary premise is that the dominance of patriarchal religions, particularly monotheistic ones, has served to separate women from the possibility of any transcendence achieved by being made in ‘God’s image’. Women as having no access to transcendence within a male imaginary realm is something Irigaray pursued in her earlier work, particularly her essay ‘Divine Women’, in Sexes

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It is, of course, just such an act of renunciation that led Adam into exile from the original garden and to Eve’s time-laden condemnation as the harbinger of sin and sexuality. Such renunciation, too, maintains for the male imaginary the phantasm of its own investment in a far-off future ‘salvation’, rather than the type of becoming divine in the here-and-now that was deemed so important to the all-female community I will be examining in this present chapter. For both Jantzen and Irigaray, flourishing as a dominant philosophy of the feminine endangers the hegemony of the male subject-position and has therefore required corralling and taming (burying?) within masculinist thought in order to fit the terms of an imaginary that is in thrall to death and futile attempts to combat it, rather in thrall to life.8 For Jantzen and Irigaray, the need for such appropriation is predicated on the psychoanalytic model within which the boy-child has to separate himself from his mother – and thus his maternal origins – in order to construct a socially-acceptable paradigm of masculinity as he becomes a man.9 Within Irigarayan thought particularly, a boy’s relinquishment of his own female origins is reflected in an increased ‘quest for glory obtained through struggle … and not the quest for a shared flowering of desire, of love’. Moreover, the boyman’s energy, separated as it is from the ‘becoming of the flesh’, causes him to ‘wander’ and ‘wither’, searching continuously ‘for someone in which to be incarnated in order to survive’.10 Nor is this the belle fanaison of Kristevan thought discussed in my previous and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 57–72. 8 As mentioned in the introduction to this present study, the term used by Irigaray that equates with Jantzen’s flourishing is efflorescence – a theoretical premise I examine in more detail in the next chapter. 9 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 166. Vern L. Bullough discusses the medieval manifestations of this type of separation from the mother in ‘On Being Male in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 31–46, where he claims that the strict rules imposed upon men to facilitate their development of an identity as male ‘put limitations on male development’ which, although unlike the extent of those burdens imposed upon women because of their gender, ‘were nonetheless quite burdensome’ (pp. 33–4). 10 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 49.

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chapter; instead it is a violent withering on the vine as he cuts himself off from all possibility of future flourishing. Such, of course, was the fate to which Christ was consigned within western Christendom, along with those countless romance heroes whose cultic, ‘Christic’ presence made a strong impact upon the literary geography of Europe from the twelfth century onwards.11 This accords neatly with the succinct structural definition of the role and motivations attached to the medieval romance hero offered by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, who has defined his generic peregrinations as a ‘problem’ brought about by some kind of ‘lack’, adding: ‘The sans that will emerge from romance depends on our recognition and interpretation of such patterns.’12 For Jantzen and Irigaray, it is just this kind of sans that forms a fundamental driver of those countless narratives implicated in the construction of patriarchal religious systems. As Jantzen asserts: ‘The links between individualism, patriarchy, and an imaginary of death could hardly be clearer.’13 As we saw in the previous chapter, the etymology of the term ‘flourish’, like that of florilegium, relates closely to the Latin term for ‘flower’ (flora), with its Middle English derivative being flour (or sometimes flur or flor). In the Middle Ages, as previously mentioned, the term flour not only signified the vegetal ‘flower’, but also, in its plural form (floures) the menstrual flow,14 suggesting, indeed, an alternative female-coded imaginary within which a most positive communion inimitable can be achieved via this conflation of the cycles naturels of both the flower and the woman. Jantzen, Irigaray and Kristeva, therefore, all identify the potential of a feminist 11 The origins of western romance tales are multiple, emerging in both Classical and Arabic traditions. On this and other aspects of the history and development of the genre, see, for example, the various essays collected in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004). 12 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ‘The Shape of Romance in Medieval France’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–28 (p. 23). 13 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 166. 14 MED s.v. flour, a, 3 and 6. See also my discussion in the previous chapter, p. 125, and in chapter five, p. 328.

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philosophy of flourishing as well placed to challenge the status quo of the masculinist imaginary and provide an altogether more productive and unifying conceptual framework for a fully human becoming; although, as Jantzen crucially reminds us, this process is far more complicated than a mere ‘one-to-one gender-mapping’.15 Nevertheless, as Jantzen also points out, the elisions and overwritings so prevalent within the creation of our grand narratives in the west point towards ‘a series of choices’ that have served to ‘reflect the intensity of the preoccupation with death in the western imaginary’.16 The making of an altogether different set of choices, ones that foreground flourishing and the natal, would offer an alternative route towards the source of an immanent divinity shared within and by all.17 For Jantzen, therefore, a conscious return to an imaginary of flourishing, could serve to ‘open up a space for women subjects and offer striking possibilities for a feminist philosophy of religion’.18 Nor is this a revisionist stance; it merely requires a rereading and reassembling of the evidence and the making of different choices during the course of that reassembling. As I shall also demonstrate in what follows, such an imaginary, built upon an ethics and poetics of flourishing (and, in particular, the flourishing garden as a subtly insistent ‘speech act’) is not a utopian postmodernist space available only for consideration within the present moment, either. It is, in fact, a space with considerable precedents, carved out most insistently within the precincts of an independent nunnery in northern Germany during the late thirteenth century. The writings emerging from this context, moreover, went on to enjoy wide readership and circulation throughout Europe during the ensuing centuries, speaking to their lay and religious audiences, particularly in the contexts of the Benedictine church reforms mentioned 15 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 159. 16 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 161. 17 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 161. The issue of making different choices as part of a feminist historico-literary recuperative strategy is something investigated at length by Liedeke Plate in her Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), for a brief discussion of which see chapter one, p. 44 above. 18 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 157.

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in the previous chapter, but also those of fifteenth-century England, where some of these writings enjoyed a wide resurrection.19

Gertrude of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn: A ‘Conversational Theology’ Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298) and Gertrude of Helfta (d. 1302) were nuns living in the independent Cistercian nunnery of Helfta in Saxony during the latter part of the thirteenth century.20 Both women had entered the religious life as child oblates, Gertrude at the age of four, Mechthild at seven, and they are the attributed authors of the Legatus Diviniae Pietatis and the Liber Specialis Gratiae, 19 For a useful set of essays on the development of women’s mysticism and devotional practices in northern Germany, see A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann and Anne Simon (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). While the adoption of these women’s works by advocates of church reform in fifteenth-century contexts lies beyond the scope of this present chapter, for an overview of this see Dennis D. Martin, ‘Carthusians as Advocates of Women Visionary Reformers’, in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Julian M. Luxford (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 127–53. See also Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘“Flourish like a garden”: Pain, Purgatory and Salvation in the Writing of Medieval Religious Women’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 50.1 (2014), 33–60 (especially 55); and ‘“O der lady, be my help”: Women’s Visionary Writing and the Devotional Literary Canon’, The Chaucer Review 51.1 (2016), 68–87. 20 Although the nunnery appeared to follow the Benedictine rule, it was essentially an independent Cistercian foundation, having been denied official integration by the General Chapter’s decision of 1228 forbidding the foundation and direction of communities of nuns by the order, for a brief overview of which see Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), p. 53. See also Constance H. Berman, ‘Were there Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?’ Church History 68.4 (1999), 824–64. The first abbess of Helfta, Cunegund of Halberstadt, had arrived with seven ‘grey’ nuns – that is to say Cistercians – at Mansfeld, where the founders, Burchard and his wife Elisabeth, were living in 1229. Upon Burchard’s death soon afterwards, his wife accompanied the foundation to Rodarsdorf and stayed with them until her own death in 1240. The foundation did not move to Helfta until 1258, driven by a water shortage, according to Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 2. For a discussion of the nuns’ Cistercian identity, see Ursmer D. Berlière, ‘Sainte Mechtilde et sainte Gertrude la grande, furent-elles Bénédictines?’ Revue Bénédictine 6 (1899), 457–61.

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respectively.21 The vitae of both women, appended to those texts with which they are directly associated, describe how they were both privy to visionary experiences at the nunnery. Indeed, there seems to have been a rich culture of visionary and literary activity at Helfta during the same period. In 1272, for example, the much older Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. c. 1282 or 1294), an elderly beguine who joined the nunnery to escape the type of persecution to which such semi-religious women were increasingly subject during the period,22 also completed the final book of a work in the 21 The original Latin texts of the Legatus and the Liber were edited together by Louis Paquelin in the nineteenth century: Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae, ed. Dom Louis Paquelin, 2 vols (Paris: Oudin, 1875–77). For the modern English translations of these texts see: Gertrude of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love, trans. Margaret Winkworth (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992); and Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace, trans. Barbara Newman (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2017). All translations will be taken from these editions unless stated otherwise, with the original Latin text cited by book, chapter and page number. Mechthild’s Liber was also translated into Middle English in the early fifteenth century and, to date, the only edition has been The Booke of Gostlye Grace of Mechtild of Hackeborn, ed. Theresa A. Halligan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute Press, 1979). However, a new edition of the Middle English text is forthcoming: Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Boke of Gostely Grace, ed. Anne Muron and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021). All Middle English quotations will be taken from this latter edition, cited by folio numbers. I am grateful to the editors for sharing the manuscript with me prior to publication. Mechthild and Gertrude have also been discussed in some length by other commentators, particularly Rosalynn Voaden, ‘The Company She Keeps: Mechtild of Hackeborn in Late-Medieval Devotional Compositions’, in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 51–70; and her ‘All Girls Together’ at pp. 76–7. On both Mechthild and Gertrude, see Finnegan, Women of Helfta, as before. For the account of Gertrude’s entry into the nunnery at the age of four, see Legatus, I.i, p. 7 (Herald, p. 52). For Mechthild’s at the age of seven, see Liber, ‘Praefatio’, p. 12 (Book, p. 217). I will discuss the textual implications of Mechthild’s oblation in my next chapter. 22 There is considerable literature focusing on the medieval beguine movement. See, for example, Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage and Spiritual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); and Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). See also, Laura Swan, The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Woman’s Movement (New York: Bluebridge, 2014). For a brief summary of how increased persecution affected the movement, and Mechthild of Magdeburg in particular, see Frank Tobin’s introduction to the modern English translation of Mechthild’s book, Das Fließende Licht der

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nunnery, entitled Das fließende Licht der Gottheit [The Flowing Light of the Godhead], focusing on her own visionary experiences both before and during her life of enclosure.23 Evidence internal to those works associated with Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude of Helfta, the Liber Specialis Gratiae and the Legatus Divinae Pietatis respectively, point towards close collaboration, not only between these particular nuns, but one involving a good many more of the Helfta sisters.24 Indeed, while today’s commentators still sometimes Gottheit: Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, ed. and trans. Frank Tobin (Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1998), pp. 3–4. As Tobin recounts, during the thirteenth century, a number of German synods concerned themselves with issues connected to local beguines, who were forbidden by decrees at Magdeburg in 1261, Trier in 1277 and Eichstätt in 1284 from travelling about the countryside, requiring them to maintain stability of abode and to be self-sustaining in terms of income. They were also warned against disseminating what was deemed to be ‘false doctrine’ (p. 3). The implications for Mechthild of Magdeburg, who had already completed a large proportion of her book by 1261, were clearly serious, something that undoubtedly also prompted her enclosure at Helfta, whose reputation as a serious centre of literary activity and learning was already established. For a recent study of Mechthild’s literary influence at Helfta and elsewhere, see Barbara Newman, ‘Mechthild of Magdeburg at Helfta: A Study in Literary Influence’, in Women Intellectuals, ed. Kirby-Fulton, Bugyis and Engen, pp. 383–96. 23 Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit, was written in Middle High German, later translated into Latin as the Lux divinitatis. The latter was edited alongside the works of Gertrude of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn by Louis Paquelin in Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae, vol. 2, pp. 423–643 (see note 21, above). For an informative discussion of the text’s transmission and impact, see Sara S. Poor, ‘Transmission and Impact: Mechtild of Magdeburg’s Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit’, in Companion to Mysticism and Devotion, ed. Andersen, Lähnemann and Simon, pp. 73–96; and Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 24 For an extended examination of this collaboration and its environment, see Laura M. Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation: Gertrude of Helfta and her Sisters as Readers of Augustine’, Unpublished doctoral dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, IN (2004), especially pp. 51–76; and Anna Harrison, ‘“Oh what treasure is in this book?” Writing, Reading, and Community at the Monastery of Helfta’, Viator 39.1 (2008), 75–106. Also useful is Balázs J. Nemes, ‘Text Production and Authorship: Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus Divinae Pietatis’, in Companion to Mysticism and Devotion, ed. Andersen, Lähnemann and Simon, pp.103–30 (especially pp. 115–20). See also Voaden, ‘All Girls Together’. In my discussion of Gertrude’s and Mechthild’s writing here, while using the names of each author for purposes of clarity, I nevertheless acknowledge these works as multi-authored, collaborative ventures revolving around the primary ‘author’ with whom they soon became associated but not wholly written by her alone.

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tend to discuss Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great as discrete writers and ‘authors’ of their own texts, nevertheless this position is complicated by the fact the works were clearly conceived of as joint, fully collaborative ventures – even discussed as such in the texts themselves. The Liber, for example, seems to have been written down initially by other nuns without Mechthild’s knowledge – probably Gertrude in collaboration with another, unnamed, sister, although recent scholarship has further interrogated this possibility by arguing for much wider contribution to the book’s theological discussions from within the nunnery.25 What is clear, however, is that Mechthild, whose personal experiences of God are documented closely in the Liber, took some considerable time to reconcile herself to its materiality when eventually alerted to it.26 Additionally, the final two books of the Liber (Books VI and VII) comprise largely biographical material and were most likely written after Mechthild’s death in 1298 as pseudo-hagiographic narrative. Meanwhile, as Laura Grimes has demonstrated in her study of Gertrude’s ‘own’ writing, the Legatus foregrounds a myriad of different voices, registers and subject-positions, pointing concertedly to the macaronic and collaborative nature of the book’s production.27 Indeed, it is probable that Gertrude herself wrote only the second book of the Legatus, with books three, four and five having been added by at least one, if not more, of her sister nuns during her lifetime, and book one comprising a type of biographical obituary after her death, again written by other nuns.28 Such complex and 25 In his introduction to his editions, Paquelin asserts Gertrude’s scripting of Mechthild’s Liber (‘Praefatio’, p. iii). While most scholars recognise a number of similarities between the Legatus and the Liber, there is now a consensus that these correlations were more likely to have been a result of the close communal collaboration involved in the production of both works. Again, see Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation’, and Harrison, ‘Oh what treasure’. 26 See, for example, Liber, V.xxii, p. 354 (Book, p. 242), when Mechthild asks Christ whether the book recording her visions, but written down by other nuns, is a valid enterprise, given that she had neither read it herself nor approved it (‘ego non legerim, nec approbaverim’ [‘I have neither read it nor approved it’]. 27 Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation’. 28 On this, see Sister Maximilian Marnau’s introduction to Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, ed. and trans. Winkworth, pp. 5–44 (p. 12). As Harrison also points out, the Legatus is also inconsistent in its discussions of authorship

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committed collaboration points towards an intensely literary and writerly environment at Helfta, produced by what Anna Harrison has termed ‘a tangle of talk’ and what Grimes has identified as the complex and ongoing ‘conversation’ between the nuns, their audiences and, ultimately, between those audiences and God.29 For Grimes, this provides a fertile ground for the growth of what she terms a ‘conversational theology’, so visible in the Helfta writings, that are full of documented interchanges between the nuns and with God. However, for Grimes, this interactive theology is based on an Augustinian model established in the Confessions where the ‘transverberation’ of the mystic – that is to say, ‘piercing-through’ by the ‘shaft’ of the love of God she experiences – is not necessarily a characteristic of an individual’s personal relationship with God, but ‘a profound conversion effected through a community’s liturgy and spiritual sharing’.30 For Grimes, too, such a sharing is a product of ‘the sisters of Helfta teaching and directing each other as well as both lay and clerical visitors to the convent’.31 As such, the mystical experiences of Gertrude and Mechthild become the mystical experiences of all associated with them. In effect they are the privileged pars pro toto for the wider community, a community, moreover, that is monastic, lay and discursive.32 With this in mind, to discuss either the Legatus or the Liber as attributable to a single assigned ‘author’

29

30 31 32

and, although she suspects the final text was the work of a single compiler working closely with Gertrude, nevertheless she directs the reader to the many references throughout the text pointing towards multiple authorship: ‘Oh what treasure’, p. 78, n.14. Harrison, ‘Oh what treasure’, p. 94. Jessica Barr has argued that the Legatus was particularly instrumental in shaping both the reading and writing practices at Helfta in ‘Imagined Bodies: Intimate Reading and Divine Union in Gertrude of Helfta’s Legatus’, Journal of Medieval and Religious Cultures 43.2 (2017), 186–208. For further discussion of the collaborative nature of the Helfta texts, see Margarete Hubrath, ‘The Liber specialis gratiae as a Collective Work of Several Nuns’, Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 11 (1999), 233–44. Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation’, p. 44. Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation’, pp. 11–12. For a discussion of such communities, see Carolyn Meussig, ‘“Communities of Discourse”: Religious Authority and the Role of Holy Women in the Later Middle Ages’, in Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing, ed. Anneke Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 65–81.

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is ultimately misleading. Indeed, it is important to be fully mindful that these texts were the results of deeply collaborative and multi-voiced compositional practices that revolved around, rather than emerging from, the hands of, the individuals to whom they have become closely associated.33

Collaborative Responses to the Natural World While I agree with Grimes’s assessment of such interrelational collaboration as providing a discrete and intimate shared ‘language’ that was enhanced by the female-only context of their production,34 what has been almost entirely overlooked to date is the contribution made to such language by the startling proliferation of garden and other horticultural imagery common to the Liber and Legatus and, so I argue, forming the basis of a powerful hermeneutics of communion and flourishing in both texts. Indeed, not even Sara Ritchey, whose important work on other mystical garden imagery was self-confessedly predicated on ‘a fascination with non-real trees, arboreal metaphors and virtual forests’, included scrutiny of the Helfta texts in her 2014 book, Holy Matter.35 However, as we saw in the case of Herrad, Hildegard (whom Ritchey does discuss) and the women of Mechelen (whom she does not), the abundance of such hermeneutics in a text, manuscript or other material artefact, carries the potential to form a distinct, disruptive – and ultimately female-coded – ‘language of landscape’ that is drawn not only from immersion in – and the radical reworking of – the orthodox 33 For this reason, I will be focusing on both women together, rather than individually, digressing from my methodological practice in the previous chapter. Similarly, for purposes of flow and fluency, I will be using the names of both women as shorthand for the texts associated with them, whilst bearing in mind the problems inherent to such firm attribution, as mentioned above. 34 Although the nunnery as an independent institution was reliant upon visiting Dominican confessors, who, no doubt, formed part of the ‘conversational’ network, nevertheless, the books emerging from Helfta were clearly composed, compiled and scribed by the women themselves without clerical intervention. See Barbara Newman’s ‘Introduction’ to her translation, The Book of Special Grace, p. 1. 35 Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: The Recreation of the World in Later Medieval Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. viii.

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theology of sacred biblical gardens such as Eden and the Song of Songs, but also from wider garden discourses that Gertrude and Mechthild would have encountered and accrued via their own extensive reading practices at Helfta. No doubt, too, they would also have recognised such hermeneutic potential in their observations of the natural world adjacent to the cloister, both within and without the monastic walls.36 It has, of course, long been understood that the Cistercians were great gardeners, with a predilection for founding their institutions in remote, and often highly scenic, locations where, in Janet Burton’s and Julie Kerr’s words, ‘the landscape was symbolic of the soul’s return to God’.37 The Cistercian rule laid down the requirement that its adherents be entirely self-sufficient in food-production and other goods but, as Jean-Louis Gaulin has argued, rather than imposing themselves upon the land in which they found themselves, the Cistercians were particularly adept at inserting themselves into existing agricultural settings, collaborating, as it were, with surrounding farming regimes and adjusting their own horticultural practices accordingly.38 As Constance Berman has also demonstrated, the Cistercian granges forming the basis of food production for each foundation consisted of a continuum of 36 There is no extant Helfta library catalogue, although Grimes’s work has established that the women were clearly deeply familiar with the writing of Augustine and that a significant number of florilegia would have been at their disposal (‘Theology as Conversation’, p. 81). Nemes goes further, defining Helfta as ‘an island of written and illuminated literary manuscripts in the Saxon-Thuringian region’ (‘Text Production and Authorship’, p. 111). Both texts also draw explicitly on the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux and mention him by name. See Legatus, I.v–vi, pp. 19–21 (Herald, pp. 61–3), where Gertrude is identified as one of the female ‘elect’ extolled by Bernard; and Liber, I.xxviii, pp. 97–8, where Bernard is described as appearing to Mechthild in a vision with ‘Amor … in specie virginis pulcherrimae’ [‘Love, in the form of a beautiful virgin’ (Book, p. 103)] standing by his side. For a discussion of other ‘horticultural’ texts with which the Helfta nuns may have been acquainted, along with the communities of discourse they produced, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers, ‘Strange Fruits: Grafting, Foreigners and the Garden Imaginary in Northern France and Germany 1250–1350’, Speculum 94.2 (2019), 467–95. 37 Burton and Kerr, Cistercians, p. 56. 38 Jean-Louis Gaulin, ‘Agronomie antique et élaboration médiévale: de Palladius aux Préceptes cisterciens d’économie rurale’, Médiévales 26 (1994), 59–84.

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horticultural spaces – from the kitchen garden to cultivated fields, orchards, pastures and forest.39 The gifting of gardens to Cistercian houses was also not uncommon,40 and the first female Cistercian house, founded in 1182 in Herkenrode in Belgium, seems to have had a set of formal gardens attached to the abbess’s house.41 The widespread references to the natural world, gardens, growth and flourishing we find in the Legatus and the Liber, then, stand testimony not only to their exploitation of those biblical discourses of flourishing of such importance to Jantzen and Irigaray, as discussed at the start of this chapter, but also to the shaping of the nunnery by the Cistercian order’s singular relationship with the natural world, forging itself into a language with which to articulate those meanings that lay beyond the power of everyday – and orthodox – language. If we recall Spirn’s assessment of the natural landscape as ‘a continuum of meaning’,42 then these holy women’s shared experiences, their collaborative practices and the texts they produced at Helfta form just such a continuum that incorporates both the physical landscape of Helfta and the sacred imaginary of flourishing it helped to generate. Moreover, such an imaginary, as Jantzen has shown, had too often been derogated to opaqueness or invisibility within male theological discourse that instead prioritised necrophilic narratives of heroic rescue and salvation. It is clear that, for women wishing to articulate experiences often deemed irreconcilable with orthodox theology, the development of an imaginary based on similarly authorised biblical discourses of growth, fruition and flourishing thus carried the potential to articulate the 39 Constance H. Berman, ‘Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside and the Early Cistercians: A Study of 43 Monasteries’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 76.5 (1986), 1–179 (14). 40 Ann E. Lester, Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 71–2, p. 82 and p. 207. 41 This information is taken from the website of Jan Haenraets and is based on a case study from his unpublished MA dissertation at the University of York (2001), entitled ‘Conservation, Awareness and the Historic Landscape: The Example of Herkenrode’: https://explearth.org/cistercian-landscape-herkenrode-hasselt/). Accessed 6 March 2017. 42 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 24.

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otherwise inarticulable.43 Indeed, developing her thesis, Spirn’s assessment of landscape is equally applicable to the type of literary discourse and the conversational mystical theology we witness in both the Liber and the Legatus when she adds: Landscape is the sum of countless dialogues. It has no silence to be filled, no blank page; in landscape, dialogues have already begun before a new author enters the conversation.44

Both the landscapes of the natural world and their literary representations thus form important but non-specified ‘intertexts’ for those works attributed to Gertrude and Mechthild, what Nicholas Royle has identified in a study on the literary ‘uncanny’ as ‘textual phantoms which do not necessarily have the solidity or objectivity of a quotation, an intertext or explicit, acknowledged presence and which do not, in fact, come to rest anywhere’.45 Gardens and their landscapes, therefore, produce what I term in the context of the Helfta texts a ‘spectral intertextuality’ that, like the works discussed in the previous chapter, amalgamate into a ‘tangle of talk’ predicated on constantly reworked hermeneutics of flourishing that also reflect the Kristevan notion of la communion de la femme et la fleur examined in my previous chapter.

Hermeneutics of Greening If the Legatus and the Liber provide compelling visionary and literary models for a ‘conversational’ mystical theology founded on complex garden imagery, they also adhere closely to what Newman has termed an ‘imaginative theology’ that works concertedly with 43 For a study of some of the ways in which visions and prophecy offered some medieval women a potential pathway to authority, see Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999). On discretio spirituum in the context of the inquisitional culture of the medieval church, see Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). 44 Spirn, Language of Landscape, p. 40. 45 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 280.

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fluid, labile image patterns to attempt an articulation of God. Newman defines this ‘new category’ of medieval writing as, ‘the pursuit of serious religious and theological thought through the techniques of imaginative literature, especially vision, dialogue, and personification’.46 Although Newman’s study of texts exhibiting this innovative approach includes neither the Legatus nor the Liber,47 as I have suggested, each text is shot through with prolific and imaginatively produced imagery shaped by the natural world and often productive of intimate domestic spaces that can be shared with God – the sacred heart, and the sacred heart as hortus conclusus included. As Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa also points out: Mechtild’s revelations exploit a spatial allegory centred on Christ’s heart as a space of mutual indwelling that transforms in a variety of ways – a house, a dining room, a bridal chamber, an enclosed garden, and medicine chest – all of which contribute to nurture her developing mystical relationship with Christ.48

In these texts, therefore, Helfta is often configured as a flourishing enclosed space that can morph between domestic and horticultural at will. Moreover, this space is frequently inflected as a reshaped and reclaimed Eden, overlayed with the hortus of the Song of Songs and within which the Helfta brides await – or encounter – their bridegroom, its ‘gardener’. Indeed, as Barbara Baert and Liesbet Kusters have pointed out, ‘Christ in mystical thought was perceived as a real gardener … The enclosed garden thereby symbolises the soul in which Jesus delves and sows.’49 In fact, the intrinsic influence of the wider geography of Helfta upon the Legatus, in particular, was recognised as early as 1877 by its editor, Louis Paquelin, who, adding a note on one particularly 46 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 297. 47 The analysis does include Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Fließende as falling within this category, however. 48 Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ‘Mechtild of Hackeborn as Spiritual Authority: The Middle English Translation of The Book of Gostely Grace’, The Medieval Translator (2017), 241–53 (243). 49 Barbara Baert and Liesbet Kusters, ‘The Tree as Narrative, Formal and Allegorical Index in the Noli me Tangere’, in The Tree: Symbol, Allegory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought, ed. Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 159–86 (pp. 178–9).

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vivid – and formative – garden description in the text, refers the reader to Helfta’s rural location which, he reminds us, occupied ‘a shallow and gently sloping valley opening out into an extensive plain, both fertile and fruitful’ [‘Helftense monasterium situm erat in valle non profunda et leni collium undequaque deflexu in planitiem extensa: jucunda quippe et frugifera’].50 As such, the surrounding landscape of this Cistercian-identified foundation forms a macrocosm reflecting the microcosm of the monastery’s own enclosed spaces: whether the garden in which Gertrude is sitting, the cloister, the cell or the sacred heart itself. Indeed, the expressive possibilities of these correlations were clearly not lost on Gertrude who, in an episode recorded early in the second book of the Legatus, describes the abundant joy she received whilst sitting in the enclosed monastic garden at sunrise in the springtime: die quodam infra Resurrectionem et Ascensionem, cum ante Primam, curiam intrassem, et prope piscinam sedens, intenderem amoenitatem loci illius, qui mihi placebat ex aquae praeterfluentis limpiditate, circumastantium arborum viriditate circumvolantium avium et specialiter columbarum libertate, et praecipue ex absconsae sessionis secreta quiete. [One day between Easter and Ascension I went into the garden before Prime, and, sitting down beside the pond, I began to consider what a pleasant place it was. I was charmed by the clear water and flowing streams, the fresh green of the surrounding trees, the birds flying so freely about, especially the doves. But most of all, I loved the quiet, hidden peace of this secluded retreat.]51

Here, Gertrude is described as experiencing this physical garden at Helfta as a place full of the renewed vigour and veriditas of the springtime, and, as a result, she sees it afresh, as if for the first time. However, what brings her the most pleasure is the fact that it allows her some solitude, some time to orient herself towards contemplation, offering a slow invitation for her to ‘consider’ it, and be ‘charmed’ by it, and to ‘love the quiet, hidden peace’, drawing her inexorably into a universe of sweet contemplation and visionary transformation. In this sense, the Helfta garden, and Gertrude’s 50 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, p. 62, n.1 (my translation). 51 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, pp. 62–3 (Herald, p. 97).

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response to it, confirms Harrison’s more general assessment that ‘[garden] repose is a kind of orientation … [G]ardens visibly gather around themselves the spiritual, mental, and physical energies that their surroundings would otherwise dissipate, disperse and dissolve.’52 Indeed, once Gertrude has ‘oriented’ and ‘reposed’ herself in this way within the garden (and subsequently within the ‘pathways’ of the written text within which the garden takes literary shape), rather than struggling with ‘the old and enormous root’ of the garden as problematic Edenic space where, for women in particular, sins may be unearthed, Gertrude’s solitary communion with the Helfta garden and its cycles naturels generates a sense of her own re-orientation and re-embodiment in and as garden. Rather than appropriating it merely as poetic device and observing it from without, in effect Gertrude transforms it – and herself by association – into a type of matrixial paradise shared with God. She writes, for example, how this experience of the garden incentivises her to ‘green’ herself like the trees in springtime, to grow spiritual wings like the birds in the leafy branches, and soar directly towards God, and, in such transcendence, become the mother-like garden-womb of the Song of Songs and of Mary, in which he will flourish: Si … in modum arborum, bonorum operum viriditate florerem; insuper terrena despiciendo, coelestia libero volatu in modum columbae appeterem, et cum his sensibus corporalibus a tumultu exteriorum alienata, tota tibi mente vacarem, omni amoenitate praejucunda tibi cor meum praeberet inhabitationem. [[I]f like a tree, growing in the exercise of virtue, I were to cover myself with the leaves and blossoms of good works, if, like the doves I were to spurn earth and soar heavenward; and if, with my senses set free from passions and worldly distractions, I were to occupy myself with you alone; then my heart would afford you a dwelling most suitably appointed from which no joys would be lacking.]53

Initially, this garden experience causes Mechthild to envision herself as the same garden space, the ‘garden enclosed’, into which, as Bride, she welcomes the Bridegroom as Christ enters: ‘Intusque 52 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 43. 53 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, p. 63 (Herald, p. 97).

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luteum cor meum sensit te sibi praesentialiter adventatum’ [‘inwardly my heart of clay felt your coming and your presence’].54 In Gertrude’s subsequent response to this Christic entry into her body, however, she suddenly becomes mindful of the more abject – and necrophilic – connotations of the flesh-as-clay analogy: forgetful of her transcendent experience within the monastic garden, here, back in the cloister, she is now tormented by the words of Isaiah 1:23 (‘I will purge away thy dross’). No doubt, too, Gertrude’s distress at finding herself once more a woman of the reviled flesh is also inflected by any number of secular ‘phantom texts’ that presented the lone woman in the hortus conclusus as a figure of desire – and herself a desiring figure – a literary and iconographic trope that, by the time of writing, had taken up a position at the forefront of the contemporary cultural imaginary, as discussed previously.55 Indeed, these hauntings, whether biblical or secular, continue to trouble Gertrude in her return from the joys of the garden to a re-immersion within the orthodox routines of the convent. Quickly, the ‘clay’ analogy develops into an overwhelming sense of self-disgust that had wholly eluded her while sitting surrounded by the fruitful soil of the monastic garden; soil, moreover, that she had erstwhile viewed as ‘the exercise of good virtue’ housing the theologically orthodox ‘tree’ of good works.56 It was also as a quasi- or becoming-tree herself that Gertrude had felt the mystical communion that had allowed to her to both envision and enclose God in her heart’s soil. Now, clearly recalling how orthodox theology always already 54 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, p. 63 (Herald, p. 98). 55 The highly influential and deeply allegorical poem, Le Roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose], begun in about 1230 by Guillaume de Lorris and continued and completed by Jean de Meun sometime around 1275, had already had a major impact upon contemporary conceptions of the hortus conclusus by the time Gertrude was writing. For an overview of this influence, along with a detailed appraisal of the tradition more generally, see Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’: Text, Image, Reception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). See also Newman, God and the Goddesses, where she integrates Le Roman de la Rose into the category of ‘imaginative theology’ (p. 292). 56 For a discussion of the theology embedded within the tree of virtue, see Susanne Wittekind, ‘Visualizing Salvation: The Role of Arboreal Imagery in the Speculum Salvationis (Kremsmünster, Library of the Convent, Cod. 243)’, in Trees, ed. Salonius and Worm, pp. 117–42 (pp. 122–8).

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configures her as a ‘sinful’ woman, Gertrude calls upon God in anguish to purify her as ‘sentina extremae vilitatis’ [‘this sink of utter vileness’].57 While the initial part of the ensuing ‘purification’ process involves recalling the words of the patriarchs on the beneficence of God – Saint Matthew, Saint Paul, Bernard of Clairvaux, for example – after a long meditation on her unworthiness and Christ’s compassion, Gertrude works her way back imaginatively along the pathway towards her comfortable and comforting garden, where she finds the Bridegroom awaiting her. Only there can she be wholly sure of the promise of his ‘arctissimum amplexum et efficacissimum osculum’ [‘close embrace and all-powerful kiss!’] and of uniting with him ‘in florenti aeternitate’ [‘in the flowering of eternity’].58 In its dealing with the materiality of the natural word, Mechthild’s Liber also reveals its visionary protagonist to be initially ambivalent about the joys and seductions of the Helfta landscape. Recalling one of the few occasions when, along with her sister nuns, she left the monastery to travel through the surrounding fields to meet the funeral cortege of one of the monastery’s founders,59 Mechthild writes: Cum piae memoriae Dominus B. Comes junior obiisset, et Congregatio ejus funeri processionaliter obviaret, haec Dei ancilla videns campi planitiem et amplitudinem, multum sibi complacuit. Postea nocte quadam dum dormire non posset, et tamen surgere ad orationem prae sua infirmitate nequiret, apparuit ei Dominus in veste candida, sedens ante lectum ipsius. [At the time of the pious memorial of Lord B the younger who had died, and the congregation of nuns left the house in procession to his funeral, upon seeing the vastness of the plains, this handmaid of the Lord liked them very much. Later that night, when she was unable to sleep and therefore arose to pray on behalf of her sickness, the Lord appeared to her, dressed in a white robe, sitting in front of her bed.]60 57 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, p. 63 (Herald, p. 98). 58 Gertrude, Legatus, II.iii, p. 65 (modified from Herald, p. 99). 59 Paquelin considers this to have been Burchard XII of Mansfeld, who died ‘prematurely’ in 1294 (Mechthild, Liber, p. 161, n.1). 60 Mechthild, Liber, II. xxii, p, 161. Newman does not include this chapter in her translation, so the translations here and below are my own. Interestingly, the

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Here, Mechthild first relates her overwhelming pleasure at seeing the expansive natural world outside Helfta’s walls in all its majestic glory, but then tells of how she was unable to sleep that same night, due to her ongoing illness.61 Turning to prayer, Mechthild experiences a vision of Christ sitting at the bottom of her bed, with whom she enters into conversation about her joy at seeing the open fields and her overwhelming desire to be able to walk in them with him.62 Immediately (and chiming loudly with Gertrude’s ‘tree growing in the exercise of virtue’ experienced within the monastic garden, as recounted above) the end of Mechthild’s bed morphs into an arboreal bush [‘rubus’] such as she had seen in the fields,63 the fronds filling her room in all directions, with Christ sitting in majesty on one of its high branches. Each branch, she writes (and again mirroring Gertrude’s experience and initial exegesis), signifies one of his many virtues. As part of his explanation why Mechthild does not need to go out into the fields to experience joy, even if she were to walk there with him, Christ draws upon another ‘spectral intertext’, this time a short parable clearly drawing on a proverbial vernacular Middle English translator of the text alters the context somewhat by translating ‘campi planitiem et amplitudinem’ [the flatness and depth of the field] as ‘þe fayrnes of þe felde’ (Boke, II.xxv, fol. 64r). He then proceeds to cut most of the narrative that follows. 61 Interestingly, the Middle English translator continues to suggest he has difficulties with this chapter by offering an interpolation not present in the Latin original, describing how Mechthild was anguished because of her love of the scenery she had experienced and how Christ admonished her harshly for having taken that pleasure: ‘“O my lorde, what have y trespaced to þe þat y have delyted my lokyng aboute þus in walkyng of þis feld?” Our lord answeryd and seyde: “Thou hast don aȝens thyne obedience and þou hast nouȝt tentyd to me, and morover þou hast be necligent to pray for þe soule of hym þat is ded”’ (Boke, II.xxv, fol. 64r). Since the Middle English translation was likely undertaken for the women of Syon Abbey, whose vows of enclosure and isolation seem to have been far more strictly enforced than at Helfta, it may be that the translator not only thought the meditation on meeting Christ in the open fields was not relevant to them, but, moreover, chose to warn them against such thoughts. 62 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, p. 162. 63 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, p. 162. The Latin term rubus is attested from the twelfth century as a signifying a generic ‘bush’ but is later associated with the both the dog-rose and raspberry. In Classical Latin, it was used to signify the blackberry. See the Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist, s.v. rub/us, p. 412; Latin Dictionary Online, s.v. rubus (3): https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/. Accessed 25 April 2018.

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saying concerning the ‘dangers’ of the fields and forests: ‘silva habet aures, et campus oculos’ [the woods have ears and the open field eyes] – and thus emphasising the lack of privacy and specular vulnerability proffered by the world outside Helfta’s safe and private enclosures.64 As Christ reminds her, two people walking across the fields can be seen by everybody from a very long way off. Instead, he tells her, while it is possible to carry him with her into the fields within the ‘garden’ of her heart, she may also meet him as her lover within the enclosed and private ‘garden’ of her cell; which cell, of course, at the point of speaking has morphed entirely into a hortus conclusus with the expansive bush housing Christ and Mechthild at its centre. Whether inside or outside the monastery, therefore, it is in this garden and from the perspective of this bush that Mechthild is best able to enjoy the paradisal landscape and her lover within it. Such a teaching, however, throws Mechthild also into a moment of deep anxiety about her former careless response to the world’s beauty: Tunc dixit ad Dominum: ‘Mi Domine, quid in hoc deliqui cum me circumspiciendo, sic in spatiositate campi delectabar?’ Respondit: ‘Contra obedientiam fecisti, et mihi non intendisti; insuper pro anima defuncti orare neglexisti.’ Et illa: ‘Doce me, amantissime, qualiter de caetero si exire contigit, faciamus?’ Qui respondit: ‘Dum primo a choro exitis, legite illum versum: Deduc me, Domine, in via tua, et ingrediar in verite tua. Laetetur cor meum ut timeat nomen tuum’ (Psal. LXXXV.11). [Then she said to the Lord: ‘My Lord, what sin have I committed by delighting so much in looking about me at the boundlessness of the field?’ He responded: ‘You have contravened your obedience, and have not concentrated on me; moreover, you neglected to pray for the departed soul.’ And she responded: ‘Teach me, most beloved, moreover, what we should do if it happens we go out again.’ To which he responded: ‘When you first go out of the choir, read this verse: Conduct me, O Lord, in thy way, and I will walk in thy truth. Let my heart rejoice that it may fear your name.]65 64 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, p. 162. This is the equivalent to the perhaps better-known proverb, ‘the walls have ears’. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), the saying was first attested c. 1225. 65 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, p. 164.

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Mechthild, therefore, should hold Christ at all times in the ‘garden’ of her heart, whether outside the monastic confines or within its walls, but she should also be mindful of orthodoxy, too. In the garden of her heart, like the small cell of her vision, Christ and his virtues will flourish, and cause Mechthild to do the same ‘sicut olivia’ [‘like a green olive tree’].66 As Christ confirms: In campo etiam solent homines carpere flores; ita in anima sancta varia desideria, quibus sicut campus floridus decoratur, ego libens carpo, faciens inde sertum quod capiti meo impono. [Furthermore, a person may pick flowers in the open field; so I willingly pick diverse desires in the sacred soul, which is decorated with flowers just like the open field, making a garland there to be placed on my head.]67

Again, we are reminded of Baert’s observations on Christ as sacred gardener as an orthodox enough image. However, it is clear that both Gertrude’s and Mechthild’s rich internal gardens, along with their textual representations, are predicated not merely on the grand narrative of sacred history but on their channelling of their own experiences – in this case, the natural world in and around Helfta – into a personally constructed ‘green’ space shared ultimately with each other – and God. It is here they may achieve their own flourishing and becoming. Here, too, they also uncover a lush, generative hermeneutic to articulate a perfect understanding of the divine as both gardener and lover. Within such transformations, the Helfta enclosure, like those of Hohenbourg, Rupertsberg and Mechelen, is also ‘greened’, with such greening becoming a fundamental part of the complex ‘tangle of talk’ at the nunnery, the conversational theology it produced and those literary texts in which it is manifested.

66 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, p. 162. 67 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxii, pp. 163–4.

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Greening the Flesh The greening of Helfta and its human and divine inhabitants provides one of the strongest points of correlation between the Legatus and the Liber and such a process is particularly privileged in discussions of Christ’s appearance, clothing and actions. In both texts, too, this greening is explicitly associated with the ‘flourishing’ brought by Christ to those who love him most dearly and is largely inseparable from his female-associated humanity. In the Legatus, for example, Christ is often depicted as wearing a green tunic, an image that proves rare in synchronic iconographical contexts but which also provides a dominant palate for the vestments of Christ preferred by Mechthild. This is, no doubt, related in part to the liturgical seasons, when the various colours of priestly vestments were – and still are – prescribed to symbolise the specific festival or season within the religious calendar. In his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, a much relied upon treatise on the origin and symbolism of Christian ritual, for example, the thirteenth-century canonist, Guillaume Durandus (d. 1296) specifies that green, as an intermediary colour [‘color medius est’] between white, black and red, is particularly appropriate for the ‘common days’ between the octave of Epiphany and Septuagesima, and on Sundays between Pentecost and Advent.68 To this colour, also according to Durandus, the colour saffron may also be added, clearly drawing on the allegorised garden aesthetics of the Song of Songs 4:13–14 (‘Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates with the fruits of the orchard. Cypress with spikenard. Spikenard and saffron, sweet cane and cinnamon, with all the trees of Libanus.’). These lines from the Song, moreover, follow on immediately from the much quoted verse, ‘My sister, my spouse is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up’,69 cited in chapter one above and thus allying the priestly colour green and its saffron additions expressly to the feminine as embodied by the flourishing Bride. Similarly, in his detailed study of the history of 68 A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum written by William Durandus Sometime Bishop of Mende, trans. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), I.iii.7, p. 194. 69 Song of Songs 4:12.

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the colour green, Michel Pastoureau has pointed out the increased prevalence of green as a liturgical colour as a result of the writings of Pope Innocent III (d. 1216). In his De sacro altaris mysterio, Innocent III extolled the symbolism of colours, especially in terms of their liturgical roles within the Roman diocese in the closing decades of the twelfth century. As Pastoureau asserts, the pope ‘made [green] the colour of life eternal’, adding: ‘inconspicuous and uncertain for many millennia … green grew in presence and significance following the year 1000’.70 What we see in the concerted use made of green garments in the writing of Gertrude and Mechthild, therefore, is an overwriting of the ecclesiastic liturgical meanings accruing to the colour with those same garden hermeneutics being developed at Helfta as a ‘conversational’ between-women theology. Elsewhere in his study, Pastoureau traces the growth in popularity of the colour green within the Germanic world after this watershed moment, where stained-glass windows, intricate miniatures and enamels celebrated green pigments whilst the rest of Europe had begun to offer exceptional value to the colour blue.71 Adding to this, Pastoureau points out that the tradition of fin’amor adopted green as emblematic of the courtly quest (often causing the hero to traverse through forests and other overgrown green wildernesses), and was used also to accentuate the Lady’s ‘natural’ location in terms of the reverdie of Spring and the hortus conclusus.72 In the Germanic lands, too, the revered figure of Minne, an allegorical goddess-figure embodying the concept of courtly love as manifested in the lyric poetry devoted to it, also privileged the colour green. Indeed, Minne was frequently depicted as clothed entirely in green, which Pastoureau reads as ‘symbolic of her inconstancy and the uncertain love she prompts’.73 Minne as a figure of absolute power and manifesting the seductive cruelty of passionate love, especially in contexts of the courtly 70 See Michel Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Colour (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 42 and p. 53. Book VI of Innocent III’s treatise, dealing with the issue of liturgical colours, can be found in PL 217, cols 773B–916A (here at col. 799D). 71 Pastoureau, Green, p. 53. 72 Pastoureau, Green, p. 53 and p. 65. 73 Pastoureau, Green, p. 72.

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lyric, has been examined by Newman in some detail, partly in terms of this figure’s appearance in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s work. As Newman points out, ‘in positing Minne [in the Fließende] as an independent force, a goddess who co-exists with and indeed overpowers the Trinity, Mechthild makes God as vulnerable as the Soul is: he too is crazy-in-love’.74 In the Fließende, too, the interchange between Minne and the human soul is, in Newman’s assessment ‘considerably more aggressive, for a barely controlled fury animates their love’.75 The readings of both Pastoureau and Newman, however, throw up problems when it comes to the representation of Minne in the writings attributed to Mechthild of Hackeborn, where, far from unstable or aggressive, she is the powerful embodiment of the all-encompassing love of an altogether more feminine and maternal Christ and, as such, pulls together many of the green and fruitful hermeneutics deployed elsewhere in the text. For this reason I will return to the figure of Minne in this context later in this chapter, but suffice it to say here that green as an apt colour for divine garments pulls together a variety of conventions and is manifested extensively in both the Legatus and the Liber, where it is frequently linked, whether overtly or covertly, to aspects of natal and matrixial authority. On one occasion in the Legatus, for example, when Gertrude is recalling how the newborn Christ once called upon her to dress him in preparation for the Purification,76 she envisions 74 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 11. Newman explores the figure of Minne in greater detail in chapter four of her book, pp. 157–89. For a brief discussion of Minne’s appearance in the Fließende, see pp. 10–12. On the term Minne and other mystical terminology in the later Middle Ages, see, for example, Gordon Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), especially pp. 67–100. 75 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 11. 76 At this point, Gertrude is likely also recalling the use in the nunnery of actual Christ-like dolls to re-enact aspects of Christ’s early life (and their own role as Mary). Indeed, Chapter xvi begins with a description of this enactment: ‘Die sanctissimae Nativitatis tuae accepi te tenerum puerulum de praesepio pannis involutum, praecordiis meis impressum’ [‘On the day of your most holy nativity, I took you out of your crib, a tender Babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes. I pressed you to my heart.’]. Gertrude, Legatus, II. xvi, p. 86 (Herald, p. 115). For an account of this practice of using dolls, within German nunneries in particular, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone

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him first as a baby swaddled in white, but then as a young man clothed all in green. Finally, his robes become purple as he takes on the role of King of Heaven. Explaining her understanding of this green tunic to Christ, Gertrude tells him it is ‘signum quod florida gratia tua semper viret, nec aliquando arescit’ [‘a symbol of your grace which is never dried up but always flourishing and green’].77 Here, Winkworth’s translation is a little misleading, however, belying the emphasis the text places on the florida gratia, that is, the flowery grace of Christ which is always fertile and flourishing. Such a depiction also associates Christ more readily with the Virgin Mary who, of course, is most often depicted in terms of flowers and flourishing gardens. Moreover, this association is both conscious and deliberate, since Gertrude immediately moves on to describe the Virgin in the same terms as Christ: ‘ipsa etiam simili modo videbatur vestiri. Et cum eadem benedicta Virgo, florens rosa sine spina, candensque lilium sine macula, abundet imo superabundet floribus omnigenarum virtutum, ut per ipsam nostra ditetur inopia’ [‘I saw that she was wearing similar garments. May this blessed Virgin, rose without a thorn, immaculate white lily, in whom there flourishes an abundance of every virtue, enrich our poverty.’]78 Here, in both texts, the ‘greenness’ of those garments shared by Christ and the Virgin have obvious correlates in their shared, ‘flourishing’ flesh, gendered female, of course, and which here becomes indistinguishable. These garments of greening are also evocative of the type of communion posited by Kristeva and discussed in my previous chapter wherein both Mary and Christ are similarly female-floral and, like Minne, feminine-divine. Within this configuration, moreover, the shared ‘green’ garment of female flesh becomes a synecdoche for humanity more widely and thus comprises the palate of a redemptive ‘feminist theology of flourishing’ that predates Jantzen’s call by some 700 years. Books, 1991), p. 198. For an examination of their use in fourteenth-century Florence, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento’, in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, ed. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 310–21. 77 Gertrude, Legatus, II.xvi, p. 89 (Herald, p. 118). 78 Gertrude, Legatus, II.xvi, p. 90 (Herald, p. 118).

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The Liber’s explicit use of these hermeneutics is developed far more extensively than in the Legatus. Indeed, the Liber is keen to transform Helfta at every opportunity into a verdant and green/ greening space within which a similarly green-clad Christ often traverses freely. For example, early in Book One, Christ appears to Mechthild as a child of twelve dressed in green and white garments [‘tunicam ex viridi et albo colore’]79 – here reminiscent of the green-clad young Christ in the Legatus, but this time explicitly representative of Christ at the age when he disappeared from his home to go to the temple and speak to the elders, as expounded in Luke 2:41–50. Within the biblical narrative, this is effectively the moment when he separates himself from his earthly mother to begin the journey towards his necrophilic destiny and align himself more fully with his divine father. Not so for Mechthild’s Christ, however, although he initially adopts an orthodox enough register to explain to her his reasons for disappearing to the temple: Cui Dominus: ‘Quia tunc secundum humanam naturam in humanis actibus me coepi exercere in omni sapientia, de die in diem proficiens, licet Deo Patri in aeterna sapientia essem coaequalis.’ [(The Lord replied to her): ‘Because it was then that I began to exercise my humanity in wise human actions making daily progress, even though I was equal to the Father in eternal wisdom.’]80

The Middle English translation of this passage in the Liber accentuates the apparent orthodoxy of this explanation, although the translator becomes a little entangled in the text’s Latin syntax at this point. Nevertheless, by aligning the Latin original alongside the Middle English translation here, we can clearly discern a choice of terminology made by the translator that brings about a rather different nuance and connotation to the text: Oure lorde answered and seyde: ‘For at þat age and tyme after þat natur of man y beganne in mannys dedys to have me as be exercyse in all wysdom. Y profytyd to her fro day to day nouȝ[t]withstondyng þat y was man and ȝitt even to þe fader in everlastyng wisdome.81

79 Mechthild, Liber, I.ix, p. 29 (Book, p. 53). 80 Mechthild, Liber, I.ix, pp. 29–30 (Book, p. 53). 81 Mechthild, Boke, I.xix, fol. 22v.

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Mechthild’s use of the noun humanus, rather than the homo frequently used elsewhere, here posits a specific lexical choice that insists both upon the degendering of humanity as a priori male and the (re)incorporation of the human female who, as we have seen, is best placed to represent Christ’s humanum naturam. As such Christ-as-becoming-man is removed from the orthodox necrophilic pathway laid down in traditional treatments of this Presentation to the Elders scene (and in which, of course, he offers his first rejection of his mother) and is transposed by Mechthild firmly to the place of flourishing by means of an hermeneutic overlaying that has already been established as female-coded in the text. Indeed, as we also saw in the example from Gertrude’s Legatus, the green garments worn by Christ also a priori collapse his humanity into the feminine by virtue of his mother’s flesh and its own flourishing capabilities. Now, Mechthild actively orchestrates such an explanation for her readers, moving on quickly to question Christ explicitly about the meaning of his clothing’s colours in case we are left in any doubt: ‘Quid designat hoc duplex vestimentum tuum?’ [‘What does your double garment signify?’], she asks him. Christ’s response is incisive and immediate: ‘Per album colorem designatur virginalis puritas meae sanctissimae vitae; per viridem autem viror quo semper floreo in meipso’ [‘White designates the virginal purity of my holy life; green is the vitality that makes me flourish within myself forever’].82 Again, such a configuration continues to ally Christ’s qualities with those of the Virgin, who appears bedecked in similar garments elsewhere in the text and which associate her too with a paradigmatic femininity (whiteness, purity, a holy life, flourishing, flowers). For example, at the beginning of Book Two, Mechthild recounts a number of visions received during the weekly Saturday commemoration of the Virgin, during which she joins both the Virgin and Christ sitting alongside each other in majesty. Over her saffron-coloured gown, embroidered with red and gold roses, the Virgin wears a green mantle, also embroidered with gold roses. This particular schema, according to Mechthild’s own exegesis 82 Mechthild, Liber, I.ix, p. 30 (Book, pp. 53–4).

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‘designans quod semper in bonis operibus et virtutibus sanctis florebat’ [‘indicat[es] that she always flourished in good works and holy virtues’].83 Here we see Mechthild award the same virtues to Mary as she has done to Christ and, by decking them out in the same types of garments – and within the same type of setting – she establishes a synonymy between their flourishing and the nurturing capacities of the female-coded flesh. Such synonymy is accentuated later in the text when Mechthild envisions the ‘garment’ of Christ’s flesh as the cloth of Christ’s humanity [‘panno humanitatis Christi’], a cloth that humankind may use to gently wipe its face clean from sin.84 Here, of course, Mechthild is tangentially invoking another female act of compassion: that of the apocryphal Saint Veronica on the Via Dolorosa, when she took her own veil to wipe Christ’s blood- and sweatstained face as he carried his cross towards Calvary and which alleviated, if only for a moment, the inexorable necrophilics of the march towards Golgotha – the place of the skull and, reputedly, the burial site of Adam, as we have seen.85 Indeed, this invocation of Veronica’s veil links neatly back to a vision received on the Feast of Veronica’s Veil in Book One, where all the sinful are invited to Christ’s banquet, laid out on a table in the fields of a flowery mountain. Here, Christ’s face wraps round the sinful like a veil as they share the communal meal.86 Mechthild’s later depiction of Christ’s flesh as the cloth of humanity, then, inscribes this same feminine intervention of compassion upon Christ, whose nourishing and redemptive femininity is ontologically bound up in the female flesh he too wears like a garment and in its deployment to alleviate the sufferings of humankind. Indeed, as Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí have recently pointed out, within medieval belief, the figure of Veronica was frequently conflated with the Haemorrhoïssa, or bleeding woman, of Mark 5:31–4, whose perpetual menstrual flow

83 Mechthild, Liber, II.i, p. 136 (Book, p. 120). 84 Mechthild, Liber, III.li, p. 254. 85 For a full-length study of representations of Veronica, albeit in early modern art, see Katherine T. Brown, The Legend of Veronica in Early Modern Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 86 Mechthild, Liber, I.x, p. 32 (Book, p. 55).

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(‘fountain of blood’) was healed by a touch of Christ’s garment.87 It is possible to take such conflation a little further than do Cirlot and Garí, however, and argue that Christ’s blood and sweat, as imprinted onto Veronica’s veil, conflate also with the bloody cloths used to soak up the Haemorrhoïssa’s menstrual flow, adding depth and complexity to this already female-coded set of hermeneutics and ultimately announcing both Christ and the menstruating woman as the vera icon and thus the imago Dei, too.88 In different ways, then, Gertrude and Mechthild draw upon the orthodox theology of Christ’s human flesh as garment taken on at the incarnation, whether through his parabular healing or his bleeding onto Veronica’s veil, or, indeed, both at the same time. More importantly, both writers exploit the femininity of these fleshly and bodily entanglements by allying them to a greening that makes Christ’s womanly body his most redemptive feature and the ensuing flourishing its most redemptive action.

Gertrude’s and Mechthild’s Enclosed Gardens of the Soul In both texts, the ‘natural’ milieu of a green and greening Christ is also envisioned as a garden, superimposed in visionary fashion upon well-trodden areas of the monastery – the choir, the altar, the cell, the dormitory – and, as such, serving to cast the entire monastic precinct as a place of veriditas and to establish it as doubly sacred space. This space, moreover, is simultaneously part of this world and part of the eternal. As such it constitutes what Michel Foucault has identified as a ‘heterotopia’, that is to say a site that has ‘the 87 Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí, ‘ConTact. Tactile Experiences of the Sacred and the Divinity in the Middle Ages’, in Touching Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages, ed. David Carrillo-Rangel, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel and Pablo Acosta-García (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 237–66. This episode is also recorded in Luke 8:42–8 and Matthew 9:19–22. For an art-historical discussion of this episode, see Barbara Baert, ‘“Who touched my clothes?” The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5: 24–34; Luke 8: 42–48 and Matthew 9: 19–22) in Early Medieval Visual Culture’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift 79.2 (2010), 65–90. 88 For a detailed treatment of this, see Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a ‘True’ Image (New York: Blackwell, 1991).

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curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect’.89 Thus, the ‘garden heterotopia’ invoked by Gertrude and Mechthild within the monastic space asserts, again in Foucault’s terms, ‘a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space’,90 allowing for disruption of traditional – and hegemonic – ‘old root’ readings of the grand narrative, as discussed in chapter one and mentioned above. This is again played out in both texts where the visionary gardens are frequently associated with a reconfigured crucifixion scene, but where again, as we saw in the refreshing intervention of the Veronica-Christ detailed above, the expected necrophilic horrors are diminished by an overlaying of images of green flourishing and fluidity that once more bear strong overtones of the maternal feminine. On one occasion, for example, Gertrude (who is referred to in the third person in Book III), tells us: [B]enignus Dominus, compatiens demonstravit illi hortulum valde parvum nimisque angustum, qui diversorum florum vernantia plenus, spinis erat circumseptus, et modicum mellis erat fluens in ipso. [[T]he merciful Lord showed her a very small and extremely narrow garden, where flowers of various kinds were growing in a profusion. It was surrounded by a hedge of thorns and a feeble trickle of honey was flowing through it.]91

The thorn hedge, of course, was a staple component of many horti conclusi during the period and, no doubt, part of the topography of Helfta’s own gardens.92 Indeed, one of the most widely circulated garden treatises of the later Middle Ages, the Liber ruralium commodorium, written a few years after Gertrude’s death by the aged 89 Michel Foucault, trans. Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 22–7 (24). 90 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 24. 91 Gertrude, Legatus, III.iv, p. 122 (Herald, p. 158). 92 The tenants of the manors belonging to Ramsey Abbey in England, for example, are recorded as establishing hedges to protect their vineyards in the thirteenth century. Indeed, waggon loads of thorn bushes for hedges were bought annually, with helpers paid to position them around the edge. See Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981, repr. 2014), p. 260.

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Bolognese lawyer, Piero de’ Crescenzi between 1304 and 1309, suggests that elite gardens of moderate size should, indeed, be enclosed by hedges of thorns or roses.93 The thorn hedge’s reappearance here in the Legatus, however, when related directly to Christ, becomes a clear mnemonic for the crucifixion: once more Christ himself becomes a hortus conclusus, and the hedge’s thorny parameter his crown. Similarly, the allusion to the seeping honey, whilst summoning up consideration of Christ’s shed blood and the ‘sweetness’ of the Eucharistic wine, also superimposes upon the narrative strong resonances of the Song of Songs 4:1 and 5:1, quoted in the previous chapter in the context of Herrad’s writing (‘Thy lips, my spouse, are as a dropping honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue’; ‘I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse … I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey’).94 As discussed, the Song, of course, was a book whose origins clearly lay in the celebration of a transcendent, rather than sinful, feminine sexuality and in a promotion of an erotics of flourishing, in spite of protracted male exegetical traditions that had separated off its feminine poetics from women themselves by a process that Irigaray has termed ‘mastery by discourse’ that is ultimately ‘discourse between-men’.95 Although steeped in these male exegetical traditions in which a theology of flourishing has been derogated to privilege the necrophilic, both the Legatus and the Liber recast these biblical episodes via a visionary realignment of their poetics in order to return them to their feminine origins – and, in so doing, their authors make them entirely their own. This is again exemplified in the Legatus, which records a vision of Christ walking in a garden that is superimposed upon the choir in the Helfta church as the nuns are singing the liturgy of one of 93 For a contemporary analysis of Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium, see Robert G. Calkins, ‘Piero de’ Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden’, in Medieval Gardens, ed. MacDougall, pp. 157–69 (here at p. 165). Calkins also includes two appendices: the first containing a list of Crescenzi’s chapters, the second a modern English translation of the first three chapters of Book VIII, based on the French texts in two manuscripts (Arsenal MS 5064 and Pierpont Morgan MS 232). 94 Song of Songs 1:1 and 4:11. 95 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 100 and p. 40.

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the holy martyrs. Clearly, this liturgy has evoked for Gertrude further crucifixion images of Christ carrying his cross to Golgotha to enact his own moment of martyrdom.96 However, rather than reconstructing this scene according to its established necrophilic aesthetic, the text transposes it into a visionary hortus conclusus, now thriving within the monastic church and waiting to receive its newly conceived plantings: conspexit Dominum iter quoddam transeuntem, amoenosum quidem viriditate ac florum venustate, sed angustum et asperum spinarum densitate; cui conspexit praecedere similitudinem cruces, divisione spinarum ab invicem iter commodose dilatantem, retroque versum sereno vultu suos post se invitantem ac dicentem: Qui vult venire post me, abneget semetipsum, et tollat crucem suam, et sequatur me, etc. [She saw the Lord walking along a path, pleasant to behold, with fairest flowers and verdure, but narrow and lined with dense hedges bristling with sharp thorns. She saw that he seemed to be preceded by a cross, which parted the thorns and made the way wider and easier. With a serene expression on his face, turning toward those who belonged to him, he invited them to follow him, saying: ‘Whoever wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.’]97

More reminiscent of the romance hero’s quest than biblical re-enactment, here the road to Golgotha is a pleasant garden pathway, with flowery banks and thorny hedging – no doubt emulating the garden landscapes of Helfta mentioned above. Nor is the engine of the cross a burden for Christ: instead he is freed from its carriage, not by a Simon Cyrene figure of ‘rescue’ as in some biblical accounts,98 but, so it seems, spectrally, with the cross ‘preceding’ him ‘in the air’, moving independently to clear the pathway of thorny branches ahead to allow him and his followers an easy passage through the garden. Moreover, rather than the intense suffering traditionally 96 John 19:17: ‘And bearing his own cross, he went forth to that place that is called Calvary, but in Hebrew Golgotha.’ 97 Gertrude, Legatus, III.xxx, p. 180–1 (Herald, p. 195). 98 Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26. John is the only evangelist to assert that Christ carried his own cross to Golgotha, although this became the accepted account within the contexts of late medieval affective piety.

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associated with this particular station of the cross, instead the garden’s serenity is written on Christ’s face in a way that again recalls common iconographical depictions of the Virgin; and his words, quoted from Matthew 16:24, where he is addressing his twelve male disciples before embarking on his final journey to Jerusalem, are directed this time at his female followers (‘those who belonged to him’), that is to say Mechthild and, by implication, her Helfta sisters. Nor is this Christ ever explicitly a crucified Christ but one who walks readily through the garden, a new Adam, a restored Bridegroom, the post-Resurrection gardener.99 As such, it typically presents a newly configured redemptive narrative that eliminates the expected necrophilics of the crucifixion narrative to allow buried discourses of renewal and flourishing to take centre stage. Mechthild’s gardens are equally evocative and multivalent. In one dramatic vision received in the monastic chapel during Mass, for example, Mechthild sees Christ sitting on a flowery mound within a garden with a fountain that ‘circumspectus est arboribus pulcherrimis, plenis fructibus’ [‘is surrounded by beautiful trees, full of fruit’]. Again, this garden is occupied, this time by a host of saints taking their rest beneath the trees and, ‘Sub quibus Sanctorum animae quiescebant’ [‘under them rested the souls of the saints’]. Each saint lies beneath a golden tent, eating fruits from the tree ‘in magno gaudio et delectatione’ [‘with great joy and delight’].100 Once more, this vision of Christ, in what constitutes a more courtly hortus conclusus, associates him directly with popular representations of the Virgin reading, sewing, knitting or nursing her child in a narrow, enclosed garden. Mechthild, however, leaves no room for misinterpretation of the gender fluidity of her Christ. Indeed, she has him explain himself to her readers the meaning of this vision: the hill represents Christ’s holy manner of living; the trees (as we have seen before) represent charity, mercy and the other virtues; the fruit-eating saints provide models for those who ‘in operibus 99 The iconographic series of Christ-as-gardener in John 20:15, the noli me tangere episode, has been examined in detail by Barbara Baert in ‘“An Odour. A Taste. A Touch. Impossible to Describe”: Noli me tangere and the Senses’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 111–51. 100 Mechthild, Liber, I.x, p. 31 (Book, p. 55).

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misericordiae floruerant’ [‘had flourished in the works of mercy’] by being refreshed ‘de arbore misericordiae’ [‘by the tree of mercy’].101 Again, crucifixion imagery is invoked, this time by allusion to the ‘tree of mercy’, which also bears resonances of the locus of original sin – Eden with its Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life, as discussed in my first chapter. However, here there is no blood, no suffering, no pain. In this reconfigured imaginary, again devoid of the usual crucifixion necrophilics, the tree is instead rooted within a field of flowers which, encircled and enclosed, becomes a secure, matrixial home: a hortus conclusus, with Christ-the-Bride at its centre. The complex narratives attached to this single tree in this text confirm entirely the conception of the rooted tree as posited in more recent times by Gaston Bachelard, who has identified the recurrent imaging of the subterranean ‘root’ within the human imaginary as constituting an abject, womb-like site and thus the feared place of origins. However, for Bachelard, it is also the locus of ambivalence in that it simultaneously provides the source of our stability and our nurture. Additionally, Bachelard identifies the above-ground manifestations of the root, that is the tree, as an objet intégrant – that is an object that, like the conscious imagination it represents, culturally accrues images and thus produces many meanings. For Bachelard, therefore, the flourishing tree with its below-and-above dialectic becomes a figure for the human psyche, which, for him, is equally ‘arborescent’.102 Thus, in Mechthild’s hands, Christ-inand-as-tree is also subject to such arborescent transformation: from conquering, bleeding, beaten hero of the abject necrophilic, to image of the flourishing mother of God herself, the locus of stability and nurture, rooted in the matrixial space of the walled garden. 101 Mechthild, Liber, I.x, p. 32 (Book, p. 55). Here, Newman translates floruerant as ‘prospered’, but I prefer ‘flourished’ as a term closer to the etymology of the original and in keeping with the discourse I am identifying here. The Middle English translator agrees, rendering the same section thus: ‘Þey þat folowyd our lorde next in cheryte, they eten of þe tre of cheryte. Þey [þat] folowyd hym moste and floryshyd in werkys of mercye, þey hadden her refeccion of þe tree of mercy. And so all other wer refresshyd of fruyte of diverse trees after the merytes of her vertuous.’ (Boke, fol. 23r). 102 Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les reveries du repos: Essai sur les images de l’intimité (Paris: José Corti, 1948), p. 299.

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Christ explicitly confirms this motherly, matrixial status on a number of occasions, moreover. In Book I, for example, he prefigures a brief first-person resumé of the crucifixion with the qualifier, ‘tamquam filio suo mater illis me obviam dedi, ut eos de faucibus luporum eruerem’ [‘I gave myself to them just like a mother to her child, to rescue them from the jaws of wolves’].103 From this narrative ‘root’, all the traditional pains of the crucifixion that he then goes on to enumerate are recast as a mother’s pains, pleasures and rewards, with Christ’s self-confessed ‘maternity’ transforming his scourges into kisses, his head-wounds into a coronet of precious stones, and his side-wound into a breast flowing with milk: the ‘poculum vitae’ [‘the cup of life’].104 So too the Legatus manifests the same maternal (re)configurations,105 especially in Book Three, the prologue to which states that it was revealed by Gertrude to ‘cuidam personae’ [‘another person’], and written down ‘praeceptis Praelatorum’ [‘at the command of her superiors’].106 In fact, the overarching prologue to all three books of the Legatus points towards a twenty-year gap between the writing of Books One and Three,107 with Grimes considering this further evidence of protracted theological conversations enjoyed by the nuns at Helfta.108 With Mechthild also appearing several times in the Legatus, it seems clear that such mutual hermeneutics would have been formulated, not just through individual prayer and visionary activity, but also long years of interaction, discussion, reworking and ongoing approbation for each other. One of the most arresting uses of the Christ-as-divine-mother motif in the Legatus occurs after Gertrude has been documenting a 103 Mechthild, Liber, I. xviii, p. 53 (Book, p. 71). 104 Mechthild, Liber, I. xviii, p. 53 (Book, p. 71). 105 In a recent essay on the use of maternity in the Legatus, Ella Johnson considers it in the context of Gertrude’s imitatio Mariae, but overlooks the episodes where Christ presents as a loving mother. Interestingly, however, Johnson analyses Gertrude’s relationship with Mary as ‘mother-in-law’ in terms of her apparent abandonment at the monastery at the age of four by parents with whom she had no future contact (or, it would seem, memory). See Ella Johnson, ‘Reproducing Motherhood: Images of Mary and Maternity in the Writings of Gertrud the Great of Helfta’, Magistra 18.1 (2012), 3–23. 106 Gertrude, Legatus, III. Prologus, p. 117 (Herald, p. 156). 107 Gertrude, Legatus, III. Prologus, p. 2 (Herald, p. 47). 108 Grimes, ‘Theology as Conversation’, p. 49.

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period of illness, identified in the text as what we would now recognise as a form of depression or despair [‘suam desolationem’].109 Unable even to raise her eyes to view the elevation of the host at Mass because of this malady, Christ first attempts to console her by reasserting his relationship with her as a spousal one enacted within a private part of a hortus conclusus that is ‘areolis florum consitum, et mihi valde amoenum’ [‘planted with flowers and very lovely in my sight’] where they may rest in peace and serenity together.110 When even this ‘garden therapy’ proves ineffectual, Christ pulls out his trump card, reconfiguring himself as a loving mother comforting her child, requesting the exchange of kisses and pointing out the superiority of a mother’s love because it is only the mother who is able to understand the words of her child, adding: ‘Sic solus Deus intelligit intentionem hominis … longe aliter quam homines, qui tantummodo respiciunt exteriora’ [‘So only God can understand man’s intention … , far otherwise than man, who sees only external things’].111 Since, of course, Gertrude and her sister nuns at Helfta are certainly not included amongst those who fail to see deeply and internally, her choice of the signifier homo here seems to be a conscious one, since it accentuates the lack of insight of generic ‘man’, whilst asserting by default the female-coded privilege of those who are able to see deep and secret mysteries – and also foregrounds this ‘feminine’ seeing that they share with the mother-God. Later in Book Three, such representation is consolidated when Christ repeats the same example of a mother devising strategies to teach her child not to stray too far from her loving arms. This is followed by Christ’s own re-enactment of the example, as he takes Gertrude up into his arms and puts her to his breast: Hinc assumpsit eam Dominus in sinum suum quasi tenellum infantulum, et multis modis ipsi blandiebatur, apponensque os suum deificum auri ejus, et diversimode ipsam demulcens, ait: ‘Sicut mater benigna infantulo tenello exosculari solet quaeque sibi aversa; sic ego per blandissimum susurrium amatoriorum verborum lenire tibi desidero universa gravamina tua et contrarietates.’ 109 Gertrude, Legatus, III.xxx, p. 190 (Herald, p. 202). 110 Gertrude, Legatus, III.xxx, p. 189 (Herald, p. 201). 111 Gertrude, Legatus, III.xxx, p. 191 (Herald, p. 203).

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Christ completes this maternal re-enactment by forging a garland for Gertrude out of golden flowers picked from the garden of his love, each representing one of her tribulations. Such a garland, Christ explains, the good mother will make for her child because, unlike gold or silver ornaments, light flowers ‘pondere non gravantes splendorem tamen administrent’ [‘do not weigh [the child] down and yet impart a certain air of brilliance’].113 In this way, in both texts, the garden and the maternal frequently collapse into one another, very often forming a heterotopic space for the same flourishing image, just as for Bachelard the root below the ground and the flourishing tree above it are always already mirror images of one another.

Grafting in the Visionary Garden In a recent study of what she also regards to be the ubiquitous metaphor of the tree and its ‘rootedness’ within human culture, Christy Wampole joins Bachelard and, indeed, Derrida, in arguing for the root as a powerfully subconscious image – indeed going so far as to term it a ‘figure for the subconscious itself’.114 For Wampole, however, the root is ontologically female and a representative, moreover, of ‘a matricial impression, an irrecuperable home where one’s character and body were still in their embryonic phases’.115 Always already symptomatic of irredeemably lost maternal origins (and thus easily appropriable by the type of Derridian phallogocentric discourse discussed in chapter one), the ubiquitous appearance of 112 Gertrude, Legatus, III.lxiii, p. 236 (Herald, p. 226). 113 Gertrude, Legatus, III.lxiii, p. 237 (Herald, p. 227). 114 Wampole, Rootedness, p. 18. 115 Wampole, Rootedness, p. 18.

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the root as metaphor is, for Wampole, part of an ‘umbilical memory of attachment’ that brings uterine traces into consciousness and therefore into language. In its overlooked ability to make sense of these traces, the root, as the taboo, the illicit and the abject, bridges the gulf between the earth and heavens in its ability to generate a visible fruitfulness and affirmation above ground.116 In the words of Baert and Kusters in the context of their work on the tree at the centre of the post-Resurrection garden in the Noli me tangere scene of John 20:17, its significance rests in its being ‘a place of transit between the earthly and the heavenly’. As they continue: Reminiscent of the cross and symbolically linking earth and heaven – rooted in the earth and towering skywards – there is perhaps no better symbol to support the visualization of Christ’s Resurrection.117

Read in this capacity, the frequent depiction of a profusion of visible roots and grafted shoots emerging from the dark earth into the light of the church/world that we find in both the Legatus and the Liber brings the always already feminine theology of a flourishing mother-God from its pre-discursive – or extra-discursive – origins into the realm of articulation. Moreover, in the light of Wampole’s further suggestion that the subconscious and the mystical are both entirely ‘root based’ – in that it is not possible to ‘transcend’ without being rooted somewhere118 – we see the trees and gardens of the Legatus and the Liber functioning clearly in terms of an arborescent ‘grammar’ able to approximate on the mystical insights inherent to the garden’s cyclical (that is, seasonal) ‘syntax’. Indeed, as Wampole also points out, ‘Language, whose basic morphemes are known as word roots, is imagined to grow and proliferate like a plant.’119 However, MacCannell has also noted of such horticultural ‘syntax’ that it ‘appeal[s] to the ineffability of immediately intuited sensations that are felt but cannot be named’; this is to say that gardens form part of a human imaginary which is ultimately less about the gardens themselves and more about ‘a type of

116 117 118 119

Wampole, Rootedness, p. 24. Baert and Kusters, ‘The Tree as Narrative’, p. 168 and p. 169. Wampole, Rootedness, p. 8. Wampole, Rootedness, p. 12.

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consciousness twisted in a particular way’.120 As such, the rooted tree in the visionary hortus conclusus is in a position – and literally so – to give utterance both to orthodox (re)iteration but also to ‘the unsayable aspects of the psyche’ – or, indeed, the unsayable aspects of a mystical experience that, in Irigarayan terms, is always already rooted in a re-accessed space of the feminine.121 Another recurrent image in both the Legatus and the Liber closely concerned with the ontology of trees and their roots is the grafted tree, often bearing fruit-laden boughs and strange, hybrid entanglements and providing yet a further complex grammar for understanding otherwise opaque divine mysteries.122 The practice of plant-grafting, involving the manual insertion of a shoot of one plant into the rootstock of another to allow the grafted shoot to benefit from the root’s already established strength and growth, had become an important horticultural practice by the time Gertrude and Mechthild were active and, as such, had begun to feed what, in the hands of the Helfta women, would become a rich metaphorical schema. Prior to the Helfta texts, the grafting metaphor had appeared – but only in passing – in some of the Middle High German tales of romance heroism that, by the year 1200, had begun to form part of what Mark Chinca has termed (using an apt metaphor himself) a Blütezeit, that is to say a period of ‘extraordinary florescence’ of ‘secular’ works written in the German vernacular.123 In his Tristan, for example, the poet Gottfried von Strassburg (d. c. 1210), keen to insert – and assert – himself within established poetic tradition, identifies German literature as a tree whose many branches are laden with ‘flowers’ for him and his contemporaries

120 Dean MacCannell, ‘Landscaping and the Unconscious’, in The Meaning of Gardens, ed. Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 94–101, p. 95. 121 Wampole, Rootedness, p. 19. 122 For an examination of the motif and the practice of grafting, along with its material results, see McAvoy, Skinner and Tyers, ‘Strange Fruits’. 123 Mark Chinca, Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 12. I am grateful to Alissa Theiss for pointing to this use of grafting in Gottfried’s writing, and to her later communications positing a link with Rudolph von Ems (for which, see the brief discussion above).

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to pick.124 For Gottfried, these ‘flowers’ are offerings by those poets also forming part of the ‘florescence’ of German vernacular tradition, particularly Heinrich von Veldeke (d. after 1184), Hartmann von Aue (d. c. 1210) and Wolfram von Eschenbach (d. c 1220). Elsewhere in Tristan, writing specifically about Heinrich von Veldeke’s contribution, Gottfried asserts reverentially: ‘er inpfete daz erste rîs /in tintishcher zungen’ [He grafted the first branch in German tongue].125 For Gottfried, grafting as a practice provides an apt literary metaphor for the merging of Latinate learning, classical poetry and the vernacular into a new and flourishing tradition, something with which his contemporary (and, as Chinca argues, rival), Rudolph von Ems (d. c. 1254), appeared to agree, with the same metaphor, no doubt a direct borrowing from Gottfried, appearing in his historical epic, Alexander.126 Here, emulating Gottfried’s eulogy to Heinrich von Veldeke, Rudolph claims his own work to be a ‘branch’ [‘min zwî’] on the tree that has flourished by means of the literature produced by ‘the artistic Heinrich’ [‘der künsterîche Heinrich’].127 The extent to which the women of Helfta would have been familiar with the vernacular romances of these authors, however, is uncertain, although Newman has noted a parallel between Mechthild’s vision of a little silver house and its gate with a golden 124 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, ed. Karl Marold (Leipzig: Verlag, 1906), lines 4748–50. For a modern English translation of the text, see Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan with the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas, trans. A. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960, various repr.). 125 Gottfried, Tristan, lines 4706–7. 126 Gottfried refers to Rudolph as a ‘hare’ (he is ‘swer nû des hasen geselle sî’ [companion of the hare], line 4638), most likely insinuating a slow-wittedness based on a metaphor appearing in Rudolph’s Parzival (1200–10), which opens with the image of a ‘slow-witted’ hare who is startled into visibility by the huntsman’s bell (Chinca, Gottfried, p. 9). Interestingly, the vision of Mechthild’s soul in the form of a hare sleeping in Christ’s lap with its eyes open provides one of the more unusual moments in the Liber (III.xxxiv, p. 238). This time, however, the hare provides a positive example of the Christian’s need to always have her eyes open for God. For a detailed account of the life and works of Rudolph, see Sebastian Coxon, The Presentation of Authorship in Medieval Narrative Literature 1220–1290 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 37–94. For an assertion of the extent of Rudolph’s borrowings from Gottfried, see p. 71 and p. 76. 127 Rudolph von Ems, Alexander. Ein höfischer Versroman des 13. Jahrhunderts, ed. Victor Junk, 2 vols (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1928–29 repr. 1970), line 3277 and line 3115.

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locking mechanism and the ‘Cave of Lovers’ episode in Gottfried’s Tristan.128 Recent scholarship by both Newman and Jessica Barr, moreover, has pointed towards far less division between what have long been thought to be relatively discrete literary environments.129 By the time Gottfried and, later, the women of Helfta were writing, these and other vernacular romance tales had long been appealing to a new urban elite who had benefited greatly from a political and economic stability enjoyed during the region in the twelfth century and for whom book ownership and its display offered signs of prestige and signalled enhanced social status.130 Nor is there any evidence to suggest that such secular works did not penetrate the monastic walls: as Margarete Hubrath has asserted,131 Helfta was ‘an island of written and illuminated literary manuscripts in the Saxon-Thuringian region’ during the period, with Nemes adding that the Helfta convent was renowned for housing nuns from some of the most elite central German families, creating an intellectual climate ideally suited to superlative literary activity.132 No doubt, many of these nuns would have brought with them, if not manuscripts of romance tales, a familiarity with many of the most popular stories, Tristan included, embedded deep within their memories, and, perhaps, their subconscious too. With the Helfta literary culture being an overtly ‘conversational’ one, again to use the term coined by Grimes, many of the visionary images populating the pages of both the Legatus and the Liber – the walled garden and plant-grafting amongst them – therefore sit equally comfortably within both secular and religious literary genres. Within this context, Chinca could be writing equally of the visionary genre as

128 Book of Special Grace, trans. Newman, p. 259, n. 48. For this episode see Liber I.xix, pp. 61–2 (Book, p. 77). 129 Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2013). Here, Newman posits ‘the secular as always already in dialogue with the sacred’ (p. ix). See also Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Ohio: Ohio State Press, 2010). 130 Chinca, Gottfried, pp. 13–14. 131 Margarete Hubrath, Schrieben und Erinnen. Zur “memoria” im Liber Specialis gratiae Mechtildis von Hakeborn (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöingh, 1996), p. 30. 132 Nemes, ‘Text, Production and Authorship’, p. 111.

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developed at Helfta as the Middle High German romance of his own scrutiny here when he claims: All of them [the Tristan romances] divide the courtly world into two groups: the insiders, who are privy to love’s secrets, and the outsiders, who are not. The lovers and their confidants meet in private chambers and secluded places, and they communicate by secret signs which they alone recognise. The association of love with the ‘inside’, with privacy and secrecy, can be carried further: if love takes root inside the characters themselves, and if their state of heart and mind is represented as an order of reality in their own right, then love has become a form of interiority.133

Like the women of Helfta and their Christic lover, so powerful and deep a union does fin’ amor bring about for Gottfried’s lovers that, again quoting Chinca, ‘they … merge into a single person’.134 There was, then, some literary precedent for the use of plant grafting as a means of explicating the melding of two lovers. However, there was also biblical precedent, making it a highly suitable vehicle within devotional treatises and other forms of didactic literature – and, indeed, Gottfried, too, may also have had just such biblical use in mind when he conjured up the image.135 Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 11:23, for example, famously warns that if the Gentiles, ‘do not continue in their unbelief, [they] will be grafted in [to the Christian faith], for God has the power to graft them in again’. For Paul, the practice of plant-grafting – in this case the grafting of the olive tree – forms an apt metaphor for religious conversion, where a ‘weak’ stock (the Gentiles) is incorporated into the root-system of a much stronger stock (the Christian faith) to create an altogether more prolific fruit-bearing capacity – that is to say, more Christians to worship God. Yet, in spite of the clear horticultural benefits of this process, grafting was, even in Paul’s text, sometimes deemed problematic and, on occasion, ‘contrary to nature’ (11:24). In the Middle Ages, the term contra natura frequently bore the connotation of illegitimate sexual practices, of course, a caveat also implicit to 133 Chinca, Tristan, p. 33. 134 Chinca, Tristan, p. 36. 135 Chinca also suggests that Gottfried draws upon the type of exegetical practices displayed in the writings of the Church Fathers in his treatment of his poetic material (Gottfried, p. 86).

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the grafting process – which involved a type of forced coitus in the slitting and penetrating of the ‘natural’ rootstock with a phallus-like scion that then dominated the partnership and the production of offspring. Indeed, grafting as this type of imperfect – unnatural, even – ‘breeding’ practice is confirmed by the assessment of the Jewish commentator from Cordoba, Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), writing in his Guide for the Perplexed, in which he associates plant-grafting with those disparaged and feared pagan practices enjoyed in ancient fertility rites.136 What was of most concern to him was the fact that in such rites the success of the plant-grafting process was ultimately dependent upon the scion’s being inserted into the incision on the host tree by a beautiful maiden during intercourse with a man in the open air next to the tree. As Michael Marder asserts of Maimonides’s stance: ‘To Maimonides, grafting is offensive both for its public display of raw vegetal and human sexuality and for the mixing of the species.’137 Maimonides was a highly respected philosopher during the thirteenth century who was well versed in the type of learning so evident in the Helfta writings, whether theological, medical, astrological or, as we see here, horticultural. Indeed, his learning had a great impact upon both Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who are picked out for particular veneration by Mechthild of Hackeborn in the Liber.138 Writing nearly a century after Maimonides, and in a somewhat different cultural milieu, the women of Helfta, however, 136 See Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M Friedländer (New York, 1956), III.37, p. 337. The sexual motif has earlier, Islamic roots, for which see D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscape (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), who cites the al-Filahat al-nabatiyya of the Iraqi writer al-Wahshiyya, a copy of which is known in Al-Andalus from the tenth century and ‘was probably the catalyst for new agricultural manuals there’ (p. 32). For a useful discussion of Maimonides’s use of the garden and plant hermeneutic more widely, see Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 97–112. On grafting, see pp. 108–9. See also his Grafts: Writing on Plants (Minneapolis: Univocal n.d.), in which he examines, amongst other things, the vegetal nature of human friendships and other closely-entwined interactions: ‘all friendships are vegetal … to the extent that they involve a resonance of multiplicities comprising the subjectivities of friends’ (p. 31). 137 Marder, Philosopher’s Plant, p. 108. 138 Mechthild, Liber, V.ix, pp. 332–3 (Book, pp. 191–2).

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fearlessly take the metaphor of grafting to far greater heights than any previous or contemporary writers, exploiting its ‘unnatural’ connotations to express their understanding of the supranatural qualities of the divine and how these may, indeed, be ‘grafted’ onto the human. In Book One of the Liber, for example, Mechthild records a vision granted to her within the monastic church, where Christ appears during the Maundy Thursday Mass. Here, rather than the traditional crucifixion vision we might legitimately expect at this point in the church calendar, Mechthild envisions Christ as an enormous tree, its trunk made up of three interweaving shoots rooted in the Helfta church and spreading its branches across the whole earth: Vidit in medio Ecclesiae arborem pulcherrimam proceritate, et latitudine sua totam terram implentem, quae ex tribus frondibus de terra insimul ortis excreverat; et frondes arcuatae et reflexae erant ad terram. [She again saw a beautiful tree growing in the middle of the church, so high and broad it filled the whole earth. It grew out of three leafy boughs that had sprung up from the earth and curved back down to it.]139

Instead of merely referencing the three trees growing from Adam’s breast (or, as we saw in chapter one, from under his tongue)140 that heralded the forthcoming desolation of Golgotha, however, this tree by-passes such necrophilic aesthetics, preferring instead to prefigure the joys of the Easter Sunday to come, and, as in the example from Gertrude’s Legatus discussed above, similarly subsumes Christ’s suffering and death into a statement of the arboreal flourishing of a hybrid, Trinitarian God within the reclaimed Eden of the monastic church. For Mechthild, Christ as and on the tree of life emerges from a single root, with the ‘trunk’ of his body made up of three intertwining fronds, clearly signifying his own tri-partite ontology as divine, spirit and flesh. Moreover, as the fruit-laden branches begin to spread far and wide over the earth, the officiating priest also begins to morph into a vegetal being by virtue of 139 Mechthild, Liber, I.xvii, p. 50 (Book, p. 68). 140 See pp. 72–4 above.

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his Christic office, ‘vestitus et praeparatus … foliis ejusdem arboris’ [‘vested in leaves from the same tree’], with the ‘fruits’ of the transubstantiation hanging lusciously from his ‘branches’.141 This extraordinary transformation, where the human becomes plant without relinquishing either its humanity or its arboreality, chimes readily with claims being made in our own contemporary times that, as Wampole also reminds us, ‘a botanical human was never a metaphor’.142 Indeed, within Mechthild’s theology an arboreal Christ grafted together with the ‘green’ flesh of humanity comes closest to articulating the female-focused imaginary of flourishing that she envisions as central to her mystically-infracted insights. Later in the same book, Mechthild presents both Christ and the Virgin in the same vegetal manner, with the roots of the Tree of Life grafted into their fleshly bodies. In the first instance, during Mass on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, Mechthild envisions Christ with ‘duas arbores mirae viriditatis’ [‘two vivid green trees’] grafted onto his wounded feet. Again, of great height and breadth, the two trees are laden with ‘fructu pulcherrimo’ [the most beautiful fruit], which Mary Magdalene picks for Mechthild to eat. These fruits, she explains, are the fruits of penance, which, from the strengthened scions grafted into the rootstock of Christ’s body, will cause the supplicant equally to flourish and grow.143 This complex grammar of human flourishing articulated via the union of the vegetal and the human-divine is echoed in a later depiction of the Virgin herself with a tree grafted onto the rootstock of her womb, envisioned by Mechthild on the night of the feast of the Virgin’s nativity as the Stirps Jesse is being sung.144 By the time of writing, this responsory, 141 Mechthild, Liber, I.xvii, p. 50 (Book, p. 69). 142 Wampole, Rootedness, p. 36. 143 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxvi, p. 88 (Book, p. 95). 144 For a fourteenth-century iconographic depiction of this representation of the Virgin with the tree grafted to her womb, see Plate 5. This episode has been discussed in some length by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa in ‘The Virgin in the hortus conclusus: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 50.1 (2014), 11–32. See also, Margot Fassler, ‘Mary’s Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation c. 1000 and Its Afterlife’, Speculum 75 (2000), 389–434. For a booklength discussion of the Stirps Jesse tradition, as played out within Germanic regions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Charles Edward Scillia, ‘The Textual and Figurative Sources of the Stirps Jesse in the First Half of

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based on Isaiah 11:1: ‘And a rod shall rise forth out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall come forth out of his rod’, had become part of an exegetical commonplace that recognised correlations between the flourishing ‘branch’ (virga) of male genealogical descent leading from Adam (via Jesse) to Christ (and something I discussed at the end of chapter one) and the flourishing womb of the Virgin (virga) in the type of semantic play so enjoyed by Hildegard, as discussed in chapter two. As such, the biblical verse was considered to be an early prediction of Christ’s virgin birth. Most usually represented via the typology of a tree emerging from a reclining Jesse’s side, however, what Sara Ritchey terms ‘this celebratory image … of fulfillment, marking the coming of Christ into the world via the branches of a great tree’,145 was rarely inscribed upon the Virgin Mary, whose divine child was seen as the end-point – and fruition – of the male genealogical ‘tree’. Mechthild, however, is assertive and confident in her transformation of this exegetical tradition into an image of female flourishing that recasts traditional androcentric imagery into the framework of an insistent ‘feminist theology’ that centres on Helfta itself: In santa nocte dum cantaretur: Stirps Jesse, vidit beatam Virginem in similitudinem arboris pulcherrimae super omnem terrae altitudinem et latitudinem extensae. Eratque arbor illa perspicua ut speculum perlucidum; folia habens aurea suavissiumum reddentia sonum. In cujus summitate flos deliciosissiumus erat, qui totum orbem contegebat, et odore mirifico respergebat. [On the holy night when the Stirps Jesse (The trunk of Jesse) is sung, she saw the blessed Virgin in the form of a beautiful tree, higher and broader than the whole earth. The tree was just as transparent as a luminous mirror, and its golden leaves made the loveliest sound. In its crown was a delicious flower that shaded the whole world and spread abroad an extraordinary fragrance.]146

the Twelfth Century with Special Reference to the Rhine Meuse Area’. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, PA, 1977. 145 Ritchey, Holy Matter, p. 19. 146 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxix, p.100 (Book, p. 105).

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While Mechthild’s lexis here is clearly lifted from the responsory itself,147 what is significant is that she appropriates and transforms it into a language of her own, merging it with her own freshly conceived hermeneutics of plant-grafting as a practice that also produces a new horticultural taxonomy. This she then deploys in her attempts to articulate the ultimately unspeakable mystical experience and complex theological insights they have relayed to her, echoing as she does Bachelard’s perception of the subterranean root as uterine and the flourishing branches as psychic and all-encompassing, cited above: ‘his (Christ’s) entire life was inscribed on the tree’ [‘tota conversatio ejus habebatur in arbore scripta’].148 Gertrude similarly presents her trees as a ‘language’ rooted within the body, linking it also to the nuptial poetics of the Song of Songs by presenting herself as a root grafted onto the ‘root’ of Christ’s side-wound as she unites with him. Redolent also with a powerful sexual charge, Gertrude’s grafted-self injects her arboreal hermeneutics with additional charge and potency: ipse amantissimus Jesus per vaporem amoris sui vulnerati Cordis eam sibi attrahere videbatur, et abluere in aqua inde profluneti, deinde irrigare ipsa in sanguine vivificante sui Cordis. Ad quod illa ex minutissimo carbone convalescens, crevit in viriditatem arboris …. Post haec dum illa corpus Christi sumpsisset, ut supra dictum est, animam suam, in similitudine arboris conspiceret radicem habere fixam in vulnere lateris Jesu Christi, per ipsum vulnus tanquam per radicem, novo quodam mirabili modo sentit se quasi per singulos ramos simul, et fructus, atque folia penetrari a virtute humanitatis simul et divinitatis. [Her most loving Jesus seemed to draw her toward himself by the breath of love of his pierced heart, and to wash her in the water flowing from it and then to sprinkle her with the life-giving blood of his heart. With this action, she began to revive … and grew into a green tree, whose branches were divided in three … Afterward, when she had received the body of Christ, she beheld her soul, as was said above, in the likeness of a tree fixing its roots in the wound of the 147 ‘Stirps Jesse virgam produxit, virgaque florem; et super hunc florem requiescit spiritus almus. Virgo Dei Genitrix virga est; flos, filius ejus’ [The tree of Jesse brought forth a rod, and the rod a flower; and upon this flower rests the Spirit. The rod is the Virgin, mother of God, the flower her son]. 148 Mechthild, Liber, I.ix, p. 30 (Book, p. 54).

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Here, however, we see Gertrude forging an image in which all these associations conglomerate to produce a language of flourishing that is able to express her fusion with God: by grafting herself onto Christ she not only perfects her own ‘root-stock’ but allows its shoots to emerge from the soil within which it has long been buried, producing in the process a ‘new’ language with which to articulate the hitherto inexpressible. Indeed, both the Legatus and the Liber, on the admission of their authors, frequently struggle with such inexpressibility, constrained as they are by the ‘old root’ language which initially presents as the only one available to them and which, in a woman’s hands, can prove particularly dangerous. As Gertrude confesses early in her text: pertractare coepi quam difficile vel etiam impossibile mihi foret, talem invenire sensum sive verba, quibus sine scandulo ad humanum intellectum saepe dicta produci possent. [I began to consider how difficult, not to say impossible, it would be for me to find the right expressions and words for all the things that were said to me, so as to make them intelligible on a human level without danger of scandal.]150

As she also admits, using a suitably vegetal metaphor: tam novella et tenera plantatio depressa succumbens nihil mihi imbibere potui ad profectum, exceptis quibusdam valde ponderosis verbis ad quae nequaquam sensuum intellectu pertingere praevalebam. [Like a young and tender plant, I felt myself now beaten down to the ground by the violence of the downpour. In my human misery, I could take in nothing of what was said, except for some particularly weighty words which I should never have been able to find for myself].151

But find the right expressions and words both they and their collaborators manage to do, no doubt from much of the conversational 149 Gertrude, Legatus, III. xviii, p. 152 (Herald, pp. 176–7). 150 Gertrude, Legatus, II.x, p. 79 (Herald, p. 109). 151 Gertrude, Legatus, II.x, p. 79 (Herald, pp. 109–10).

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theology enjoyed at the monastery, as they dig up and expose the ‘old root’ to offer an alternative language of flourishing that approximates on the link both women forge between the unconscious, the feminine and a mystical maternal God who is also father and spouse. Mechthild describes her own mystical union with Christ in very similar, sexually-infused terms in the Liber, drawing also upon powerful re-enactments of grafting that bring together all of the arboreal – and arborescent – poetics I have been examining here. In a highly dramatic and climactic encounter, Mechthild is invited by Christ to drink from the vine-tree rooted in the ‘garden’ of his sacred heart. In a deeply erotic, slow-moving narrative, she tells how she gently inclined her head to the mellifluous tendrils of his wound [‘vulnus melliflui’] and drank her fill thereof. Still unsatiated, she put her mouth to the vine again and ‘Ibi etiam de Corde Christi suavissimo esuxit fructum dulcissimum, quem assumens de Corde Dei in os suum posuit’ [‘there too she ate from the honeyed heart of Christ the sweetest fruit, which she took from God’s heart and put in her mouth’].152 Like Gertrude’s grafting narrative, the grape in Mechthild’s mouth, sucked from the tree rooted in Christ’s side, intensifies the arboreal, erotic charge, leading Christ to profess to Mechthild that the only fruit he has ever desired is her utter delight in him (‘tui delectamentum’) – that is to say, her mystical jouissance.153 This time, the sexual charge remains so present and so potent that for a moment it eludes all representation in language, drawing from Mechthild a primal utterance of abandon and returning its articulation to the choric realm she has momentarily unearthed: ‘Eia, eia: Amor, amor, amor!’ [Oh! Oh!: Love, love, love!’], she cries.154 This opening-up soon makes way for another type of outpouring: the source of her ecstasy, the divine lover himself, morphs from vine-tree, to fruit, to divine mother and, in his declaration to Mechthild, echoes Gertrude’s Christ in confirming the ‘roots’ of this complex conglomeration of hermeneutics as ultimately both matrixial and maternal: 152 Mechthild, Liber, II. xvi, pp. 150 (Book, pp. 128–9). 153 Mechthild, Liber, II. xvi, pp. 150 (Book, p. 129). 154 Mechthild, Liber, II. xvi, pp. 150 (Book, p. 129).

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The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary ‘Tu matrem tuam nominabas MINNE, et amor meus erit mater tua; et sicut filii sugunt matres suas, sic et tu ab ea suges internam consolationem, suavitatem inenarrabilem, et illa te cibabit et potabit ac vestiet, et omnibus necessitatibus tuis, velut mater filiam suam unicam, te procurabit.’ [‘You used to call your mother Minne – and my love will be your mother. Just as children suck their mothers’ breasts, you will suck inner consolation from her, unspeakable sweetness; and she will give you food and drink and clothing. In all your needs, she will take care of you as a mother does her only daughter.’]155

Here, Christ now explicitly conflates his own maternal status with the allegorical figure of Minne, mentioned earlier in this chapter, whom Mechthild inadvertently invokes again as she calls out in ecstasy. Earlier in the text, we encountered Minne as the greenclad Amor of Book One: ‘in specie virginis pulcherrimae viridi amictae pallio … accipiens Dominum in brachia sua’ [‘in the form of a beautiful virgin in a green mantle … taking the Lord in her arms’].156 Here too, this figure also manifests herself in the same terms as Hildegard’s materna viriditas;157 strong and strident she lifts Christ aloft in her powerful arms like the transubstantiated host and speaks to Mechthild from the subject-position of God: ‘Ego sum quae Filium de sinu Patris in terram adduxi, et nunc ipsum super omnes coelos coelorum exaltavi’ [‘It was I who brought the Son down to earth from the Father’s bosom, and now I have exalted him above all heavens’].158 Recalling the ‘leap of Love’ of the Incarnation, she now adopts a further role, in keeping with the etymology of her name, Minne, which, in Old Saxon could mean ‘love’, as well as ‘recollection’ or ‘memory’.159 Here 155 Mechthild, Liber, II. xvi, p. 150 (Book, p. 129). 156 Mechthild, Liber, I.xx, p. 71 (Book, pp. 83–4). Mechthild’s use of this vernacular term here may suggest the influence of Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose book was written in Middle High German. The Middle English translator of the Liber, operating in England at some point at the beginning of the fifteenth century, is clearly unfamiliar with this term, mistaking it for the Latin in me and translating it accordingly as ‘in me’ (‘Þou shalt nempne thy moder oonly in me’, Boke, fol. 61r). 157 Yoshikawa argues this same point in her introduction to Boke. 158 Mechthild, Liber, I.xx, p. 71 (Book, p. 84). 159 Friedrich Kluge, An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language (1891), trans John Francis Davis, s.v. Minne, p. 238. Online at: https://en.wikisource.

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this formidable, green and greening figure takes on full oversight and responsibility for the ‘rebirth’ of the entire Christian narrative, overlaying both God-the-Son and God-the-Father with the power of her maternal flourishing.

Conclusion This, perhaps, is the most confident moment within these texts of the ‘unearthing’ of the ‘old root’ long buried within the Christian narrative and, indeed, in their recalling of the ‘kind of feminine sexuality that might flourish outside of domestic relationships’ so perceptively reimagined by MacCannell.160 Indeed, long before the writings of Jantzen and Irigaray, such representations emerging from, and simultaneously articulating, a flourishing female imaginary constructed over decades at Helfta during the thirteenth century insist upon the place of the maternal and matrixial not only within Christ and the Helfta community, but within us all. In the hands of these women, moreover, human transcendence is only possible via this ‘arboresecent’ route: that is to say, via the transformed hermeneutics of the hortus conclusus once wrested free of its male-constructed walls. As such, as scholars are beginning to rediscover during the twenty-first century via the so-called ‘posthuman turn’, the idea of a botanical humanity was never merely a metaphor and the human ‘sharing of a cellular consciousness’ with plants never an absurdity.161 With much of their mystical insights focusing on a feminine Christ and his greening capacity within continually reworked matrixial garden settings, both Gertrude and Mechthild reveal, too, the arbitrary and reductive phallocentric underpinnings of language that have long served to keep Derrida’s ‘old root’ firmly org/wiki/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_German_Language/ Annotated/M_(full_text). Accessed March 20, 2020. For an in-depth discussion of the Incarnation as a ‘leap of Love’, see Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 160 MacCannell, ‘Landscape and the Unconscious’, p. 96. 161 Wampole, Rootedness, pp. 36–7.

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buried. By actively turning back towards Eden and the Song of Songs, and focusing inward towards their own Helfta community and each other, and by fully investing themselves in the reworked poetics of all these grafted and superimposed realms, the women of Helfta permitted the walled garden’s fruitful excesses to spill out into the everyday, escape their own boundaries and provide a language with which to describe the ineffable. The extent to which that same language of fruitfulness and excess infiltrated one of the most important poems of the late medieval English canon will be the subject of my next chapter.

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Plate 1. St Gall Map (ninth century), Codex Sangallensis 1092, f.r.

Plate 2. Reconstruction of the St Gall monastic precinct by J. Rudolf Rahn in Geschichte der Bildenden Künste in der Schweiz. Von den Ältesten Zeiten bis zum Schlusse des Mittelalters (Zürich 1876).

Plate 3. The Birth of Eve, Bible Moralisée.

Plate 4. Besloten hofje, Mechelen (Malines), Belgium.

Plate 5. Simone dei Crocefissi, ‘Il Sogno della Madonna’.

Plate 6. The Dreamer and the Pearl-Maiden.

4 Relocating Mechthild’s Garden Hermeneutics: The Middle English Poem Pearl I am holy Hysse. Hys prese, Hys prys, and Hys parage Is rote and grounde of all my blysse. [I am wholly His and His alone. His grace, His nobility and family line are the root and branch of all my bliss.]1

T

he late medieval poem Pearl, considered to have been written by an anonymous male author at the end of the fourteenth century, lays claim to hermeneutic patterns often identical to those I have identified in the previous chapter, particularly those presenting themselves as female-coded challenges to entrenched and ‘rooted’ exegetical traditions within necrophilic thought. In this chapter, I trace some of these compelling patterns and posit 1

Pearl in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 5th edn, 2007). All quotations will be taken from this edition, cited by line number (here at lines 418–20). All translations, unless otherwise stated, will be taken from Pearl, trans. Simon Armitage (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), cited by page number (here at p. 37). I have decided upon Armitage’s translation as the most appropriate for this chapter because of its sensitivity to the poem’s female-coded hermeneutic set and image patterns, as well as the complex entanglements of sound, rhyme, vocabulary and other poetics that deeply reflect those of the original poem, and, incidentally, much that I have been arguing in this book. In reading the poem’s Dreamer as the Pearl-Maiden’s father, I follow the prevalent reading in current scholarship, although other identifications continue to be proffered. See, for example, Cecilia A. Hatt, God and the Gawain Poet: Theology and Genre in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), who suggests the ambiguity of the Dreamer’s relation to the Pearl-Maiden can be explained by her being ‘a much younger sister’ (p. 17).

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the possibility that the Pearl-poet may well have been familiar with Mechthild’s work in some of its many manifestations and drew upon it in his construction of his own female-focused and femalecoded representation of the verdant route to the new Jerusalem. The words quoted above are spoken by the Pearl-Maiden to her earthly father towards the end of the poem and point not only towards her perspective on her newly transcendent status as sponsa Christi in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, but also to her entry into a holy lineage – Christ’s parage – that begins with Adam and his sons and culminates in the figure of Christ himself. Reminiscent of the genealogical trees we saw in the Auchinleck Life and the Canticum, as well as the enormous trees bearing saints and patriarchs rooted in Helfta’s church, within the medieval imaginary this lineage was traditionally patriarchal and articulated visually by means of the binary ‘arborescent schema’ of the so-called Tree of Jesse.2 As we have also seen, this tree was often depicted as having its roots buried within the soil of Adam’s burial or, sometimes, rooted in his breast or under his tongue, and always ready for its re-emergence at Golgotha as the reborn Tree of Life. As such, as Warren Ginsberg has pointed out, the term parage is, on the surface of it, a male-inflected term that is multi-evocative of the bounded Garden of Eden with its ‘rooted’ trees of knowledge grasping at its soil. In addition, it substitutes for the equally ‘bounded’ line of patrilinear descent directly from Adam to Christ.3 As already suggested, however, this apparently male line of descent and its gestational associations were also linked to the ‘womb’ in Adam’s side: that is, the site of Eve’s birth. In Mechthild’s writing, however, this is memorably depicted on one occasion as also emerging directly from the ‘root’ of the 2

3

The term ‘arborescent schema’ is taken from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s discussions of ‘the rhizome’ as affording a more appropriate metaphorical system within human culture than ‘the root’, in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London and New York: Continuum Books, 1987). The concept of arborescence is something I deal with later in this chapter. Warren Ginsberg examines Pearl alongside Dante’s Paradiso, focusing in particular upon the conflation of place and the subject in ‘Place and Dialectic in Pearl and Dante’s Paradiso’, ELH 55.4 (1988), 731–53 (743). The MED defines parage variously as: s.v. 1(a) descent, lineage; parentage; heritage; rank; and 2(b) a tenure of inherited land held by right of equality of blood or rank. Both branches of meanings come into play here.

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Virgin’s womb.4 The parage, therefore, is both the site of a female bodily erasure that obliterates both the maternal and the natal but is also the arboreal locus where a female hermeneutic recuperation may be staged – in Mechthild’s Liber in terms of the Virgin’s matrixial tree; in Pearl as the bleeding, vaginal wound of Christ-as-Lamb with which the Dreamer’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem culminates.5 As in Mechthild’s text, such staging is, moreover, dependent upon the various garden settings within the poem, including the heavenly Jerusalem as ‘a locus [that] has as much poetic power as the garden’.6 Indeed, this matrixial element is something that has been recognised by Ritchey, who argues for the tree of sacred genealogy as providing a ‘cognitive map’ for ‘conforming the individual self to [Christ]’.7 However, as Ritchey also points out, this map is somewhat spurious in the light of the ‘shared being’ and associated disruption of hierarchy frequently proffered by its ‘arboreal meditation’ in many medieval texts.8 While Ritchey is primarily concerned with mystical and devotional treatments of the image rather than secular ones, in Pearl we witness both hermeneutic sets operating at the same time – what Sarah Stanbury has termed a ‘crisis of fusion and separation’ – that serve initially to draw the reader into the same visionary frame as the poem’s secular Dreamer, but which ultimately effect a transference of perspective from his earthly sight to the divine insight of the lost-and-found daughter as transcendent Pearl-Maiden.9 Indeed, the Dreamer’s inability to transcend 4 5

6 7 8 9

Mechthild, Liber, I.xxix, p.100 (Book, p. 105). For my earlier discussion of this episode, see p. 187, note 144, above. Rosalind Field focuses on the representation of the lamb’s bleeding wound in ‘The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl’, The Modern Language Review 81.1 (1986), 7–17. While Field does not read the Lamb’s wound necessarily as vaginal, she does point out the mistaken view of the Dreamer when he reads this wound as a ‘blemish’ of imperfection (15). But see Amy Hollywood, ‘That Glorious Slit: Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ’s Side Wound’, in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of History, ed. Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2004.), pp. 105–25, for a discussion of Christ’s wound as vaginal. Field, ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’, p. 16. Sara Ritchey, ‘Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8.1 (2008), 64–82 (74). Ritchey, ‘Spiritual Arborescence’, p. 82, n. 36 (original emphasis). Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain Poet: Description and the Art of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 33.

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his own earth-bound rootedness in the face of his extraordinary visionary experience provides one of the most arresting instances of such double-vision in the poem; a double-vision, moreover, that is generative of the same hermeneutic framework of female-coded flourishing as we witnessed in the Helfta texts.10 Thus, as Mechthild has shown by means of her uterine trees, if Christ is rooted in the parage of Adam’s side, so too the Virgin, as his earthly mother and ‘second Eve’, constitutes that same site of enclosure. In turn, this same overlaying and union facilitates the full becoming of the Pearl-Maiden as Christ’s ‘quen þat watz so ȝonge’ [‘queen while so young in years’]11 within this now recuperated lineage that Ritchey identifies as a multi-gendered ‘spiritual arborescence’. This arborescence, therefore, is not the male-coded logic of the genealogical tree, but one that is female-coded, generated by the Maiden and the discourses of flourishing that characterise her and ultimately shaping the spirituality at the heart of the poem. In this way, along with the other ‘virgynez … /Hundreth þowsandez’ [‘virgins … a hundred thousand’],12 who join her in the heavenly Jerusalem (and 10 Again, Stanbury’s examination focuses on what she terms the ‘ocular hermeneutic’ of the poem within which we, as readers, are invited to share in different, and ultimately convergent lines of sight that alternate between wide panoramas and intimate detail. In this sense, the Pearl-poet emulates those ‘double-vision’ techniques of Mechthild of Hackeborn, whose celestial visions and heavenly panoramas often emerge from small material details within her own lived environment. Indeed, such dilatory ocular imagery is common within mystical writings, embedded particularly in the writing of the Pearl-poet’s contemporary, Julian of Norwich, who similarly overlays the specific and miniature with the infinite and universal. For a discussion of this, see Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Julian of Norwich’s “Modernist” Style and the Creation of Audience’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 139–53; and Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘“For we be double in God’s making”: Writing, Gender and the Body in Julian of Norwich’, in the same volume, pp. 166–80 11 Pearl, line 473 (trans. p. 40). 12 Pearl, line 1098 and line 1107 (trans. p. 94 and p. 95). Here and elsewhere, too, the heavenly virgins are referred to as ‘mayden(n)ez’, a term that Andrew and Waldron argue ‘was probably intended to include men and women’ (Pearl, p. 94, note on line 869). As they also point out, the procession in Pearl is based on that of Revelation 14:1–5, in which the multitude is clearly made up of 144,000 male virgins, since ‘These are they who were not defiled with women: for they are virgins’ (14:4). The fact the Pearl-author alters both the number and the sex of his processional participants supports my assertion that he deliberately feminises the heavenly realm and its dynastic associations.

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who, unlike the virgins of the grand-narrative Book of Revelation, are all female),13 the Pearl-Maiden is able to disrupt and feminise the patriarchal parage by transforming Christ into the ‘rote and grounde of alle my blysse’ as well as the ‘rote and grounde’ of the other hundred thousand female virgins in the heavenly procession.14 This, indeed, is a heaven where the sisterhood-in-Christ is fully at home in its own multiplicity and in its flourishing union with this ‘complexly gendered’ Lamb.15 Indeed, as Stanbury asserts in an argument pertinent to what I will be suggesting in this present chapter, the pearly fleece of the Lamb in Pearl links it directly to the lost child of the poem’s origins and its bleeding wound articulates a fusion between this and other ‘feminized and maternal bodies, such as the body of Christ’. For Stanbury, the female-coded wound of the Lamb is therefore the mark of the mother ‘as the first prohibition and the first loss’,16 a theme underwriting the entire poem, if, indeed, the ‘body of the woman’ is what sustains male discourse and the subjectivities it generates, as I have been arguing so far. In Middle English, one of the terms used to denote this type of mystical fusion with the divine is the noun unioun (itself a translation of the Latin noun unio), denoting variously ‘the state of matrimony’; ‘the marriage of Christ and the Church’; or even ‘the mystical union of the soul with God’.17 Indeed, it is a term selected by the Middle English translator of Mechthild’s Liber in a passage describing the visionary’s own flowing into Christ and fusion with him in love: ‘In þis unyon þe soule was nouȝtid in hersilf, that is to sey felt nouȝt of herself.’18 More pertinently, however, the term was also sometimes used to refer to a pearl, especially one noted 13 For a discussion of Revelation as source for Pearl, including medieval Apocalypses and their iconographic representations, again see Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain Poet, pp. 24–31. 14 Revelation 22:16 also uses the root metaphor, reading: ‘I am the root and stock of David, the bright and morning star.’ 15 Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Body and the City in Pearl’, Representations 48 (1994), 30–47 (41). 16 Stanbury, ‘The Body and the City’, 41. 17 MED, s.v. unio unioun (3a and 3b). 18 Mechthild, Boke, II.xix, fol. 61v (my emphasis). In typical prolix fashion, this translates the Latin ‘in hac unione’ in Liber, II.xvii, p. 152.

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for its great size and uniqueness, supplanting the more frequently used terms perle or margarita, and very often associated with the Virgin.19 In one of the popular bestiaries of the period, for instance, the unioun pearl is directly associated with both the Virgin and the Tree of Jesse, and thus functions as a metaphor for the enclosed purity of his (and her) parage. As the entry reads: ‘Lapis … figuram gerit sancta Marie, de qua prophetavit Isaias dicens: “Exiet virga de radice Jesse” [‘The stone (pearl) … symbolizes Saint Mary, of whom Isaiah foretold, saying: “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse”’].20 In other earlier traditions, the pearl signified the divine Word, presenting itself as an image of Christ himself.21 Built into the conceptual and etymological framework of the poem, then, as well as into the Pearl-Maiden’s personal identity as a flourishing tree rooted in the soil (or ‘clay’) of Christ’s side, is an ontology of union that is always already predicated on a pure, rounded, femalecoded body. Indeed, as we shall see, it is significant that, in the 19 Latin Dictionary Online, s.v. unio 1 and 2: https://www.online-latin-dictionary. com/. Accessed 25 April 2018. This is confirmed by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), where he asserts in his Etymologies, ‘a certain pearl is called a unio, an apt name because only one (unus) is found at a time’: The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 324. The fact that the term is used in the same chapter as the account of Mechthild’s being drawn by Christ to suckle from his bleeding side like a baby is also significant to the image set conglomerating at this point in the poem. 20 The Aberdeen Bestiary, fol. 96r. Available online at: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/ bestiary/. Accessed 26 April 2018. 21 Some of these traditions, although apocryphal, were nevertheless extant throughout the Middle Ages. For example, embedded within the apocryphal Acts of Thomas is to be found the ‘Hymn of the Pearl’, a poetic Gnostic retelling of the apocryphal journey of Thomas to Egypt in search of the mystical Pearl, written in Old Syriac. This poem, written in the first person from Thomas’s perspective, most likely by the Gnostic poet Bardaisian (d. 222), tells of Thomas’s pilgrimage to Egypt to find the pearl of great price. Upon seizing it, he undergoes a mystical experience in which ‘I saw it in all of me, / And saw me in all of it – / That we were twain in distinction / And yet again one in one likeness.’ See ‘The Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostle in the Country of the Indians’, trans. G. R. S. Mead, verse XVI, The Gnostic Society Library: Gnostic Scriptures and Fragments: Available at: http://gnosis.org/library/ hymnpearl.htm. Accessed 16 March 2020. I am grateful to John Herbert for pointing me towards this reference. Interestingly, Sarah Stanbury also reads Pearl as a pilgrimage narrative and a ‘work of travel literature’ in Seeing the Gawain Poet, p. 13.

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chapter immediately following this discussion of mystical union in the Liber, Mechthild moves on rapidly to a depiction of the virtues of the saints and their tears cast in terms of margarita pearls.22 As I shall argue, such resonance is anything but coincidental. In Pearl the Maiden is freighted with all these entangled associations in ways Newman has rightly identified as ‘brilliantly overdetermined’.23 Such excess, however, the Dreamer cannot begin to comprehend, not even in the visionary realm when its flourishing is presented explicitly before his eyes. As such, the Pearl-Maiden’s position within the poem’s own structurally bounded parage is re-coded in ways that trouble traditional notions of virginal purity, unbroken patriarchal lines of descent and the confident idea of their rootedness within patriarchal genealogy.24 Indeed, such troubling extends far beyond the image of the patriarchal tree I have been discussing here; it is a troubling born out of what I shall argue is a far-reaching affinity with the type of flourishing hermeneutics so prevalent within the Helfta writings, but in the Liber of Mechthild of Hackeborn in particular, whose writings had long been popular in European circles by the time the Pearl-poet was operating at the end of the fourteenth century.25 In this chapter, 22 I will return to a full discussion of this resonance between the two texts later in this chapter. 23 Barbara Newman, ‘The Artifice of Eternity: Speaking of Heaven in Three Medieval Poems’, in Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Meussig and Ad Putter (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 185–206 (p. 201). 24 As many critics have pointed out, the poetic concatenation, equal number of stanzas in each part, and cyclical structure of each stanza, combine to offer the effect of a poem that ends where it begins, with the stanzas threaded together like a necklace of pearls. See, for example Sarah Stanbury’s introduction to the TEAMS edition of Pearl, ed. Sarah Stanbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Online at: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/text/stanbury-pearl-introduction. Accessed March 18, 2020. Cecelia A. Hatt, however, reads the pearl-poem-artifact dynamic as a monstrance of the type ‘frequently carried and seen in public processions … during the fourteenth century’, in God and the Gawain Poet, p. 21. 25 Susanna Fein has dated the poem to the 1380s, based on an analysis of its balladic form. Stanbury, however, considers this too early, suggesting a more likely date as being closer to 1400 as the terminus ad quem for MS Cotton Nero A.x, the only extant manuscript copy but not the original autograph. See Susanna Greer Fein, ‘Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date of Pearl’, Speculum 72 (1997), 367–97 (393); and Stanbury, ‘Introduction’, as before (n.p).

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therefore, I read the Liber and Pearl alongside one another and, in so doing, suggest a spectral intertextuality between them that has not been seriously considered to date.26 Rootedness and Buried Bodies in Pearl The phallic associations of patriarchal lineage with the ‘rod’ and ‘stem’ of Jesse into which the pearl ‘rooted’ in the earth is swept up in the poem, ostensibly present a grand narrative of salvation written along male lines. As we have already seen, moreover, within such grand narratives the ‘old root’ of patriarchy is always already dependent upon the body of a woman buried beside it upon whose silenced flesh it feeds. This buried woman’s body is realised literally in Pearl, of course; indeed, in some ways, the poem is all about a longed-for unearthing of that female body and the generation of new meaning when, reanimated, she raises her own voice to speak. Such a reading is again confirmed by Stanbury, who suggests that mourning and female loss are pivotal for ‘understanding the transformations of Pearl’ and, moreover, ‘Pearl effects from the very beginning an extraordinary transference of grief and nostalgia onto a memorial image.’27 Nevertheless, in spite of these plot-devices that seemingly fetishise the female body and appear to be dependent upon the male gaze, from the outset the Pearl-Maiden is wholly resistant to the type of patriarchal interpellation and inscription enacted upon her by her grieving father as he revisits the location of her burial.28 In the Dreamer’s eyes, the dead, buried child is his ‘priuy perle withouten spotte’ [‘priceless pearl without a spot’], and ‘wonder perle withouten wemme’ [‘pearl … / burnished 26 Although, as pointed out, Stanbury reads Pearl as fundamentally ‘an allegorical fiction’ and ‘a work of travel literature’ (Seeing the Gawain Poet, p. 12 and p. 13), she is nevertheless sensitive to its possible visionary influences in her identification of it as ‘a visual apotheosis that imitates a vision’ (p. 13). Here, she brings to bear upon the Pearl-poet a likely influence of the ‘mystical itineraries’ of Hugh of St Victor and Bonaventure, for example, but overlooks the type of influence wrought upon late-medieval English writings by visionary women from the continent such as Mechthild. 27 Stanbury, ‘The Body and the City’, 38. 28 Again, Stanbury points out the poem’s resistance to closure in ‘The Body and the City’, 37.

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and unblemished’],29 but he also conceives of her as rooted in his own genealogical line, likening her to the seeds (‘graynez’) buried in the earth of his own parage as well as the precious pearl he has lost in the soil of the erbere.30 In addition to feeling the loss of his daughter acutely, therefore, he is also mindful of the loss of his own seminal and dynastic potential that plays into, and thus augments, his grief and desolation. When he encounters her in his ensuing dream-vision, therefore, he is unable to conceive of her as operating outside these earthly, patriarchal parameters – a lack of vision that is framed in terms of an intensely articulated subject-position pronouncement dominated by personal pronouns that narrate his own individual loss. As such the lost girl becomes mere adjunct to the ‘we’ into which the Dreamer’s ‘I’ lapses at the end of the stanza, rather than a reflection of a familial union: ‘O, perle’, quoþ I, ‘in perlez pyȝt, Art þou my perle þat I haf playned, Regretted by myn one on nyȝte? Much longeyng haf I for þe layned, Syþen into gresse þou me aglyȝte. Pensyf, payred, I am forpayned, And þou in a lyf of lykyng lyȝte, In paradys erde, of stryf vnstrayned. What Wyrde hatz hyder my juel vayned, And don me in þys del and gret daunger? Fro we in twynne wern towen and twayned, I haf ben a joylez juelere.’ [‘Oh, pearl, in those priceless pearls’, I said, ‘are you really my pearl, whose passing I mourn, and grieve for alone through lonely nights? Endless sorrow I have suffered and endured since you slipped from my grasp to the grassy earth; I am hollow with loss and harrowed by pain, Yet here you stand, lightened of all strife,

29 Pearl, line 12 etc.; and line 221 (trans. p. 3 and p. 21). 30 Pearl, line 31(trans. p. 5. Armitage prefers ‘grains’ over ‘seeds’ for his translation here). The seed as synonym for genealogical offspring is used again in the poem Cleanness, line 660, this time associated with the postmenopausal Sarah of Genesis 17–21, who ‘laughed behind the door of the tent’ (18:10) at God’s decree that she should become pregnant with Isaac at the age of ninety.

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What the Dreamer fails in his grief to envisage, is that it is God, rather than random fate, who has ‘taken’ his child.32 Nor can he conceive that, like Derrida’s buried woman, the seemingly dead ‘seed’ is entirely capable, under the right conditions, of flourishing into new life; of pushing head above soil; of being re-encountered as if for the first time; and thus of forging a cluster of entirely new identities free from the restrictive gender binary. What the Dreamer is unable to ‘see’ at this point, therefore, is that the lost pearl was never his in the first place and therefore never his to possess. Indeed, this is something hinted at very early in the poem where, though still buried, the girl’s body reflects an already divine light back on its surroundings of dirt and decay. As such, not in spite of, but by means of its apparent abjection, it is intrinsically generative of the conditions necessary for such flourishing: Þat spot of spysez mot nedez sprede, Þer such rychez to rot is runne; Blomez blayke and blewe and rede Þer schynez ful schyr agayn þe sunne. Flor and fryte may not be fede Þer hit doun drof in moldez dunne, For vch gresse mot grow of graynez dede; No whete were ellez to wonez wonne. Of goud vche goude is ay bygone: So semly a sede moȝt fayly not, Þat spryngande spycez vp ne sponne Of þat precios perle wythouten spotte. [Spices must thrive and spread in that spot where rot and ruin enrich the soil; blooms of white and blue and red 31 Pearl, lines 241–52 (my emphases; trans. p. 23). 32 Andrew and Waldron point out that, at this point, the Dreamer is also sounding ‘injured and self-pitying’ and that, for the Pearl-Maiden, ‘Wyrd’ is more aligned to the power of Providence than fate (Pearl, p. 66, commentary on lines 241–52).

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The Middle English Poem Pearl turn shining faces towards the sun. Flower and fruit could never fade where my pearl entered the dark earth; grasses must grow from lifeless grains or wheat would never be brought to the barn. For goodness out of goodness is born, and such a seed couldn’t fail to root nor splendid spices sprout and shoot from that precious pearl without a spot.]33

Here, the nourishing rays emanating from the lost pearl as its body decays in the earth and the sunlight it reflects during that process recall those sunlight hermeneutics very often found in Mechthild’s writing as she seeks to articulate her visionary theology via similar images of Christ with golden sunrays emanating from his face or heart within an enclosed garden setting.34 On one occasion, for example, Mechthild tells how Christ appeared to her in the transformed choir with the beams from his face illuminating all the Helfta nuns. As he explains to her from his throne of precious stones situated on a flowery mountainside: Sol etiam omnia fructificare facit: sic mea praesentia animam virtuosam efficit et in bonis operibus fructuosam. Est etiam illuminans: sic omnem ad me venientem lumine divinae cognitionis illustro. [The sun makes everything fruitful; so my presence makes a soul virtuous and fruitful in good works. The sun also illuminates; so I illumine everyone who comes to me with the light of divine knowledge.]35

On another occasion – this time on Easter Sunday, the culminating moment of Christian renewal and rebirth – Mechthild is herself filled with the light of the Holy Spirit, which she then refracts outwards to effect a flourishing for all those for whom she has been praying: ‘repleta de omnibus membris suis igneos radios progredi vidit, it ut quilibet eorum pro quo oraverat radium ex ea in se 33 Pearl, lines 25–36 (trans. p. 5). 34 While this is very reminiscent of the description of the divine visage in Revelation 1:16, Newman also sees in it a parallel with the description of the divine feast in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, where a shining relic also provides an abundant supply of food and drink (Book, p. 256, n. 24). 35 Mechthild, Liber, I.iv, p. 13 (Book, p. 42).

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susciperet’ [‘she saw fiery rays streaming from all her limbs, so that everyone for whom she had prayed received a ray from her’]. Such an emanation of light results in her heart melting ‘velut massam auri’ [‘like a single mass of gold’] into the heart of God, to which it will be allowed to cling forever.36 Such sentiments regarding an autonomous female flourishing by means of a receptivity to both body and spirit rather than to mere discourse and ideology, again forms a powerful hermeneutic within Pearl, where the PearlMaiden unearths herself to rise and shine forth in ways that are wholly unanticipated by – and ultimately incomprehensible to – the dogma-bound Dreamer-Father.37 In her focus on the concept of rootedness as central to human thought, Wampole has recently asserted that ‘[m]etaphysical ascension requires an immovable and nourishing ground from which to begin,’ adding that, ‘To imagine humans as rooted, one must imagine the person as a plant.’38 Whilst Wampole does not pursue the specifically gendered assumptions about how this notion plays out within western thought, other commentators, such Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray, have further explored the implications of the type of ‘vegetal being’ imbricated in the person-as-plant metonymic system.39 Here, both commentators recognise not only its inherency within patriarchal philosophical contexts, but also the possibilities it houses for fracturing the hegemony of such contexts via the notion of what Irigaray terms ‘efflorescence’ as part of a fluid and cyclical (rather than linear) ‘becoming’ that is enacted from seed to the plant’s floral transcendence. Efflorescence is a term, therefore, that for Irigaray articulates a form of female-coded flourishing that refuses both essentialism and stasis and, as such, can serve to disrupt a frozen or fetishised idea of the ‘other’ that is so

36 Mechthild, Liber, I.xix, p. 70 (Book, p. 83). 37 On this issue, Hatt argues that the Dreamer ‘already knows the substance of what the poem teaches’, although he still appears to have a ‘resistance to instruction’ (God and the Gawain Poet, p. 20). 38 Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), p. 76. 39 Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

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inextricably bound up with the derogation and control of women.40 Such a model, therefore, also equates with – and develops further – Jantzen’s concept of a flourishing that has the potential to form the basis of a new, female-coded religious imaginary, as discussed in my previous chapter. Read in these terms, rather than being mere vessel within the Dreamer’s patriarchal lineage, as Christ’s sponsa in heaven, the ‘flowering’ of the ‘seed’ of the Pearl-Maiden adheres closely to such hermeneutics, whilst eliciting, too, very close parallels with the affirmative poetics of flourishing so inherent to Mechthild’s Liber. There, as we have seen, Mechthild continually depicts herself as rooted in, grafted onto, growing out of, or feeding off Christ’s body as a means of articulating a female-coded metaphysics of divine love and union. What these texts have in common, therefore, is a poetics that breaks down traditional male-coded theological and genealogical precepts by unearthing a suppressed – or buried – female imaginary based on vegetal being to express what has been occluded within the patriarchal grand narrative.41 Nor do such female-coded epistemologies constitute an essentialist woman-equals-nature paradigm; instead they offer up the possibility of an alternative imaginary, based on shared origins and becomings that are released from the cultural shackles of patriarchal shaping and control that seek to police or eliminate such origins and becomings as part of a threatening ‘other’. Discourses of flourishing and vegetal being, common to both texts, thus posit wider possibilities 40 See Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 31–5. For a helpful analysis of this philosophy in the context of a wider discussion of philosophies of the natural world, see Elaine P. Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy to Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), especially p. 195. 41 Irigaray’s observations in her conversation with Marder in Through Vegetal Being are particularly pertinent here, where she states: ‘It is really surprising that it has not been possible, at least in our tradition, to harmonize the power of nature with the divine power. This has divided us into a natural part and a spiritual part, instead of working on a solution of continuity between the two parts, which is absolutely crucial to accomplishing our human life’ (p. 35). In both the Liber and Pearl, such dualism is disrupted to create a continuity between body and soul, the flesh and the spirit. In Pearl, it is the complex figure of the pearl in the garden (and Pearl in the Garden), that is central to forging the new, disruptive imaginary Irigaray calls for in all her work.

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for a becoming that involves the restructuring and reworking of traditional symbols to allow them to speak in new and illuminating ways – and in harmony with the human with whom they share that becoming. In this sense, in Pearl the much overlooked parage cited at the start of this chapter may masquerade as patronymic lineage, with its intimations of orderly enclosure and linearity, but, for both Adam and the Dreamer, it culminates in a divine woman emerging within it to challenge the ‘old root’ hegemony of patriarchal thought: first in an earthly erbere and then in a paradisal garden that is both the recaptured Eden and the hortus conclusus of Mary’s womb. As ‘pryuy perle’ [‘precious pearl’], simultaneously abject, rooted and divine,42 the Pearl-Maiden incrementally accrues all these significations as the poem takes its course. As mentioned above, the extent of the resonance between Mechthild’s Liber and Pearl has been largely overlooked, not least because of historical difficulties in accessing Mechthild’s writing, whether in its original Latin or its Middle English translation.43 Indeed, Ginsberg has not been alone in missing such correlation, like most critics turning instead to Dante’s Paradiso to uncover trajectories of direct influence upon Pearl.44 When read through the lens of flourishing, efflorescence and other forms of ‘vegetal being’, however, irresistible resonances between these texts are unearthed, not the least in their shared use of female-coded horticultural hermeneutics connected to gardens, plants and trees that present an entirely ‘other’ way of seeing God’s plan for humankind and the inherent flourishing that this entails. 42 Pearl, line 12 (trans. p. 4. Andrew and Waldron gloss pryuy as ‘special’ on p. 339). This term forms part of the concatenation in the first part of the poem, where it is repeated five times. 43 See p. 148, note 21, above. 44 Besides Ginsberg, see, for example, Priscilla Martin’s suggestion of this line of influence in ‘Allegory and Symbolism’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 315–28 (p. 315). More concertedly, Barbara Newman has pointed out ‘some tantalizing affinities’ between Pearl and Dante’s Divina Commedia in ‘The Artifice of Eternity’, p. 186. See also Newman’s reassertion of this possibility in Book, pp. 28–9, and her fuller treatment of it in ‘The Seven-Storey Mountain: Mechthild of Hackeborn and Dante’s Matelda’, Dante Studies 136 (2018), 62–92.

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Also shared explicitly by both works is a complex dialogic interrogation – and deep revelation – of the intricate hermeneutic entanglement of those maternal, natal and horticultural femininities examined in my previous chapters, again articulated via strange encounters within visionary gardens that dominate the spiritual and physical topography. In both texts, too, we find a once flesh-and-blood, but now transcendent woman devising and defining her own exegetical idiom within a language of flourishing. And, whilst originally speaking to two separate cultures, at the time of Pearl’s composition, those cultures had nevertheless begun to enter into a concerted spiritual dialogue with one another by means of a mystical theology predicated on feminine (or, at least female-coded) principles. As Yoshikawa and I have argued elsewhere, Mechthild’s Liber, as the only Helfta text to have been translated into Middle English, became one of the late medieval European ‘best sellers’, inserting its spectral intertextual presence and influence into any number of fifteenth-century devotional texts and anthologies in England, and helping ultimately to shape The Book of Margery Kempe, in particular.45 Moreover, as Newman has asserted of the many transcendent goddess-figures like the PearlMaiden, so popular within high and late medieval literary contexts: ‘[they] open, and thrive within, a comparatively safe space for the imaginative exploration of Christian faith.’46 In both the Liber and Pearl, this ‘safe space’ can be literalised as a series of overlaid, physically bounded – but metaphysically boundless – gardens, which seduce the onlooker with a recognisable place of engagement, a topos, but which then leads them insistently – but not always willingly – towards comprehension of the ineffable, what Ginsberg defines as a topic, via an increasingly fluid, labile and immaterial

45 See Liz Herbert McAvoy and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe: An Intertextual Conversation’, Spicilegium 4 (2021), 1–18; and ‘The Intertextual Dialogue and Conversational Theology of Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe’, in Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Laura Kalas and Laura Varnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021 forthcoming). 46 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 49.

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dissolution of fixed points and immutable binary opposition.47 As I shall demonstrate, such compelling textual resonances thus belie the common insistence that Dante’s Purgatorio was the most likely primary source for Pearl – a suggestion, of course, that has fitted neatly into traditional narratives of one male canonical poet drawing upon another to create yet another work of male ‘genius’. However, if we consider the likelihood that both Dante and the Pearl-poet were familiar with, and drew upon, Mechthild’s Liber in a variety of forms, such resonances become more triangular and nuanced, carrying far deeper implications: not only for a reappraisal of the centrality of visionary women’s spirituality within late-medieval socio-religious culture but also to our understanding of the intertextual foundations of the medieval canon itself.48

Dante’s Purgatorio and the Liber That Dante knew Mechthild’s writing is almost certainly the case. The primary evidence for this, however, lies not in the figure of Beatrice as his insightful and transcendent spiritual guide, as has most often been posited, but by his secondary female guide – and Mechthildian namesake – the all-singing-and-dancing Matelda, a goddess-like figure who emerges at the end of the Purgatorio where the poet-narrator happens upon her in what is clearly the garden of the earthly paradise.49 Here, like Beatrice, Matelda performs the 47 Drawing on Aristotelian and Ciceronian observations about the dynamics of dialogic argumentation as rooted in place, Ginsberg makes the perceptive point about the conflation of topos and topic that ‘each place has in it its own incipient argument. Within the potency of every scene is a why and a how, which may attend whatever deed has been, will be, or is being done in it’ (‘Place and Dialectic’, p. 735). 48 In a recent journal article, Roberta Magnani and I have argued for Chaucer’s familiarity with the writings of continental holy women such as Mechthild, that underpin aspects of his own writing. See Roberta Magnani and Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘What Is a Woman? Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 42 (2020), 311–24. 49 Quotations from both the original and in translation will be taken from the ‘Digital Dante’ online edition and translation, cited by Canto and line number. Online at: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/. Accessed 19 March 2020. Here Purgatorio, 28.

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role of one of the several goddess-figures in the wider Commedia who operate as spiritual guide to the poet as he approaches Paradise and, as Newman has posited, may well have been placed there by Dante because he was familiar with ‘the paradisal aesthetics of her Book’.50 It is Matelda, moreover who will mediate most concertedly between the textual Dante and the final flourishing he hopes to find in Paradise. Upon her first appearance to Dante, Matelda is likened by the poet to Proserpina and Venus, not only because of her youth and beauty, but also because of her association with the fertile garden of the earthly paradise out of which she emerges. Matelda’s goddess-like status is therefore quickly consolidated in the text. She is quite simply entrancing: a feast for Dante’s gaze, a portal for divine knowledge, food for his poetic aspirations, facilitator of his poetic inspirations: una donna soletta che si gia e cantando e scegliendo fior da fiore ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via. […] e piede innanzi piede a pena mette, volsesi in su i vermigli e in su i gialli fioretti verso me, non altrimenti che vergine che li occhi onesti avvalli; [I saw a solitary woman moving, singing, and gathering up flower on flower – the flowers that colored all of her pathway. … and scarcely lets one foot precede the other, so did she turn, upon the little red and yellow flowers, to me, no differently than would a virgin, lowering chaste eyes.]51

Soon, however, having established her affinity with the female-coded environment of her garden setting, where she insouciantly sings and dances che vergine, the poet also aligns the flourishing Matelda with divine authority: like God’s breathing of life into Eden, so Matelda’s 50 Newman, ‘Introduction’, in Book, pp. 28–9. 51 Dante, Purgatorio, 28. 40–57.

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words in response to the incessant questioning of Dante during the encounter will be like seeds blown hither and thither by the ‘living air’ [‘l’aere vivo’] of the ethereal realm; but, as Matelda aptly predicts, rather than consolidating within the earth, the ‘seeds’ will ‘extend beyond my promise’ [‘oltre promession … spazia’].52 As does ‘Dante’ in his initial vision of Matelda, it is easy to read the all singing-dancing-laughing Matelda in terms of a traditional female archetype of patriarchal imagining – that is as a type of idealised hetaira, who serves primarily as a male-oriented figure constructed to promote hegemonic agenda and ideology and who is, therefore, ultimately removed from the type of flourishing promoted by Jantzen and Irigaray.53 Indeed, as Irigaray claims in her own appraisal of such fetishised male constructs of divine women, they only serve to ‘[c]ut me off from the soil which gives me birth’, ultimately ensuring that a woman’s access to ‘efflorescence’ can only be sustained by the strength of male desire.54 Elsewhere, Irigaray has also asserted that such literary female archetypes emerge from a male imaginary shaped by a longstanding and – to her mind – utterly destructive and pathological rejection of humankind’s maternal and natal origins (‘the soil’) by patriarchal cultures. Such rejection, in turn, has resulted in an overwhelming sense of loss and a futile attempt at finding compensation in the promulgating of discourses of the ‘hero’s’ happy return to the (M)other in any given narrative. For Irigaray and others like her, then, the literary goddess-figure, such as Matelda, can be read as an appropriation and assimilation into discourse par excellence of a female divine harnessed and reshaped by the male imaginary to articulate the hoped-for return from exile to a paradise regained: ‘the mystery of life, its growth, its flowering, its reproduction’.55 Here, then, the first reaction of ‘Dante’ to Matelda is, like the Dreamer’s to his newly materialised daughter in Pearl, to essentialise her and ‘fix’ her within such patriarchal narrative via his

52 Dante, Purgatorio, 28.107 and 138. 53 On the figure of the hetaira, see Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 13–16; 75–7; and 89–91. 54 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34. 55 Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), here at p. 40 and p. 94.

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gaze (she is Proserpina or Venus).56 As such, the perspectives of both Dante and the Dreamer produce what Irigaray has identified as ‘[a] flower cut off from itself … by the erectness of the gaze’,57 in Dante’s configuration made clear by his gazing upon a woman who is also ‘erect …/ her hands entwining varicolored flowers’ [‘dritta/ trattando più color con le sue mani’].58 Nevertheless, as Matelda leads and instructs him on all that he fails to understand within the paradisal garden, eventually he comes to ‘see’ her differently, abandoning the empiricism of his gaze for an inner comprehension or ‘insight’, based on a metonymy of flourishing that mirrors exactly the Irigarayan notion of efflorescence discussed above. Only then is the poet fit to cross the stream to the other side and undergo the figurative baptism that involves a new way of viewing the world, as Dante admits to Matelda: ‘L’acqua … e ’l suon de la foresta impugnan dentro a me novella fede di cosa ch’io udi’ contraria a questa.’ [‘The water and the murmuring forest contend, in me, against the recent credence I gave to words denying their existence.’]59

To this, Matelda responds by directing the poet towards a renewed vision of Eden in words which are deeply reminiscent of those encountered in both the Liber and Pearl: ‘un lustro sùbito trascorse/ da tutte parti per la gran foresta’, [‘A sudden radiance … swept across / the mighty forest on all sides’].60 In all three cases, Pearl, the Liber and Paradiso, such radiance is represented as ontologically generated by the divinely-inspired insight of a woman of both body and spirit.

56 Dante, Purgatorio, 28.61 and 65. 57 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 33. 58 Dante, Purgatorio, 28.67–8. 59 Dante, Purgatorio, 28.85–7. 60 Dante, Purgatorio, 29.16–17.

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Mechthild and Matelda: When Two Become One For Newman, the role of the many goddess-figures operating within deeply Christianised literary contexts is culturally specific and complex, although she too recognises in them a potential for the type of gender slippage I have been discussing so far in this study. As she reminds us: As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and not least, ravishing objects of identification and desire, the goddesses substantially transformed and deepened Christendom’s concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life.61

Writing here in the context of Dante’s Commedia more widely, like Ginsberg, Newman’s primary concern is with Beatrice, the poet’s foremost goddess-like guide, his inspiration and love-object in the poem, pointing out that, whilst she is ‘canonized by no authority save Dante’s own’, Beatrice is in fact, always already ‘a mortal woman, the wife of Signor Portinari of Florence’.62 However, there is everything to suggest that Matelda too can also stake a very strong claim to historicised personhood, as Newman has intimated elsewhere:63 that is, as a poetic reincarnation of Mechthild of Hackeborn, whose writing, as we have seen, was deeply imbued with discourses of flourishing within transcendent garden settings that escape categorisation by the male gaze and may well have provided a stimulus for many of Dante’s own depictions in the Commedia. Indeed, in its own day, the contents of the Liber certainly opened up new exegetic possibilities beyond established scholastic discourse via its insistence on the pre-eminence of the natural world and its flourishing as providing a female-coded route to understanding the ineffable design of God – something, moreover, with which Dante appears particularly fascinated. Indeed, 61 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 2 (my emphasis). 62 Newman, God and the Goddesses, p. 181. 63 Newman is of the opinion that Dante was ‘one of [the Liber’s] earliest, most celebrated readers’ and acknowledges that Matelda may well be a representation of Mechthild: see her ‘Introduction’, in Book, p. 28. See also the detailed treatment in Newman, ‘The Seven-Storey Mountain’.

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as discussed further below, by the time Dante came to write the Commedia, Mechthild was already well known within wider European literary and devotional contexts as a visionary holy woman and had also been very well placed to explain, in Matelda’s words to Dante, ‘“come procede / per sua cagion ciò ch’ammirar ti face”’ [‘“how the source / of your amazement has its special cause”’]64 – and in terms that certainly lay outside traditional scholastic or theological articulation, although often informed by both.65 As I have already shown, Mechthild’s work is characterised by intensely realised, and yet always fluidly immaterial, images of visionary gardens and their offshoots, which she enters and participates within, before extracting from them their maximum potential for hermeneutic exegesis. Moreover, as official chantress at the Helfta community, music, singing and the liturgy also play pivotal parts in defining not only Helfta’s materiality, but also its potential to morph into the transcendent and universal ‘garden’ of visionary insights which became animated within the nunnery’s often labile church and its precincts. Thus, we find plenty of antecedents for Matelda’s singing-and-dancing persona in Mechthild’s text, as well as the music that characterises Dante’s vision of heaven: music, song and dance frequently burst out from the Helfta choir and re-establish themselves as part of the divine realm to which Mechthild is privy. On one occasion, for example, Christ invites his Helfta sponsae to join with him in ‘a kind of dance’ [‘quasi choream’] in a heaven that is overlaid upon the Helfta cloister. There they join the Virgin and all the virgin saints, accompanied by the sound of the organ and angels singing.66 Also interspersed with such invocations of music and dance are myriad representations of flowers, as we have seen: roses and lilies variously represent Christ 64 Dante, Purgatorio, 28.88–9. 65 For a recent investigation into the ways in which theological and historical debate surrounding the Eucharist and the flesh, for example, influence the poem, see Sheila J. Nayar, Dante’s Sacred Poem: Flesh and the Centrality of the Eucharist to the Divine Comedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 66 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxxi, p. 106 (Book, p. 109). For a discussion of the interaction of music and the liturgy at Helfta, see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 240–53.

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and the love of God; the divinised humanity of Mary; the sacred heart; and the specially-assigned status of Mechthild and her sisters in the ‘garden’ of the Helfta community. Picking up on this in the early twentieth century, Edmund Gardner was one of the first commentators to recognise Mechthildian influence upon Dante in his study of the poet’s co-option into the Commedia of mystical allusions from a wide range of Christian texts.67 As evidence for what he saw as the compelling resonances between Matelda, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gardner presented a copious list of episodes from both women’s texts that, he claimed, bore strong resemblances to parts of the Commedia. However, as Gardner readily admits, Dante was likely subject to a common misconception that conflated the two Helfta-based Mechthilds into a single person – as also happened fairly often in the centuries following their deaths.68 And, given the very different dissemination histories of these women’s texts, the fact that Mechthild of Hackeborn was operating much closer to the date of Dante’s writing and some biographic material had been included in Book V of her writing by other nuns at Helfta, the evidence for Mechthild of Hackeborn as a model for Matelda is altogether more compelling.69 Indeed, her widespread renown during her own lifetime is explicitly testified to in the Liber where, soon after her death, she is depicted in influential and ultimately transcultural terms, with a broad and far-flung audience seemingly influenced by her ‘doctrine’: Doctrinam in tanta abundantia effundebat ut ejus similis in nostro coenobio non surrexit … et quam plures a suis gravaminibus se per eam ereptos, non solum intra claustrum, sed etiam exteri, et de longe venientes religiosi et saeculares; nec ab homine unquam tantum consolationis sicut ab ista se invenisse dicebant. 67 Edmund Garrett Gardner, Dante and the Mystics (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1913), pp. 265–97. The name Mechthild, of course, is merely the Germanic version of Matelda. Other variants in the Middle Ages are, variously, Mat(h)ilda, Mahaut and Maud. 68 Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, p. 297. Mechthild of Magdeburg died either c. 1282 or 1294, and Mechthild of Hackeborn in 1298. 69 For a detailed study of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s writing and dissemination, see Sara S. Poor, Mechtild of Magdeburg and her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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Resonances between Mechthild’s Liber and the Commedia are not restricted to the figure of Matelda, however, although many revolve around her in some shape or form. This may suggest, of course, that Dante was familiar, not just with excerpts of Mechthild’s writing but with her entire book. For example, a dominating – and, in the case of the Commedia, culminating – exegetical image in both texts is the dramatic vision of a cosmic wheel, in Mechthild’s Liber taking the form of another celestial dance, and in the Commedia a wheeling circle of divine splendour. Both Mechthild and Dante, however, present this wheel as a material demonstration of the free will of humanity, as well as the endless possibilities that allow for union between the human and the divine. In Mechthild’s account this is symbolised by long golden strands like umbilical sunbeams extending between the heart of Christ and that of his lovers, another image with strong overtones of the maternal and matrixial: Vidit aliquando Dominum Jesum et hominem quemdam coram ipso stantem, et in Corde Dei rotam quae continue volvebatur, funem vero longum de Corde Dei tendentem ad cor hominis, in quo etiam erat rota quae volvebatur. [Once she saw the Lord Jesus and a man standing before him. In the heart of God there was a wheel, constantly turning. A long cord extended from God’s heart to the man’s heart, in which there was another turning wheel.]71

In Dante’s case the strands are less material, forming instead shafts of ethereal light in which he sees himself reflected. Indeed, the 70 Mechthild, Liber, V.xxx, p. 365 (Book, p. 221). My emphasis. 71 Mechthild, Liber, IV.xx, p. 277 (Book, p. 170). Mechthild explains of her cosmic wheel: ‘intelligitur quod Deus ex suo libero arbitrio homini dedit liberum arbitrium convertendi se ad bonum sive ad malum’ [‘[it] indicates that God of his own free will gave humankind free will to turn toward either good or evil’], Mechthild, Liber, IV.xx, p. 277 (Book, pp. 170–1). Paquelin also points out the resonance between this passage and Dante’s Paradiso in his note on p. 277.

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culminating image – and the final lines – of the entire Commedia demonstrate the intrinsic centrality of this conceit, where the poet writes: ma già volgeva il mio disiro e ’l velle, Sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. [my/ desire and will were moved already – like a wheel revolving uniformly – by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars].72

Another compelling piece of evidence for Mechthild’s influence upon Dante, also presented by Gardner, is the close similarity between the depiction of Mount Purgatory in the Purgatorio, with its seven levels of purgation functioning as giant steps, and Mechthild’s dramatic vision of the Mountain of the Virtues, also with seven levels, as documented in Book I of the Liber.73 Here she describes how Christ as both her bridegroom and spiritual guide leads her from step to step, with each level being a material manifestation of one of the seven virtues, and each bearing a spring to wash Mechthild free of a particular sin. For example: Tunc ostendit ei montem excelsum et mirae magnitudinis ab Oriente usque ad Occidentem, habentem septem gradus per quos ascendebatur, et septem fontes. Et assumens eam pervenit ad primum gradum, qui vocabatur gradus humilitatis. [Then he showed her a lofty mountain of great size, reaching from the east to the west. It had seven stairs by which it could be climbed, and seven springs. He took her with him to the first stair, the step of humility.]74 72 Dante, Paradiso, 33.142–5. This is an image that also finds its way into The Book of Margery Kempe, written down more than three decades after the composition of Pearl. Here, Christ reassures Margery of her right to join the eternal dance of the virgins in heaven: ‘I xal take þe be þe on hand in Hevyn & my Modyr be þe oþer hand, & so xalt þu dawnsyn in Hevyn wyth oþer holy maydens & virgynes, for I may clepyn þe dere a-bowte & myn owyn derworthy derlyng’. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London, Toronto and New York, repr. 1997), I.22, p. 52. Again, for a more detailed discussion of this, see McAvoy and Yoshikawa, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe’. 73 This episode forms the main focus of Newman’s analysis in ‘The Seven-Storey Mountain’. 74 Mechthild, Liber, I.xiii, p. 40 (Book, p. 61).

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So, too, the first level of Dante’s Mount Purgatory forms the base of a great mountain with seven levels, extending as far as the eye can see: Da la sua sponda, ove confina il vano, al piè de l’altaripa che pur sale, misurrebbe in tre volte un corpo umano; e quanto l’occhio mio potea trar d’ale, or dal sinistro e or dal destro fianco, questa cornice mi parea cotale. [The distance from its edge, which rims the void, in to the base of the steep slope, which climbs and climbs, would measure three times one man’s body; and for as far as my sight took its flight, now to the left, now to the right-hand side, that terrace seemed to me equally wide.]75

What is even more significant is that, beyond the initial similarities and structural correlations, both engagements with this purgatorial realm are preceded – and ultimately defined – by the narrator’s vision of a representation of Annunciation and a reminder of Gabriel’s words to the Virgin. In Mechthild’s case, Gabriel precedes the Virgin in a heavenly procession, carrying a sceptre inscribed with: ‘Ave gratia plena: Dominus tecum’ [‘Hail, full of grace: the Lord is with you’]; in the Purgatorio, Dante is privy to a marble relief of the Annunciation carved into the Mount of Purgatory which is so life-like that ‘Giurato si saria ch’el dicesse “Ave”’ [‘One would have sworn that he [Gabriel] was saying “Ave”’].76 In the Liber too, it is Mary’s ‘meekness’ [‘humilitatis’] as ancilla dei that imbues the mountain’s first step with inherent virtue; and in the Purgatorio, the words Ecce ancilla Dei define Mary’s visible humility, imbuing the first step with Gabriel’s ‘gracious action’ [‘atto suavo’] in genuflecting before Mary.77 In both cases, too, the rocky crags at the top of each mountain yield to a vision of the earthly paradise, the one containing Mechthild, the other Matelda. What we are also reminded 75 Dante, Purgatorio, 10.22–7. 76 The visions of the Annunciation are recorded in Mechthild, Liber, I.xii (Book, p. 60) and Dante, Purgatorio, 10.38 (here at Liber, I.xii, p. 39 (Book, p. 60); and Dante, Purgatorio, 10.40). 77 Mechthild, Liber I.xiii, p. 40 (Book, p. 61).

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of here is the way in which the Pearl-Maiden emerges from a rocky cliff-face standing between the Dreamer and the heavenly city in Pearl – an episode I discuss in more depth below. Such juxtapositioning of the Virgin alongside the purgatorial mountain in both the Liber and the Purgatorio, of course, draws heavily on the newly established role during the thirteenth century of holy women as effective intercessors for suffering souls in Purgatory,78 a role frequently adopted by Mechthild, as recorded in Book V of the Liber particularly. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, besides having had a likely influence upon Dante, this book seems also to have had an especial influence upon other late medieval English writings focusing on purgatorial suffering and redemption.79 As the doctrine of Purgatory developed into a widespread belief and acceptance from the twelfth century onwards, so the role of the Virgin – and the maternal poetics of those women who chose to imitate her – was adapted to encompass that of compassionate mediatrix.80 In the words of Miri Rubin, the intercession of Mary became, ‘an avenue for penance and atonement [and] thus combined the enticing attractions of a mother – loving, and consoling – with the effective powers of an agent of redemption.’81 Rubin’s observation chimes also with that of Newman concerning the transference of Marian imagery into a more widespread and personal maternal idiom within the spiritual intercessions of late medieval holy women: ‘Despite their gender-specific liabilities, religious women offered what they had – their prayers and tears, their compassion and determination, their propensity for visions, and above all their sufferings – to ease the pain of the indigent dead.’82 Thus, 78 See Newman, From Virile Woman, pp.108–36. 79 See, McAvoy, ‘O der lady’, where I make out a case for Mechthild’s influence upon the fifteenth-century female-authored text, A Revelation of Purgatory. See also McAvoy and Yoshikawa, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe’. 80 See Takami Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997); and my introduction to A Revelation of Purgatory, ed. and trans. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 1–69. 81 Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 132. 82 Newman, From Virile Woman, p. 113.

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from the onset of the Liber – in a preliminary chapter dealing with Mechthild’s birth and early childhood – such a role is emphatically gendered as she is cast as ‘vera mater’ [‘true mother’] who comforts those in heavy spirits who visit her window to seek advice and consolation, ‘ita ut quicumque ad eam accessisset, consolatus rediret aut instructus’ [‘so that nobody who came to visit her left without having been consoled or instructed’].83 Similarly, later, in Book 2, it is Christ who is represented as the mother of consolation after inviting Mechthild into the ‘vineyard’ of his heart at the moment when the Asperges me is being sung in the Helfta church. Rushing to meet her there, ‘quasi mater filio’ [‘as a mother goes to meet her child’], and encompassing her within his maternal arms, Christ washes Mechthild’s soul clean in the deep, fast-flowing stream of his vineyard/heart.84 Similarly in the Purgatorio, Dante tells how Matelda too, ‘opened wide her arms’ [‘le braccia aprissi’] like a mother, and ‘clasped [his] head’ [‘abbracciommi la testa’], submerging Dante deep within the stream separating him from paradise and washing him clean from sin as a divine chorus sings the Asperges me.85 Here, in both texts, the performance of the baptismal sacrament by women in two visionary gardens involves continual role-reversal and gender code-switching, thus facilitating full exploitation of the fissures in male theological discourses of salvation that obscure the ways in which a theology of flourishing and efflorescence may provide a more enlightened route to mystical insight than does obsession with the necrophilic discourses emanating from a bleeding and suffering male saviour. These baptismal episodes, of course, again find their expression in Pearl, where, as also discussed further below, the fragile vision of the Dreamer is shattered by his futile attempt to enact his own baptismal crossing of the heavenly river without the leave of his divine female interlocutor.86 A third resonance between Mechthild’s writing and Dante’s Commedia is equally specific, this time in the Paradiso, where the 83 Mechthild, Liber, ‘Caput Praevium’, p. 6 (Book, p. 217). 84 Mechthild, Liber, II.i, p. 137 (Book, p. 121). I will discuss the appearance of the vineyard in both texts towards the end of this chapter. 85 Dante, Purgatorio, 31.100–1. 86 Pearl, lines 1155–71 (trans. 99–100).

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image of divinity is laid out in terms of a ‘cosmic rose’ spread out against the heavens. In Book III of the Liber, Mechthild recounts a vision of Christ experienced during the Mass when she sees a beautiful rose with five leaves emerging from his breast and spreading outwards. Like the visionary green trees discussed in the previous chapter, this rose, Christ explains to her, is synonymous with his humanity, that is to say with the female flesh of his mother, Mary, and emblematic particularly of his five wits. This rose, moreover, also bears a silver leaf covering Christ’s heart, its petals expanding outward and each morphing into one of an infinite number of saints dressed in bright clothing (and, as such, also reminiscent of Hildegard’s nuns) and all glorifying God. For example: Et ecce rosa pulcherrima habens quinque folia exivit de Corde Dei totum pectus ejus cooperiens … [And, behold, the most beautiful rose with five leaves emerged from God’s heart, covering the whole of his breast …] .87

And, again, later: [V]idit … habentem in pectore folium ex argento perspicuo, in cujus circuitu errant inaestimabiliter decoratae singulae passiones Sanctorum, quas pro Domino pertulerunt. [on his breast I saw a leaf made of gleaming silver, around the edge of which were innumerable images of the suffering of the saints, endured for love of the Lord.]88

The key term here is exivit: for Mechthild the rose is a flower-in-motion, enacting an unfolding which is key to its reappropriation from patriarchal fetish into a female articulation of the type of ‘efflorescence’ identified by Irigaray. Instead of the ‘Growth suspended in ecstasy’ or the ‘immortal show’ that is the (al)ready-picked rose within the male imaginary,89 Mechthild’s rose is emergent, agential, restless, multivalent. It ‘flowers outwards’ and becomes ‘a brazier’ of enlightenment. So too we find the same emergent rose in the Paradiso, again with cosmic implications as the poet’s vision of the 87 Mechthild, Liber, III.ii, p. 198. This chapter is omitted from Newman’s translation. It is therefore, once again, my own. 88 Mechthild, Liber, III.iv, p. 199. Again, the translation is my own. 89 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 32.

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heavenly multitude morphs into a rose that imbues the panoply of heaven with its own vegetal being: In forma dunque di candida rosa mi si mostrava la milizia santa che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa; ma l’altra, che volando vede e canta la gloria di colui che la ’nnamora e la bontà che la fece cotanta, sì come schiera d’ape che s’infiora una fïata e una si ritorna là dove suo laboro s’insapora, nel gran fior discendeva che s’addorna di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva là dove ‘l süo amor sempre soggiorna. [So, in the shape of that white Rose, the holy legion was shown to me – the host that Christ with His own blood, had taken as His bride. The other host, which flying, sees and sings the glory of the One who draws its love, and that goodness which granted it such glory, just like a swarm of bees that, at one moment, enters the flowers and, at another, turns back to that labor which yields such sweet savor, descended into that vast flower graced with many petals, then again rose up to the eternal dwelling of its love].90

Here we are reminded, not just of Mechthild’s rose, but of Herrad’s bees, feeding off the nectar of the flowers of knowledge embedded within their own production. But we are also reminded of this same important hermeneutic thread in Pearl, within which the rose appears twice. On the first occasion it provides a rather clichéd, and somewhat dismissive, metaphor used by the Dreamer for the Pearl-Maiden (‘For þat þou lestez watz bot a rose / Þat flowred and fayled as kynde hit gef’ [‘what rendered you bereft was only a rose / that flowered and faded as nature intended’).91 Here the rose’s function is more in keeping with the male gaze’s idealisation of ‘the maiden’ in medieval Romance literature, the ‘erect’ gaze that 90 Dante, Paradiso, 31. 1–12. 91 Pearl, lines 269–70 (trans. p. 25).

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Irigaray depicts (again, addressing its male orchestrator directly) as ‘the one which you would produce, keeping it within your horizon’.92 However, by the time the Dreamer draws upon the image again towards the end of the poem, he has learned enough from his interchange with the Pearl-Maiden to recognise it as not only distinctly Marian but also as emblematic of the earth-bound limitations of his entrenched belief-systems in the face of the efflorescence so evident in his daughter, in spite of her short time on earth. As he ruefully acknowledges: ‘I am bot mokke and mul among,/ And þou so ryche a reken rose’ [I am … nothing but a mix of dust and muck, / and you such a rare and regal rose’].93 Here the use made by Mechthild, Dante and the Pearl-poet of the complex symbol of the rose therefore articulates an awareness of the same tension between theologies of flourishing and the necrophilic as is identified in Jantzen’s work; and part of that awareness is the ultimate presentation of a female-coded efflorescence that affirms, in a modification of Irigaray’s words, that ‘I also have roots and from them I can flower’.94 Such sensibility, moreover, has the capacity to overturn linear, ‘erect’ and phallic conceptions of salvation by drawing on the rose’s female-coded cyclical blossoming and constant becoming – its efflorescence that, for Irigaray, leads to an understanding of ‘that other growth, that other potentiality, which is not arrested in one actuality’.95 In all three texts, then, we have versions of the same ‘mystic rose’, to coin Irigaray’s term: that is to say, a blossoming becoming which escapes the fixity of a patriarchal interpellative gaze and which is, finally, a ‘flower already individual, formed, open. Appearing in its proper being.’ For Irigaray, as for Mechthild, Dante and the Pearl-poet, there is joy in the ‘immortality of that unfolding’;96 and, moreover, due to the foregrounding of this floral unfolding, the male necrophilic gaze’s fixing (fixation?) and codification, ‘no longer occurs’ as the texts reach their respective conclusions.97 92 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34. 93 Pearl, lines 905–6 (trans. p. 78). 94 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34. 95 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 32. 96 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 78. 97 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 32.

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Mechthild’s Wider Influence There are countless more examples one could draw upon here to suggest Dante’s familiarity with the Liber, but even these few point towards the fact that, soon after its inception, the Liber, with its insistent discourses of spiritual growth and flourishing, was making an indelible mark upon the wider community of northern Europe. Indeed, there is also independent evidence to suggest that some parts of the Liber were circulating in Florence in the early fourteenth century, since Giovanni Boccaccio’s (d. 1375) Decameron, produced barely a generation after the Commedia, testifies to how the Florentines were accustomed to reciting one of Mechthild’s better known prayers, ‘Le laude di Donna Matelda’ [‘Dame Matilda’s Hymn’], as part of the ritual of image veneration.98 Moreover, the garden setting in which Boccaccio chooses to locate his frame narrative is particularly suggestive of this wider influence. In Boccaccio‘s text, many Florentine citizens have fled to this pseudo-Edenic space on the hills surrounding the city in the hope of finding safety and solace from the plague-ridden streets below. On the seventh day of the story-telling undertaken to pass the time, one John of Lorraine is described as having learned to recite Mechthild’s ‘Hymn’ alongside the Paternoster in the vernacular as a sure means of protecting ‘the salvation of his soul’.99 This acknowledgement of Mechthild’s intercessionary powers, documented copiously in the Liber, and the allying of her prayers to the Paternoster in the vernacular, point towards her having already become a household name and a model for lay spirituality by the time Boccaccio came to write the Decameron. Clearly, too, her prayers, incorporated into her text and containing the same hermeneutics of growth and spiritual flourishing, were deemed entirely suitable for recitation within the garden setting above death-torn Florence where they provided access to a

98 Sr Mary Jeremy Finnegan, ‘Mechtild of Hackeborn’, in Medieval Religious Women: Peaceweavers, ed. Lillian Thomas Shank and John A. Nichols, Vol. II, Part 1 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), pp. 213–21, here at p. 218. 99 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Jonathan Usher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), VII.1, p. 419.

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flourishing spiritual ‘garden’ and release from the purgatorial necrophilics of plague raging in the city below them. Commenting on the significance of Matelda’s appearance at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio, Robin Kirkpatrick has suggested that she provides us with an important confirmation of ‘the modulation … where feminine presences begin to displace the male guides on whom Dante has so far been dependent’.100 Prudence Allen, however, goes even further, arguing that Mechthild’s influence upon both the Commedia and the Decameron constitutes part of a powerful and already well-established ‘intergender dialogue’ across two seemingly separate communities: that of the female-focused, enclosed spiritual environment of Helfta, and the expanding world of the male Renaissance Humanists.101 If, as I am positing here, Mechthild’s writing had also reached England – and the Pearlpoet – by the end of the fourteenth century, then that ‘intergender dialogue’ had a much further reach and influence upon medieval English literature than has hitherto been considered, extending into the humanistic enterprises of another of the period’s most admired and respected poets and casting its feminine poetics across his own works.102 Such feminine poetics, culturally and linguistically adapted to serve the purposes of late medieval English demands for more affective – and thus female-coded – approaches to God, therefore provide a new language, idiom and an imaginary of flourishing that, in this case, draws upon authorised women’s voices from the past to feed into renewed calls for church reform in a post-Wycliffe and pre-Arundel moment.103 100 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatorio, ed. and trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), p. 469. 101 Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250– 1500: Part 1 (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), p. 336, n. 36. 102 A discussion of Mechthildian influence upon the other three poems by the same poet – Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – is beyond the remit of this present chapter but there is certainly enough internal evidence to warrant such a study. 103 For comprehensive coverage of the socio-religious politics attached to this period’s devotional literature, see the essays collected in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). See, in particular, Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel’, in the same volume, pp. 3–42. Yoshikawa also discusses the Middle English translation of

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While we have no material evidence that Mechthild’s book was available in its English translation until the second decade of the fifteenth century, when, as mentioned, it was likely produced at Syon Abbey sometime after its founding in 1415, a five-book version of the seven-book Latin original had been circulating in western Europe from very soon after Mechthild’s death.104 We know, for example, that the entire seven books were copied in 1370 by a priest named Albertus, vicar of the church of Saint Paul in the town of Erfurt in Germany, with the manuscript he produced asserting its faithfulness to the original Helfta autograph completed soon after Mechthild’s death in 1298.105 Within fifty years or so, an abridged, five-book version of the Liber had been translated into many of the European vernaculars, the earliest of these dating from the first quarter of the fifteenth century at the very latest. This was an important Dutch translation, from which, as Richard Bromberg has established, all other vernacular translations ensued, including German, Swedish, Italian, Irish and English.106 Copies of the Liber had almost certainly reached England by the end of the fourteenth century, or else Mechthild’s work was being disseminated orally by then, possibly via the well-established trade links. Indeed, there is some internal evidence to suggest that Chaucer may have known of it, for example.107 As Dennis D. Martin

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105 106

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Mechthild’s text in this same context in ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Cecily Neville’s Devotional Reading: Images of the Heart in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Revisiting the Medieval North of England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Anita Auer, Denis Renevey, Camille Marchall and Tion Oudeslujis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), pp. 25–38. For a detailed study of the books produced and housed at Syon, see the essays collected in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion c. 1400–1700, ed. E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010). This is Wolfenbuttel HAB codex 1003 Helmst. Ernst Hellgardt, ‘Latin and the Vernacular: Mechtild of Magdeburg – Mechtild of Hackeborn – Gertrude of Helfta’, in A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Andersen, Henrike Lähnemann and Anne Simon (Leiden and Boston, 2014), pp. 131–55 (here at pp. 137–8). This Dutch translation, Het boek der bijzondere enade van Mechthild van Hackeborn, has been edited by R. L. J. Bromberg (Zwolle: Willink, 1967). For an examination of such resonance in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’, see Magnani and McAvoy, ‘What Is a Woman?’.

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has shown, it is also listed in the now fragmentary catalogues of both the London and Witham charterhouses, alongside the works of Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Elisabeth of Shönau, again pointing to its popularity within Carthusian networks.108 Indeed, much of its later preservation and circulation history, both in Latin and the vernacular, maintains Carthusian links, especially with Syon Abbey as part of an imperative for church reform. The Myroure of Oure Ladye, for instance, a text written for the nuns of Syon probably between 1420 and 1448, contains two excerpts from ‘Mawdes boke’,109 although determining whether these were based on the Liber or its Middle English translation is all but impossible, given that they largely comprise paraphrase, rather than citation.110 Extracts also appear in other early fifteenth-century texts: The Speculum devotorum, or Myrowre to Devout Peple, written between c. 1415 and 1425, where the Carthusian author names Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Mechthild of Hackeborn as so-called ‘approued women’, no doubt because of the deemed orthodoxy of their visions.111 Again, however, determining which version of Mechthild’s writing was used is beset with difficulty. Her work, both in Latin and in Middle English translation, also found its way into a number of other devotional compilations and anthologies, including British Library, MS Lansdowne 379;112 British Library, 108 See Dennis D. Martin, ‘Carthusians as Advocates of Women Visionary Reformers’, in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Julian M. Luxford (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 127–53 (p. 136) 109 The Myroure of oure Ladye, ed. John Henry Blunt, EETS ES 19 (London: N. Trübner, 1973), pp. 33, 38–9. 110 Rosalynn Voaden, ‘The Company She Keeps: Mechtild of Hackeborn in Late-Medieval Devotional Compositions’, in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), pp. 51–70 (p. 55). 111 The Speculum devotorum, or Myrowre to Devout Peple is a meditative prose life of Christ in Middle English. See A Mirror to Devout People (Speculum devotorum), ed. Paul J. Patterson, EETS o.s. 346 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 6. 112 Again, this dates to the mid fifteenth century and has clear Mountgrace connections. It contains an extended passage on the use of Mechthild’s prayers and the Paternoster commentary found in the Liber. This section also contains correspondence between a Mountgrace monk and London Charterhouse monk that includes a homily focusing on the efficacy of using Mechthild’s prayers as prophylatic against misfortune (fols 52r–54r).

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MS Harley 4012;113 and British Library, MS Harley 494, which cites Mechthild’s revelations bilingually as one of its primary sources.114 Whether Latin, vernacular or bilingual, Mechthild’s text (in a variety of forms) thus forged close Carthusian (and later, Brigittine) connections and was widely disseminated under their auspices. In all cases, too, Mechthild’s name appears to have needed no further embellishment or explanation, again suggestive of her widespread renown as a spiritual authority.115 The Carthusians had long been known to lend out their books to elite recipients,116 and a list of donors of cells at the London Charterhouse at the end of the fourteenth century includes noblemen and women, men and women from the gentry, as well as wealthy mercantile families, all of whom were in a position to have been reading such works.117 They were also known for their maintaining of individual gardens attached to each cell.118 No doubt such texts, with their deeply entrenched horticultural hermeneutic appeal, were particularly attractive acquisitions for Carthusian libraries, 113 This manuscript is also dated to the mid fifteenth century and, as well as recording a dialogue between Mechthild and Christ in Middle English (fols 77v–78r), includes a pardon for the monastery of Syon Abbey (fols 110r–113r). 114 Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ‘The Liber Specialis Gratiae in a Devotional Anthology: London, British Library, MS Harley 494’, in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, ed. Marlene Cré, Diana Denissen and Denis Renevey (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 341–60. 115 BL, Lansdowne 379 refers to her as ‘Sainte Mawde’ on fol. 52r, suggesting her elevated status in the Carthusian circles from which this manuscript emerged. 116 Susan Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, The Library 20.3 (1998), 197–240 (220). On the movement of books between the Carthusians and the laity, see Roger Lovatt, ‘The Imitation of Christ in Late Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5.18 (1968), 97–121; Michael Sargent, ‘The Transmission by the English Carthusians of some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976), 225–40 (231– 2); and Vincent Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’, in De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), pp. 163–89 (pp. 175–81). 117 ‘Religious Houses: House of Carthusian Monks’, in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 1, ed. J. S. Cockburn, H. P. F. King and K. G. T. McDonnell (London, 1969), pp. 159–69. British History Online http://www.british-history. ac.uk/vch/middx/vol1/pp159-169. Accessed 16 May 2016. 118 Indeed, the remains of the Carthusian monastery of Mountgrace in north Yorkshire reveal the extent to which each cell was backed by its own enclosed garden in which each monk would toil to produce for the table.

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therefore. As Yoshikawa has asserted, too, Mechthild’s writing, which combines orthodox teaching with contemplative, aspirational spirituality, was received in England as one of the ‘approved’ texts by female visionary authors and was read both by those in holy orders and by the laity, its approval by the Church no doubt a means of re-enforcing a new spirit of reform being called for within the Church and to ensure a new religious beginning after the trouble forged by Wycliffe and his followers in or around the time when the Pearl-poet came to write his poem.119 If, as is now thought far more likely to be the case, the poet (most likely some kind of ecclesiastic)120 was operating in more metropolitan – and, I would add, international – contexts than a west-Midlands context would allow for, Mechthild’s work, therefore, may well have come to his attention via the Carthusian networks already established in England during the period and within which the works of holy women like Mechthild were clearly beginning to circulate in a number of different forms – and, without doubt, orally too.121

Imagistic and Thematic Resonances: The Gardens of Paradise The gardens populating both the Liber and Pearl reflect one another in striking and significant ways: simultaneously mutable, heterotopic and heterochronic, they are fundamental to the hermeneutic strategies constructed by both authors. In Pearl particularly, the overlaid gardens of the erbere, where the Dreamer loses his ‘pearl’, and the earthly paradise, where he attempts to reclaim her again, function to unpick the apparently oppositional binaries of death, 119 See Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church’, especially pp. 4–5. 120 For a comprehensive survey of theories regarding the Pearl-author’s identity, see the introduction to the edition by Andrew and Waldron I am using here, pp. 5–12. Here they quote Ad Putter as one of the most influential commentators on this issue: ‘[The author] was almost certainly a cleric from the north west Midlands – probably a relatively unimportant cleric; perhaps in the service of a nobleman.’ See also Ad Putter, An Introduction to the “Gawain”-Poet (London: Longman, 1996), p. 37 (quoted by Andrew and Waldron, ‘Introduction’, in Pearl, p. 12). 121 On this, especially on Mechthild’s influence upon Margery Kempe, see McAvoy and Yoshikawa, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Margery Kempe’.

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decay and abjection/life, efflorescence and transcendence, only to re-harmonise them again into a single, palimpsestic fertile terrain as the Dreamer witnesses the Pearl-Maiden’s jouissance in heaven beside the Lamb. Indeed, as Harrison has argued in more recent times, the garden is a place that houses both life and death in equal measure, but it is also a place within which ‘Death sets things in motion, including our desires’.122 The garden settings in the Liber and Pearl both animate intense desire, understanding and union with the object of such desire, but also exemplify how the gulf between subject and object must dissolve before that union can be realised.123 As the Pearl-Maiden patiently explains to the Dreamer, the loss of paradise by our ‘ȝorefader’ [‘ancestor’], Adam, necessitates that a ‘corse in clot mot calder keue’ [‘cold corpse must sink through the soil’] before such dissolution of self can effect a merger with the other.124 Again for Harrison, gardens – especially enclosed gardens – carry myriad ‘latent dimensions’ that ‘seem like gateways to other worlds or other orders of being’ because of their ability to transform themselves – and those interacting intensely with them.125 Indeed, both the Liber and Pearl are brought to mind when Harrison identifies such transformation (or ‘becoming’) as the reason ‘why gardens in the human imagination often figure as the sites of visions and epiphanies, be they spiritual, erotic, or otherwise’.126 For Pearl’s Dreamer-narrator, the garden-graveyard of the poem’s onset proves indeed to be the ‘gateway’ into a series of other simultaneously encountered visions and epiphanies of gardens and other enclosures shaped by the pulls of his desire. Whilst remaining physically in ‘þat spote’ [‘that spot’] besides his daughter’s grave127 – both in terms of location and the ontology of his 122 Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 19. 123 For a useful essay on the function of desire in Pearl, see María Bullón-Fernández, ‘“Byȝonde þe Water”: Courtly and Religious Desire in Pearl’, Studies in Philology 91.1 (1994), 35–49. 124 Pearl, lines 320–3 (trans. p. 29). 125 Harrison, Gardens, p. 54. 126 Harrison, Gardens, pp. 54–5. 127 Pearl, line 13 (trans. p. 4). On the idea of the ‘spot’ as both ‘location’ and ‘topic’ (topos), see Ginsberg, ‘Place and Dialectic’.

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own corruption – the Dreamer’s grief-laden desire for his daughter transports his ‘spyryt’ into a place he does not recognise, although he still believes it to be somewhere ‘in þis worlde’ [‘spirit … in the world’].128 Here he becomes conscious of an Edenic dream-scape, a paradisal garden both fertile and afforested, bounded not by a wall or fence as in the erbere in which he sleeps, but, more naturally, by cliffs of sheer crystal that are ‘so cler of kynde’ [‘of the clearest form’] and by a deep, meandering stream (‘water by schore þat scherez’ [‘shore of a winding river’]).129 This stream, we learn at the end of the poem, is the same one that flows out from beneath the throne of God in the Heavenly Jerusalem and whose waters are ‘bryȝter þen boþe þe sunne and mone’ [‘more radiant than sun and moon’].130 As he comes – literally – to his senses and passes through the ‘gateway’ into the lush dreamscape, the Dreamer feels himself move from the darkness of grief into the solace of a shining, transcendent garden made fertile by the sun reflecting off the cliffs and the refreshing waters of paradise: I ne wyste in þis worlde quere þat hit wace, Bot I knew me keste þer klyfez cleuen. Toward a foreste I bere þe face, Where rych rokkez wer to dyscreuen. Þe lyȝt of hem myȝt no mon leuen, Þe glemande glory þat of hem glent, For wern neuer webbez þat wyȝez weuen Of half so dere adubbemente. [But my soul was set down where cliffs split the sky and I turned my face towards a forest where astounding stones astonished the eye: no one would believe what light they lent, what gleaming glory shone from them;]131

Now rapt into a paradisal garden that, in his worldly estimation, outdoes even the most extravagantly coloured tapestry, the Dreamer becomes intensely aware of the otherness of his surroundings, with their glimmering light and their scented fruit-trees that quickly 128 129 130 131

Pearl, line 61 and line 65 (trans. p. 8). Pearl, line 73 and line 107 (trans. p. 9 and p. 11). Pearl, line 1056 (trans. p. 90). Pearl, lines 65–71 (trans. p. 8).

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refresh his ailing spirit (‘As fode hit con me fayre refete’).132 Myriad birds, also ‘Of flaumbande hwez’ [‘Of flaming colours’], fly together around the enclosed wooded meadow (‘fryth’),133 their songs more joyful than any citole- or gittern-player could emulate.134 As he follows the river, moreover, the Dreamer is drawn inexorably towards his daughter, taking in the riverbank and all its splendid ‘addubement’ (‘Þe playn, þe plonttez, þe spyse, þe perez; / And rawez and randez and rych reuerez, / As fyldor fyn her bonkes brent’ [‘sedges, shrubs, spices and pears / hedges, wetlands and splendid streams / with steep slopes like spun gold’]),135 before happening upon the Pearl-Maiden sitting alone beneath the cliffs of crystal. Such a description of paradise, of course, is not unusual in Middle English literary contexts, and certainly resonates with those visionary paradisal landscapes so familiar to Mechthild.136 Indeed, in one protracted vision, Mechthild’s heaven also resounds synaesthetically with colour and gleaming gold, accompanied by divine music, no doubt stimulated by the antiphonal singing which she is leading for the Helfta community. Indeed, as Barbara Kline has pointed out, some of Mechthild’s most vividly realised descriptions of heaven are characterised by rapid movement between the visual and auditory, ultimately providing what she terms ‘the best example of the influence of her role as chantress […] upon her literary expression’.137 This is realised nowhere more clearly than in 132 Pearl, line 88 (trans. p. 10). 133 Pearl, lines 89–90. The translation here is my own, since Armitage prefers ‘shimmering fowl’ (p. 10). The term frith is variously used in Middle English to signify a forest, or wooded meadow; a hedge or enclosure, or, in some cases, peace (later the King’s peace specifically). See MED, s.v. 2(a); 3(a) and 1(a). 134 Pearl, lines 90–1 (trans. p. 10). 135 Pearl, lines 104–6 (trans. p. 11). 136 For a wider discussion of medieval representation of Paradise, see Alastair Minnis, From Eden to Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). For his discussion of the paradises in Pearl, see pp. 172–92. 137 Barbara Kline, ‘The Discourse of Heaven in Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Book of Gostlye Grace’, in Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, ed. Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss OSB (New York and London: Garland, 2000), pp. 83–99 (p. 83). Here, Kline is working with the Middle English translation of Mechthild’s writing, citing Book I, chapters 26–31. In the Liber, the equivalent episodes cover Book I, chapters xiii–xvii, pp. 40–51 (Book, pp. 61–9). For further discussion of the use of music to describe divine harmony, this time in the

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Mechthild’s vision of the seven-stepped mountain (discussed in the context of Dante’s vision of the Mountain of Purgatory above). Here Mechthild describes how on Quinquagesima Sunday she thought she fell down at the feet of Christ, precipitating a vision-within-avision of the heavenly throng who ‘dulcifluo amoris epithalamio … ac si una vox esset’ [‘chanted with such dulcet harmony … as if they were all in one voice’]. Once she and Christ reach the top of the mountain, they come across the angels ‘in modo avium … dulcem sonum reddentium’ [‘voicing a sweet song just like birds’]138 above two thrones ‘de quo procedebant quatuor rivi aquarum vivarum’ [‘from which four streams of the living water flowed’].139 Later in this same vision, when she envisions the enormous tree of life growing in the monastic church, she is struck by a flock of birds populating its third bough, ‘suavissime modulantes’ [‘making sweet melody’] in emulation of the endless praise of God by the saints.140 On another occasion, this time on the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist, Mechthild writes of her vision of the saint’s apotheosis: ‘velut si radians sol, per crystallum lucens, desuper gemmis optimis fulciretur’ [‘it was as if radiant sunlight filtered through a crystal were intensified by the most exquisite gems’].141 Here, in the Liber and Pearl, then, we see similar treatment of birds and their song, sacred streams of clear water allied to sunbeams shining on crystal, all conglomerating into an opulent shared pattern of imagery. Indeed, the introduction of semi-precious crystal in both instances serves to invoke in each case what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has termed the ‘lithic sublime’, that is to say, ‘the human desire that stone elicits and amplifies: the yearning for beauty’.142 The yearning for the beauty of his dead daughter that dominates the opening stanzas of the Pearl is therefore both eased and amplified by the context of Hildegard of Bingen, see Stephen D’Evelyn, ‘Heaven as Performance and Participation in the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum of Hildegard of Bingen’, in Envisaging Heaven, ed. Muessig and Putter, pp. 155– 65. 138 Mechthild, Liber, I.xiii, pp. 40–1 (Book, p. 62). 139 Mechthild, Liber, I.xiii, pp. 41–2 (Book, p. 62). 140 Mechthild, Liber, I.xvii, p. 50 (Book, p. 69). 141 Mechthild, Liber, I.vi, p. 22 (Book, p. 48). 142 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 106.

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sublime beauty of the visionary landscape the Dreamer finds himself inhabiting: it is a place where ‘The addubement of þo downez dere/ Garten my goste al greffe forȝete’ [‘The image of highly ornamented hills / made my spirit forget all feelings of grief’].143 As well as a symbol of beauty, however, crystal was also representative of purity and purification, something reflected in the proliferation of iconographic representations of the Virgin with transparent crystalline womb in the Middle Ages, especially in scenes of the Visitation, as Jacqueline Jung has demonstrated. As Jung also suggests, such images were particularly popular in the nunneries of the northern Rhine during the thirteenth century.144 Additionally, in some medical writings, crystal carried significant healing properties – for a failing eyesight, in particular – fully apposite, of course, to the visionary’s own need for special (in)sight for the processing of the mystical experience. In her de Physica, for example, Hildegard of Bingen describes in some detail how crystal is formed from ancient black ice, eventually becoming purified and transparent by the heat of the sunlight and providing an excellent cure for blurred vision, amongst other ailments.145 Indeed, within 143 Pearl, lines 85–6 (trans. p. 10). Andrew and Waldron gloss the term addubement as ‘adornment’ or ‘splendour’ (p. 301). 144 Jacqueline E. Jung, ‘Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinethal Visitation Group’, in History in the Comic Mode, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 223–37. Here Jung argues that medieval iconographical uses of crystalline wombs ‘embodied the very paradoxes often ascribed to the glorified bodies of the blessed – solidity and transparency, hardness and fluidity – and was a favorite metaphor of purity, especially that of the Virgin Mary’ (p. 226). Jung begins her essay with a quotation from Gertrude’s Legatus, IV.iii concerning a vision of Mary’s crystalline womb. Mechthild also has a number of visions involving crystal, including the words of Saint John lit up like the sun shining through crystal (I.vi); a vision of her union with Christ that sees him transformed into crystalline form (I.xviii); and a vision at Matins of Christ sitting on a transparent throne of crystal (I.xxxi). 145 Hildegard of Bingen, ‘Diversarum naturarum creaturarum et sic de aliis quammultis bonis’ (de Physica), PL 197, cols 1117–352. For a Modern English translation of this text, see Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica, ed. and trans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998) pp. 153–4. Some of the popular medieval lapidaries also claimed glacial ice as the origin for crystal and its ability to generate fire by means of refracted sunlight. Ground crystal was also deemed to be useful for wet-nurses and new mothers to stimulate the production of breastmilk, if ground down and ingested. See, for example, Albertus Magnus’ (d. 1280) de Mineralibus, II.ii, ‘Crystallus’, where he

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Pearl particularly, the Pearl-Maiden goes to some lengths to point out to the Dreamer the inadequacy of physical eyesight as opposed to spiritual insight. Instead, she tells him, he is resolutely locked into an entrenched and worldly seeing-as-believing mindset (‘I halde þat jueler lyttel to prayse / Þat leuez wel þat he sez wyth yȝe’ [‘I judge unworthy of praise the jeweller / who only believes what his eyes behold’]),146 and thus ignorant entirely of the insightful world the Pearl-Maiden shares with her visionary sisters such as Mechthild and Matelda. Within the sublime realms of the Liber and Pearl, therefore, the flourishing of Mechthild and the Pearl-Maiden is engendered not just by the verdant and fruitful efflorescence of the vegetal realms they occupy, but also the crystalline sunlight of the divine love that shines upon and through them and which nurtures them like a mother’s milk. In this way, the lithic becomes liquified, rendered fluid by the light it absorbs and refracts outwards. Indeed, the appearance of the Pearl-Maiden to her father before the ‘crystal clyffe ful relusaunt’ [‘crystal cliff, brilliantly bright’],147 not only suggests the swimming of the landscape in the Dreamer’s dazzled eyes and the gradual clearing of his blurred vision; it also offers the impression that the Pearl-Maiden herself is part of that unstable crystalline structure which gives her up to her father’s eyesight in a gradual becoming: ‘At þe fote þerof þer sete a faunt/ A mayden of menske ful debonere; / Blysnande whyt watz hyr bleaunt’ [‘Seated at the foot of that summit was a child / a noble girl, a young woman of grace / wearing a gown of iridescent white’].148 As a maiden viewed in and of crystal, then, she absorbs both its appearance and its qualities, linking her from the outset to the crystal-wombed Virgin in the Visitation imagery of Jung’s discussion. And, as Cohen argues of the transcendent qualities asserts that ground crystal, mixed with honey to make it palatable, will fill a mother’s breasts with milk: see Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 83. See also, Marbode of Rennes (d. 1123), de Lapidibus, ed. John Riddle, trans. C. W. King (Wiesbaden: Granz Steiner Verlag, 1977), ‘de cristallo’, pp. 77–8. 146 Pearl, lines 301–2 (trans. p. 28). See also Stanbury’s discussion in Seeing the Gawain Poet, especially pp. 12–17. 147 Pearl, line 158 (trans. p. 16). 148 Pearl, lines 160–3 (trans. p. 16).

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of precious stones, they share a close affinity with souls because of their ‘non-human endurance, radiance, chaste singularity, and a love of reproaching the human world for its inferiority’.149 It is little wonder, then, that the crystalline Pearl-Maiden’s relationship with her father is now one of gentle but persistent reproach for the inferiority of his male-coded perspectives and encouragement for greater self-reflection and insight. Indeed, as once a ‘jueler gente’ [‘gentle jeweller’] himself before her death, he, more than most, should be aware of the multifarious non-human subjectivities of precious stone and jewels and what they can teach about beauty and transcendence.150 The Middle English translator of Mechthild’s Liber also labours the same point in his embellishment of Mechthild’s vision of the jewel-encrusted thrones of the Trinity and of Mary situated at the top of the seven-stepped hill. Here, unlike in the Latin original, he explains to the reader how the ‘bryghttenesse of þe pur golde’ and the light refracted by the ‘precyous stones’ is ‘a ryall workyng of þe kyng of heven’.151 In this translated version of Mechthild’s text, the beauty of the precious stones lies not so much in their aesthetics as in the way they articulate the working of divine love.

Mechthild’s Rivers and Pearl’s Flowing Stream That the Pearl-author was aware of Mechthild’s often unique imagistic combinations and exegeses – especially those conglomerating in Book II of her text – is perhaps best suggested by his lyrical description of the river flowing from beneath God’s throne, which leads the Dreamer to the Pearl-Maiden sitting on its banks, a description that in many ways consolidates the other resonances between the two literary works I have delineated so far. Now he describes first how the banks of the river, on closer inspection, re-solidify into 149 Cohen, Stone, p. 37. 150 Pearl, line 264 (trans. p. 25). For a detailed and sensitive examination of the Dreamer as jeweller and the poem as ‘jewelled’ artefact, see Felicity Riddy, ‘Jewels in Pearl’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 143–55. 151 Boke, I.xxvi, fols. 26v–27r.

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the precious stone, beryl (a stone that, within lapidary-lore, was frequently confused with crystal and which also contained properties believed to improve feeble eyesight and cure deep sorrow);152 and second how the pebbles on the river-bed are comprised, not of common stone but of emeralds and sapphires. Again, it was considered that, like crystal, both emeralds and sapphires were able to improve eyesight and calm the emotions; and, in the case of sapphire, it was also believed to be able to reconcile a person to God.153 More significant, however, is the Dreamer’s description of the paths running alongside the river which he finds himself drawn to follow. Here, instead of the usual eluvia, the pathway is made from a gravel of precious pearls that crunch loudly under his feet, shining so brightly that they dim the sunlight: Þe grauayl þat on grounde con grynde Wern precious perlez of oryente; Þe sunne bemez blot blo and blynde In respecte of þat addubbement. [The grinding gravel when crunched underfoot was precious pearl of Orient, so even sunbeams seemed dark and dim, outshone by opulent ornament.]154

While a gem-encrusted river-bed is a fairly common image within medieval depictions of paradise,155 a gravelly pearl-encrusted pathway is, to my knowledge, only attested in one other text: that is to say, Mechthild’s Liber, again in in Book 2, where by far the greatest resonance between the two works is to be found. In a passage that follows on closely from Mechthild’s description of her union with Christ, discussed at the start of this chapter, Mechthild describes her interrogation of Christ about the meaning of a line from Psalm 148 ‘Laudate eum, celi celorum, et aque que super celos sunt, laudent domini’ [Praise him, you heaven of heavens and let all those 152 Marbode of Rennes, commentary on ‘De berillo’, in De Lapidibus, p. 49. 153 Marbode of Rennes, commentaries on ‘De smaragdo’ and ‘De sappiro’, in De Lapidibus, pp. 44–5 and p. 42. 154 Pearl, lines 81–4 (trans. p. 9). 155 Dorothy Metlitski has traced this to Arabic tradition, emerging in European contexts via Spain. See her The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), especially p. 216.

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above the heavens praise the Lord].156 In response, Christ informs Mechthild that the waters of the heavenly river are made up of the tears of the saints, to exemplify which he offers her a vision of ‘aqua limpidissimam’ [a river of great clarity], the bed of which is ‘auro purissimo’ [the purest gold]. Again, instead of the usual eluvia of sand and gravel, ‘habens pro arena margaritas et gemmas pretiosas, designantes diversas Sanctorum virtutes’ [instead of sand, it had margery pearls and precious stones, signifying the various virtues of the saints].157 Mechthild’s river, moreover, with its pearly paths is teeming with shoals of fish swimming in harmony, symbolising, so she informs us, the desires that direct a soul towards her union with God: Erat etiam multitudo piscium in illa aqua ludentium et se agitantium; per quod significabantur desideria quae animam ad Deum agitant, et suspiria, et planctus quibus anima Deum allicit ad se. [Also, there was a great multitude of fish in that water that played and thrashed about; by this was signified the desire which stirs a soul towards God, and the sighing and lamenting with which a soul draws God to herself.]158

Nor is this the only time Mechthild draws upon such imagery to describe the virtues of heaven. Earlier in Book 2, Mechthild describes her union with Christ within an enclosed vineyard setting. In the stream running through the vineyard again there appear shoals of fish, this time with glittering golden scales, swimming freely in its waters. For Mechthild, these fish signify ‘amantes animas, quae ab omnibus terrenis delectationibus separatae, seipsas fonti omnium bonorum, hoc est in Jesum, immerserunt’ [‘loving souls who have torn themselves away from earthly delights and plunged into the fountain of all goodness, which is Jesus’].159 Later in the same book, Mechthild again describes her union with Christ in terms of 156 Psalm 148:4–5. 157 Mechthild, Liber, II.xviii, p. 153. This is a chapter that Newman omits from her modern English translation. The translations are therefore my own. The Aberdeen Bestiary describes pearls as being formed from the morning dew of heaven and that, in a moral sense, twelve of them represent the twelve virtues: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f100v. Accessed 20 March 2020. 158 Mechthild, Liber, II.xviii, p. 153. My translation. 159 Mechthild, Liber, II.ii, p. 137 (Book, p. 121).

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fish enclosed in water [‘sicut piscis in aqua’].160 Although at first fearful that the fish will be netted and killed, with Christ’s guidance Mechthild is brought to the realisation that ‘Pisces in aqua fructificant’ [‘Fish in water are fruitful’].161 Again, just two chapters later, Mechthild compares another moment of union with Christ to fish swimming in the waters of the divine: her soul-in-Christ, ‘in divina fruitione deliciatur, natans in divinitate sicut piscis in aqua’ [‘delights in divine fruition, swimming in divinity like a fish in water’].162 The linking of the fruitfulness of divine union with swimming fish here produces exactly the type of fluid efflorescence that Irigaray has recognised as productive of a female imaginary that escapes the fixity of patriarchal arborescent thinking. Indeed, in Mechthild’s work the fluid, glittering, scale-encrusted fish, rendered translucent via the liquidity of sunlight and flowing water, function also as re-renderings of the powerfully evocative and orthodox Christian symbol of the fish as figure of Christ himself. This symbolism was based on the Greek term for fish, ἰχθύς [‘ichthys’], and its transliteration as an acrostic, meaning ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’.163 Such orthodox association was further enhanced by recourse to various biblical references to fish: Matthew 1.17, for example, when Christ invites the disciples to become ‘fishers of men’; or John 21.6, which recounts the miracle of the fish suddenly becoming abundant in the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, in Matthew 12:40 Christ explicitly identifies with the biggest ‘fish’ of all, the great whale that swallowed up Jonah, telling his disciples: ‘For as Jonas was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.’ Mechthild surely had all these associations in mind in her attempts to explicate the flourishing liquidity of her mystical union with Christ in all these examples. When placing these extracts from the Liber alongside Pearl, it becomes impossible to read Mechthild’s depictions of fish with glittering scales representing human souls within the fast-flowing 160 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxiv, p. 166 (Book, pp. 132–3). 161 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxiv, p. 166 (Book, p.133). 162 Mechthild, Liber, II.xxvi, p. 170 (Book, p. 135). 163 ησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ [Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr].

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stream of paradise without their bringing to mind the four manuscript illustrations of the poem preceding Pearl that detail the encounter between the Pearl-Maiden and the Dreamer, as well as the depiction of Jonah and the whale in Cleanness’s retelling (also illustrated in the manuscript on folio 86r). Although there are no such piscean references within Pearl itself, nevertheless, the illustrator certainly saw fit to draw them into the heavenly stream on three occasions as part of his own imaginative response to the poem.164 Indeed, scholars have long debated the provenance and expertise behind these images, with the consensus until recently being that they were most likely added by an unskilled illustrator sometime after the manuscript’s production at the end of the fourteenth century.165 However, contemporary spectral imaging techniques have recently uncovered that the illustrator and the colourist were, in fact, different people with rather different artistic visions (the latter being considerably less adept than the former) and, moreover, that both artistic endeavours were carried out separately – at some distance from the production of the manuscript itself (although most likely at the behest of the manuscript’s owner).166 Given what I have been arguing above, therefore, it is not beyond possibility that, like the poet, the owner of Cotton Nero A.x at the very least (if not the illustrator and painter), was also familiar with Mechthild’s writing and had proffered instructions to bring the illustrated scenes more in line with her visions of the earthly paradise, images that had, in turn, perhaps lodged themselves in the owner’s mind, 164 Pearl is included alongside the poems Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in BL, MS Cotton Nero A.x. This manuscript has been digitised and is available online at: https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ ms_nero_a_x!2_fs001r#. The images in question appear on fols. 41r, 41v, 42r and 42v and three of them depict the Dreamer separated from the Pearl-Maiden by a wide stream in which are swimming large, agile fish (Plate 6). 165 For Andrew and Waldron, these images are ‘notably crude, and are presumably the work of an artist of limited talent’. Commenting directly on the inclusion of fish in the stream illustrations, they add: ‘the presence of huge fish in the stream depicted in three of the illustrations of Pearl … seems singularly inept’ (‘Introduction’, in Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, p. 4 and p. 5). 166 For a comprehensive treatment of these new discoveries, see Murray McGillivray and Christina Duffy, ‘New Light on the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Manuscript: Multispectral Imaging and the Cotton Nero A.x. Illustrations’, Speculum 92.1 (2017), 110–44.

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given the orthodoxy of the image set. As such, it could be that these unexpected representations of fish in the waters of paradise owe their provenance to their startling – and repeated – presence as transcendent piscean souls in the Liber, where their appearance in the water flowing over the pearly gravel of Mechthild’s paradise signifies the flowing of these souls towards divine union.

Hermeneutics of the Child as ‘Becoming-Woman’ As we have seen, there are sufficient thematic and imagistic resonances between Mechthild’s Liber and Pearl to suggest some kind of spectral intertextuality at the very least, especially in those vegetal and horticultural hermeneutics that dominate both works and constitute a primary means of articulating complex mystical union within a range of garden settings. Perhaps the most startling, however, is the importance placed in both works upon the body of a small child who is swept off in either an actual, or else figurative, death. In both the Liber and Pearl, too, the young-child hermeneutic generated is shaped into another important articulation of the type of female-coded efflorescence I have been discussing above, as we follow these infant girls’ trajectories from birth to death (or quasi-death); from fetishised flower to unfolding celestial ‘Rose’; to apotheosis as divine interlocutor and, ultimately, to queen of heaven. Both Pearl and the Liber also go to some considerable lengths via their similar frame-narratives to trace the origins of their protagonists’ transcendent nuptial spirituality as lying in an untimely death – or, in Mechthild’s case, an early brush with death close enough to effect a very hasty baptism soon after her birth.167 In both cases, too, such an early encounter with death allows both infants to escape those conventional life-pathways laid out for them by their respective cultures: that is to say, the arborescent logic of 167 See Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 5 (Book, p. 216): ‘ita ut primo nata cum videretur jam spiritum exhalare, eam presbytero sancto et justo viro jam missam celebraturo, cum festinatione offerrent baptizandam’ [‘As a newborn she seemed to be on the verge of death, so she was brought hastily to be baptized by a priest, a holy and righteous man, who was about to celebrate Mass’].

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their parages.168 Similarly, the parental reluctance to release them to God is foregrounded in both texts as a major shortcoming: in Mechthild’s case, having refused at the age of seven to leave the Helfta nunnery after a visit with her mother, she is threatened and entreated by both parents to come home – but to no avail.169 Meanwhile, in Pearl, as we have seen, the Dreamer allows worldly sorrow to cloud his belief that his daughter could ever achieve the role of queen of heaven and, as such, he is equally reluctant to relinquish her to God. In their critique of what they configure as the ‘arborescent schema’ of the type of genealogical ‘tree’ discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari characterise this form of knowledge as nothing less than ‘the oldest, and weariest kind of thought’. For these commentators, the genealogical tree, with its phantasmagorical root-to-branches vertical uprightness, embodies and perpetuates ‘binary logic [as] the spiritual reality of the root-tree’. As they also aptly point out: ‘Nature doesn’t work that way’ and, moreover, ‘Thought lags behind nature’ as a result.170 Patriarchal representation of historical lineage in terms of a ‘tree’ of direct descendancy within the enclosed parage of the patrilinear family structure thus creates the logic that entrenches grand narratives within a fixity or rootedness that denies the type of flourishing advocated by Jantzen, or the efflorescence that lies at the centre of Irigaray’s recent work, or, indeed, the links drawn by Wampole between the blossoming sub-divisive and subterranean root and the (feminine) subconscious, all discussed in previous chapters. Rejecting the logic of the ‘root-tree’ (and its correlational off-shoot,

168 As Newman points out, Mechthild’s father was the lord of Hackeborn-Wippra, which constituted a powerful and influential Thuringian dynasty. At the time of Mechthild’s birth, her elder sister, Gertrude, was already a nun at Helfta, which, at that time, was situated in Rodarsdorf (Book, p. 271, n. 3). Gertrude of Hackeborn would go on to become a longstanding abbess of the institution between 1251 and 1291. Perhaps because Gertrude was already at the nunnery, Mechthild’s parents were all the more reluctant to release her as an oblate. 169 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 6 (Book, p. 217). 170 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 5.

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the ‘root-book’)171 alongside their famous rejection of the ‘root’ in favour of the ‘rhizome’,172 Deleuze and Guattari, like Mechthild and the Pearl-poet, turn instead to the figure of ‘the child’ who, whilst always already swept up into the branches of the genealogical tree of her forebears, is nevertheless, because of her cultural immaturity, disruptive in her ability to generate ‘gestural, mimetic, ludic and other semiotic systems’ that lie initially outside the hegemony of patriarchal signification and understanding. The child’s logic, based on traces of the type of natal semiotics and the efflorescence of ‘becoming’ discussed in earlier chapters, before it is stifled by a culturally-assimilated adulthood (in Deleuze and Guattari words, ‘dessicated’), is, for these commentators, ‘a microscopic event [that] upsets the local balance of power’. The disruptive potential of this microscopic child-logic, too small to be visible or taken into account, in turn allows young children, who also largely remain unseen within wider patriarchal culture, thereby to ‘extricate themselves from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language’.173 This extrication from aspects of the ‘law’, has nothing to do with fetishised notions of an infant’s ‘purity’ or even ‘cuteness’, however. Instead, as far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, a child’s disruptive logic is always already a form of what they term ‘becoming-woman’, regardless of the child’s sex or gender attribution. This is due to the fact that, within patriarchal culture, the act of fixing and essentialising of inherently fluid bodies is most clearly demonstrated by the fate of women and the captured use-value of their bodies under patriarchy. As they explain about this femalecoded process: The body is first stolen from the girl …. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. The boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example, by pointing 171 For Deleuze and Guattari, the two are interchangeable, since they are both ‘the measure of something else’. For these commentators, as they consolidate into the ‘root-book’, traditional masculinist forms of writing have nothing to do with the process of signifying, but are instead ‘to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’ (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 5). 172 For a detailed analysis of this concept, see Wampole, Rootedness, especially pp. 216–54. 173 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 15.

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Here, the ‘theft’ of the girl’s body by patriarchy and its co-option into patriarchal binary logic operates as a predicate for the eventual loss of all bodies to that same patriarchal logic, as a sexed and gendered history is similarly imposed upon those bodies to sustain and perpetuate patriarchal law. A constantly ‘becoming woman’ (as opposed to a fixed ‘being woman’), therefore, constitutes the site of a dynamic resistance to the patriarchal act of shaping and fixing bodies to fit the precepts of that patriarchy’s own law. The childas-becoming-woman, therefore, is ‘like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term: man, woman, child, adult’.175 In other words, the child’s non-fixed, becoming status is able to reveal the fixity to be laid upon it, as the law of binary opposition moves to assimilate it into its hegemony. In its co-existence with that fixity, the process of becoming (that is, the inherent becoming-woman of us all) most apparent in the child provides a force that lays bare the arbitrariness of that hegemony. The opening narratives of Mechthild’s Liber and Pearl serve both to animate and exemplify this thinking in extraordinarily prescient ways, in spite of their functioning in different epistemological contexts. Here, in both texts, we have a girl-child as a becoming-woman who breaks with the arborescent logic of the root-tree and the ‘dominant competence of the teacher’s language’ to assert the competence of her own teachings which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, are ‘atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, of contaminating men’.176 This is a ‘contaminating’ teaching, moreover, that draws its linguistic idiom, not from the old and weary root-tree (which, of course, is also the Derridean phallogocentric root discussed in chapter one), but upon an alternative hermeneutics of flourishing gardens in which trees are no longer static or exponential, but, like the flowers beneath

174 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 305. 175 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 305. 176 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 304.

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them, are female-coded and efflorescent in their own spreading, unfolding and their ‘molecular impregnating’ of the soil.177 In the Liber, such dynamics are played out in its first chapter, which, as mentioned, tells how Mechthild was rushed to church by her parents soon after her birth since ‘videtur jam spiritum exhalare’ [‘it seemed [she] would already give up the spirit’].178 A drama ensues within which the priest saying the Mass rebukes Mechthild’s parents harshly for the same lack of faith (itself an ‘arborescent logic’) that we see displayed later by the Dreamer in Pearl, and foretells that the sick child (to whom the text refers generically as puer), will not only survive but ‘sanctus et religiosus homo erit’ [‘will become a holy and religious person’].179 Mechthild’s use of the masculine nouns here, while grammatically valid as a means of signifying what was deemed the generic masculinity of the ‘human’, nevertheless also highlights the fact that, as a new-born infant, she had not yet been ‘girled’ (that is to say, ‘fixed’) by her culture – and thus, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms, is a paradigmatic ‘becoming-woman’.180 After baptising the sick infant, moreover, the priest learns from an interlocution with Christ that the precipitous baptism was nothing but a divine ploy, ‘ut absque mora ejus anima Deo templum dedicaretur, eamque ex utero matris totaliter inhabitando sua gratia possideret’ [‘to dedicate her soul without delay as a temple to God, so his grace could inhabit and possess her completely from her mother’s womb’].181 From birth, therefore, Mechthild is destined not to fulfil the role laid down for her by the noble parage into which she is born. Instead, having survived this near-death encounter, upon a later visit with her mother to Helfta at the age of seven ‘propre castrum cui parentes ejus praeerant’ [‘from the castle where the family had its seat’] Mechthild insists – much against 177 The concept of the disruptive becoming-woman’s ability to ‘impregnate’ culture, especially writing, is discussed in terms of the molecular by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, especially p. 304. 178 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 5. My translation. Newman prefers to translate it more loosely: ‘she seemed to be on the verge of death’ (Book, p. 216). 179 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 5 (Book, p. 216). 180 Use of term ‘girling’ as an activity of culturally constructed gendering was coined by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 7. 181 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 5 (Book, p. 217).

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the will of her parents – on joining the convent, where her sister, Gertrude of Hackeborn, was currently a nun and, later, abbess.182 Whilst John Boswell defines this type of child oblation during the high Middle Ages as ‘a decorous means of limiting family size’ as well as ‘a means of dealing with unwanted daughters’,183 there is no evidence in the text to suggest that this was anything other than Mechthild’s own volition, her becoming-woman resistance to the (L)law-of the (F)father, no doubt with the example of her sister, Gertrude, held in mind. Indeed, very soon, Mechthild’s decision to extricate herself from the demands of her parage is vindicated when, as child and ‘becoming-woman’, she is privy to divine grace and visionary experiences as Christ’s sponsa-in-waiting: ‘Statimque miro modo coepit in Dei amore et devotione fervere, spiritusque ejus melliflua suavitate crebro in Deo exultare’ [‘At once she began to burn in marvellous devotion and love of God, and her spirit frequently exulted in God’].184 Even at this young age, then, Mechthild is depicted as rejecting the arborescent logic of the dynastic life laid out for her as a girl of high-born status. Instead, she chooses her own pathway to God within the nunnery where she can flourish as a continually becoming-woman amongst other becoming-women. Indeed, very soon in the following narrative, she exchanges roles with her parents, becoming ‘mother’ and ‘teacher’ herself, so much so that that ‘sicut vera mater … ut quicumque ad eam accessisset, consolatus redirect aut instructas’ [‘like a true mother … anyone who approached her went away comforted or instructed’].185 Thus, in the space of a single chapter in the opening of the frame-narrative, Mechthild is imbued – as infant, daughter, sister, mother, sponsa – with the same type of disruptive child and becoming-woman contemporaneity as posited by Deleuze and Guattari. And, just like the 182 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 5 (Book, p. 217). Mary Jeremy Finnegan devotes an entire chapter to the often-overlooked Gertrude of Hackeborn in The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 11–25. 183 John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 279. 184 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 6 (Book, p. 217). 185 Mechthild, Liber, I.i, p. 6 (Book, p. 217).

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Pearl-poet in his own place and time, Mechthild makes full use of its hermeneutic potential. Indeed, the opening sections of Pearl follow this same trajectory very closely: like Mechthild, the Pearl-Maiden is taken from her parents in untimely fashion, but this time through physical death and burial within the erbere where, as we have seen, to the Dreamer’s mind, rot and decay now predominate, rather than the flourishing with which such gardens are normally associated (‘Þat spot of spysez mot nedez sprede, / Þer such rychez to rot is runne’ [‘Spices must thrive and spread in that spot / where rot and ruin enrich the soil’].186 Like the decaying body, even the flowers reflect the father’s grief by taking on the hue of bodily corruption in their ‘Blomez blayke and blwe and rede’ [‘blooms of white and blue and red’].187 Nevertheless, the Dreamer also carries a forlorn hope that the gleam of the lost ‘pearl’ will somehow illuminate the deep undergrowth, reaching where the sun’s own beams cannot (‘Flor and fryte may not be fede / Þer hit doun drof in moldez dunne’ [‘Flower and fruit could never fade / where my pearl entered the dark earth’).188 Unbeknown to him at the start of the poem, however, far from illuminating the undergrowth, as we have also seen, his daughter is already illuminating heaven, joined with the heavenly bridegroom and occupying an altogether different garden, where death does not impinge and which flourishes perpetually. In his pre-visionary state, then (and, indeed, for most of his visionary experience), the Dreamer fails to draw the connections between the gleaming pearl in the undergrowth and the becoming-woman of his daughter’s resurrection. Like Mechthild’s parents, he is unwilling to relinquish his daughter to God and a flourishing in the afterlife: even when he sees her in the realm of her transcendence, he is still incredulous in his response, asking of her role as heavenly queen: ‘“may þis be trwe?”’ [‘can your tale be true?’].189 In her reply, the PearlMaiden, again like Mechthild, reverses their conventional familial roles to admonish him for his lack of insight and belief. As she aptly 186 187 188 189

Pearl, lines 25–6 (trans. p. 5) Pearl, line 27 (trans. p. 5). Pearl, lines 29–30 (trans. p. 5) Pearl, line 421 (trans. p. 38).

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warns him, those who only believe what they see with earthly eyes deserve no praise and, moreover, belie the deeper truths inherent to God. Such people are: … much to blame and vncortoyse Þat leuez oure Lorde wolde make a lyȝe, Þat lelly hyȝte your lyf to rayse, Þat Fortune dyd your flesh to dyȝe. [… discourteous and worthy of blame For believing our Lord would speak a lie, Who faithfully promised to lift up your life Should Fortune cause your flesh to rot.]190

In spite of her efforts, however, to the end the Dreamer is unable to fathom how a child of two, recently swept from him by death and who ‘cowþez neuer God nauþer plese ne pray, / Ne neuer nawþer Pater ne Crede’ [‘knew neither … creed nor paternoster / nor how to pray or to please God’], could so rapidly achieve such transcendence ‘on þe first day!’ [‘on your first day!’] after her death.191 The correlation of the child hermeneutic in both texts does not stop there, however. In fact, it runs far more deeply than this initial comparison may suggest by virtue of a memorable vision recorded in Book V of the Liber, one devoted to Mechthild’s redemptive gifts and her special ability to release suffering souls from purgatory. Here Mechthild tells of how she too had a visionary encounter with the soul of a two-year-old girl whose mother had pledged to devote her to God as an oblate.192 The child, however, had died before this could be achieved. Significantly, too, instead of appearing to Mechthild in the form of an infant, the girl appears to her as an adult woman who contemporaneously incorporates the child in the same way as we saw in Pearl, announcing her apotheosis by means of clothes the colour of roses, overlaid with a mantle of gold upon which appear embroidered snow-white lilies. In this manifestation, 190 Pearl, lines 302–5 (trans. p. 28). 191 Pearl, lines 484–6 (trans. p. 43). The Paternoster and the Creed were the first prayers a child would have been taught. Mechthild was clearly known for her own Paternoster meditations, as testified to by Boccaccio’s Decameron and MS Lansdowne 379 (see p. 225, note 98 and p. 228, note 112 above). 192 Mechthild, Liber, V.xii, pp. 339–40 (Book, p. 195). Newman also notes this resonance, pointing out that the episode ‘anticipates Pearl’ (Book, p. 268, n.13).

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she clearly anticipates the Pearl-Maiden in appearance and impact, whose garment, as we have seen, is similarly ‘Blysnande whyte’ and ‘glysnande golde’, but, in this case, Mechthild casts herself as the questioning ‘dreamer’, and in a dialogue that bears more than a passing resemblance to that exchanged between the Pearl-Maiden and the Dreamer in Pearl: Dixitque ad puerum: ‘Unde tibi haec tanta gloria?’ Respondit: ‘Dominus in sua benignitate haec mihi contulit. Haec rubea vestis significant quod naturaliter eram amans; aureum vero pallium Religionis designat habitum, quem mihi Dominus contulit, pro eo quod mater mea religiosam vitam me ducere delegavit. Et omnia quae mihi Dominus erat daturus, si perfecte Religionis habitum duxissem, nunc mihi secundum liberalitatis suae magnificentiam donavit. Insuper mihi speciale meritum est, quod in utero matris Christo fueram assignata.’ [Mechthild asked the child, ‘How is it that you have such great glory?’ She replied, ‘The Lord in his kindness gave it to me. This red robe signifies that I was naturally loving. The golden mantle denotes the monastic habit, which the Lord gave me because my mother had destined me for religious life. Everything the Lord would have given me if I had worn the habit in a perfect life, he has given me now according to his magnificent largesse. Moreover, I have a special reward because I was dedicated to Christ in my mother’s womb.’]193

Here again, we have a precocious two-year-old child manifesting contemporaneously as a becoming-woman whose earthly beauty and goodness make her far more fitted to heaven than to earth: ‘Tam amabilis puer erat, quod ei manere in terris non expediebat’ [‘She was such a lovely child that it was not fitting for her to remain on earth’].194 In Pearl, the child is also picked out by Christ and ‘called … to Hys bonerté’ [‘to become His bride’] because ‘“For mote ne spot is non in þe”’ [‘there is no blame or blemish in your being’].195 In both cases, too, we have a visionary or a dreamer who is at first incredulous about the honour bestowed by God upon the child but

193 Mechthild, Liber, V.xii, pp. 339–40 (Book, 195). 194 Mechthild, Liber, V.xii, p. 340 (Book, p. 195). 195 Pearl, line 761 and line 763 (trans. p. 66). Andrew and Waldron gloss the term bonerté as ‘beatitude’ (p. 306).

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who is then instructed by that same child, who is also a transcendent becoming-woman. The female-coded nuance of all three episodes is therefore dependent upon the becoming-woman’s escape from patriarchal logic and the arborescent earth-bound constraints it would impose upon her. Indeed, in the Liber this is accentuated by the fact that the girl had been offered as an oblate even before her birth – ‘in utero matris’ – representing a practice that may have been relatively common within the elite milieu that produced the Helfta nunnery, in spite of the fact that it ran contrary to canon law: the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX in the mid thirteenth century made it clear that children were not to be professed before the ages of twelve for girls and fourteen for boys and, additionally, that those joining the religious life before those ages should be free to leave, if they so wanted. This was confirmed by Pope Innocent IV who allowed for reconfirmation of child oblates at the age of fifteen, should they wish to remain in their religious order.196 However, as Nicholas Orme points out, professions at an earlier age remained common well into the later Middle Ages, especially amongst the nobility.197 What follows in the Liber not only reflects this debate exactly, but further demonstrates the female-coded hermeneutic system so important to this text: here, in the face of Mechthild’s continued scepticism, Christ sides resolutely with the dead infant’s mother, reminding Mechthild, moreover, that, just as when a child dies soon after baptism and the promises of the godmother [‘mater spiritualis’] are able to secure her salvation, so in this case, since it was the intention of the actual mother [‘mater’] to devote the child to God, so that same child was able to take up her place as sponsa Christi in heaven. To leave the reader in no doubt about the divine endorsement of such female authority, moreover, Christ adds an addendum that presents the arborescent logic of the father as running directly counter to divine will, and negates the former in the process: ‘“Insuper,”’ he asserts, ‘“ejus pater post mortem primogenitae suae votum matris irritasset, 196 Decretales Greg., IX.3.31 and Sexti Decretales, 3.14.1, as cited in Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, pp. 63–4. 197 Nicholas Orme discusses child oblation in Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 224–5 (here at p. 225).

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et eum in saeculo reservasset”’ [‘“Moreover, her father would have annulled the mother’s vow after the death of his firstborn daughter and kept this child in the world”’].198 This father, then, is unwilling to sanction releasing a second daughter to the nunnery after losing a first to death – something entirely understandable, of course, both within the terms of parental emotion and the dynastic logic of the patriarchal parage, as enshrined in canon law. Both texts, however, present paternal intransigence as running counter to God’s plan for female spiritual efflorescence, thus necessitating divine intervention to effect the child’s becoming-woman in each case.

Entering the Vineyard: The Late-Comers in Paradise Whether Mechthild’s visionary child had been baptised before her death is unclear, although high levels of infant mortality during the period necessitated baptism soon after birth.199 That this necessity was a source of anxiety, however, is attested by an interpolation offered by the Middle English translator of the Liber, where, at the end of the chapter concerning the dead child discussed above, he claims that the ‘wryter’ of the Liber was mistaken in her assertion that a mother can vouch vicariously for the security of the soul of her dead infant, writing: Of þis ensample before be warre, that ys to seye that a childe be þe moders vowe of cristiaunte shall be savyd þowȝ it deye tofore, for clerkes holden the contrarie opynyon, for y trowe þe fyrst wryter mysseundyrstode.200

Undertaking his translation sometime in the early fifteenth century, such anxieties may well have been exacerbated for the translator, not only because of the politics attached to English translation

198 Mechthild, Liber, V.xii, p. 340 (Book, p. 195). 199 Orme, Medieval Children, p. 24–6. 200 Boke, V.vi, fol. 93v. In her commentary, Yoshikawa, however, considers this as part of Mechthild’s clear predilection for universal salvation, as suggested elsewhere in her writing (Boke, ed. Mouron and Yoshikawa, forthcoming 2021). I am grateful to Yoshikawa for sharing her pre-publication manuscript with me.

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during the period,201 but also by deep vestigial fears following the outbreak of bubonic plague in the mid fourteenth century (fears that also drove the frame-narrative of Boccaccio’s Decameron, as we saw earlier).202 Indeed, these same anxieties present themselves as a subtext in Pearl where the dead daughter, in the Dreamer’s mind at least, is still ‘clad in clot’ and died at too young an age to achieve apotheosis in heaven. He is, moreover, unable to believe that God could make such a mistake: ‘“I may not traw, so God me spede,”’ he tells her upon their visionary encounter (and just a little patronisingly), ‘“Þat God wolde wryþe so wrange away”’ [‘My Lord excuse me, but I cannot believe / that God would make such a great mistake’].203 The maiden’s powerful and protracted response here is not one of frustration or anger, but instead draws again on a teaching predicated firmly on the garden hermeneutics and flourishing of the location of their encounter as she launches a lengthy retelling of the parable of the vineyard as recounted in Matthew 20:1–16. Here, the vineyard’s owner, having paid his early workers a penny to toil in the vineyard all day, nevertheless pays the same amount to those who come to the vineyard to work only at the end of the day – to the great disgruntlement of those who had arrived early. Such, the Pearl-Maiden intimates, is her own reward as a ‘late-comer’, who had only toiled but two years in the vineyard of Holy Church but whose reward is the same as if she had toiled there an entire lifetime. Such too will be the reward of the grumbling, jealous and incredulous early labourers – an image of the resentful Dreamer himself, whose own ‘work’ 201 The image of the vineyard was a commonplace for representing the church in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England, but came to be associated with the anti-Lollard mission of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, who referred to the ‘infected vineyard wall’ of the Church as having been polluted by the Oxford-born heresy. See Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church’, as before; and ‘The Mole in the Vineyard: Wyclif at Syon in the Fifteenth Century’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchinson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 131–62. For a discussion of how the writing of Mechthild fits into this context, see Yoshikawa, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn and Cecily Neville’. 202 For a detailed study arguing for the significant impact of the plague upon the four poems included in the manuscript, including Pearl, see David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl Maiden (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2019). 203 Pearl, lines 486–7 (trans. p. 43).

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for God is erroneously deemed by him to be of more value, since it has extended over an adult lifetime. This lively retelling and its lengthy exegesis take up nearly twenty stanzas at the epicentre of the poem before morphing into a retelling of Luke 18:15–17, where Christ rebukes his disciples for attempting to send away those children who had been brought to him by their mothers for blessing or healing (‘Suffer children to come to me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God’). Thus, the seemingly mistaken transcendence in heaven of the child-as-precious-pearl (and the becoming-woman of Deleuze and Guattari) are juxtaposed here and rendered contemporaneous in refutation of the binary logic of ‘the … weariest kind of thought’ via the Pearl-Maiden’s fresh reminder of these two biblical grand-narrative parables. Moreover, these re-tellings then morph seamlessly into a third, this time the story of the pearl of great price, based on Matthew 13:46, another apt parable for the Pearl-Maiden to levy against the Dreamer’s weary lack of understanding. Within this parable a merchant is depicted as selling all his goods in order to purchase the most precious of pearls, just as God ‘sold’ his only son to purchase human souls for the kingdom of heaven.204 These parabular juxtapositions serve as an entangled metanarrative, within which the Pearl-Maiden ventriloquises the master narrative in seemingly orthodox fashion. Simultaneously, however, she realigns its components to create an altogether new dialogue that prioritises the sanctity of her own experience as child, becoming-woman, pearl and gardener in the vineyard-of-the-Lord. Such a realignment, therefore, presents an alternative understanding of a transcendence that allows her also to integrate a contemporaneous set of subjectivities that counter the weariest thought and logical constraints of traditional exegeses of these parables. By means of such a realignment of discourse, poetics and hermeneutics the Pearl-Maiden is able to confront the Dreamer’s incredulity at her right to transcendence and his forgetfulness of how infant baptism allies the infant soul to God within the paradise of his vineyard:

204 Pearl, lines 730–2 (trans. p. 63).

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The Middle English Poem Pearl ‘Bot innoghe of grace hatz innocent: As sone as þay arn borne, by lyne In þe water of babtem þay dyssente. Þen aren þay boroȝt into the vyne. Anon þe day with derk endente Þe niyȝt of deth dotz to enclyne. Þat wroȝt neuer wrang er þenne þay wente Þe gentyle Lorde þenne payez Hys hyne’. [But the innocent have enough inherent grace. After being born they are duly baptised, immersed at once in holy water, and so they venture into the vineyard. Soon their day, edged with darkness, descends at dusk into deathly night-time, and the Lord allots His labourers their allowance who were blameless during their brief lives.]205

Again using the hermeneutic of the child, the Pearl-Maiden demonstrates that, regardless of how short a time they have lived, God will pay infants their due and welcome them into the flourishing vineyard where they will find the ‘welle’ of Christ crucified at its centre.206 As I have shown, to find the likely source for such poetic gymnastics that overlay child, woman, gardener and sponsa in a single paradigm as becoming-woman and place her in an enclosed vineyard as her proper place, we need look no further than Mechthild’s Liber. Here, the sacred vineyard makes a number of important appearances, sometimes comprising a multivalent image for Christ himself – and especially the enclosure of his sacred heart. As we have already seen, on one occasion Mechthild is encouraged by Christ to draw grapes with her mouth from grafted vines emerging from his heart.207 On another, as also discussed above, Christ invites Mechthild into the vineyard of his heart, entered via his wounded side.208 In yet another significant vision received in the monastic church during the singing of the Vinea facta est [A vineyard 205 Pearl, lines 625–32 (trans. p. 55). 206 Pearl, lines 649–56 (trans. p. 57). 207 See the discussion of Mechthild’s union with Christ in the vineyard of his sacred heart in the previous chapter. 208 See note 159 above.

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is planted], Mechthild sees her own heart transformed into the vineyard of God in which grapes productive of four different types of wine to feed the faithful are growing.209 The purest and sweetest of these, flourishing on the east side, signifies, moreover, ‘operum fructus quos homo Deo in pueritia defert’ [‘the fruit of those works that a child offers to God’,210 with the wines made from the grapes in the north, south and west designating adolescent labour, youthful works and the ‘panting’ [‘anhelat’] for God of Mechthild as the feminised soul, respectively. Thus we see in Mechthild’s text another realigned vineyard of biblical parable, within which she traces her own paradigmatic labour in the vineyard also in terms of contemporaneous identities: from infant and becoming-woman to transcendent sponsa Christi. As she explains in her exegesis (and thus prefiguring the same exegesis as provided by the PearlMaiden in Pearl): ‘Deumque valde in eo delectari qui ab infantia usque ad mortem, per omnem vitam suam Deo laudabiliter vivit.’ [‘And God takes great delight in it when a person lives a praiseworthy life for his sake from early childhood until death.’]211 By means of her own efflorescent vineyard heart, in which the child as ‘becoming-woman’ morphs into transcendent soul, Mechthild presents her own reconfigured treatment of the parable of the Lord’s vineyard and its potential for human flourishing. Such an adept reconfiguration continues, now with the appearance of Christ in the vineyard of Mechthild’s heart. There he sits in majesty, a rushing stream running from his own heart into a fountain, with which water he sprinkles all who come near. What then follows serves in part to animate what lies outside the Dreamer’s (and, indeed, reader’s) view in Pearl: that is, the otherwise unseen process whereby the Pearl-Maiden achieves her apotheosis. In Mechthild’s vision, in her own vineyard-heart she approaches the Virgin who is suddenly visible on Christ’s right-hand side. Now Mechthild appeals to the mother of God to allow her to be cleansed 209 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxii, pp. 79–80 (Book, pp. 89–90). 210 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxii, p. 79 (Book, p. 89). 211 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxii, pp. 79–80 (Book, p. 90). Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa suggests these four wines also equate to the ‘four ages of man’ in ‘Mechtild of Hackeborn as Spiritual Authority: The Middle English Translation of The Book of Gostely Grace’, The Medieval Translator (2017), 241–53 (248).

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within the water emerging from Christ’s side in a new and wholly literalised enactment of the symbolic baptismal rite. At this, the Virgin sweeps Mechthild up into her arms, again like a child, placing her into the bosom of God where she lies her head upon his heart, planting kisses on it in the process. This is soon followed by a moment of ecstasy which sees Mechthild ‘intra Cor Dei raptus est’ [‘ravished into the heart of God’]212 where she joins all the elect in the company of heaven. Another striking use of the vineyard-as-hermeneutic in Mechthild’s text (as mentioned above in the context of resonance with Dante’s Paradiso) emerges in Book Two, where Mechthild records a vision of herself being invited into the vineyard of Christ’s heart during Mass as the Asperges me is being sung by the women (an antiphon, of course, closely related to the baptismal rite and the forgiveness of sins). Again envisioning herself as a small child, Mechthild is once more swept up into the arms of Christ who has greeted her just as a mother does her child [‘quasi mater filio’] before opening up the gate to his heart and inviting her to enter.213 Inside Christ’s heart she finds a fertile vineyard with a river running from east to west in which Mechthild is washed clean of sin. Along the river-banks grow twelve trees, some with blossoms reaching towards the heavens, with others infertile, bending towards the earth.214 Explaining to Mechthild that the vineyard signifies the Church ‘in qua triginta tribus annis multo labore desudavi’ [‘in which I sweated with hard labour for thirty-three years’],215 Christ presents himself as a gardener and early-labourer, imploring the late-comer, Mechthild, to assist him with the watering. Rushing 212 Mechthild, Liber, I.xxii, p. 81 (Book, p. 90). 213 Mechthild, Liber, II.ii, p. 137 (Book, p. 121). 214 Mechthild, Liber, II.ii, p. 137 (Book, p. 121). This is reminiscent of Revelation 22:2 that describes Saint John’s vision of the Tree of Life in the heavenly Jerusalem, bearing twelve fruits ‘for the healing of the nations’. Mechthild interprets her own visionary trees as the virtues enumerated by Saint Paul in Galatians 5:22. For a discussion of the iconographic tradition of the trees of virtues and vices, see Susanne Wittekind, ‘Visualising Salvation: The Role of Arboreal Imagery in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Kremsmünster, Library of the Convent, Cod. 243)’, in The Tree, ed. Salonius and Worm, pp. 117–42 (especially pp. 122–6). 215 Mechthild, Liber, II.ii, p. 138 (Book, p. 121).

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to the river with a heavy bucket, Mechthild strives to irrigate the garden herself, until Christ relieves her of her burden and provides her with a vision of the heavenly host as a reward for her garden labour. Thus, like Pearl, this episode also clearly references Matthew 20:1–16, with both Mechthild and the Pearl-Maiden taking up the role of late-comers to the toil. Such accounts of Mechthild’s efflorescent transformation, first into a fertile and flourishing vineyard with Christ as baptismal ‘font’, then into child being admitted into the arms of God, then into divine gardener, contain all the hermeneutics we have been examining in Pearl, therefore: divinely enlightened female interlocutor; flourishing spirituality of the ‘latecomer’ child; fertile garden-vineyard as exegetical medium; and becoming-woman’s elevation to the heavenly elect. In both treatments, too, the vineyard parable and its exegesis animate for an incredulous onlooker/reader the flourishing of the divine Word in action and the exegetical benefits of placing a becoming-woman’s voice at the core of that Word’s locution. In turn, this suggests far more than a merely spectral presence of the Liber in the poem Pearl.

Conclusion In many ways, therefore, the horticulturally-refracted hermeneutics of flourishing, efflorescence and becoming are key to the extraordinary reconfigurations of biblical grand narrative and exegesis common to both texts. Indeed, as Elaine Miller has argued of just these types of efflorescent garden hermeneutics, they work ‘productively to multiply readings and signification’. Moreover, the signature of such hermeneutics ‘precludes the temptation to closure, resists an end that will never come’.216 In both cases, Mechthild and the Pearl-Maiden confidently rework their material, recasting it via their garden hermeneutics in terms that are distinctly femalecoded, repetitive and cyclical in ways that also resist an end(ing). Again in both cases, both Mechthild and the Pearl-Maiden as becoming-women are fully present within the gardens of their own 216 Miller, Vegetative Soul, p. 200.

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narration but are also contemporaneously elsewhere – in the cloister; in the grave; in the text; in the intertext – an overlaid set of presences they use to animate – and render paradigmatic – the role of the feminine as a route towards human transcension. It is in the garden where women and the sacred fuse, both texts ultimately confirming that to enter with understanding the man has to learn to ‘speak woman’, as Irigaray so aptly puts it; and, in the words of McNamer, where he too must ‘feel like a woman’. In his deft handling of an all-encompassing female flourishing as paradigm that incorporates both the natal and the maternal without in the least essentialising or fetishising it, the Pearl-poet surely speaks and feels like a woman: again in the words of Miller, whether male or female, ‘efflorescence … represents the impossibility of conflating masculinity with neutrality or universality [and] resists any possibility of recuperation in single mode’.217 In both Mechthild’s and the Pearl-poet’s treatments, then, the locus of the enclosed garden is where efflorescence and the transcendent are rendered both visible and accessible – but only when the operations of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ are understood as intrinsically different from their earthly, male-coded manifestations. And, in this manifestation of his own ability to speak and feel as a becoming-woman, the Pearlpoet is surely responding in some way to the voice of Mechthild of Hackeborn and the flourishing theologies that emerged from the nunnery of Helfta more than a century before the composition of Pearl.

217 Miller, Vegetative Soul, pp. 199–200.

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5 ‘Straitened on Every Side’: Susanna’s Garden Dilemma Man does not have, or no longer has, an understanding about the sensible, nor even about the natural – these realities elude him …. [L]anguage is no more than a means to univocally appropriate things, to dominate them from on high starting from an idea that man gets of them.1

I

n this final chapter, I return to where this study began: with the representation of a woman enclosed within a garden and the lifeand-death dilemma she is forced to confront within the apparent security of its high stone walls. Like Eve, the popular Old Testament figure of Susanna is equally hemmed in by the Logos; by the gender roles dictated by that Logos; and by the laws laid down by and for it. In this biblical episode, recorded in Daniel 13, and its many medieval retellings, we again see the limitations of worldly marital and filial relationships in their willingness or ability to sustain the woman; and, as in the apocryphal Life, here we witness a God who once more leaves it until the final hour to intervene – again by proxy, and this time via his prophet, Daniel. Central to both women’s dilemmas, too, is a ‘tree of life’ and a ‘tree of knowledge’, introduced to offer some kind of testimony that, in some of the more female-coded treatments of Susanna’s story, will ultimately (re)connect the enclosed woman with her own body and legitimise her desires. Indeed, in the light of the arboreal hermeneutics of flourishing deployed by those holy women discussed in my two previous chapters, it is clear that the testimony of trees and their flourishing environs can sometimes prove to be an infinitely more articulate and compassionate facilitator of a woman’s access to the divine than the ‘arborescent logic’ constructed 1

Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 85.

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under the aegis of the Logos. Even more importantly, the testimony of trees can also pinpoint the major shortcomings of patriarchal necrophilics and assert a woman’s right to the type of transcendent becoming through flourishing such necrophilics deny her – whatever the personal cost of that testimony may ultimately be. In order to trace this development, in this final chapter I examine a number of medieval reworkings of the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders to unpack the levels of misrepresentation, gendered appropriation and, on occasion, the personal investment of the reteller. First I track the history of Susanna’s appropriation as exemplum within early Christian and later male exegetical contexts; then I focus on a number of poetic reworkings of Susanna and her garden within high medieval male-authored verse, contrasting those treatments with a female-authored Leonine verse text from the same period. Finally, I turn to the anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English poem, the Pistil of Swete Susan, in which the garden location of Susanna’s dilemma achieves its most significant development and realisation as an ambiguous, labile and ultimately redemptive location. In all of these treatments, moreover, the testimony of trees is crucial; but only latterly – and in the more female-coded treatments – does this arboreal testimony drown out the prophetic voice of the boy Daniel who, as the paradigmatic necrophilic hero of Janzen’s conception, is brought in at the final hour by God to resolve Susanna’s seemingly intractable dilemma and save her from execution.

The Biblical Susanna The biblical Susanna was frequently interpreted by medieval exegetes as a Marian figure or ‘new Eve’, whose steadfastness in the context of attempted seduction within her husband’s walled garden redeemed the sin of the first woman.2 As such, from her first appearance in the Book of Daniel 13, Susanna captured Christian 2

For an overview of early responses to the Susanna story, see Lynn Staley, The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 177–81.

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imagination, something vividly manifested in the proliferation of textual and iconographic reconfigurations of the tale that began to emerge in the early days of Christianity and continued well into the seventeenth century and beyond.3 The biblical narrative famously recounts the dilemma of a paradigmatic Jewish wife and mother hemmed in and betrayed by two lascivious elders who orchestrate to spy on her whilst she enjoys the garden of the home she shares with her husband, Joachim, and her family. Desirous of her body, and in the face of her resolute rejection of their advances, the elders accuse Susanna of adultery with a non-existent youth, who, so they claim, had entered the garden to meet Susanna surreptitiously and have sex with her beneath the overhanging trees. Thus, they see to it that the law they themselves police as both elders and judges takes its course and it is only divine intervention, channelled through the young boy-prophet, Daniel, that rescues Susanna from a seemingly inevitable execution by stoning. In turn, using the testimony of the elders of a wrongly identified tree as the site of Susanna’s ‘sin’ in the garden, Daniel reveals these patriarchs to be both duplicitous and culpable, for which they subsequently receive the punishment previously destined for Susanna. The tale concludes with the good reputations of both Susanna’s father, Helcias, and her husband, Joachim, being restored by means of her exoneration: as the biblical account concludes: ‘Helcias and his wife praised God for their daughter Susanna, with Joakim her husband, because there was no dishonesty found in her’, with the final conclusion reading: ‘And Daniel became great in the sight of the people from that day, and thenceforward’.4 This biblical account therefore leaves us in little doubt that the story is meant to revolve, firstly, around the upright respectability of Helcias and Joachim as Susanna’s guardians and keepers, and later around the prophetic powers of the young Daniel, from whom the entire book takes its name. In other words, in spite of Susanna’s apparent positioning at its centre, the story is all about those men 3 4

For an overview of origins and reconfigurations of this story, see the essays collected in The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. Ellen Spolsky (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996). Daniel 19:63–4.

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who have control over her and how they choose to use – or abuse – it and solve – or resolve – it. Thus, Susanna presents as mere narrative device, appropriated and moulded to promote the dominant necrophilics of the culture in which she lives, one that would overwrite her own pleasures within the garden with the operations of deception and death. As such, she is nothing but body – what Irigaray would term ‘envelope’ – to be appropriated, filled with discourse and passed between men, first de malo as she is accused of adultery, and then de bono as she is rescued by the ‘saviour’, Daniel.5 The power of such discourse is that she is ultimately kept, quite literally, in her place as visible receptable and enactment of the law. In his work on this biblical tale, Lorenzo DiTommaso finds in it ‘all the elements of fine entertainment’, identifying evidence too for ‘the art of story-telling at its finest’.6 Whilst doubtless dramatic and suspenseful, Daniel 13 is nevertheless another example of the type of story-telling within grand-narrative contexts that resolutely foregrounds the world of men, even when the body and experiences of a woman are ultimately at stake and lie centre-stage. Indeed, in this biblical account, neither family nor friends attempt to speak up on Susanna’s behalf, nor is she ever asked to testify in her own defence. Within this schematic structure, any female protagonist – even the one after whom the story eventually comes to be named – is always already in danger of being reduced to internal dramatic antagonist and objectified body, a silent and silenced witness entirely overwritten by a story that begins, and remains, determinedly configured as action and relations between men. As Irigaray reminds us of this process within our own cultural contexts: ‘Speech has been appropriated only on the side of the man, leaving woman in a natural status, still deprived of any voice.’7 It is little wonder, then, that like the Pearl-Maiden, Susanna must, in the end, rely on the testimony of the natural world – in this case the tree in the garden – to support her release from her earth-bound 5 6 7

The envelope is a common term in Irigarayan philosophy but for a succinct summary, see ‘Sexual Difference’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 165–77 (pp. 169–71). Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 61 and p. 86. Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 110.

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double-bind and save her from the torture and execution for which she seems destined. However, as we shall see later in this chapter, in one late medieval treatment of the story, the eloquence of Susanna’s garden does not in any way reflect a traditional arborescent logic, but a female-coded efflorescent statement as its flourishing explodes into a generative cacophony raised in Susanna’s defence that, in turn, casts out the hitherto relentless necrophilics of the narrative’s exegetically inflected precursors. Without doubt, the roots of the biblical Susanna narrative lie buried somewhere within pre-Christian folkloric contexts. Carey A. Moore, for example, has argued credibly for the story as having originated as a secular folk tale that, during the course of its retellings, gradually became Judaised and accommodated itself within different cultural contexts.8 In Christian tradition, however, it is first testified to as forming part of the Greek Septuagint version of the Bible (the so-called ‘Alexandrine’ version of the text), and comprised part of a collection of eclectic apocryphal material gradually accruing to the canonical Book of Daniel. Although it long laid claim to have been written in the sixth century BCE at the time of the Babylonian exile (in which the story is set), DiTommaso and others have more recently dated it, along with other apocryphal Daniel material, to c. 164 BCE.9 Moreover, it is a story entirely absent from earlier Hebrew manifestations of the Book of Daniel, although DiTommaso has posited that there must have been some kind of underlying Susanna text, possibly written in Aramaic or another Semitic language, but now entirely lost to us.10 For DiTommaso, it is also an account ‘textually independent’ of other apocryphal Daniel material, and thus represents the earliest example of this ‘extra-biblical episode’ in which the figure of Susanna is deployed to illuminate the prophetic powers of the young Daniel.11 Betsy Halpern-Amaru’s position on this AlexanCarey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah, The Additions, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 88–9. See also DiTommaso, Book of Daniel, p. 48 and Betsy Halpern-Amaru, ‘The Journey of Susanna Among the Church Fathers’, in Judgment of Susanna, ed. Spolsky, pp. 21–34 (p. 21). 9 DiTommaso, Book of Daniel, p. 3. 10 DiTommaso, Book of Daniel, p. 4 and p. 48. 11 DiTommaso, Book of Daniel, p. 6 and p. 59. 8

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drine account of the Susanna story, however, is that it is dependent upon male characters who are ‘tactically devised’,12 an observation that can also be applied to Joachim’s garden as functional reflection of his wealth, power and renown within his own community in all versions (‘Now Joakim was very rich, and had an orchard near his house’).13 For this commentator, too, Susanna’s ‘attractive femininity and naiveté are primary indicators of vulnerability’, with the elders representing ‘the socially empowered’.14 Moreover, as Halpern-Amaru rightly points out, in this early account, Susanna does not display any intention to bathe in the enclosed garden setting, instead showing a desire to merely walk in the shaded enclosure to escape the excesses of the early afternoon sun.15 What escapes discussion here, however, is the fact that this garden is described resolutely as belonging to Joachim; on no occasion is it conceptualised as a space belonging to Susanna also. As such, in this version of the tale, Joachim’s walled garden equates with all those other male-constructed and male-dominated enclosed spaces in which Susanna is bound: the house; the synagogue; the false accusations of the elders; the Law. In Irigarayan terms, Susanna is deprived of ‘the tissue or texture of her spatiality’, that is to say, she is given an enclosed ‘place’ to inhabit – in the family, the house, the garden – that is merely a construction of the male imaginary to keep her reconciled to the laws produced by that imaginary and to guarantee their perpetuation. In this case, that ‘place’ is Joachim’s lavish house and his shady garden and the ennui it produces for Susanna (as Harrison claims Eden did for Eve),16 a compensatory gesture that ‘shuts her up in it, and places limits on her that are the counterpart of the place without limits where he unwittingly leaves her. He envelops her within these walls while he envelops himself and his things in her flesh.’ In this way, Irigaray helps to lay bare what is at stake in this early version of the Susanna tale: as a woman 12 13 14 15 16

Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, p. 22. Daniel 13:4. Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, p. 22. Daniel 13:8. Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, p. 22. Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 15. For further discussion of Eden as a place of ennui see chapter one above, p. 49.

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prismed via a male necrophilic imaginary and ‘straitened on every side’,17 Susanna ‘finds herself defined as a thing’.18 The potential of this story for development and narrative exploitation clearly rendered this functional, prosaic treatment subject to revision and embellishment, a process that saw it morph voyeuristically into a far more dramatic version that introduces a Susanna who is bathing ‘innocently’ in the garden but which invites the reader to become complicit onlooker to compromise that innocence. It was this revised version, known as the ‘Theodotion’ text after its presumed author, that was to take on canonical status in the early days of Christianity and would capture the imaginations of readers, writers and artists for well over eighteen-hundred years.19 Theodotion (fl. c. 190 CE), was an Hellenic Jewish scholar who is thought to have drawn upon either oral tradition or lost Semitic texts in order to recast the biblical narrative.20 Such attribution, however, has continued to generate much scholarly debate well into contemporary times, particularly as there are some elements in this version of the text that, in fact, predate Theodotion and could not have been written by him.21 What is clear, however, is that, by the third century, this was the version that had fully captured and colonised the Christian imaginary, introducing an arresting Edenic aesthetic and supplanting the earlier Alexandrine text in the service of what Halpern-Amaru terms ‘the development of Christian self definition’.22 Susanna as a measure of the ongoing anxieties within the self-definition of subsequent Christian communities (and those male exegetes who documented them) can thus be traced from the 17 Daniel 13:22. 18 Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, p. 169. 19 For an overview of the translation of the Susanna story from written text to visual media, see Ellen Spolsky, ‘Law or the Garden: The Betrayal of Susanna in Pastoral Painting’, in Judgment of Susanna, ed. Spolsky, pp. 101–17. 20 For a far more detailed discussion of the textual histories of both versions, see Alexander A. Di Lella, ‘The Textual History of Septuagint-Susanna and Theodotion-Susanna’, in The Book of Daniel. Vol. 2 History and Reception, Vetus Testamentum, Supplements 83.2 (2014), 587–607. See also, George J. Brook, ‘Additions to Daniel’, in The Apocrypha, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 120–8. 21 For an overview on such debate, again see Brook, ‘Additions to Daniel’, particularly pp. 120–1. 22 Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, p. 24.

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faith’s earliest days through to the early modern period and beyond. As an imperative ‘locus of [patriarchal] imprints, marks and mirage of his activity’,23 therefore, Susanna also provides us with a useful gauge for shifting paradigms of gender and power relations during the same period, as they played out in representations of this insistent story over time. In this chapter, therefore, I will trace some of the gender and power trajectories embedded within various retellings of this story during the Middle Ages, through to a significant shift that takes place at the end of the fourteenth century – at the very same time as Mechthild’s work had begun to circulate in England and the Pearl-poet was working with another set of shifting garden dynamics in his own female-coded retellings in Pearl. Within the Theodotion revision, many of the strong judicial elements dominating the Alexandrine version have been lost and the mise en scène is restricted to Joachim’s house and garden, rather than being transferred to the synagogue for Susanna’s trial, as happened in the earlier version. Additionally, this revision omits specific reference to Susanna as ‘Jewess’, whereas the Alexandrine rendition is keen to emphasise her identity as a respectable Jewish wife and mother. For Halpern-Amaru, this suggests that the reworking was ultimately an ‘attempt on the part of early Christianity to come to grips with its Jewish past’ and reconcile its ambivalences,24 although, to the alert feminist commentator, the figure of Susanna undertakes identical cultural work as empty vessel to be filled with patriarchal discourse in either case, as already suggested above. Indeed, that cultural work is increased and rendered even more urgent in the reworked text and its later offshoots, with other additions including an accentuation of Susanna’s beauty and vulnerability, as well as the introduction of a bathing scene, also mentioned above, leading to innumerable recastings of her as

23 Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 170–91 (p. 177). 24 Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, p. 23, p. 23 n. 8, and p. 25. Staley, however, reads the tale and its various medieval literary manifestations as ‘focused not exclusively on Susanna’s piety or God’s justice but on the evils of unjust judgment and on legal processes’ (The Island Garden, p. 179). I respond to Staley’s stance later in this present chapter.

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both naked and seductive.25 Additionally, Susanna does not simply respond to the Elder’s advances but vocally articulates the double-bind in which they have placed her (‘[I]f I do this thing, it is death to me: and if I do it not, I shall not escape your hands’),26 but it is a vocality that twice collapses into an incoherent cry when she realises the extent of the seemingly intractable dilemma in which she finds herself. Thus, the story morphs into one that literally and metaphorically undresses Susanna, putting her on display for all to examine as she sets about washing herself in the garden. Doubly stripped – of clothes and of language – her qualities are coopted as visual commodities to be judged as much by the onlooker/reader as the internal judicial procedures. In this way, the audience becomes complicit, invited to join these elders, partake in their lascivious gazes, and thus take up a male subject-position alongside them as they appropriate Susanna’s flourishing and deny her her jouissance. Again, Irigaray could have been writing explicitly about Susanna when she asserts to an imagined male interlocutor about the separations afforded to humans by unthinking adherence to a patriarchal imaginary: ‘I am positioned by your desire’, adding too, ‘I am there, but yet in exile’.27 In many ways, then, the story of Susanna and the Elders as it emerged in the Theodotion revision was rendered a particularly malleable medium for the speculations of the patriarchal imaginary that fed into what, for Halpern-Amaru, is ‘the evolution of the Christian canon’.28 25 This naked embellishment is largely found in iconographic settings, for which again see Spolsky, ‘Law or the Garden’. 26 Daniel 13:22. 27 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 35 and p. 36. 28 Halpern-Amaru, ‘Journey of Susanna’, pp. 24–5. A number of essays in Judgment of Susanna collection trace this trajectory of an increasingly sexualised Susanna from this early period through to the early modern. See, for example, Susan Sered and Samuel Cooper, ‘Sexuality and Social Control: Anthropological Reflections on the Book of Susanna’, in Judgment of Susanna, ed. Spolsky, pp. 43–55; and M. Lindsay Kaplan, ‘Sexual Slander and the Politics of the Erotic in Garter’s Susanna’, in the same volume, pp. 73–84. For another detailed analysis of how these and other iconographic representations of the Susanna story help to promote an ideal of marital chastity within early Christian contexts, see Kathryn A. Smith, ‘Inventing Marital Chastity: Iconography of Susanna’, Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993), 3–34.

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Susanna amongst the Early Christians That the Theodotion version was indeed popular amongst early Christians in Rome is attested by the plethora of visual representations of the story painted onto the walls of the labyrinthine catacombs carved out of the rock beneath the city by early Christians.29 For example, the late third-century Eusebius crypt houses a depiction of Susanna’s exoneration, as recorded in Daniel 13:51–60, that is set, however not in the synagogue of the Alexandrine text, but in the domestic setting of Joachim’s house, as in the Theodotion revision. Although this fresco had long been classified as a generic interrogation of an unspecified Christian martyr, more recent scholarship has confirmed it to be an image of Susanna standing alongside an adolescent Daniel and the two Elders as the former catches the latter out in their duplicitous testimony.30 The domestic setting is an important modification, especially given Susanna’s identity as daughter, wife and mother being central to her representation in the Theodotion revision. As Karen Jo Jorgeson has pointed out in her account of early Christian fresco depictions of holy women with arms raised in prayer (the so-called orans figure), the earliest Christian communities met in domestic spaces and celebrated the Eucharist in the form of shared repasts over which the women of the house presided as deacons and presbyters. Moreover, Jorgeson argues that such images would have been instantly recognisable as indicating a sacred and prophetic leadership role within the early church, rather than a vulnerable and subservient woman. As such it posits evidence for women as central figures of some agency within the early Christian religious imaginary.31 29 For a detailed account of the incursion into the mainstream of Christian imaginary of this apocryphal tale, see Piero Boitani, ‘Susanna in Excelsis’, in Judgment of Susanna, ed. Spolsky, pp. 7–19. 30 Boitani, ‘Susanna in Excelsis’, p. 8. 31 The orans figure depicts a woman (and, occasionally, a man) in ecstatic prayer, arms raised towards heaven or else open-armed to emulate the cross, for which see Karen Jo Jorgeson, ‘The Early Christian Orans: An Artistic Representation of Women’s Liturgical Prayer and Prophecy’, in Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverley Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 42–56.

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In the nearby capella graeca in the catacombs of Priscilla is to be found an entire cycle of episodes taken from the Susanna story, dating to the early fourth century, one of which certainly features Susanna in the orans pose. These include the attempted seduction scene; the appearance of Daniel as witness for Susanna; the court accusation of the elders and their laying of their hands upon her; and a final image of Daniel and Susanna giving praise to God. In the culminating illustration of this cycle, featuring the accusation and laying-on of hands on the right and the rejoicing of Susanna and Daniel on the left, the images are separated by the central figure of a tree leaning discernibly – and protectively – towards Susanna, as if in dialogue with her. The effect of this leaning tree’s presence is to point the onlooker’s attention away from the seemingly protagonistic Daniel and the certainly antagonistic Elders and direct it towards the rejoicing Susanna. In this image, too, Daniel’s eyes, like those of the onlookers, focus keenly on Susanna, and both figures this time have their arms raised as orantes. The tree at the centre of this fresco also links the garden of Susanna’s dilemma (and later salvation) to Edenic typology, connecting Susanna to a vindicated Eve and thus to Mary, with Daniel alongside her as a new Adam and precursor to Christ. As such, in these early depictions, which give rein to a woman’s redemptive possibilities within the ‘real time’ of her domestic space and its enclosed garden, we find referenced a deeply embedded female flourishing and spiritual leadership that resonates loudly with Jantzen’s assertions regarding the transformative possibilities of a lived theology of flourishing when pitted against the negative necrophilic poetics of male-orchestrated salvation. As Jantzen argues: ‘It is not possible to emphasize flourishing without emphasizing also the material conditions of people’s lives as they are lived now, here, upon this earth in relation to one another.’ Moreover, for Jantzen, ‘a philosophy of flourishing could not content itself with looking piously to an afterlife where present injustices will be abolished, while doing nothing in the struggle for their abolition here and now.’ In these paintings, the non-gender-specific orans pose of both figures in the light of the revelation of Susanna’s innocence presents to the onlooker the possibility of a transcendence for women based on flourishing as much 271

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achievable in this life as in the next. Overcome by that flourishing is a dogmatic reliance upon the ‘law’ and those necrophilics of maleonly testimony that alienate a woman from her children, family and community. For Jantzen, such accumulated necrophilics ‘are the things which prevent people and communities from flourishing’.32 Thus, in the capella graeca cycle, we are given an early glimpse of a flourishing that works as antidote to the concentrated necrophilics that drive much of Old Testamental discourse, and how that flourishing operates within an early Christian culture cognisant of its female-coded possibilities. Such is true of at least four more fourth-century Susanna frescos found in the maze of catacombs beneath the city, all clearly influenced by the Theodotion version of the story. Indeed, such prevalence of Susanna as an early visual Christian exemplum in Rome suggests that this abused wife and mother spoke perhaps even more cogently than those young virgin martyrs who had also begun to dominate the imaginary of the earliest Christian communities. One of these four images, this time in the catacomb of Praetextatus, instead of featuring the two elders as the primary antagonists, presents the viewer with two wolves labelled SENIORES. Between them stands not Susanna but a lamb bearing the inscription SVSANNA. Again, the typology is clear. As Piero Boitani points out, such representation serves to elevate Susanna to Christic status, both in terms of the sacrificial paschal lamb and as bridegroom of the Church, as imaged in Revelation 21.9–10 (‘I will show thee the Bride, the wife of the Lamb’).33 However, it also configures Daniel as the ‘good shepherd’ and thus Susanna as the errant lamb brought back into the fold, reminding us again of Eve’s transgression and Susanna’s Mary-like exoneration of that fault. Indeed, the feminising of the lamb by means of its association with Susanna resonates loudly with the feminised Christ-as-lamb who processes in heaven amongst the host of female virgins at the end of Pearl. As Boitani asserts, during this period ‘[Susanna] becomes the paradigm of Christianity’s survival as an organised body of individuals, in 32 Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 169. 33 Boitani, ‘Susanna in Excelsis’, p. 9.

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short as ecclesia, a church’.34 In these catacomb depictions, therefore, the gender associations accruing to the figure of Susanna become increasingly fluid and malleable and certainly prefigure the type of proto-feminist exploitation of the fault-lines within traditional patriarchal discourse that emerged in later treatments of the hortus conclusus, as discussed in my previous chapters.35 As such, these images pave the way for Susanna to emerge as a key actor within the late antique and medieval Christian imaginary and as another potential site for disruption of its patriarchal precepts, in spite of her frequent co-option as sexualised and fetishised body intent on providing titillation for the male onlooker’s gaze.36

Susanna and the Church Fathers: Tertullian and Augustine If Susanna formed a paradigm for the survival of early Christianity in the face of Roman persecution, such a conceptualisation was not lost on the early Church Fathers and later male exegetes.37 Indeed, as suggested above, as a pious married woman conversant with the traditional laws of her faith (‘for her parents, being just, had instructed her in the law of Moses’),38 Susanna provided for such exegetes, as for the early Christians of Rome, a consistent yet malleable paradigm that not only echoed the torments of the virgin martyrs but also reconfigured their passiones in terms of a more domestic and intimate dilemma, one that involved earthly and spiritual (re) integration for the faithful woman, rather than public execution. No doubt, too, Susanna also provided an accessible and attainable 34 Boitani, ‘Susanna in Excelsis’, p. 11. 35 For a detailed examination of Susanna as Christic, see Catherine Brown Tkacz, ‘Susanna as a Type of Christ’, Studies in Iconography 20 (1999), 101–53. Here Tkacz asserts this typological correlation as deliberate and self-evident, claiming ‘Susanna is nothing less than a prefiguration of Christ’ (p. 101). 36 For a case study on this issue, see, for example, Cordula Bischoff, ‘Albrecht Altdorfer’s “Susanna and the Elders”: Female Virtues, Male Politics’, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 23.1/2 (1996), 22–35. 37 Staley briefly covers the treatment of Susanna by a number of the Church Fathers and their later followers, including Ambrose, Tertullian, Augustine and Abelard, in The Island Garden, p. 179. For a much more expansive treatment, see Smith, ‘Marital Chastity’, pp. 6–16. 38 Daniel 13:3.

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role model for women of the new faith that initially outweighed the example of the Virgin Mary, whose virginal maternity, as Rubin has asserted, ‘did not capture the imagination as martyrs did’.39 Susanna therefore worked multivalently, especially within the context of a developing ambivalence and anxiety towards women within early Christian exegesis, one that saw Eve – and female sexuality more widely – as convenient scapegoat for human misery. We certainly do not need to be reminded of the famous edict of Tertullian (d. after 220), the Carthaginian exegete who was himself a convert to Christianity in his middle age and whose oft-quoted pronouncements regarding women as de facto the ‘gateway to the devil’ served to legitimise religious misogyny, both in the Middle Ages and well into the present day.40 Indeed, in his attempts at erasing the epistemological divide between the confessional practices resulting from early Christian fears of the ‘flesh’ and twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalysis, Foucault discusses the key role played by Tertullian and other Church Fathers in the development of what he terms a ‘technology of the self’ that was directed at women in particular in western culture via this fleshly hermeneutic. Here, Foucault singles out Tertullian as prime developer of such a technology of the fleshly self, which, so he claims, would later morph from ‘flesh’ into ‘sexuality’ in the eighteenth century.41 In this way, the concept of the ‘flesh’ united both body and spirit as hermeneutic antagonist to human hopes of salvation and thus it became the ideal focus for 39 Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2010), p. xiv. 40 Tertullian is considered the first Christian exegete to have written in Latin whose works, or many of them, are still extant. As Geoffrey D. Dunn asserts, ‘The lasting importance of Tertullian is … he was responsible for much of the theological vocabulary of Western Christianity’. See, Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), here at p. 7. For a defence of Tertullian’s apparent misogyny and a counter to more recent feminist appraisals of Tertullian’s writings, see Donna-Marie Cooper, ‘Was Tertullian a Misogynist? A Re-examination of this Charge Based on a Rhetorical Analysis of Tertullian’s Word’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2012. 41 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, various repr.), p. 211.

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the type of necrophilic overwriting of human flourishing on which Jantzen claims the new religion would come to depend. Tertullian, was, indeed, singularly masterful in his deployment of such technologies of the self in his writings – particularly those focusing on the behaviour and self-presentation of women. His rhetorical, allusive questioning style, that also appealed to the law, tradition and, ultimately, to plain ‘common sense’, was productive of a power-laden mélange of ideas that seemingly offered little room for manoeuvre for women – be they holy women, virgins, married women or widows – in their requirement to uphold, and, more importantly, be seen to uphold, both the law and unwritten tradition with their bodies. As Tertullian reminds them of the necessity for a modest self-presentation in his de Cultu Feminarum: ‘Pudicitiae christianae satis non est esse uerum et uideri’ [‘To Christian modesty it is not enough to be so, but to seem so too’].42 Only when recognised, confessed and amended by performatively modest dress, deportment and behaviour may Tertullian’s women – and, indeed, his conception of Susanna in Joachim’s garden – find integration into a healthy religious community and maintain that health by means of the patriarchally-approved visibility of their fidelity. As Foucault reminds us of such interlocutory practice (and, in so doing, anticipating the stance of Irigaray with which this chapter began): The master’s discourse has to talk, to explain, to persuade; he has to give the disciple a universal code for all his life, so that the verbalization takes place on the side of the master and not on the side of the disciple.43

Tertullian’s use of Susanna in his writing falls into line with both Foucault and Irigaray regarding ‘the master’s discourse’ and is both 42 Tertullian, de Cultu Feminarum, II.xiii.3. All Latin quotations are taken from Tertulliani De Cultu Feminarum Libri Duo: Liber II, ed. Marie Turcan, Sources Chrétiennes 173 (Paris: Cerf, 1971), available at: http://www.tertullian.org/ latin/de_cultu_feminarum_2.htm. The modern English translation is from Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women, New Advent publications, available online at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0402.htm. Both accessed 24 March 2020. 43 Foucault, Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 163–4.

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universal and succinct. He invokes her, for example, in one of his shorter treatises known as de Corona – a text aimed at persuading the community of newly converted Christians to eschew the wearing of coronets made of flowers for personal adornment and the Roman chaplet as military symbol. In so doing, he advises that, as Christians, they will stand out from the crowd as milites Christi, adorned only with their love of Christ.44 Donna-Marie Cooper has suggested of this text that it reveals anxieties about Christian men’s subordination to the Roman emperors and their gods: since Christian men owe their worship to God alone, there is no need to cover their heads with the corona.45 For Kathryn A. Smith, however, Tertullian’s approach in de Corona shows a ‘vehemence’ that she attributes to his ‘convictions concerning the inherent weakness and sensuality of women’ along with an ‘ascetic viewpoint’ that saw all women as able to incite porneia in men.46 Tertullian’s rhetoric in de Corona certainly goes far beyond a demonstration of mere anxiety. For him, the practice of wearing the coronet is not only an unnatural one but the process it involves of removing flowers from their ‘natural’ milieu, merely for purposes of adorning the head, is inherently monstrous: Tam contra naturam est florem capite sectari quam cibum aure, quam sonum nare. Omne autem, quod contra naturam est, monstri meretur notam penes omnes. [It is as much against nature to long after a flower with the head, as it is to crave food with the ear, or sound with the nostril. But everything which is against nature deserves to be branded as monstrous among all men.]47

44 Tertullian, de Corona Militis, ed. Jacques Fontaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), available at: http://www.tertullian.org/latin/de_corona.htm. The modern English translation is taken from Tertullian, The Chaplet, trans. S. Thelwall, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, available at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0304.htm. Both accessed 3 July 2019. 45 Cooper, ‘Was Tertullian a Misogynist?’, p. 196, n. 107. 46 Smith, ‘Marital Chastity’, p. 6. 47 Tertullian, de Corona, V.4.

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In order to increase the rhetorical charge of his argument, Tertullian draws on another of his treatises, the de Virginibus Velandis, in which he embellishes the pronouncements of Saint Paul in I Corinthians 11 regarding the need for all non-virgins to be veiled (‘But every woman praying or prophesying with her head not covered, disgraceth her head: for it is all one as if she were shaven’). Here, Tertullian goes a step further, suggesting that not only should non-virgins be veiled, but all women should.48 The subtext in de Corona is quite clear, therefore: whereas, for Tertullian, a coronet of flowers serves to enhance a woman’s appearance and her sexual allure, the wearing of a veil preserves and demonstrates her Christian modesty. Indeed, drawing first on a host of pagans (‘candidatis diaboli’ [‘the devil’s candidates’]),49 whose downfalls he attributes to their vain coronet-wearing – Saturn, Jupiter, Priapus, Ariadne, Bacchus, Juno, Isis, to name a few – he then links Eve directly to Pandora as the first coroneted woman within pagan myth, pointing out that Eve ‘facilius pudenda foliis quam tempora floribus incinctam’ [‘[had] her loins more naturally girt about with leaves than her temples with flowers’].50 For Tertullian, the covering of a woman’s head is directly associated with the veiling of her flesh – that is to say her sexuality – with the head and face standing in synecdochally for the genitalia and the sexual allure that, as Simone de Beauvoir famously reminded us, constitutes what a woman actually is within the male imaginary.51 Tertullian’s wider project, therefore, is to forge a gulf between a woman and the natural world and thus her potential for flourishing; to have her enclosed within a necrophilic universe of dependency upon the male other for her survival. As he advises them to recall: ‘Nam et urguemur a communione naturalis disciplinae conuerti ad proprietatem 48 Tertullian, de Virginibus Velandis, XVII, available at: http://www.tertullian. org/latin/de_virginibus_velandis.htm. The translation is again taken from the New Advent website, available at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0403. htm. Both accessed 25 March 2020. 49 Tertullian, de Corona, VII.8. 50 Tertullian, de Corona, VII.3. 51 ‘Woman? Very simple …. She is a woman, an ovary; she is a female – this word is sufficient to define her.’ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 35.

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christianam totam iam defendendam’ [‘we are obliged to turn from the rule of Nature, which we share with mankind in general, that we may maintain the whole peculiarity of our Christian discipline’].52 As ever with Tertullian, however, he is inconsistent, forging arguments from a carefully crafted rhetoric constructed to suit the particular context. Indeed, in her apologia for Tertullian’s tendencies towards a deemed misogyny, Cooper also acknowledges this lack of systematic theological thought, pointing out that ‘Tertullian did not have a systematic account on the topics of the Fall, Mary, and women’.53 As such, when Tertullian draws upon the example of Susanna in de Corona it is to her wearing of the veil, rather than the coronet, that he turns, returning to his prescription in the de Virginibus Velandis regarding the veiling of all Christian women. Now he reminds his readers of Susanna’s modest veiling of herself as a married woman to enter the court for her arraignment, and the abusive unveiling of her by the Elders as she does so (in the words of Daniel 13:32: ‘those wicked men commanded that her face should be uncovered, for she was covered’). Explaining Susanna’s choice of veiling for his readers, Tertullian writes: ‘Rea uenerat, erubescens de infamia sua, merito abscondens decorem, uel quia timens iam placere’ [‘She had come accused, ashamed of the disgrace she had brought on herself, properly concealing her beauty, even because now she feared to please’].54 For Tertullian, in spite of Susanna’s role as exemplum of the best of women, she is still an essentially fallen woman, still a daughter of Eve: she remains aware of her sexual allure and, moreover, is clearly aware that she must share in the blame for her own calamity by means of that fall. By associating herself with the enclosed garden, being desirous to walk in it and wash in it privately away from the eyes of men, Susanna has also chosen to eschew the male gaze at the same time as inviting it. Thus, she both upholds and compromises the ‘production technologies’ that serve to produce a gendered selfhood. What is at stake here is nothing less than the patriarchal necrophilic – and scopophilic – imaginary itself, therefore, played out once more in Tertullian’s 52 Tertullian, de Corona, VII.2. 53 Cooper, ‘Was Tertullian a Misogynist’, p. 5. 54 Tertullian, de Corona, IV.3.

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account of Susanna’s rejection of the lascivious advances of the Elders who catch her in a double-bind that insists upon her figurative deflowering and disgrace within the male-dominated court of law. Rather than have her veil herself in an act of self-defence (or defiance) against the hegemony of the deathly male gaze that has entrapped her, however, Tertullian’s apportioned blame, subtle though it is, unwittingly aligns him with the duplicitous Elders who also prefer to see Susanna veil herself to hide her entirely fabricated ‘disgrace’, for which she only narrowly escapes execution. For Tertullian, the moral of the tale is that the veiling of women and relinquishment of the coronet do not even need to be written into the law, therefore; instead, it behoves a person, as it did Susanna, to make a choice – and, moreover, to make the right choice – because, ‘Consuetudo autem etiam in ciuilibus rebus pro lege suscipitur’ [‘even in civil matters, custom is accepted as law’].55 In his treatment of women, here and elsewhere, Tertullian frequently appropriates the language of flourishing to support a necrophilic patriarchal agenda. In Susanna’s case, this is closely tied to his readers’ knowledge of the locus of Susanna’s ‘fall’: that is to say, the garden of her husband, Joachim, that manifests itself as an always-already Edenic setting, with the Elders as embodiments of the seductive serpent and Susanna always already a potential Eve, as I have suggested. Indeed, such necrophilic appropriation again fits neatly with what Irigaray has to say about the type of female flourishing – efflorescence – discussed in previous chapters and which is singularly denied to Susanna – and Eve – in biblical grand narrative, Tertullian’s treatment included. Indeed, Irigaray’s words and their first-person poetics could equally form the speechless cry of Susanna when she writes: Let me flower outwards too. Free, in the air. Come out of the earth and blossom, following the rhythm of my growth. Cut off from the soil which gives me birth, my efflorescence is supported by the strength of your desire, but is deprived of sap. My petals swell with your vigour, itself nourished by my blood, but thus separated from their life’s source.56 55 Tertullian, de Corona, IV.5. 56 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34.

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Here, like Susanna, Irigaray recognises how, like all women fixed by the patriarchal gaze and its laws, she too is hemmed in by a desire not her own, deprived of her own ability to flourish as an individuated, desiring being by having to operate according to the rhythms (sexual and other), or habitus of patriarchal imagining. She, too, is caught up in a perpetual double-bind, ‘straitened on all sides’. Indeed, again in his de Virginibus Velandis, Tertullian offers another bravura performance of such appropriation in terms that eerily confirm Irigaray’s critique, at the same time as establishing the hegemonic certainty of such appropriation: Aspice ipsam creaturam paulatim ad fructum promoveri: granum est primo et de grano frutex oritur et de frutice arbuscula enititur, deinde rami et frondes invalescunt et totum arboris nomen expanditur, inde germinis tumor et flos de germine solvitur et de flore fructus aperitur; is quoque rudis aliquamdiu et informis paulatim aetatem suam dirigens eruditur in mansuetudinem saporis. Sic et iustitia … [Look how creation itself advances little by little to fructification. First comes the grain, and from the grain arises the shoot, and from the shoot struggles out the shrub: thereafter boughs and leaves gather strength, and the whole that we call a tree expands: then follows the swelling of the germen, and from the germen bursts the flower, and from the flower the fruit opens: that fruit itself, rude for a while, and unshapely, little by little, keeping the straight course of its development, is trained to the mellowness of its flavour. So, too, righteousness …]57

Beginning with the same type of female-coded ‘fructification’ of creation as we have seen in the writings of Hildegard and the Helfta women, and echoed vociferously by the Pearl-poet, the longed-for Irigarayan ‘coming’ out of the earth, the ‘swelling’ of the petals and ‘nourishment’ collapse immediately into the denial of female ‘sap’ by Tertullian’s phallocentric colonisation of the female-coded imagery. Now that female encoding wilts beneath the sheer weight of the text’s linguistic necrophilics: the growing plant ‘struggles’; ‘expands’; ‘swells’; ‘bursts’; is ‘rude’ and ‘unshapely’ but keeps to a ‘straight course’, the result being that it is ultimately phallically ‘trained’ to become what it is destined to become – that is a 57 Tertullian, de Virginibus Velandis, I.9–10.

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reproduction of the same at the expense of the other. Applied to Tertullian’s appropriation of the Susanna narrative as exemplum, then, we see laid bare – both figuratively and literally – what is at stake in presenting a devout married woman and the hermeneutics of the walled garden as joint embodiment of patriarchal law. Indeed, the intense risk to Susanna’s flourishing – and, indeed, her life – in this story, as unspoken by-product of the upholding of the law, can again be summed up by Irigaray, who writes of the necrophilic demands of the male imaginary, ‘you therefore seek to go or return ever deeper to make the flower bloom’.58 As we shall see, treatments of Susanna from Tertullian’s time onwards did, indeed, go deeper in order to ensure her continued appropriation as exemplum within a Christian necrophilic imaginary. The writings of Saint Augustine also find in the figure of Susanna a particularly malleable example for discussions on virginity, widowhood and the married life, including those focusing on marital continence and hierarchies of chastity. In his de Sancta Virginitate, for example, he draws upon Susanna in defence of Saint Paul’s, to his mind, often misunderstood pronouncements on virginity, asking his audience: Nonne jam mitius accusatur Susanna, non de conjugio, sed de ipso adulterio, quam doctrina apostolica de mendacio? Quid in tanto periculo faceremus, nisi tam certum apertumque esset pudicas nuptias non debere damnari, quam certum apertumque est sanctam Scripturam non posse mentiri? [Is it not now a milder charge, to charge Susanna, not with marriage, but with adultery itself, than to charge the doctrine of the Apostle with falsehood? What in so great peril could we do, were it not as sure and plain that chaste marriage ought not to be condemned, as it is sure and plain that holy Scripture cannot lie?]59

For Augustine, the narratives of Daniel 13 and Saint Paul’s considerations in I Corinthians 7 regarding sexual continence and the subsequent status of women (‘It is better to marry than to be 58 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 35. 59 Augustine, de Sancta Virginitate, PL 40, cols 395–428 (here at XX.20, col. 406). All translations are taken from On Holy Virginity, New Advent texts, available at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1310.htm. Accessed 25 March 2020.

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burnt’)60 should be read in the same light, with the one informing the other in spite of their apparently contradictory premises. How, Augustine asks, could the Apostle have been party to the condemnation of marriage when Scripture speaks so cogently of the purity and faith of a wife such as Susanna?61 Elaborating upon this theme in his de Bono Conjugari, Augustine again demonstrates the expediency of Susanna as an exemplum for the desirability of a chaste marriage, first exhorting ‘ita bonum Susannae in conjugali castitate laudamus’ [‘the praise of the good Susanna in married chastity’] and then suggesting her lowlier position within the hierarchy of women’s sexual identities: ‘non quantum ab Anna, Susanna; sed quantum ambae a Maria superantur’ [‘but yet we set before her the good of the widow Anna, and, much more, of the Virgin Mary’].62 The caveat here introduced by the sed quantum construction serves more than to lower Susanna’s position within the patriarchal structuration established by Paul and reinforced by Augustine; it functions also as a window onto the linguistic and discursive arbitrariness of such structuring, what Irigaray helps us to understand as a ‘rather abstract, arbitrary, artificial encoding [that] makes it accessible to many provided that its usage, if not its sense, has been learned from a master’.63 Like Tertullian, too, the ‘artificial encoding’ of Susanna’s appropriation into the master narrative is dependent in part on a similar co-opting of the natural world into its service, this time in terms of marriage as a mountain to climb, where the married woman is depicted as labouring to achieve its pinnacle – chastity – and to which she is perpetually bound: Qui ergo sine conjugio permanere voluerint, non tanquam foveam peccati nuptias fugiant: sed tanquam collem minoris boni transcendant, ut in majoris continentiae monte requiescant. Ea quippe lege collis iste inhabitatur, ut non cum voluerit quis emigret. Mulier enim 60 I Corinthians 7:9. 61 Augustine, de Sancta Virginitate, XX.20, PL 40, col. 405. 62 Augustine, de Bono Conjugali, PL 40, cols 373–96 (here at VIII.8, col. 379 and XXVI.35, col. 396). The modern English translation is taken from Augustine, Of the Good of Marriage, New Advent texts, available online at: http://www. newadvent.org/fathers/1309.htm. Accessed 24 March 2020. The emphasis is my own. 63 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 84.

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In deep contrast to Mechthild’s depiction of the flourishing and affirming seven-stepped hill and her denuding it entirely of its hermeneutics of a male-coded straight line of ascent; or the Pearl-poet’s transparent, crystalline cliff below which the Pearl-Maiden sits with such unspoken confidence in her own jouissance, here Augustine’s mountain is a locus of a ‘lesser good’, something to be endured, a place that encloses a woman with no hope of escape, her life subsumed into that of her earthly spouse until the moment of his death. Even in death, the status of ‘widow’ is dependent upon perpetual spousal commemoration. As Irigaray astutely points out: ‘It is he who decides on the relevance of the coding’,65 and here we see laid bare how this figurative earthly paradise and its tiered hillside is rendered relevant as a place for female containment by means of the phallic poetics of the master. Augustine’s most protracted treatment of Susanna appears in his Sermon 343, in which he draws upon both Susanna and Joseph as biblical examples of the successful promulgation of marital chastity, likening his discourse from the onset to the sparrow and the turtle-dove, that, like the word and mercy of God, ‘nidum faciant in mentibus nostris’ [‘make a nest for themselves in our mind’].66 Again, however, in spite of this drawing on the natural world for suitable idiom, the prevailing hermeneutic is one of rigid enclosure; 64 Augustine, de Sancta Virginitate, XVIII.18, PL 40, col. 405. 65 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 84. 66 Augustine, Sermo CCCXLIII. All quotations will be taken from S. Aur. Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi, Opera Omnia (Paris: Gaume Fratres, 1838), cols. 1960–9 (here at col. 1960). The translation is taken from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 3, Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1995), pp. 39–48 (here at p. 39).

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the mind of the Christian, like her body, should form a necrophilic palisade for these ideas on chastity, rather than a flourishing garden, in spite of Augustine’s discursive nod in the direction of the Song of Songs: ‘Aedificatur pudicitia conjugalis, et tam firmo fundamento innitatur muroque valletur, ut et insidiantes repellat, et falsos testes convincat’ [‘May married chastity be built up by it [the example of Susanna], and laid on such a firm foundation, and fenced about with such a wall, that it can both repel intruders and convict false witnesses’].67 Augustine, moreover, then proceeds to encode these sentiments as Susanna’s own, co-opting and recasting them within the frame of the master narrative – and his own agenda as part of that narrative: ‘Conscripta sunt verba ejus, quae habuit in paradiso, hoc est in viridario suo: quae verba nullus hominum audivit, nisi soli duo, qui pudori uxoris alienae insidiabantur’ [‘Her words are recorded, which she spoke in the paradise (Dan. 13:7), that is her shrubbery, words that no other human being heard, apart from the two who were lying in wait to ensnare the modesty of another man’s wife’].68 In spite of Susanna’s words being heard by few, they are (re)produced for many, absorbed first into biblical narrative and then into Augustine’s exegetical treatment, both of which retain Susanna in her walled palisade, denied of the flourishing garden which, as we will see, in later versions provides the only voice to testify in her defence. Again, Irigaray could be writing of this very discrepancy when she suggests that ‘submission to the common discourse of between-men … will become blind instinctual violence towards women … presumed to belong to the world of nature – henceforth parallel to the logos – that man intends to dominate’.69 So, the female-coded dynamics of the enclosed garden, Susanna’s hoped-for private space, the place of her desired flourishing, her own Song of Songs, is dispensed with by the between-men dialogue of the Logos that needs her willingly enclosed in its necrophilic discourse. As Irigaray observes of such patriarchal practice: ‘[M]en must create a dynamic to assemble these pieces into a whole. They create it through opposition, conflict, even hatred, over which rules 67 Augustine, Sermo CCCXLIII, col. 1961 (Sermons. p. 39). 68 Augustine, Sermo CCCXLIII, col. 1961 (Sermons, p. 39). 69 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 86.

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an indifference that claims to arbitrate in a neutral way.’ As a result, the woman and her voice are obliterated: ‘the pieces are no longer animated with her life’.70 Augustine thus replots Susanna’s story from the pieces he finds most expedient to (re)assemble, de-animating her and removing her voice by means of a subtle ventriloquism. Given the enthusiasm of both Tertullian and Augustine for Susanna as a useful exemplum to promulgate their own particular perspectives on expectations attached to Christian women, it is unsurprising that she remained a popular figure within later patristic and exegetical writings, which used her to convey often quite discrete and diverse concerns regarding gender relations and the Logos. Indeed, Lynn Staley has offered a helpful overview of some of these, arguing ultimately that the primary concern of most of them was the understanding and upholding of justice and the law within the frame of severe testing. For Staley, ‘the tale is certainly a courtroom drama, but it is also a narrative of transgressions – of female chastity and modesty, of the household and property, of justice itself’.71 What we might wish to add to Staley’s appraisal, however, is that Susanna – whichever form she takes in patristic thought through to the later Middle Ages – is far more imbricated with male-driven anxieties about sexually-active women, their societal and dynastic roles and how best to reshape, re-assemble and secure them to better fit the discourses emerging from, and driving a male socio-religious imaginary. Such anxieties, for example, surface in the writing of Bernard of Clairvaux and later Cistercian treatments, where Susanna participates in what Engh has termed, ‘the Christomimesis involved in voluntary self-feminization […] radically different from the femaleness of real women’. Recognising a performance of the feminine at Cîteaux as a type of performative appropriation, rather than a route towards a multi-gendered spirituality, for Engh such ‘self-feminization’ is, in fact, a mimesis, not of a lived femininity but of a ‘model of masculinity to be acquired and

70 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 87. 71 Staley, The Island Garden, p. 179.

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conquered by everyone’, that is to say, a masculinity dependent upon a feminine aesthetic for its spiritual charge.72

Peter Abelard’s Susanna This was certainly a lesson not lost upon Bernard’s contemporary and intellectual antagonist, Peter Abelard (d. 1142), whose use of Susanna, both as a Christomimetic paradigm and a figure for self-mimesis, provides another stark and illuminating instance of male appropriation of Susanna as exegetical tool. Abelard, of course, was writing in the wake of an enforced castration in the early twelfth century following the discovery of his disastrous affair with his young pupil, Heloise – a penalty enacted on the instructions of Fulbert, Heloise’s uncle. Indeed, the affair, Heloise’s subsequent pregnancy and reluctant marriage to Abelard and his retributive castration rapidly became one of the primary causes célèbres of the age.73 Following the birth of their only child, Abelard opted for the monastic life and Heloise was also enclosed, seemingly against her will, eventually becoming abbess at the house of the Paraclete in Paris. Indeed, the copious letters subsequently exchanged between the two former lovers suggest that Heloise was never fully reconciled to her new status, although her enclosure seems to have helped appease what came to be an intransigent sense of remorse on the part of Abelard.74 His difficulties did not end there, however. Often an intellectual outsider, Abelard went on to be twice arraigned for

72 Line Cecilie Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), p. 405. 73 For biographical studies of Abelard and Heloise, see Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Also useful are the essays collected in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a brief discussion of the events leading to Abelard’s castration and remorse, see Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 7. 74 For a modern English translation of this correspondence, see The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. Michael Clanchy and Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003).

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heresy, having found a formidable theological opponent in Bernard of Clairvaux, amongst others.75 Given all these circumstances, also recorded by Abelard in his Historia calamitatum,76 it comes as small surprise that he, too, makes recourse to the figure of the betrayed and wrongly calumniated Susanna at some length, focusing, as we might expect, on her marital chastity and adherence to God’s laws, as well as the openness of those laws to abuse and the devastating potential of bearing false testimony against the innocent. In his Sermo 29, de Sancta Susanna ad Hortationem Virginum,77 written for the nuns of the Paraclete, over which, as mentioned above, his former lover, Heloise, presided, Abelard concentrates on Susanna as matrona – that is, married laywoman – and insists throughout the treatise that a woman’s chastity within the world has much to teach those who remain cloistered. Indeed, Susanna is deployed by him ostensibly to instruct the enclosed sisters that chastity is not necessarily a safely established prerogative of their vocation but one that must always be actively guarded and protected: like Susanna, they should see to it that the gate of their own ‘garden’ is not left open and therefore vulnerable. For Abelard, too, cloistered chastity also renders the sisters susceptible to the dangers of pride or vainglory, something that again opens up the walled garden of their own bodies to assault and penetration. Quoting copiously from Daniel 13 to prove his points regarding Susanna’s steadfastness within an enclosed garden that nevertheless also proves vulnerable, Abelard mobilises her to ask his audience rhetorically: ‘Quali autem agone matrona mirabilis mirabiliter triumphaverit, perpendite, virgines, ut ex ea discatis?’ [‘Also, consider this carefully, you virgins: by what struggle will a remarkable matrona triumph miraculously, so that you may learn from her?’]78 75 For an account of this antagonistic relationship, see Constant J. Mews, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard’, in A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 133–68. 76 Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, PL, 178, cols. 113–82. 77 For the Latin text, see Abelard, Sermo XXIX: de Sancta Susanna, ad Hortationem Virginum, PL 178, cols 555–64. All quotations are taken from this edition and the translations are my own. 78 Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 557C.

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In this sermon, Abelard is particularly concerned with Susanna’s silencing, by the fact she is ‘straitened on every side’ and unable to defend herself. He focuses especially on how she cries out on two occasions, heard, not by family or friends but only by God: once in the garden as her dilemma unfolds; the second time in the courtroom as she is condemned to death. For Abelard, as for other writers, Susanna’s cries, moreover, are those of internal prayer rather than those far more disturbing and embarrassing ones emitted by a flesh-and-blood woman in distress – and in real time. As he exhorts the nuns of the Paraclete, therefore: Non timetis mortis periculum, si a vobis incestuosos repuleritis, sicut illa, ut dictum est, faciebat […]. Aut si clamare necesse sit, facilius vos sponsus quam Susannam exaudiet maritus, et quo potest amplius, liberabit citius. [Do not fear the danger of death, if you repel fornication from yourselves just as she did, as has been said …. For if it were necessary for you to cry out, your [divine] spouse will hear you more easily than did the husband of Susanna, and, what is more, he will free you more quickly.]79

Here, as in other similar accounts, we find patriarchal fears and abhorrence of a woman’s publicly raised voice displayed, resulting in its rhetorical absorption into metaphor and figura. Yet, with many of the women of the Paraclete – Heloise included – having been sexually active within the world before their professions, the figure of Susanna also provides a literal example, perhaps more potent than the Virgin, serving Abelard a doubly useful purpose as he warns them about exposure to what he sees as the more repugnant influences of the world, with sexuality at their apex. There have been very few analyses of this Abelardian sermon to date, with the main exception being that of C. Stephen Jaeger who, in his book on medieval intellectual history, devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of the ways in which, to his mind, Sermo 29 functions as another autobiographical return for Abelard to his own troubled history.80 For Jaeger, the ‘eloquent silence’ of Susanna 79 Sermo XXIX, PL 178, cols 558C–D. 80 C. Stephen Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers: Intellectuals and Society in the Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 331–54.

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stands in for Abelard’s own, in the face of the injustice and suffering he feels have been inflicted upon him, especially following his castration and public humiliation.81 In particular, Abelard’s famous refusal to respond to Bernard of Clairvaux’s reading of the nineteen articles against him during his second arraignment for heresy in 1140 is explained by Jaeger as fully imbricated in this sermon. Here, to prove his point, Jaeger draws upon Abelard’s depiction of Susanna’s ‘passive, determined silence’ as she waits to hear her fate during her trial:82 Exspectabat ibi tacita damnationis suae sententiam, et tacens hominibus, soli Deo fletu loquebatur. Nunc vero damnationis accepta sententia, ad excusationem sui, non liberationem, suam innocentiam protestata, famae potius quam vitae decrevit consulere. [She quietly awaited there the sentence of her condemnation, and silent before men, she spoke to God alone by her weeping. But now, having received the condemnation, she protested her innocence – in order to excuse herself, not to free herself; she resolved to save her reputation rather than her life.]83

As such, Jaeger posits a strong identification with the falsely accused Susanna on the part of Abelard, suggesting also the creation of a type of apologia pro vita sua encoded within the sermon. As Jaeger asserts, for Abelard, ‘[t]he example of Susanna is particularly important because it showed the possibility of higher vindication beyond the judgment of false judges’.84 Whilst I concur with Jaeger that there is a deep encoding to be discovered in Abelard’s Sermo 29, it is not necessarily the subtle encrypting of the specific autobiographical detail he envisages. Indeed, only a cursory reading of the text reveals that the sermon’s primary preoccupation is not injustice or silence but an inexorable subtext concerning the ravaging dangers of sexuality as they come to settle in and upon the female body. Indeed, in order to render this an insistent imperative, Abelard all but elides Susanna’s garden as the important locus of her seemingly intractable dilemma, instead 81 Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers, p. 31. 82 Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers, p. 41. 83 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 561C. 84 Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers, p. 42.

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summoning it only tangentially: first in citing the lascivious words of the Elders uttered in Daniel 13:20 as they persuade Susanna that the gates of the garden are locked and their actions, therefore, invisible; and, secondly, towards the end of the sermon when the Elders start building their case against her, claiming that they came upon her adulterous activities by chance whilst walking in the garden. Seemingly, for Abelard, the physical garden of the Elders’ assault upon Susanna and the repose afforded by the natural world she has sought out for her comfort and safety in the biblical version do not bear great relevance to his mission, being relegated to minor topographical context. Indeed, his only nod in the direction of the garden outside of these two brief allusions is at the opening of his sermon, where he writes: Audistis, charissimae, atque utinam exaudissetis beatam illam sponsae sollicitudinem in Cantico canticorum, ad exhortationem vestram diligenter descriptam. Quae cum diu quaesitum in lectulo dilectum invenire non posset: Surgam, inquit, et circuibo civitatem: per vicos et plateas quaeram quem diligit anima mea (Cant. III, 2). In lectulo dilectum quaerit, et non invenit, cum anima perfecta fatuis virginibus adjuncta opera ipsarum considerans, exemplis earum instrui cupit, quas de continentia carnis in magna virtutem perfectione esse credit. [You have heard, my dearest ones, and I would that you have understood clearly, the blessed solicitude of the bride in the Song of Songs, for your diligently organized encouragement. Although inquiring for a long time, she was not able to find her beloved in her bed. I will arise, she said, and go about the city; in the streets and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves (Canticle of Canticles. 3, 2). She sought her beloved in the bed but did not find him, since the perfect soul, united with foolish virgins [and] considering all their deeds, desires to instruct by their examples those he believes to be of great virtue with regard to perfect continence of the flesh.]85

Here, however, rather than place the Bride within the lavish and erotically charged garden of the Song of Songs, with which she is traditionally conflated, Abelard reminds his audience of the Bride’s marital bed, which her lover has left and which she too abandons in order to seek him out. Entrenched and traditional allegorical 85 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 550B.

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readings apart, given the history of his relations with Heloise and her enforced separation from him, followed by her equally enforced profession, the image of a bride leaving her marital bed to follow her spouse is pointed, potent – and, indeed, deeply poignant – invested as much in its more literal meanings at this point as the spiritual meanings with which these verses had long been overlaid. This is soon confirmed and compounded by Abelard’s concerted recourse to epithets of repugnance directed at the bed of worldly lovers: it is a ‘tumultuous bed’ [‘tumulto … lectulo’], locus of the ‘voluptuous flesh’ [‘voluptatibus carnis’] and the ‘molesting of brides’ [‘molestis nuptiarum’].86 When he turns to the depiction of Susanna herself, described in Daniel 13:1 merely as ‘a very beautiful woman’, his rhetoric is equally explicit. Now he transforms the ‘beautiful woman’ into a woman who, like the view he once held of Heloise, has both a beautiful body and a beautiful mind – and who encountered considerable difficulties in defending both as a result: Pulchra corpore, sed pulchrior mente, tanto laudabilius haec duo simul, quanto difficilius custodiebat. In altero habebat pugnandi materiam, ex altero cepit victoriae coronam. [With a beautiful body, but with a more beautiful mind – so much more praiseworthy, these two things together – how much more difficult it was to guard them. On the one hand she had to fight the material flesh, on the other she took the crown of victory.]87

What follows on from this is, indeed, even more telling, with Abelard masking the encoded depiction of his own sexual ‘sin’ with Heloise behind his account of the Elders’ response to the beauty of Susanna’s corporal and intellectual beauty: ‘Ex illo in concupiscentiam ejus exarserunt sacerdotes, ut hoc per constantiam virtutis probaretur’ [‘From that, the priests were inflamed with lust for her, so that she would be tested by means of the constancy of her virtue’].88 For Abelard, too, rather than succumbing to the pleasures of worldly sexuality, Susanna’s/Heloise’s beautiful body and equally beautiful mind would better be presented to God as ‘hostiam 86 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 555B. 87 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 556A. 88 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 556A.

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immaculatum’ [‘an immaculate sacrifice’].89 Indeed, configuring the sexual advances of a man upon his wife as obscene and coercive, Abelard appears to subtly re-enact the sexual encounters that led to his castration and subsequent calamitates. As he reminds the women of the Paraclete (and, no doubt, Heloise specifically), an earthly husband ‘exegerit turpitudinem, et in tantum etiam fortasse perstiterit ut vim facere praesumat’ [‘exercises filthy demands, and maybe even persists to the point that he overcomes her by force’]. As a result, they/she should ‘respicite vestrum maritum non hominem, sed Deum, non Joachim, sed Christum, et intrepida Susanna vestrum unaquaeque dicat: Si hoc egero, mors mihi est’ [‘consider your husband to be not a man, but God, not Joachim, but Christ, and the intrepid Susanna will say to every one of you: If I do this thing, it is death to me’].90 Susanna and her undefined garden, therefore, operate in this text not just as exempla for the nuns of the Paraclete, nor as apologiae for Abelard’s sense of the injustices directed against him, but as an encoded ‘conversation’ with Heloise about their former encounters within the luscious ‘garden’ of the sexual passion they seem to have shared initially and Heloise’s reluctance to leave that garden for the cloister. As such, Abelard’s return to the words of the Elders in Daniel 13:36 and his brief exegesis of them, sums up his project and encapsulates perfectly the role Susanna has played within the metatext of his rhetoric: Cum deambularemus, inquiunt, in pomario soli, etc. Bene, inquam, dicitis, deambularemus, et soli qui concupiscentiae stimulis agitati, a Deo pariter et lege jam eratis alieni. As we walked, they say, in the orchard alone, etc. Well, I say: [if] you say, we were walking, and alone, those of you stirred by the stings of concupiscence are equally already estranged from God and the law.91

Like Augustine and Tertullian, therefore, Abelard’s fascination and fear of the implications of Susanna’s garden and his close scrutiny of it (never mind his own calamitous experience of its earthly delights) again align him with the Elders even as he attempts to 89 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 556A. 90 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 558B. 91 Abelard, Sermo XXIX, PL 178, col. 559B.

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exhort Heloise and her nuns (and, indeed, himself) to identify with the straitened Susanna. In his impassioned re-telling, then, Abelard cannot but ‘univocally appropriate things [and] dominate them from on high starting from an idea that [he] gets of them’.92 In this way, he demonstrates the extent to which he is himself caught up in a double-bind of his own – and in so doing confirms Irigaray’s conception of male discourse cited at the beginning of this chapter.

Susanna and the Feminine The figure of Susanna as both a rhetorical and personal exemplum, then, offered multiple appeals to many of the early Christian exegetes and later commentators, who seem to have been particularly locked into the inescapable politics of a male gaze and its eroticising of a woman entrapped within a walled garden. It is therefore of little surprise that the ubiquity of such treatments spilled over into other monastic settings during the high Middle Ages, this time primarily in the form of Latin versification. Extant library catalogues from St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, Peterborough Abbey and the Austin friary at York, for example, all record poetic treatments of the story, with one of the texts housed in the Peterborough library betraying in its title what was largely at stake: the Verba Floris Judicis de Susanna versifice.93 While the Latin adjective florus is usually taken to mean ‘beautiful’, nevertheless, its shared etymology with the noun flor [flower] and the verb florio [to bloom or blossom] betrays the garden poetics at the heart of the tale’s ongoing popularity – and, of course, the type of appropriation of its female coding by a male imaginary and its scopophilic gaze of the type identified by Irigaray and discussed above. For J. H. Mozley, early editor of three such high medieval treatments written in Latin, these intricate and 92 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 85. 93 The texts are recorded variously as Versus or Rithmi de Susanna, with one of the Peterborough texts recorded as Verba Floris Judicis de Susanna versifice. See Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 290; and Lists of Manuscripts formerly in Peterborough Abbey Library, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 31, p. 46 and p. 48.

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pun-laden poems, within which multiple layers of meaning operate simultaneously, were primarily constructed ‘as a kind of exercise in rhetoric’, although he does note the ‘rich description of Joachim’s house and garden’ in the context of another such treatment by the thirteenth-century Cistercian author, Alan of Melsa, which I discuss further below.94 One of the poems of such interest to Mozley is that of Petrus de Riga (d. 1209), a canon of Rheims, whose longer work known as the Aurora comprised a series of versifications of biblical episodes,95 and into which series his Susanna poem is thought to have been first incorporated.96 Indeed, A. G. Rigg suggests that the Aurora was particularly popular in England, pointing out also that in one colophon appended to the text, Petrus is himself identified as English (‘natione anglicus’).97 Whatever the truth of that claim, there is little doubt that Petrus’ work provided a source for later English treatments of the narrative – Alan of Melsa’s included – and that Petrus regarded Susanna as a subtly troubling figure: on the one hand she was the dutiful and virtuous wife, a faithful Christian subject to be emulated by the monastic community; on the other, she, like all women, was the embodiment of seductiveness, an alluring scapegoat for male sexual arousal and therefore to be treated with caution. Indeed, in his initial overview of the story in the opening lines of the poem, this is more than merely suggested in Petrus’

94 J. H. Mozley, ‘Susanna and the Elders: Three Medieval Poems’, Studi Medievali, Nuova Serie 3 (1930), 27–52 (27 and 29). All quotations from the poems by Petrus de Riga and Alan of Melsa will be taken from these editions. Translations are my own. 95 Mozley discusses Petrus de Riga in the introduction to his edition, ‘Susanna and the Elders’, pp. 27–8. See also Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language Gender and Authority from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 131–2 and p. 135; and ‘Anglo-Latin Women Poets’, in Latin Learning and English Lore (2 vols): Vol. 2: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine O’Brian O’Keefe and Andy Orchard (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 86–107. 96 The Susanna poem seems also to have circulated separately, finding its way into numerous anthologies, for an account of which see A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 156. 97 Rigg, History, p. 156.

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word-play on the medieval Latin verbs tempto and laudo, along with their cognates: Temptat aquam, laudat temptatam, nuda subintrat Laudatam, nudam uidit uterque senum. [She tested the water, she approved the test, she entered the excellent water naked. Each Elder saw her naked.]98

Here, the intermingling of temptation and testing, praise and approval serves to put Susanna in the frame of culpable and complicit object of desire: not only does she ‘tempt’ the onlooker but she ‘tests’ him also, simply by being present – and by being a woman.99 In addition, the repetition of (in this context) the salacious nuda/nudam and the half-rhyme shared with laudatum and senum, brings about another collapse in meaning, where Susanna is clearly implicated in her own downfall alongside that of the Elders. She is always already a daughter of a fallen Eve and, in Irigarayan terms, therefore a figuration of the grand narrative, ‘a projection of … history’.100 As Jane Stevenson also points out: Peter of Riga chose to say that even though Susanna is chaste and virtuous, her beauty exerts a compelling, magnetic force to which the men respond, apparently helplessly: thus the problem of male lust lies with women.101

To this end, from the onset of the poem the author establishes – and maintains – Susanna herself as the poem’s primary enclosed garden narrative; but this is a garden built by men, unwittingly confirming Irigaray’s stance on women as enflowered appropriations within a patriarchal imaginary, and the way in which they function for, and are written into being by, men. As such, for those same men, a woman as an efflorescent being is ‘buried in the depths of your memory, where you constantly try to grasp it again’.102 Thus, for Petrus and his Elders, Susanna is simultaneously represented as 98 Petrus, ‘Susanna’, lines 23–4. 99 Stevenson also makes this point in the context of Petrus’ repetition of the verb temptare and the adjective nuda in this section of the poem (Women Latin Poets, p. 132). 100 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 33. 101 Stevenson, ‘Anglo-Latin Women Poets’, p. 99. 102 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 35.

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both flower and garden, buried within the cultural memory Petrus shares with those Elders and reinvigorated as he attempts to ‘grasp’ and reshape Susanna accordingly. As the ‘extrapolated reflection’ formed by these omnitemporal desires,103 the grasped Susanna must also be entered and possessed, like Joachim’s garden, in order to refresh an ailing male sexual prowess built on necrophilic impulses of dominance and control – even in the face of the threat of death. Thus, like Abelard, Augustine and Tertullian before him, the male gaze cast by Petrus upon his own material collapses into that of the Elders, despite his best efforts to remain apart and impartial. This gaze guarantees that he cast Susanna’s ‘floral’ body, its cultural meanings (her reputation under patriarchy) and the garden (another floral body owned by her husband and an ‘interchangeable metonym’ for Susanna’s)104 into one single entity, subjecting both to the same lush terms of appropriable abundance, fruitfulness and excess. After outlining for his readers and commenting on the main features of the plot, for instance, Petrus establishes for his audience: ‘Hactenus in populo floruit eius honor’ [Thus far her honour flourished among the people]; adding the rhetorical question: ‘Sed quis erit fructus si te flos nominis ornet / Et de messe boni nil tua uita ferat?’ [But what will the fruit be if the flower of your reputation adorns you and your life brings you nothing in terms of a harvest of good things?].105 Here the intimations are clear: for Petrus, the garden and its fruitfulness can be deceptive, just as the ‘flower’ of a woman’s body also serves to ‘deceive’ – as it once did in Eden. Therefore, within the garden hermeneutics of this text, both Joachim’s garden and Susanna’s body are loci where the indolent dangers of Eden similarly abound, as the fallen Elders rise – in all senses of the word – in barely disguised excitement to enter both the garden and Susanna and, in so doing, aim to reanimate their sexual masculinity:

103 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 32. 104 For a brief discussion of this metonymy, see Jennifer A. Glancy, ‘The Accused: Susanna and her Readers’, in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 288–302 (p. 292). 105 Petrus, ‘Susanna’, lines 81–2; 85–6.

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Susanna amongst the Women At this point, before moving on to examine the significantly different treatment of Susanna and her garden in the fifteenth-century Middle English poem, the Pistil of Swete Susan and one of its likely sources, the Tractatus metricus de Susanna per fratrem Alanum monachum de Malsa de Beverlaco, it is worth pausing to consider how the phallic, scopophilic and necrophilic elements I have been identifying here, not the least in Petrus’ intricate text, are almost wholly absent from one female-authored treatment of the tale contemporary with that of Petrus de Riga, except where introduced in order to cast them under the spotlight of sometimes acerbic critique. Also using an intricate Latin poetic form, in this case Leonine versification, this lengthy treatment of the Susanna story is attributed to Willetrudis, a twelfth-century nun; or, more likely an abbess, at least according to Stevenson’s reading of the ‘tone’ with which the author addresses the sisters in her text.107 The poem is only extant in a single manuscript dating from the thirteenth century (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 12513, fols. 23–35), about whose provenance we know virtually nothing, although Stevenson, amongst others, has identified the poem’s author as likely the same Wiletrudis [sic] who was included amongst those named in prayers for the recently deceased at the Anglo-Norman house

106 Petrus, ‘Susanna’, lines 111–12. Here, Petrus’s use of the noun tedium creates layers of ambiguity and nuance, with its additional meanings of ‘boredom’, ‘weariness’ and, importantly, ‘disgust’ also being imbricated in the term. I have chosen to translate tedia as ‘injuries’, presupposing their sense of how age has ‘injured’ their virility and its visibility in terms of sexual prowess. See the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. te/dium. 107 This text and its author are discussed briefly in Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, pp. 130–6. What follows is indebted in part to her astute reading of the text.

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of Wilton in England in 1122.108 Indeed, a poem commemorating Vitalis of Savigny (d. 1122), former chaplain to William the Conqueror, produced at the Wilton nunnery in the same year, bears some comparison with the Susanna text, being also written in the same type of complex Leonine hexameter verse.109 And, of course, the Wilton community was widely renowned for its heightened levels of learning and literary productivity, providing exactly the type of milieu conducive to the composition of this Susanna poem, as both Stevenson and Elizabeth Muir Tyler have argued.110 Whatever the case, it is striking how differently this woman author treats her material from Petrus de Riga and those male exegetes discussed earlier, whose scopophilic imposition upon the material and appropriation of those feminine poetics affixed to its garden echo the Elders’ own lascivious gaze upon Susanna’s body, as we have seen. Indeed, as Stevenson points out, Petrus is keen on using carefully chosen ‘verbs of agency’ to insinuate Susanna’s complicity in her own abuse.111 What we see in the case of Willetrudis, however, is the same type of impassioned dismantling of male scopophilic ownership of the woman at the centre of the tale as we saw in Pearl, effected by means of a concerted reassignment of its hegemony and thus rendering it object of (protofeminist) critique. In so doing, she establishes Susanna’s bathing and later actions as assertions of a valid female agency ultimately unencumbered by negative male intervention and embedded within the dominant female-coded poetics of the garden space. 108 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, p. 130. The Munich manuscript is unpublished but has been digitised and is available online at: https:// daten.digitale–sammlungen.de/~db/0000/bsb00003588/images/index. html?seite=00001&l=de. The text will be cited as Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, and all translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. 109 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, p. 130. 110 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets; and Elizabeth Muir Tyler, England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage c. 1000–c.1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 323–4. Tyler also discusses Willetrudis’s Susanna poem on pp. 321–4. Another contender as author is Willetrudis of Hohenvart, who was active in and around 1090, although, as Stevenson also points out, the Hohenvart house has not been associated with any known literary activity (Women Latin Poets, p. 130). 111 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, p. 132. See also the discussion on Petrus’ multifaceted use of the verb temptare above, p. 295.

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For example, as she introduces the bathing scene, Willetrudis cleverly makes use of the same type of vocabulary of accusation and double entendre as we have seen in the case of the male authors, yet manipulates the connotative linguistic possibilities to testify on behalf of the woman, rather than offering a sense of patriarchal judgement: Susanna chooses to bathe, for instance: ‘Nam fervens estus fuerat tum valde molestus’ [For the burning heat was intensely tiresome].112 Not only is there a deep logic built into Susanna’s actions – and thus a deliberate subjectivity – but the often sexualised terms fervens and molestus, as deployed here to describe the weather conditions, serve to ‘short circuit’ the normal narrative line, throwing back the patriarchal gaze (and the vocabulary used to reinforce it) upon itself in order to reclaim the space of Susanna’s bathing for the reshaped feminine. The delineation of this space as feminine is further reinforced by Willetrudis’s depiction of Susanna as ‘accustomed’ to being in the garden [‘ut fuerat sueta’] surrounded by her handmaids [‘famulabus … comitata’] who tend carefully to her needs within what is clearly a familiar, ritualistic and communal female-only scenario.113 Willetrudis also makes other significant lexical choices that tip the events in Susanna’s favour. As Stevenson also points out, Willetrudis’s selection of the Latin verb lavare, rather than the more erotically-charged (at least in the hands of Petrus) balneare to describe Susanna’s bathing activity corroborates the pragmatic, habitual cooling and cleaning functionality of Susanna’s actions, as opposed to an insistence upon its performativity as erotic provocation as in Petrus’ text.114 Similarly, as we have come to expect from a text emerging from a female hand (or hands) within an all-female community, Willetrudis also constructs the garden in direct opposition to the 112 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 25r. 113 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 25r. 114 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, pp. 132–3. Unlike the more functional lavare, the term balneare (Petrus’ chosen term) carries connotations of indolence, vanity and self-indulgence. See, for example, the definition presented in the Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist, s.v. balne/o [banneo / bauneo]: ‘to bathe’ or ‘to conduct to a bath’ (my emphasis); and banneor: ‘to take a bath’. Stevenson also points out that Willetrudis makes use of balneare only once, whilst making lavare her preferred term (p. 133, n. 134).

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patriarchal house, manipulating the latter via culturally imposed binaries as hyperbolised site of intensely masculine behaviours within the world – that is to say, a meeting-place for the great and the good (men) of Babylon where their culturally-sanctioned justice may be administered. In what amounts to an ironic juxtapositional emphasis on the quiet, secluded, time-released tranquility of the garden, and Susanna’s active withdrawal into the ‘pomerarium’ [orchard] with its ‘fons placidus’ [peaceful spring], Willetrudis throws into relief the life-giving properties of this fruitful, solicitous space by pitting it against the time-and-rule-laden system within which Joachim ‘populorum dat iura diatim’ [bestowed the peoples’ judgements each day]. Indeed, Willetrudis again uses careful lexical choice to emphasise the flourishing capacities of the former, whilst foregrounding the necrophilic imperatives of the latter: for example, Susanna actively ‘enters’ the garden of her husband to assert it as a feminine space [‘Pomeriumque viri … intrat’]; she ‘wanted’ to wash in its waters [‘voluit … lavari’]; and, as we have seen, she was ‘accustomed’ to doing this [‘ut fuerat sueta’].115 In other words, whereas Joachim’s domestic realm, as synecdoche for the world, is the place where men gather to judge and condemn, for Willetrudis the garden is synecdochal of the nunnery where the nurturing of body and soul is to be found within its enclosing walls, just as we found in Hohenbourg, Rupertsberg and Helfta. This garden, although barely separated from the world, could not be further removed from the frenetic and rigid daily grind of men, the constant turning of their wheels of justice, the predictability of their determined hours [‘certis […] horis’] and their mediating gaze.116 Nor is this a mythical garden of Eden within which the woman is appropriated to shoulder the blame for her own seduction, as we saw in the case of Petrus de Riga’s poem; neither is it the marital or mystical garden of the Song of Songs that metaphorises the female body and its desires out of material existence. Indeed, Willetrudis offers no lavish descriptions of the type of exoticised vegetation we find in later treatments of the story. Instead, she presents it as 115 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 25r. 116 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 25r.

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a real, material space within which the more disruptive gendered interpellations of the world have no significant role to play, even by uninvited or violent intrusion. Like the Wilton nunnery and again those examined in previous chapters, this garden stands in for the secluded, flourishing environment of its female (re)creator and her religious sisters whose only loyalty is to God. It is thus imagined as a place where women may flourish together, and care for each other unencumbered by the ideologies that would seek to shape and judge them if living in the world of men. More than ever, then, the Elders are uncompromisingly critiqued as unsolicited intruders, entirely out of their depth yet deploying their scopophilic and necrophilic gaze in order to draw upon Susanna’s youth and beauty to rejuvenate their diminished sexual desire and prowess. Indeed, such critique elicits from Willetrudis’s pen a barely disguised poetics of anger-tinged-with-contempt as she deploys what Stevenson terms ‘a torrent of metaphors’ to log her protest at the behaviour of these men.117 For Willetrudis, Susanna is a dove [‘columba’] or swan [‘cygna’] unwittingly in the line of sight of the hunter; a lamb [‘agnus’] captured by the venal speech of the wolf [‘ore venere lupi’], or a lamb whom a kite snatches away [‘prenderet milvus’]; all are violently and viciously taken without warning [‘raptat … subito’].118 But these creatures are not victims, in spite of Willetrudis’s righteous anger. Instead, she soon lays bare her perspective as she presents her accused Susanna returning to the judgement-space of men in the guise of woman-warrior, rather than calumniated adulterer, as she energetically casts back upon the patriarchy its scopophilic gaze: Que bene fermata domini spe nilque morata, Orans cum psalmis comitata parentibus almis Ac sibi cognatis cum cunctis vel sibi notis, Prompti accelerat.

117 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, p. 134. 118 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 25v. Obviously, there is a major subtext to Willetrudis’s use of the verb raptio (which is repeated several times here in quick succession) in this context, too. Not only can it mean to carry off, or to drag away violently, but it is also a verb used for rape, as well as to become spiritually ‘rapt’.

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Here there are uncanny resonances with the Christ-hero who heads with alacrity towards his crucifixion in the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, a treatment whose poetics also refuse the protagonist any sense of victimhood.120 To confirm this scopophilic reversal – and in what appears to be a unique innovation within the courtroom drama, and one eventually eliciting a personal interpolation by Willetrudis – again like the Dream of the Rood’s Christ, she has the Elders strip Susanna of all her clothing in this public space, rather than merely laying their hands on her head to remove her veil, as in other treatments.121 Again, authorial anger and disgust at their attempts to further abuse Susanna spill over as Willetrudis makes it quite clear where the culpability lies – in the endless performances of male entitlement and its sexualising gaze: Iusserunt tolli vestes de corpore molli, Ac visu dignae violant pudibunda Susannae Quo mens pravata conspectus sit saciata. O male perversi peius post pessima versi! [They ordered her clothes to be stripped from her tender body And with their gaze they violate the worthy Susanna’s private parts,

119 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 27v (my emphasis). 120 ‘Ongyrede hine þa geong haleð – þæt wæs God ælmihtig – /strang ond stimoð; gestah he on gealgan heanne, /modig on manigra gesyhðe‘ [‘He stripped himself then, young hero – that was God Almighty – / strong and resolute; he ascended on the high gallows/ brave in the sight of many’]. See ‘The Dream of the Rood’, in Old and Middle English: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), lines 39–41, p. 111. 121 In The Dream of the Rood, of course, Christ’s agency is accentuated by the fact he chooses to strip himself ready for his execution. Amy-Jill Levine contends that, according to the Mishnah, under Hebrew law an accused woman denying her guilt was to have her clothes torn from her body by the priest ‘until he exposed her bosom’. Similarly, she was to appear unveiled with dishevelled hair. See Amy-Jill Levine, ‘“Hemmed in on Every Side”: Jews and Women in the Book of Susanna’, in A Feminist Companion, ed. Brenner, pp. 303–23 (p. 318).

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Susanna’s Garden Dilemma By which sight a depraved mind may be satisfied! O, how wickedly depraved men change to worse after worst!]122

By reflecting the pravata conspectus back upon the perversi themselves, however, Willetrudis negates its very charge; for, as Jennifer A. Glancy reminds us in the context of the Susanna story’s scophophilics, ‘who controls the gaze determines the outcome of the story’.123 Instead of embodying sexual desire and the dangers of Eden writ large, therefore, Susanna’s naked body transposed into the courtroom serves to bring the nurturing poetics of the garden into this intensely patriarchal space in order to counter its necrophilics. Here, Susanna’s uncovered innocence and self-belief serve to protect her and it is these, not her body, moreover, that are ultimately laid bare for all to see via Susanna’s divestment in the text. It therefore comes as little surprise that, naked as she is, Willetrudis’s Susanna remains entirely resistant to these attempts at shaming her; as Willetrudis tells us: ‘Non pudet ullum’ [she was not in any way ashamed],124 because, as Glancy also asserts: ‘to have one’s (own) vision represented is to have one’s (own) perception of the world ratified’.125 Such a position on the Susanna story, with its refusal to allow her to succumb to interpellation or shaping by the male gaze, and its resistance to a necrophilic overwriting of its female-coded poetics by casting that gaze back upon its male generators, links neatly with the poem’s lengthy prologue, another Willetrudian innovation within which the calumniated Susanna is elevated to the height of victor, flourishing on her own merits rather than cast as vulnerable victim to be redeemed – necrophilic-like – by Daniel-the-saviour. Here, reclaiming the central self-confidence of Susanna’s faith (both in God and herself), Willetrudis affirms the ontological superiority of Susanna’s flourishing stance through her association with a garden that she insists upon as her own space: although assailed and assaulted, not just by the Elders but by the entire system that 122 123 124 125

Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 27v. Glancy, ‘The Accused’, p. 293. Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 27v. Glancy, ‘The Accused’, p. 290.

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upholds their patriarchal privilege, by refusing the role of Irigarayan ‘envelope’ into which they may pour their discourse, in this text Susanna proves time and again to be ‘greater’ than her accusers: [‘magis … probatur’].126 Stevenson is therefore correct in her assertion: What we have here is therefore something very unusual. A poem from the Latin Middle Ages, by a woman, that unflinchingly takes on medieval misogyny … and presents an ideal of active and heroic womanhood.127

Perhaps not since Hildegard have we witnessed such a determined assault upon male interpellative attempts and the reframing of a specifically female spirituality according to a newly insistent all-female gaze.

Susanna and her Speaking Garden The gardens in the treatments of the Susanna story examined here so far therefore do much to confirm the position of Spirn when she claims ‘the language of landscape is a habitat of mind […]; landscape truly is the house of being; we dwell within it’.128 However, as we have seen, that ‘house of being’ is not always a satisfactory space within which women may achieve a sense of dwelling or becoming, except when they insist upon occupying it differently or redefine the meaning of its space and parameters by casting upon it a differently-gendered gaze. This is, indeed, a concept that has been extensively addressed by Irigaray who, borrowing and adapting Heidegger’s notion of ‘dwelling’ to argue that a woman’s full emplacement within a man-made world is largely denied her, has asserted: ‘The dwelling of man is not built without hatred of nature; that is why she must be the one to safeguard it’. In this sense, as Irigaray proceeds to argue, in pursuing his (phallic) destiny, man removes from a woman the ‘nature of her life and in exchange has 126 Willetrudis, ‘Susanna’, fol. 23v. 127 Stevenson, Women Latin Poets, p. 136. 128 Spirn, Language of Landscape, p. 16.

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given (back) to her death’.129 Indeed, commenting on this area of Irigaray’s philosophy, Margaret Whitford’s analysis is equally pertinent to the way in which space is occupied in Susanna’s garden, when she states: So building and dwelling reveal hatred and destructiveness as intrinsic moments, yet unthought, so never confronted. The underside of male creativity is the deathlike immobilising ‘appropriation’ of ‘nature’.130

In the context of the Susanna story, even when left undefined in the text, the meaning of Susanna’s garden – and thus its effect upon the treatment of the story – is utterly dependent upon how that garden is occupied as a space: that is to say, what sort of dwelling takes place within it, by whom, and what this dwelling articulates to us as readers. If Susanna is depicted as flaunting her nakedness, transfixed by and within the male gaze, as in Petrus’ treatment or the myriad of popular iconographic depictions that emerged during the later medieval period, then the garden becomes a new Eden and a necrophilic fantasy. In this guise, it provides a troubling testing-ground, not just for the Elders but also Susanna in terms of its associating her with the always already fallen woman and exchanging her – and its – ‘nature’ for death. If, however, as we saw in the case of Willetrudis’s treatment, the garden is the place of Susanna’s becoming, a place where she comfortably dwells and where she undertakes the nurturing work of her own life amongst the women,131 then the garden means differently: slipping away from the focus of the male gaze and the edifices built by the phallocentric male imaginary this gaze produces, Willetrudis’s garden refuses Susanna her traditional vulnerability and victimhood. As I 129 Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 75. 130 Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy of the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 157. 131 It is worth noting at this point that the Old English and Middle High German term buan (in modern German bauen) [to dwell] is closely related to the concept of building but, unlike building, contains elements of cherishing, preserving, protecting and caring, as well as cultivation of the soil and the vines etc. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), pp. 144–5.

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argue below, such difference is ultimately based on a reliance, not on grand-narrative necrophilics for that meaning, but on a femalecoded ethics of dwelling, flourishing and becoming; or, as we have seen, again in Irigarayan terms, an efflorescence, a type of viriditas embedded into a set of garden poetics that may either be covertly written out by the male pen, or else, as we shall see, burst forth to assert the garden as the text’s primary, speaking protagonist. Two such treatments – most likely linked intertextually – within which the garden is given full voice as a place of dwelling, emerge in England during the high to late Middle Ages. The first is the Tractatus metricus de Susanna per fratrem Alanum monachum de Malsa de Beverlaco, a poetic treatment, written in Latin, and attributed in the single manuscript copy to the Cistercian monk, Alan of Melsa, clerk and chaplain of York c. 1204–12.132 The second is the fourteenth-century anonymous poem, the Pistil of Swete Susan, also with likely provenance of the north-east of England and circumstantially linked to a female readership, if not authorship.133 Of course, the lack of concrete evidence for female authorship should never lead us to presume that ‘anonymous’ was necessarily male and, as I have argued elsewhere, female-coded poetics can also find their way into male-authored texts in a way that falls short of the type of Irigarayan appropriative mechanisms discussed 132 This text is extant in BL, Harley MS 2851. All references to Alan of Melsa’s poem will be to Alan of Melsa, Tractatus metricus de Susanna, ed. J. H. Mozley, in Mozley, ‘Susanna and the Elders’. Translations are my own. 133 The Pistil survives in five manuscript contexts, at least three of which are associated with women: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS eng. poet. a. 1 (the ‘Vernon’ manuscript); BL Additional 22283 (the ‘Simeon’ manuscript); Huntington Library HM 114 (Philips MS 8252); Pierpoint Morgan Library M 818 (the ‘Ingilby’ manuscript); and BL MS Cotton Caligula A.ii (pt 1). Russell A. Peck discusses the female associations of the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts and these manuscript versions of the poem in the introduction to his edition of the Vernon rendition. See The Pistil of Swete Susan, ed. Russell A. Peck, in Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo: TEAMS Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), pp. 4–6. All quotations will be taken from this edition and cited by line number. There are also two other excellent editions of the Pistil, including comprehensive introductory material and notes, for which see Susannah: An Alliterative Poem of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Alice Miskimin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969); and Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology, ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (London: Routledge, 1989).

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earlier in this chapter.134 Indeed, as Irigaray has famously suggested of mystical discourse, he is able to occupy the place of she ‘in some cases’ if he is prepared to follow her, rather than assume the defining and exegetical lead.135 Here, Irigaray is discussing the type of visionary experience medieval women such as Hildegard, Gertrude and Mechthild struggled to articulate by means of a traditional use of language (what Irigaray terms ‘the dry desolation of reason’).136 But, as Jantzen has also shown, such a position of inarticulacy in the face of the ‘master’s’ language also pertains to the gendered poetics of flourishing, long subsumed into the grand narrative of salvation.137 In order to occupy the position of she, therefore, and relinquish the hegemony of the male gaze, a man/male author must ‘take the detour through metaphors that can scarcely be called figures’ in a way that utterly resists the stasis of mere mimicry and allows him, like the Dreamer in Pearl, to discover an eloquence in the apparently least powerful.138 It is this type of disruption that we discover in the fourteenth-century Middle English retelling of the Susanna story mentioned above, articulated in this case by an elusive poet named ‘Hutcheon’, who may or may not have been based at the Royal Court of Scotland during the reign of David II.139 Evidence for this identification is 134 I am thinking here of the type of mystical speech we find in the writings of Heinrich Suso or Richard Rolle, both of whom understand the Irigarayan premise of medieval men needing to ‘speak woman’ if they are to fully experience mystical union with God (Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 191–202). On the inherently female encoding of late-medieval affective piety and its poetics, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010). For further discussion of feminine subjectivity in both female- and male-authored medieval texts, see also my ‘Anonymous Texts’, in The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 1: 700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 160–8. 135 Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, p. 191. 136 Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, p. 191. 137 Jantzen, Becoming Divine. 138 Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, p. 192. 139 For a rehearsal of all the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century arguments about Huchown’s identity, see H. N. MacCracken, ‘Concerning Hutchown’, PMLA 25 (1910), 507–34. For a more recent overview of the debate, see C. Edington, ‘Hucheon [Huchown] of the Awle Ryale (fl. 14th

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based on an allusion to an otherwise unknown poet of this name in the Cronykil of Scotland, dated to 1420 and written by Andrew of Wyntoun (d. c. 1425). Here Andrew refers to a Susanna poem clearly written in the English vernacular and names it specifically as the Pistell of Suet Susane, citing its author as ‘Huchown of the Awle Ryale’. Nothing more is known about this shadowy poet, except that, also according to Andrew, Hutcheon was also the author of two other texts named by him as ‘a gret gest of Arthure, / And the Awntyr of Gawayne’. As Peck points out, these may or may not be referring to the Middle English Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Awntyrs of Arthur,140 texts that, like the Pistil, certainly, in the estimation of Peck, ‘explore abuses of power by men in authority’.141 More than just examining gendered abuse, however, the author of the Pistil (a text that Peck also posits was likely commissioned for the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts by a powerful literary and pious aristocratic woman – someone like Joan de Bohun, for example, whose name is to be found in a margin of the Vernon manuscript)142 is fully conversant with the type of female-coded poetics identified earlier in this study that adhere to female – or feminine – treatments of garden narratives and/or their hermeneutics. In turn such treatments are inextricable from those gender politics always already imbricated with issues of both voice and authority. While, however, the narrative thread tends to remain close to its biblical original in most areas of the text, the poem’s extensive dwelling cent.)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available online at: https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14021. Accessed 30 March 2020. 140 Andrew of Wyntoun, The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, ed. David Lang (Edinburgh: Edmondston and Douglas, 1872–9), V.12, lines 4311–13 and line 4280. Peck rehearses the various arguments in his introduction, Pistil, p. 4. 141 ‘Introduction’, Pistil, p. 4. 142 Joan de Bohun (d. 1419) was the daughter of Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and sister of Thomas Arundel (d. 1414), archbishop of York and Canterbury. She married Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1373) and her second daughter, Mary, was second wife of Henry IV and mother of Henry V. She seems to have led a particularly pious life, evidenced by permission granted to her to modify a vow of fasting. Peck rehearses this suggestion in ‘Introduction’, Pistil, p. 5. Further suggestions are made by David Lyle Jeffrey, who offers a Wycliffite reading of the text and posits a number of pro-Lollard families as possible patrons of the text: see ‘False Witness and the Just Use of Evidence in The Wycliffite Pistel of Swete Susan’, in Judgment of Susanna, ed. Spolsky, pp. 57–71 (p. 59, n. 9).

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within the moment and locus of the garden is highly unusual – indeed, almost unique. In most other literary treatments, as we have seen, Susanna’s garden forms an absent presence, a lacuna that often speaks more about the gendered politics and misogynistic impulses of its author’s own necrophilic groundings than Susanna’s own capacity for flourishing. Indeed, in many of these earlier treatments, the lacuna of this absent garden animates the ‘deathlike immobilizing’ and the ‘appropriation of nature’ posited by Irigaray and quoted above. I will return to the extended garden poetics of the Pistil shortly, but will first turn to the only other narrative treatment of the Susanna story in England that embellishes the account of the garden: that is, the aforementioned Tractatus metricus de Susanna by Alan of Melsa, a poem that was most likely known to ‘Hucheon’, judging from some areas of internal resonance and the fact that both texts seem to have emerged from the same geographical area of north-east Yorkshire.143 We also know that the Cistercian foundation of Melsa, daughter house of Fountains Abbey, housed a copy of Petrus de Riga’s Aurora, so it may well be that Alan’s own poetic treatment of the story was inspired by access to this earlier text.144 Alan of Melsa and his Tractatus have been rigorously subjected to close scrutiny by Staley, particularly in terms of Alan’s Cistercian credentials and the poem’s strong garden aesthetics that Staley connects to that identity, and I do not intend to reiterate her meticulous argumentation here.145 Suffice it to say that Staley makes out a strong case for Alan’s own extended garden narrative as predicated upon the Cistercian drive to recreate a type of monastic Eden within this life in order to secure heaven in the next. This certainly goes a long way to explain why Alan’s extended depiction of the 143 One other treatment – beyond the remit of this present chapter – is to be found in the so-called de Brailes Hours (1240) where a Gradual Psalms sequence focuses on the story of Susanna, which is also depicted in a series of illustrations with suitable captions. Claire Donovan posits that the entire sequence was created for a noblewoman of the same name, for which see her The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p. 24. 144 Staley traces the pertinent literary circles at and surrounding Fountains in The Island Garden, especially pp. 185–6 and 196–7. 145 Staley, The Island Garden, esp. pp. 182–96.

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garden includes many of the common architectural appurtenances one would associate with a flourishing Cistercian foundation, as Staley also points out: ‘Horrea, pistrinum, zeta, coquina, penu’ [a barn, bake house, chamber, kitchen, food store], for example.146 These man-made spaces therefore frame the garden’s aesthetics emphasising the allegorical link between them and Joachim’s own man-made displays of conspicuous consumption within the world. Indeed, in the poem, Susanna, too, is subsumed overtly into such a display of wealth, as the poet deploys much the same terms to describe both: for example, Joachim’s house is ‘multo decorata’ [much decorated] and his wife, Susanna, ‘Ornatus … plurimus … erat’ [was the greatest decoration].147 Such an early treatment of the garden as Joachim’s fine possession announced alongside the description of Susanna, points towards strong allegorical leanings that leave Susanna and her garden as merely ciphers for Alan’s vision of the ideal Cistercian life he seems so keen to promote – as ‘envelopes’ for this particular form of discourse. Indeed, on closer examination, in spite of the poem’s piling up of verdant, vegetal imagery in an attempt to construct a ‘real’ and ‘living’ garden, this enclosed space is, in fact, somewhat sterile and timebound. Crucially, its plants are caught, transfixed, in ‘a perpetual spring’ [‘Ver … perpetuum’],148 and of those plants that Alan chooses to foreground, most form the basis of common biblical allegory: here, for example, are to be found the lily, the rose, the apple, the vine, the fig, the cherry, nard, frankincense and balsam, all deeply symbolic images within traditional Marian piety and especially the Song of Songs.149 In this way, Alan’s description of the garden moves from visualisation of ‘reality’ to the psycho-geographical – and far more mythical – biblical aesthetic, with the garden becoming a fixed

146 147 148 149

Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 142. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, lines 137–9. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 153. For a detailed discussion of the garden and its plants in the Song of Songs, see Elaine T. James, Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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statement and commonplace hermeneutic that leaves open a clear pathway for a (re)assertion of the necrophilic, as I argue below.150 As mentioned, Melsa was a daughter house of Fountains Abbey, a foundation that, as Elizabeth Freeman has shown, was also keen to exploit an Edenic poetics to establish its own foundation narrative in terms of a rich and fruitful garden space forged by monastic hands out of the wild, inaccessible wilderness of its Yorkshire location.151 In Alan’s treatment of the Susanna story, much of the imaginative embellishments, then, become harnessed to specific male Cistercian concerns – and clearly some of Alan’s own personal anxieties – about monastic space and how best to negotiate the requirements of the order and the law, particularly in the face of what Staley presents as the ‘judicial corruption … to be found in northern circles during Angevin reign.’152 Indeed, such anxieties first raise their head in the other significant addition made by Alan to the story, that is to say, a lengthy prologue in which he discusses his own religious conversion effected many years previously, and his casting off of a former worldly existence in favour of what he depicts as a flourishing monastic life. In this way, both digressions – that of the garden and Alan’s conversion – contribute to a single overarching narrative that presents, again in Staley’s words: ‘the psychology of conversion where the mind sees itself dimly as it formerly was and testifies to its own reformation’.153 However, far from shifting ‘to the point when he can no longer find himself as “subject” anymore’ and going to ‘where he had no wish to follow’, as Irigaray has suggested of men who are able to relinquish their own subjectivity to take up the same place as ‘woman’, Alan soon finds himself ‘falling … into the trap of mimicking them, of claiming to find jouissance as “she” does’.154 And in this case, the ‘she’ is 150 Staley also points out this shift from ‘the picture of great plenty to a more mythical reference’, The Island Garden, p. 191. 151 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Male and Female Cistercians and their Gendered Experiences of the Margins, the Wilderness and the Periphery’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 65–76. 152 Staley, The Island Garden, p. 184. 153 Staley, The Island Garden, p. 187. 154 Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, p. 192.

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Susanna, with whose steadfast faith he ultimately wishes to identify in order to boost his credentials as a devout Cistercian monk; but that ‘she’ is also the garden that Alan appropriates as the most apt place to enact his own dwelling and becoming. Alan begins his prologue by articulating at some length the type of ‘unlearning’ of all he had previously known and believed, upon which his conversion was predicated [‘Que prius addidici, que scio nulla scio’], and which, he claims, led him ultimately to become entirely ‘another self’ [‘sum reor alter ego’].155 While this profession clearly articulates a ‘radical Pauline expression of change’,156 it is also characterised by his drawing upon the figure of Susanna [‘Occurit Susanna mihi’] as an edifying and articulate exemplum of the type of ‘causa uirilis’ [masculine qualities] of ‘casta’ [chastity] and ‘pudica’ [modesty] he feels a devout Cistercian monk should emulate.157 In one fell swoop, then, he problematises his own attempts at engagement with the type of female-coded discourses of flourishing that also proved so popular to the nuns of the Cistercian-affiliated Helfta and the other enclosed women focused on in this study. Unlike his nun precursors, he fails to follow through to achieve a transformative jouissance because of his inability to relinquish his own male, monastic subjectivity. This early conversion narrative, too, further problematises the later narrative by its invidious identification of Alan as even more coterminous with the two Elders than we saw in the case of the male exegetes. Like Alan – but this time de malo – the Elders have also chosen to ‘unlearn’ everything they once held dear, that is to say, the same law in which Susanna has been so well versed by her parents. Meanwhile, like the recidivist Elders, the pre-conversion Alan cared nothing about sin [‘nil reputare nephas’]; his mission in life was to serve commerce and indulge in greedy practices in a masquerade of power [‘seruire lucris … / Indulgere gule’].158 Again emulating the Elders, in whom the sight of Susanna incited

155 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 2 and line 4. 156 Staley, The Island Garden, p. 187. 157 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 31 and 39. 158 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, lines 5–6.

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the desire for sex [‘incitat in Venerem’],159 Alan was often flippant and carnal in his speech and in his behaviours [‘Doctus eram iocunda iocis, que carnea carni’];160 and he chose always to prioritise the physical over the spiritual [‘Preter corporeum, spiritualem nichil’].161 This is, moreover, emphasised by means of Alan’s use of an etymological pun on the term ‘venus’ [sexual proclivity] and its personification in the figure of the pagan goddess, ‘Venus’.162 Just as the Elders’ viewing of Susanna in the garden ‘incitat in Veneram’, Alan’s own former shortcomings are thus cast within the frame of the horrors of paganity: he was a Dionysus, insane and inebriated in the darkness [‘Ebrietate furens nocte Dionis eram’] of a world he appropriated for his own pleasures and whose flourishing potential he used for his own ends.163 Indeed, Alan’s clever word-play on the present participle furens here serves to emphasise this misuse by invoking its near homonym, fruens, present participle of the verb fruor, which, as we have seen, not only means ‘to delight in’ but is a term used regularly in the type of female-coded texts examined in previous chapters to describe the action of viriditas and the coming to fruition embedded within the concept of efflorescence.164 Alan’s word-play, involving a mere inversion of letters, thus reflects both the ease with which both he and the Elders have inverted their own values – but also hints at the wish-fulfilment fantasy that Susanna, too, may easily be persuaded to do the same. In Jantzen’s terms, the word’s anagrammatic slipperiness is all that is needed to demonstrate how readily the necrophilic can so simply overwrite the human impulse towards, and ethics of, flourishing – and reverse and disperse it. Thus, in spite of its descriptive embellishments, the garden here remains a place of an ominous overwriting of its flourishing potential by a necrophilic gaze that ultimately sterilises it. Deeply reminiscent of the Eden of Harrison’s estimation discussed in chapter one, this is fundamentally a static domain, full of ennui; 159 160 161 162 163 164

Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 182. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 9. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 12. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 182. Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 14. This meaning is confirmed by the entry in the Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist, s.v. fruo/or, testified to from the fifth century.

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it rests in a state of perpetual, inconsequential existence; it is devoid of all becoming. It is therefore a space that the woman at its centre – whether Eve or Susanna – will have to reshape via her own resistance to its interpellative mechanisms if she is ever to dwell within it, even if the legacy of that dwelling is death. This necrophilic imposition makes its presence felt elsewhere in Alan’s garden. This is a place whose flourishing is further stifled and where the tree destined to support Daniel’s intervention on behalf of Susanna (here a laurel tree, with all its embedded connotations of potential rape and resistance to that rape)165 fails woefully to articulate any animation of flourishing. Instead, the laurel tree’s shade, underneath which Susanna bathes, seems to welcome necrophilic incursion by darkening the water, rather than offering the comfort and solace of restful shade. Indeed, this is something emphasised by the poet’s repetition of the image of darkness in lines 165 and 178: ‘Laurus obumbrat aquam’ [The laurel darkens the water] and ‘Laurus obumbrabat solis ab igne locum’ [The laurel defended the place from the heat of the sun]. Indeed, given the emphasis placed on this tree in the poem, Alan renders it all the more surprising that the Elders are later unable to recall its genus and thus save their own lives, testifying, therefore, to the ‘blindness’ they also share with Alan’s former self (‘Cecus eram, uideo’).166 Unlike the opening of his own eyes, however (‘uideo’), the eyes of the Elders are never ‘opened’, in spite of the relentlessness of their necrophilic gaze upon Susanna, both in the garden and, later, in the courtroom. Since their gaze continues to be cast within the shadow of the negatively-connoted laurel tree, the Elders are destined to collapse the living – garden, tree, woman – into a sterile generic concept, invented merely to serve their own purposeful appropriation.167 What matter if the putative adultery 165 In Classical mythology, as recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the naiad Daphne is saved from rape by Apollo by being transformed by her river-god father into a laurel tree overhanging the water. Apollo’s infatuation with Daphne, moreover, was brought about by the curse of Cupid (Book 1, lines 452–566). 166 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 21. 167 For a detailed analysis of the multiple ‘lines of sight’ in the biblical version of the story, see Jennie Grillo, ‘Showing Seeing in Susanna: The Virtue of the Text’, Prooftexts 15.2 (2015), 250–70.

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were or were not enacted within the ‘Ostia pomerii’ [apple orchard] of their initial accusation? Or under the ‘cinus’ [ash-tree] of the first Elder’s testimony? Or beneath the ‘arbor / Prinus’ [holm-oak] of the second Elder’s profession?168 To the Elders, an elite male privilege countermands the detail – within which, as the saying goes, lies the devil. For them, a tree is a tree is a tree; and, like the woman, Susanna, another mere envelope into which they are able to pour a toxic discourse to substantiate their self-serving claims. Within Alan’s garden of stasis, then, the Elders carve out a space for their necrophilic credentials; instead of its harbouring an infinite variety of life, ‘Mors habet ingressum’ [Death had made its entry].169 Here we are again reminded of Harrison’s assessment of Eden’s similarly negative-charged aesthetics and the double-bind that, Susanna-like, threatened to consume Eve. Unlike in Eden, however, that consummation fails to take place because Susanna lives in a world where death already exists and by means of her embracing the choice of life-in-death rather than death-in-life, she stakes a claim on a fruitfulness that survives, even in the face of her accusations: as Harrison reminds us: ‘If death is the price one pays for fruitfulness, so be it …. It is the generative source of nature’s ceaseless movement into form.’170 Indeed, Harrison could be writing as much about Susanna as he is about Eve in this estimation: his words resonate uncannily with Susanna’s anguished response to her own garden predicament, as recorded in Daniel 13:22 and reiterated in all these retellings, as well as quoted above: ‘I am straitened on every side: for if I do this thing, it is death to me: and if I do it not, I shall not escape your hands.’ Escape their hands, she does, however – and at the eleventh hour – in a resolution always already attributed to Daniel’s salvific (and, in Jantzen’s terms, necrophilic) intervention but which, in fact, is purely and simply a result of the testimony of trees in their living, deific specificity speaking on Susanna’s behalf. This garden then, testifies loudly – and ultimately stands resistant – to the dark impulses of the Elders, who, like the laurel tree, attempt to overshadow the garden and confirm it as a 168 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, lines 316, 389 and 394. 169 Alan of Melsa, Tractatus, line 196. 170 Harrison, Gardens, p. 19.

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place of those ‘penumbral depths’ that, to coin Harrison’s terms, ‘belong as much to the garden as to the mind or soul of the beholder’.171 And it is such an arborescent testimony that sets the scene for its further development in the fourteenth-century Middle English poem, the Pistil of Swete Susan. As Staley has already convincingly demonstrated, the Pistil bears many similarities with Alan’s Tractatus, not the least in its alliterative poetic style and its detailed description of the garden that covers four twelve-line stanzas towards the beginning of the poem.172 Also like the Tractatus, the author sets up a strong tension between this garden with its poetics of flourishing, the necrophilics of primary difference, and a Susanna who is caught between the two. The primary difference in this case, however, is one of degree: from the start of the Pistil, the two Elders are defined as always already having been caught up in an ontology of abusive and self-serving destructiveness, something that removes Susanna entirely from the frame of any culpability. For example, these men are described as continually lurking about Joachim’s house (they ‘haunted til her hous’) and as feared by all and sundry (‘dredde were that day’).173 As ‘dredful demers’ [dreadful judges], moreover, they have been in the habit of issuing false judgements (‘wrongwys domes’) to the people, adding to this configuration of ontological corruption.174 Additionally, these judges, as they manifest themselves in this poem, have already made their decision to abuse Susanna by occupying her garden together on a regular basis (‘Every day bi day’),175 to view and shape her to fit their own desires. This is an activity, moreover, that they adopt as a legitimate pastime (‘play’) which, because of their status, they deem to carry no risk:176 Thus this dredful demers on daies thider drewe, Al for gentrise and joye of that Juwess,

171 Harrison, Gardens, p. 118. 172 Staley, The Island Garden. For a detailed discussion of the Pistil’s poetic form, see also, Susannah, ed. Miskimin, pp. 53–65. 173 Pistil, lines 31–2. 174 Pistil, lines 40 and 37. 175 Pistil, line 62. 176 Pistil, line 64.

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Little do they realise in their self-serving complacency, however, that, by entering the garden, and stealing its fruit in the way they intend to steal Susanna, they risk nothing less than all: And whon thei seigh Susan, semelich of hewe, Thei weor so set uppon hire, might thei not sese. Thei wolde enchaunte the child – hou schold heo eschewe?178

The poet’s firm positioning of blame within the Elders’ own ontology of male lasciviousness rather than a learned patriarchal corruption runs counter to almost every other version of the story I have been recounting so far but is rendered paramount in this description, exacerbated further by the poet’s description of Susanna as a ‘child’, of course.179 Here we cannot help but be reminded of the child-becoming-woman who dominated the garden landscapes of Pearl and who was utterly resistant to the attempts of the scopophilic Dreamer to shape her according to his own theological (mis)beliefs and (mis)understandings. In the case of the Pistil, however, we move far beyond a misguidedness into the realm of the reprehensible: indeed, the only ‘floures and fruit’ the Elders collect within the garden beside their stolen produce is their captured image of Susanna, which, so the poem suggests, they take home with them to ‘play’ with in the privacy of their own bedrooms (‘And thus this cherles unchaste in chaumbre hir chese /With chere.’)180 Far from being swept away by a fruitful and seductive garden aesthetic, their stolen image of Susanna provides the material for their nightly masturbatory fantasies, their own wasted seed 177 Pistil, lines 40–3. 178 Pistil, lines 44–6. 179 This is a multivalent term meaning much more than ‘child’ in the contemporary sense. It can point towards innocent youth, or a Christian chosen by God, and is more often gendered male than female (see MED s.v. child 3a; 5; 10). Here I also suggest the term is used to emphasise the heinous intrusion and intentions of the Elders upon a young woman who is in no way inviting such voyeurism, in spite of her being sexed and gendered female. However, see also my discussion of the ‘becoming-woman’ in relation to Pearl in chapter four, above. 180 Pistil, lines 47–8.

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contrasting starkly with the fertile garden the poet will soon take such time and effort to elaborate upon after this description. Unlike Susanna, then, for whose right to dwell and flourish in this verdant and fertile garden will speak vociferously, these Elders conspire to effect their own sterility within those bleak enclosures they have constructed by means of their own desires. The Elders’ sterility and their ontological fallenness are rendered all the more stark by the poem’s representation of the garden most emphatically as a female-only space, and one that is, moreover, equally emphatically encoded as feminine. This is not only established by Susanna’s habitual occupation of it in order to escape from the heat of the sun, and by the fact she is always accompanied by her ‘two maidenes’, but, as we shall see, by the Irigarayan poetics of dwelling and efflorescence embedded everywhere within the lexis of abundance and excess that characterises its depiction. Uniquely in this poem, too, Susanna’s handmaidens are both dignified and subjectivised by being named (‘Sibell and Jone’),181 a naming that posits a much more equal, and certainly a closer relationship between the three women enjoying this garden as their wone – that is to say their own place of ‘dwelling’ or familiar ‘abode’. As intruders, the Elders are excluded from such a dwelling-ness and those female-coded poetics associated with it, in spite of their attempts at gaining access via an interpellative gaze and the desires it aims to satisfy. Indeed, the poet suggests just such exclusion, not only by juxtaposing the allusion to Susanna’s wone with an image of God in his heaven, but also by making full use of the bob-and-wheel rhyming conventions of the verse to ally that wone with God’s trone: ‘Tho thoughte the wrecches to bewile that worly in wone; / … And turned fro His teching that teeld is in trone’.182 As a result, we are told, they render themselves subject, not this time to a pagan Dionysian fallback position, but to damnation by ‘the cursying of Kai’ [cursing of Cain].183 They are, in other words, always already lost to themselves – and to God: and this is a God, moreover, who (unlike

181 Pistil, line 66. 182 Pistil, line 54 and line 56. 183 Pistil, line 59.

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in the apocryphal Life) is always already in and of the garden, and where his ‘throne’ also has its dwelling. That the poem rests firmly in the realm of a female-coded flourishing is further suggested even within the subtle connotations of its title: it is specifically a pistil, that is to say, a literary work sometimes framed as a letter, and often written in verse; or else a written legend, story, or a piece of spoken communication.184 Additionally, as David Lyle Jeffrey reminds us, the biblical text of Daniel 13 was read in church as the epistle for the Sunday in the third week of Lent alongside the gospel lection of John 8:1–11 (recounting the episode of the woman taken in adultery in whose stoning Christ intervenes to bring about her social reconciliation).185 If, indeed, this is the same poem as alluded to by the poet Alan of Wyntoun, then it was certainly known specifically as a pistil in wider circles, thus establishing its biblical and liturgical credentials alongside its role as a popular story subject to literary adaptation and embellishment. In addition to the literary or liturgical associations of the term pistil, however, it also forms a close homophone with the term pichtel, sometimes also rendered pistel, a noun which, in Middle English, carries the meaning of a small piece of enclosed land and often appearing in conjunction with the genitive case – hence, no doubt, the ‘pistil’ of ‘swete Susan’.186 Like the garden, this text, then, is Susanna’s text, at once her enclosing dilemma but also a communicating space enclosed within its own textuality. At the same time it is a hortus conclusus full of flourishing vegetal becoming and devoted to offering its eponymous protagonist a subjectivity based 184 See MED, s.v. epistle 1; 4; 5. 185 Jeffrey, ‘False Witness’. While Jeffrey makes out a strong case for Wycliffite composition – or association – not the least because of the story’s association with female learning and its pro-woman agenda, most other critics remain unconvinced. Staley, for example, acknowledges that the text likely presents a mirror for ‘the challenge to patriarchal control offered by heterodoxy’ in the last quarter of the fourteenth century (The Island Garden, p. 181), and that the poem ‘seems to beg for a Lollard pedigree’ (p. 207). However, she fails to reach any firm decision on the issue. Peck, however, is a little more decisive, claiming that the poem seems to have been written for a ‘newly literate group’ that were, in part, women, arguing that the translation of the Vulgate used by the poet was likely the early Wycliffite Bible (Peck, ‘Introduction’, Pistil, p. 1). 186 See MED, s.v. pichtel 1 and 2.

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on the dwelling and flourishing so denied her in most other renditions of the tale – except, perhaps, for the poem penned by the abbess Willetrudis nearly two centuries before. The embellished and imaginative description of Susanna’s garden surpasses even that of Alan of Melsa, as mentioned above, and this time we are presented with a garden that is animated, alive, growing and fruitful. The author takes four full stanzas packed full of vegetal detail to relay its credentials of feminine excess and to establish it as by far the most important space afforded to the poem. If, as appears to be the case, this garden is a place for Susanna to display her ‘self affection’ and where she can ‘return to [her] own body, [her] own breath […] in order not to become subjected to technologies, to money, to power, to neutralization in a universal “someone”, to assimilation into an anonymous world’,187 then it is a space that is deeply appropriate for this self-possessed married woman and mother to dwell within. To that end, this garden is not one locked into a phantasmagorical perpetual spring but one that overspills into an excess of its own abundance, opening up to us ‘[i]n the seson of somere’, and, as we shall see, speaking for and about Susanna as it ushers her out of her dilemma.188 As such, in this poem, the garden speaks multivalently: in Clare Cooper Marcus’s terms, it ‘exists […] at many levels of consciousness – as a plot of land, a cultural statement, a place of horticultural activity, a design’, but is at the same time ‘a significant symbol and metaphor for what we have lost and what we might yet attain’.189 Not everybody reads this poem’s garden in such terms of multiplicity, however, preferring instead to cast it safely within its original grand-narrative frame. Peck, for example, reads it as representative of Eden with the Elders providing a ‘rehearsal of the fall’ in their embodying the serpent in paradise. However, he also sees the garden as a reincarnation of the garden of the Song of Songs – and Susanna, therefore, as the allegorical Bride who means more in terms of what she symbolises within a male religious imaginary 187 Irigaray, In the Beginning, p. 161. 188 Pistil, line 61. 189 Clare Cooper Marcus, ‘The Garden as Metaphor’, in The Meaning of Gardens, ed. Francis and Hester Jr., pp. 26–33 (p. 32).

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than as a flesh-and-blood woman.190 Other commentators read the poem in the context of eschatology, virtually ignoring the dominance of its garden in favour of a reading of Susanna as Christic and thus operating within a clearly defined redemptive context. Juan Manuel Castro Carracedo, for example, not only reads what he terms the ‘ekphrastic digression’ of Joachim’s garden in the poem in terms of the grand narrative of the Creation, but also Susanna as enacting Christ’s Passion via her self-sacrificial ‘humbleness and self-abnegation’. Additionally, he regards the final judgement of Daniel as re-enacting and contemporising the Last Judgement, with Susanna’s salvation reaffirming the salvation available to all those loyal to God’s law.191 In Carracedo’s estimation, therefore, the poem is fully in step with the type of necrophilic domination so critiqued by Jantzen, within which Christ-the-Saviour forms one of the androcentric metaphors dominating the Christian religious imaginary and which tends to elide the alternative model of a nurturing, matrixial, maternalistic figure so insistently represented in the writing of those women – and some men – discussed earlier in this study. Indeed, in this context, Jantzen expresses a longing for a ‘counterbalance … in which the idea of a heroic saviour does not get a purchase’. Within the salvific reading, then, a Christic Susanna merely ‘maintains a position as upholder of patriarchal grand narrative and its ‘individualized, subjectivized understanding of salvation’.192 The same can be said of readings that associate this poem’s garden closely with the Roman de la Rose. Again, Peck embraces such intertextual possibilities with Susanna’s embellished garden being, for him, ‘a place of romantic love, and hence, in the minds of old men, [it] inspires thoughts of lust’.193 I am not sure of the extent to which, for the woman reader, the garden of the Roman is entirely a place of romantic love – and I am not alone here, of course. In the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan was also minded of its misogynistic 190 Peck, ‘Introduction’, Pistil, p. 1. 191 Juan Manuel Castro Carracedo, ‘Eschatological Meaning in The Pistill of Swete Susan’, English Studies 89.2 (2008), 125–40 (here at p. 129). 192 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 163. 193 Pistil, note on lines 66–72.

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masquerading as it sought to promote its fantasy of gender-mutual erotic attraction.194 While Peck rightly points out that the garden of the Roman is, indeed, amongst the most influential – and intertextual – of the Middle Ages, that association, as we see in the writings of Christine, the Pearl-poet and Chaucer, to name but a few, is not immune to a concerted critique and reworking that, indeed, often attempts a counterbalance to ensure that a self-serving antifeminist poetic does not get a purchase. Indeed, as mentioned in my main introduction, such an easy go-to comparison has often served within contemporary criticism to occlude more subtle and nuanced treatment of gardens in medieval literary contexts, something we have seen writ large in the previous chapters of this study. This is not to argue that such intertextual reference does not exist at all: quite the contrary. It is difficult to find a medieval garden that is not imbricated with at least some such allusion to the romance garden. But it is important not to engage with that presumption as a default position, so that we can begin to recuperate the contribution of women writers and the type of female-coded hermeneutics I have been discussing so far in this study. In the case of the Pistil, I argue that it is highly successful in extricating itself from the heavier weights of comparison or resonance with these past male-authored grand narratives, the Roman included. Indeed, the female-encoded poetics – and excess – of the Pistil’s garden carves out what amounts to an important space within medieval literature that tips over into what Jantzen terms ‘a feminist and womanist theology’ whereby the feminine, the deific and the vegetal collapse into one another.195 In the Pistil, this is Susanna’s place: the place of an assertive female aesthetic, a compelling female poetic and an indubitable female ethic, all embedded in a paratextuality that offers the reader an entirely different perspective on the story – and thus an alternative (female-coded) version of the grand narrative. Like Pearl or the writings of the Helfta women, it provides another way of seeing. 194 The whole debate around this poem and the subsequent querelle des femmes is beyond the remit of this chapter. However, for a useful array of primary source material in translation, including many of the letters penned by Christine on this issue, see The Debate of the Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. David F. Hult (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 195 Jantzen, Becoming Divine, p. 163.

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The mature, summer setting of the poem’s opening is enhanced by the poet’s stressing of the garden’s viriditas: it is ‘so grene’ in its abundance that not even the darkness of the linden trees and the laurels that ‘lent upon lone’ can overshadow its flourishing.196 In fact, in their overhanging of the pathways, rather than the water, these trees avoid the multiplication of reflection and tend to enhance the sense of security the verdant garden provides for Susanna. Indeed, a variant of the Middle English term lone is lane, a word that insinuates security as well as pathways offering garden access.197 Similarly, the huge red cedar and cypress trees that initially threaten to dominate this garden description are also devoid of the type of phallic charge that Deleuze and Guattari have recognised as the arborescent schema rooted within a male symbolic order, primarily because the poet’s description subsumes these trees into a whole host of other trees with entirely different associations: Ther lyndes and lores were lent upon lone, The savyne and sypres, selcouth to sene, The palme and the poplere, the pirie, the plone, The junipere jentel, jonyng bitwene, The rose ragged on rys, richest on rone, I-theuwed with the thorn trinaunt to sene, So tiht;198

Here, any vestige of the assumption of the cypress and the cedar into their dominating role in the Song of Songs is dissipated and absorbed by such a vegetal intermingling – especially with flora that more often bear heavily female-coded associations.199 Medieval lore, for example, had inherited strong correlations between the fruit of the date-palm, the pear tree and the female body, particularly in terms of equating them with the female sex organs and female fecundity.200 In some eastern traditions, moreover, such 196 Pistil, lines 67–8. 197 In Middle English, the term lone can mean ‘shelter’ as well as ‘pathway’: see MED s.v lone (2) and lane. 198 Pistil, lines 68–74. 199 See, for example, Song of Songs 1:16: ‘The beams of our houses are of cedar, our rafters of cypress trees’. 200 Michel Pastoureau points out the sexual connotations of the fig and the pear in his Red: The History of a Colour (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 201, n. 44.

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correlations were consolidated by the date-palm’s strong claim to having been the Tree of Knowledge in the Edenic grand narrative, rather than the seemingly more prosaic apple tree.201 As Francisco Prado-Vilar explains in his detailed study of the history of the date-palm: [T]he palm tree represents a vegetal analogy for human reproduction [because] the date palm is fertilized by cutting off the male flower cluster just before the stamens ripen and then suspending it among the flowers of the female tree.202

More recent scientific research has found in the fruit of the datepalm strong oestrogenic compounds that enhance this historical view of the plant.203 In similar fashion, the pear, mentioned four times in the poem within the space of four stanzas,204 is also frequently associated with a sexualised female body in medieval literature, and it is its emphatic repetition here in the Pistil that led Alfred L. Kellogg to propose that Chaucer ‘was quite familiar with the Susannah [sic] story’ in his writing of ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, which features a pear tree as the site of illicit sexual liaison.205 Whatever the case may be, Chaucer’s foregrounding of the pear tree in the centre of January’s hortus conclusus, and of May as its luscious fruit, points towards a tradition that is also being referenced in the Pistil – and, moreover, rendered emphatic. However, unlike in Chaucer’s treatment, this emphasis is not for purposes of satire; instead it establishes the firmly female-coded credentials of this garden and the fruitfulness of those credentials. In such an environment, the phallic structures, including those 201 See Ute Derks, ‘Two Trees in Paradise? A Case Study on the Iconography of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life in Italian Romanesque Sculpture’, in The Tree, ed. Salonius and Worm, pp. 143–58 (especially pp. 146–8). 202 Francisco Prado-Vilar, ‘Circular Visions of Fertility and Punishment: Caliphal Ivory Caskets from Al-Andalus’, in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, ed. Gülru Necìpoglu (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 19–41 (p. 26). 203 This is discussed by John M. Riddle in Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (London and Boston: Harvard University Press), pp. 41–2. 204 Pistil, line 70 (pirie); line 82 (peren); line 99 (wardons); and line 108 (peere). 205 Alfred L. Kellogg, ‘Susannah and The Merchant’s Tale’, Speculum 35.2 (1960), 275–9 (275).

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pertaining to the Elders, are encircled and ultimately overrun by such a female encoding. In particular, the phallic charge of the cypress and cedar, growing amongst the other trees and plants, is negated by the ‘gentle’ juniper and briar rose that wrap their tendrils around the tree trunks, both engulfing and overwriting that charge by means of an almost Mechthildian ‘jonyng bitwene’ within which all species are ‘I-theuwed’ to one another.206 Such a ‘jentel’ flourishing is not to be mistaken for weakness, however: both English juniper and the rose briar rely upon their sharp spines and thorns to do their enfolding and embracing; and, in turn, such enfolding is essential to their own survival. This, then, is a garden that, in Irigaray’s terms, insists upon ‘flower[ing] outwards’; one that is ‘free in the air’; one that determines an imaginary of flourishing and efflorescence when faced by overarching domination by bigger and taller ‘structures’; it is therefore a place enveloped by a determined ethics of flourishing; one that is formed, again to quote Irigaray, ‘out of the earth and blossom, following the rhythm of my growth’.207 In the two stanzas that follow this depiction of unfolding and enfolding, the overwriting of the phallic continues, this time by subsuming it into images of fruitful productivity as a result of self-nurture: ‘olyves and amylliers’; ‘peren and pynappel’; ‘canel’ and ‘grapes’; ‘fygers’ and ‘date with the damesene’ everywhere abound, for example.208 These lush and often exotic fruits flourish harmoniously in this garden alongside more English varieties, such as apples and those aforementioned pears. Indeed, the poet goes to some lengths to emphasise explicitly that this is a (self-)nurturing space rather than mere poetic conceit, not just in the repetition of the lush greenness of the garden and its greening agency, but also by means of its flora’s ability to integrate with and nourish other species – and vice versa. For example, ‘The fyge and the filbert were fodemed so fayre’.209 Nor is this a one- or even two-dimensional 206 Pistil, line 71 and line 73. The term ‘I-theuwed’ can mean bound together, or interdependent. See MED s.v. theu (1). 207 Irigaray, Elemental Passions, p. 34. 208 Pistil, lines 80–9. 209 Pistil, line 92.

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garden. This garden is fully rounded and animated, its air heavy with the scent of its flowers and fruit (‘Fele floures and fruit, frelich of flayre’) and the aroma of its spices (‘In erbers enhaled’). It is also fully interactive and reciprocal as it hastens to grow in a constant flurry of flourishing (the plants and flowers ‘speden to spryng’), and in its encouraging of Susanna, Sibyl and Joan to do the same.210 Moreover, its animation extends to other senses: it is filled with the sight and sounds of birdlife, that, like the tendrils of the climbing and winding plants, also inhabits the trees (‘Turtils troned on trene / By sixti I say’).211 The result is an explosion of verdant, three-dimensional flourishing, enhanced by sound, movement and haptic detail that are captured both in representation and by alliterative artistry. The poet thus invites us to exercise a type of mindfulness in our reading, what a medieval reader would recognise as a meditation or contemplation, perhaps. For Irigaray, too, this same multi-sensory approach to the non-human also forms a contemplation. Indeed, she could easily be articulating the invited perspective of the reader of a Pistil when she writes: The combination of the sensible qualities of the flower gathers me, thanks to an attention they awaken at various level, and, imperceptibly, I am brought from concentration to contemplation. If I take the time to live such a state it can be converted into a sort of ecstasy.212

What Irigaray is celebrating here is the way in which a genuine contemplation of the vegetal world – gardens included – can liberate the human from an androcentric cultural tradition within which multivalent sensory perception has long ceded to discursive appropriation and categorisation in the service of our grand narratives. In other words, by preferring one-dimensionality over the multiplicity of full sensory perception, she claims, we fail to meet the non-human – especially trees and other vegetation – as ‘another living being’.213 In the Pistil, however, unlike all other treatments of

210 Pistil, line 98, line 103 and line 104. 211 Pistil, lines 90–1. 212 Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 47. 213 Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being, p. 46.

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the story, we are invited to meet and enter the world of the non-human as the poem’s primary, and fully sentient, protagonist. Part of this process involves the poet’s protracted reconfiguration of the erstwhile exotic garden of Babylonian tradition (‘Babiloine’) as a recognisably English garden in which the original Mediterranean flora and fauna (except for its parrots or ‘popejays’) cede to the joys of an English kitchen garden. Here, then, we have a place where many married women of English provenance would also spend much of their time planting and gathering the same herbs for table or for medicine,214 and who would thus no doubt identify with Susanna and her plight as they pick The chyve and the chollet, the chibolle, the cheve, The chouwet, the cheverol that schaggen on niht, The persel, the passenep, poretes to preve The pyon, the peere, wel proudliche ipiht; The lilye, the lovache, launsyng with leve, The sauge, the sorsecle so semeliche to siht, Columbyne and charuwé clottes thei creve, With ruwe and rubarbe ragget ariht – No lees. Daysye and ditoyne, Ysope and averoyne, Peletre and plauntoyne, Proudest in pres.215

This is the point when the poem’s paratextual elements become most interesting as our senses and perceptions become saturated with the sheer excess and abundance of the vegetal world that is Susanna’s garden. Here we are invited to contemplate an array of plants that, besides their being alliteratively ‘i-theuwed’ to the avian cacophony surrounding them, are also redolent with scents, aroma and medicinal properties – particularly those associated with women’s medicine. The Liber de Sinthomatibus Mulierum [Book on the Conditions of Women] in the Trotula compendium, for example, prescribes plants from the onion family, such as leeks and onions, as part of a regimen to restore the menses in a woman of childbearing 214 Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: Viking Press, 1981, repr. 2014), pp. 218–20. 215 Pistil, lines 105–17.

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age.216 Similarly, according to another medical text, the Anglicanus Ortus of Henry of Huntingdon (d. c. 1154), the juice of plants from this same onion family (to which the chive, chollet and chibolle belong) can help to restore the fertility of young women when blended with breast milk.217 Also according to Henry, the cabbage (‘chouwet’ in the Pistil) is ‘an extraordinary herb’ [‘uiribus herbe’] also able to act as an emmenagogue or even an abortifacient.218 The Trotula, too, prescribes it as part of a cure for ‘pain of the womb’ [‘ad dolorem matricis’].219 Meanwhile, chervil (‘cheverol’) may also provide a useful emmenagogue to women whose menses were retained.220 The healing properties of the parsnip (‘passernep’) are even stronger, according to Henry: it is able to eradicate a tumour masquerading as a pregnancy and can also function as an aphrodisiac.221 Peonies (‘pyon’), when taken crushed in wine, are able to ‘purge[s] the cervix after birth’ [‘postpartum purgare steras’] and cure jaundice in the new-born.222 Lovage (‘lovache’), too, can purge the menses; sage (sauge) cures ‘itching of the vulva’ as well as ‘the manly rod’ [‘Pruritus uulue curat uirgeque uirilis’] and acts as an abortifacient; caraway (‘charuwe’) is an aphrodisiac that also brings 216 Liber de Sinthomatibus Mulierum [Book on the Conditions of Women], in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–131, pp. 70–115 (here at 28, pp. 78/9). These texts were compiled at some stage in the twelfth century, reaching the zenith of their popularity in the fourteenth century. As Green points out in her introduction, the Trotula followed Hildegard in equating the generative menstrual blood in the womb (a ‘flowering’ that eventually produces ‘branches in the fruit of her womb’) with plants and their flowers (Hildegard, de Causae et Curae, quoted by Green, Trotula, p. 22). See also pp. 125 and 145 above on the use of the Middle English term floures. 217 Henry of Huntingdon’s Anglicanus Ortus describes the medicinal use of more than 160 different herbs, spices and vegetables, with the author, better known for his historical writings, drawing closely on the work of earlier medical writers: in particular, Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides, Walahfrid Strabo, Macer Floridus and Constantine the African. For an edition with facing-page translation of this extensive text, see Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus ortus: A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. Winston Black (Bodleian Library, Oxford: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012), here at 5.2.2, pp. 286/7. 218 Henry, Ortus, 5.2.3, pp. 288/9. 219 Trotula, ed. Green, 214, pp. 152/3. 220 Henry, Ortus, 5.1.4, pp. 274/5. 221 Henry, Ortus, 2.5, pp. 138–40/139–41. 222 Henry, Ortus, 4.16, pp. 244/5.

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on the menses; while rue, like plantain (‘plauntoyne’), is effective in expelling a reluctant afterbirth.223 Hissop (‘Ysop’) is particularly effective as a cure for gynaecological ailments in its being named after Artemis, the ‘natura maxima mater’ [‘greatest mother by her nature’] and thus brings on menstruation, or blocks it up, succours mothers, and softens a hardened cervix.224 Such a piling up of plants with these gynaecological, femalecoded medical associations only serves to emphasise this garden as a space for women, and one that is specifically designed to nurture and heal rather than ‘rehearse the fall’ of Peck’s estimation.225 This is even further intensified by the sudden appearance of the lily within a list comprising primarily common, multi-purpose garden vegetables and herbs. In addition to its multiple symbolic associations with the Virgin Mary and the Bride of the Song of Songs, the lily also formed the base of a whole host of common medicines (Henry, for example, claims the flowers of the lily can cure every ailment because of its association with the Virgin’s purity);226 but, crucially, it is included here amongst the common plants and herbs to be found in every kitchen garden because it is also synonym for Susanna’s own name.227 Immersed, therefore, growing and flourishing in the midst of this rich array of aromatic flora is Susanna herself, safely ensconced not only in the material garden itself but deeply embedded in its meaning. This meaning, moreover, is not discerned prophetically – or androcentrically – by the young Daniel as a result of divine intervention of the Logos. The meaning comes from within – articulated by the trees and other fauna of the garden who speak to uphold Susanna’s place also within it and alongside them. With the one Elder citing as evidence a hawthorn as the site of Susanna’s ‘sin’ (‘Under a cyne, sothli, myselven I hir se’) and the other citing a holm-oak (‘Thei pleied bi a prine’),228 the 223 Henry, Ortus, 2.25, pp. 172/3; 1.9, pp. 96/7; 2.6, pp. 140/1; 1.10, pp. 98/9; 5.1.1, pp. 268/9. 224 Henry, Ortus, 1.1, pp. 80/1. 225 Peck, ‘Introduction’, Pistil. 226 Henry, Ortus, 2.11, pp. 152/3. 227 The Hebrew name Shoshannah, from which the English ‘Susanna’ is derived, means ‘lily’. Collins English Dictionary, s.v. Susanna (2). 228 Pistil, line 316 and line 342.

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apparently silent laurel joins with the apparently silent woman to testify vociferously in her defence. As Irigaray writes of such an interchange between a woman (herself) and the non-human world with which she interacts as ‘same’ rather than ‘other’: Listening to the uniqueness of another existence, and considering its irreducibility with respect to my own, is a way to overcome the dependence on a truth, a discourse, or a master presumed to know the whole. It is to recognize another life as transcendent to my own and to my world, forever unknowable to myself. Thus I listen to this life, letting it be and grow, as to something that I cannot fabricate or master.229

In their inability to discern the difference between a laurel, a hawthorn and a holm-oak, the Elders display the arrogance and insouciance of the ‘master presumed to know the whole’ who aims ‘to dominate [it] from on high’, as posited at the start of this chapter. In the face of the garden’s ‘transcendent life’, however, the masters are silenced and ultimately elided by the articulacy of its arboreal plant-life. Somewhat ironically, too, this elision is only rendered complete by another arboreal intervention in the poem’s closing lines, as the Elders are dragged through the streets to their executions on a wooden hurdle (‘Thei … traylen hem on tres’).230 With the verb trailen used more frequently in Middle English to describe the entwining and festooning of vines and other climbing plants around trees and trellises, the hermeneutic entanglement of and within the poem’s poetics is also complete.231

Conclusion This is a garden, then, that can and, on occasion, does speak for and of Susanna’s irreducibility to appropriated object of male exchange, both textually and paratextually, via its hermeneutics of care and cure, its flourishing and viriditas, its excess and the jouissance it generates. Moreover, its garden voice is female-focused and female-coded, promoting another way of dwelling and thriving 229 Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being, p. 50. 230 Pistil, line 356. 231 MED, s.v. trailen (4 and 5).

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that cannot be fabricated or mastered: it is one that is predicated upon becoming and emplacement within a world of efflorescent and flourishing viridity wherein God – a god – has its throne. As a poem written in the late fourteenth century, the Pistil therefore aligns itself fully with the other female-coded texts examined earlier in this study, pointing, perhaps, not necessarily just towards Wycliffite imperatives to by-pass the waning authority of the established Church, nor towards a community of noble women, like Joan de Bohun, who were increasingly steeped in literacy, learning and access to ‘so-called’ vernacular theology, but towards the poet’s grounding in an ethics of empathy, compassion and productive affect. In turn, such a grounding permitted this poetic examination of a world that includes and values both the human and the non-human as single, entangled entity, to be scrutinised from the position of the less powerful, the marginal and the maligned, presenting them with the lived example of a woman who found her own verdant emplacement – her earthly hortus conclusus – in which to dwell and fully become.

331

AFTERWORD: THE GARDEN HERMENEUTIC IN THE AGE OF COVID-19

… a leaf, a flower, a blade of grass, a smell, or a sound changes in one night. However, the forest and the garden give an impression of permanence and safety in spite of constant change.1

T

his book, focusing on the ways in which a female-coded idea and image of the enclosed garden took up its position at the forefront of the medieval religious imaginary, was completed in the early summer of 2020, at the height of a global lock-down enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The microscopic pathogen involved, known as SARS-CoV-2, has, at the date of writing this afterword, all but closed down the day-to-day workings of the entire world, turning millions of us into social recluses. Conventional social contact has been disrupted and, in many cases, severed altogether. Virtual existences, lived out via anodyne glass screens or the written word, are held onto tightly, necessary substitutes for the energies and endorphins generated by more direct interactions with colleagues, friends, lovers, family and strangers. And, significantly, people have turned once more to the natural world and its gardens in search of recompense for their lost freedoms, or for greater understanding of life’s fundamentals, or to help articulate the often inarticulable via those gardens’ inexorably reliable rhythms of growth, flourishing and what Kristeva has termed their belle fanaison, on which vital regeneration is predicated. Such a turning or re-turning to the image, idea or materiality of the garden as recompense or articulation was, as we have seen, also a preoccupation of the women at the heart of this present book – the betrayed Eve and Susanna; the creative women of Hohenbourg, Rupertsberg, Helfta and Mechelen; the transcendent Pearl-Maiden. 1

Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being, p. 57.

Afterword

In both cases too – medieval and modern – this turning has sometimes proved problematic, with access to gardens and their concomitant social hermeneutics becoming a lens through which to view social privilege and the inequalities and deprivations it generates. In Yono Park just north of Tokyo, for instance, at the peak of the current pandemic, 180 varieties of flourishing rose blossoms, all blooming in their prime, were extirpated by the authorities to discourage the city’s residents, largely without gardens of their own, from congregating there; at the same time the Welsh National Park of Snowdonia was closed off to all visitors, its coastlines also out of bounds to all but local residents; the rare plants of the country’s Botanical Gardens continue to flourish, but alone and unseen. Nevertheless, people everywhere continue to search for, lament the lack of, check their privilege over and, sometimes illegally, access all kinds of gardens and other green spaces at a time when one hour each day in the sunlight is all that, in many places across the world, has been permitted – and in some regions, not even that. How could I have ever envisaged when embarking on this book’s research in the now distant freedom of the warm and intensely verdant summer of 2014 that the idea and materiality of a garden, however small, large, accessible or enclosed, would have become such a pressing social issue; a measure of inequalities; so central to health and wellbeing; a human right? Again, these are knowledge-sets that are clearly articulated and understood in the medieval texts under scrutiny in this book, as we have seen. In many parts of the world, however, the therapeutic effects of gardens and gardening upon physical and mental wellbeing is an epistemology that has long been lost in the context of global urbanisation and advanced capitalist imperatives. Nevertheless, an array of recent studies, one of which was developed as part of my own research project, has demonstrated categorically that ‘time out’ in enclosed green spaces such as gardens or forests lowers both heart-rate and blood-pressure within the confines of an often frenetic daily lifestyle.2 Not that this provides an example of 2

See Sara Jones, ‘Report on a Pilot Study of the Garden as a Place of Health and Well-Being’, in The Medieval and Early Modern Garden: Enclosure and

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green space as ‘miracle cure’, of course: but time and again research continues to suggest that exposure to gardens and other green spaces has ameliorative effects upon both health and wellbeing. Collectively, however, we have often been slow to recognise such benefits, have been reluctant to prioritise our green spaces in the face of urban progress, have been reluctant to provide or allow free and equal access to those green spaces in the first place. Nevertheless, as we have seen, some of the more illuminated of our medieval forebears recognised in the garden its value and potential to generate a human philosophy for living the best life – something we ignore at our peril. Some weeks ago, I was deeply moved to see such sentiments articulated in footage of already overstretched hospital workers at Derriford hospital, Plymouth, sometimes without the requisite level of personal protective equipment, taking time to wheel their comatose COVID-19 patients, trussed up with tubes, bottles and trailing cumbersome machinery, out into the unseasonably warm sunshine on the hospital roof, recently converted into a safely enclosed, ‘secret’ roof-garden. As one interviewee, an exhausted Intensive Care nurse, suggested, even if the patient is unconscious or semi-conscious, there are visible responses to be had, invoked by a mixture of exposure to the direct sunlight, the spring breezes, the buzz of insect life, the aroma of the flowers and herbs and the chattering of birdlife, loud in the newly silenced cityscape. This, she added (and here she could have been paraphrasing Mechthild, or Gertrude, or the Pearl-Maiden), was a crucial part of ‘the humanisation process’ since ‘there is power in the sunlight and fresh air and rain’.3 Gardens and green spaces matter and in recent months we have learned quickly just how much they matter: whether a collection of pots on an urban balcony; herbs growing on a kitchen windowsill; municipal parklands; rented allotment plots; riverside pathways; manicured suburban lawns; or the wildly imaginative gardens of the mind constructed from within the medieval cloister.

3

Transformation, c. 1200–1400, ed. Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 155–62. ‘Back to Nature: “Secret Garden” Outings Used to Aid Coronavirus Recovery’, The Guardian (Tuesday, 5 May 2020).

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Afterword

Ultimately, garden landscapes, the wellbeing they produce, the language they generate and the meanings they disseminate reflect the synchronic and diachronic connections between place and those humans and non-humans who dwell there. They distil the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ into an always already entangled and intra-active present/presence of becoming. As a feminist medievalist, I am part of an academic community that has long been familiar with this idea of asynchronous time, particularly in the context of the many discourses currently filling our spheres of communication – whether they be of plague, famine, quarantine, social isolation, invisible contamination, overwhelming death-count, collapsing medical and public services, apocalypse, the end of the world, political conspiracy, the unequal burdens generated by sex, gender, sexuality, race, faith, (dis)ability, age and other such identity-formation engines. This present global event, along with its emergent repercussions, therefore, both is – and is not – unprecedented. We know only too well the extent to which the past is imbricated in the present and that the tried-and-tested, knotty ‘old root’ of patriarchal resolution based on scapegoating, blame-delivery, bluster and necrophilic obsession may no longer provide the preferred – or durable – pathway towards recovery. Instead, we need to take other lessons from other environments and other narratives, ones within which the habitat of mind is based on the philosophy of flourishing and mentality of greening, ones that were known and well understood by many of our female-focused forebears and which are still available to be recaptured today. I hope, in some small way, therefore, that this present book, which focuses on how the female-coded within a green and flourishing world can – and sometimes did – become a philosophy for all, will add to that gathering call.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscripts Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 (the Aberdeen Bestiary). Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (the ‘Auchinleck Manuscript’). London, British Library, Additional MS 22283 (the ‘Simeon’ manuscript). London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ii (pt 1). London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. London, British Library, MS Harley 494. London, British Library, MS Harley 2851. London, British Library, MS Harley 4012. London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 379. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 12513. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, Pierpont Morgan MS 232. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, Pierpoint Morgan Library M 818 (the ‘Ingilby’ manuscript). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS eng. poet. a. 1 (the ‘Vernon’ manuscript). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 6909 (formerly Ashmole 802). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 7419 (formerly Ashmole 244). Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5064. Rupertsberg MS (the Scivias Codex, destroyed at Dresden in 1944). San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, HM 114 (Philips MS 8252). Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex 2554. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, codex 1003 Helmst.

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INDEX References to footnotes consist of the page number followed by the letter ‘n’ followed by the number of the note. References to plates are introduced by the letters Pl. Abelard, Peter affair with Heloise and castration 286, 289, 291, 292 antagonistic relationship with Bernard de Clairvaux 110, 286, 287, 289 arraignments for heresy 110, 111, 287, 289 Historia calamitatum 287 Sermo 29, de Sancta Susanna, ad Hortationem Virginum Susanna as matrona and cloistered chastity 287–8 Susanna’s and Abelard’s silences 288–9 Susanna’s story as warning against dangers of sexuality 289–93 The Aberdeen Bestiary 105–7, 200n20, 239n157 Acts of Thomas ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ 200n21 Adam Adam-to-Christ patrilinear genealogy 71–2, 74, 91, 133, 187–8, 196–9, 201, 243–4 Eve’s birth from his side 32n20, 46, 130n144, 196 as first mother 32 Hildegard as tree growing from Adam’s mouth 117 Hildegard’s representation of 129–31 see also ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ (‘Adam

Books’); Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; Eden and the framing of Eve Aelfric Homilies 104 Alan of Melsa Tractatus metricus de Susanna 294, 297, 306, 309–16 Alan of Wyntoun 319 Albertus (vicar in Erfurt, Germany) 227 Albertus Magnus, Saint 185 de Mineralibus, ‘Crystallus’ 235n145 Aldhelm De virginitate 104 Alexandrine Bible 265–6 Allen, Prudence 226 Ambrose, Saint de virginibus 104 de virginitate 110n91 ancient cultures gardens and rituals 7n15 Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses 31n18, 41, 42n46 Andrew, Malcolm 195n1, 198n12, 204n32, 208n42, 230n120, 235n143, 241n165 Andrew of Wyntoun 308 Apocalypsis Mosis (Vita Adae et Evae) 53, 54, 56–7 ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ (‘Adam Books’) 21, 50n77, 52 Auchinleck manuscript see Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve

Index ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ (cont’d) Canticum de Creatione 53n87, 58, 72–4 Vita Adae et Evae (Apocalypsis Mosis) 53, 54, 56–7 arborescence see trees Aristotle 210n47 Armitage, Simon 195n1, 203n30 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop 226, 253n201, 308n142 Assumption of the Blessed Virgin 59 Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve description and overview date and content 21, 53n87, 58–9 female voice reclaimed by phallogocentric narrative 59–60 female-coded text and unreining in of Eve 57–8 material and narrative lacunae 59–60 textual analysis ejection of Lucifer and pre-Fall ontology of sin 60–1 God’s ‘absolute discourse’ with Adam 61–2 God’s Law and Eve’s wisdom 62–3 instability of God/Christ and unearthing of ‘body’ of Eve 63–5 moon, sea and feminine fluidity 65–6 outside Eden and Adam’s acceptance of God’s Law 66, 67 outside Eden and Eve’s Christic love 67–8, 69, 71 outside Eden and Eve’s contestation of God’s Law 66–7 stone tablets and Eve’s recording of her own history 69–70 suppression of Eve’s voice by God’s phallogocentric Law 70–2, 74–5, 77–8 traditional patriarchal genealogy from Adam 71–2, 74, 91, 133

Augustine, Saint Bathsheba as Bride in Song of Songs 41n42 Helfta nuns’ familiarity with his work 151, 153n36 interactive theology model (Confessions) 151 Susanna story de Bono Conjugari and Susanna’s lowly position 282 de Sancta Virginitate and Susanna’s purity 281–2 de Sancta Virginitate on women and marriage 282–3 Sermon 343 on Susanna as example of marital chastity 283–5 Augustinian Order 84, 90 Austin friary (York) 293 Bachelard, Gaston 176, 179, 189 Baert, Barbara 42, 83n13, 84–5, 86–7, 88, 156, 163, 180 Barr, Jessica 151n29, 183 Bathsheba 40–1, 42n46 Beauvoir, Simone de 277 ‘bee’ and ‘honey’ metaphors 103–8, 115, 173, 223 beguine movement 148n22 Benedict, Saint 30–1 Benedictine Order 114–15, 116, 146–7, 147n20 St Gall monastery gardens (Switzerland) Pl. 1, Pl. 2, 30–2, 33 Berman, Constance H. 153–4 Bernard of Clairvaux Abelard, antagonistic relationship with 110, 286, 287, 289 Gertrude’s Legatus, references to in 153n36, 160 Hildegard of Bingen, correspondence with 117, 118 Mechthild’s Liber, references to in 153n36 Song of Songs commentary 37–8, 39–40, 47 Susanna story, treatment of 285–6 Bernard Silvestris of Tours

362

Index Cosmographia 126–7 Besloten hofje, Mechelen (Malines) see under Mechelen nunneries bestiaries The Aberdeen Bestiary 105–7, 200n20, 239n157 Bible see Alexandrine Bible; Bible Moralisée; New Testament; Old Testament; separate books Bible Moralisée The Birth of Eve Pl. 3, 32n20 Black, Daisy 51–2 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron 225–6, 253 Boethius 111 Bohun, Joan de 308, 331 Boitani, Piero 272–3 Book of Daniel (13) Susanna and the Elders 23–4, 41n44, 261, 262–6, 281, 287, 319 (13:1) Susanna as ‘a very beautiful woman’ 291 (13:3) ‘for her parents... had instructed her in the law of Moses’ 273 (13:20) Elders’ lascivious words 290 (13:22) ‘If I do this thing, it is death to me’ 269, 292, 315 (13:22) ‘straitened on every side’ 267, 280, 288, 293, 315 (13:32) ‘those wicked men commanded that her face be uncovered’ 278 (13:36) ‘the elders said: As we walked in the orchard alone’ 292 (13:51-60) Susanna’s exoneration 270 Book of Genesis (1:11) ‘Let the earth bring forth the green herb’ 123n129 (1:24) ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind’ 120n119 (1:28) ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it’ 46n60, 47

(2:10) creation of first garden by God 29–30 (2:15) Eden as ‘paradise of pleasure’ 48n66 (2:16) ‘of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat’ 48n65 (2:22-3) Eve’s birth from Adam’s side 32n20 (3:15) ‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman’ 47n62 (3:16) ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’ 32n21 (17-21) Sarah laughing ‘behind the door of the tent’ 203n30 (29) removal of Rachel’s coat 110n91 ‘grand-narrative’ patriarchal text 25, 29, 44–5, 49, 63, 143 Book of Isaiah (1:23) ‘I will purge away thy dross’ 159 (11:1) ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse’ 133n159, 188 Book of Kings (21:15-23) Jezebel 42n45 Book of Psalms (148:4-5) ‘Praise him, you heaven of heavens’ 238–9 Book of Revelation (1:16) divine visage with sunrays 205n34 (14:1-5) virgins 198n12, 199, 199n13 (21:9-10) ‘I will show thee the Bride, the wife of the Lamb’ 272 (22:2) Saint John’s Tree of Life vision 257n214 (22:16) ‘I am the root and stock of David’ 199n14 Book of Samuel (11:1-27) Bathsheba 40n41 Borchardt, Rudolph 1n1, 2–3, 17, 40, 87–8 Boswell, John 247 Bridget of Sweden 228 Brigittine order 229

363

Index British Library manuscripts MS Harley 494 229 MS Harley 4012 229 MS Lansdowne 379 228, 229n115 Bromberg, Richard 227 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn 145 Buck, David Gardens and Health (National Gardens Scheme report) 1 Bullough, Vern L. 144n9 Burton, Janet 153 Bynum, Caroline Walker 87n24

and grafting/tree metaphors in Helfta texts 186–7 in green garments 164, 165–70 nuns as gardeners for Christ 99n68 pearl as an image of 200 Resurrection and ‘tree’ metaphor 180 Susanna as Christic 272–3, 321 as unstable entity 64 Veronica-Christ 170–1, 172 vulvic representation of his wound 87n24 Christine de Pizan 321–2 Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc 102 Cicero 210n47 Cirlot, Victoria 170–1 Cistercian Order 110, 147, 153–4, 285, 309–10, 311–12 Cîteaux Abbey 285 Cixous, Hélène ‘The Author in Truth’ Book of Genesis as ‘oldest book of dreams’ 63 Edenic narrative and ‘absolute discourse’ 33n22, 62 Edenic narrative as ‘Bildungsroman’ account in Genesis 29 Edenic narrative, rewritings of and ‘unconscious... indifferent to laws’ 44 Eve’s countering of the Law 48, 49 ‘the fable from which we never escape’ 74 feminine wild unconscious and male hegemonic imagery 25–6, 27, 29, 45, 49, 58, 75 ‘There is an apple, and straightaway there is a law’ 61–2 “you-shall-not-enter” series 61n114 Coming to Writing and Other Essays reading ‘with my eyes closed’ 94, 95 Cleanness 203n30, 226n102, 241

Canticum de Creatione 53n87, 58, 72–4 Caritas 133 Carracedo, Juan Manuel Castro 321 Carruthers, Mary 107, 113 Carthusian Order 228 Mountgrace monastery 228n112, 229n118 Catacomb of Praetextatus (Rome) 272–3 Catacomb of Priscilla (Rome) capella graeca 271–2 Catherine of Siena 228 Caviness, Madeline 133 ‘cellula’ term 107 Chaucer, Geoffrey 210n48, 227, 322 ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ 324 child oblation 147, 243n168, 249, 251 Chinca, Mark 181, 182, 183–4, 184n135 Christ Adam-to-Christ patrilinear genealogy 71–2, 74, 91, 133, 187–8, 196–9, 201, 243–4 Christ-as-lamb 197, 272 Christ-hero 302 Christic romance heroes 145 Christ-in-and-as-tree 175–6 Christ’s maternity 166, 177–9, 192–3 Christ-the-Saviour trope 321 crucifixion, cross and thorn hedges 172–5 Eve as embodiment of Christic love 68, 69, 71 fish as figure of Christ 240 as gardener 156, 163, 175, 257–8

364

Index climate emergency and horticultural landscapes within human imaginary 1–2 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 35, 234, 236–7 Cooper, Donna-Marie 274n40, 276, 278 Cooper Marcus, Clare 320 Corinthians see First Epistle to the Corinthians ‘cosmic garden’ concept 6, 7, 8 Council of Sens (1141) 110 COVID-19 age and garden hermeneutic gardens during pandemic access to limited by social inequalities 334 access to restricted by authorities 334 people’s re/turning to 333, 335 well-being and gardens hospital roof-garden for COVID19 patients 335 medieval vs present times 334–5 pathway to recovery and philosophy of flourishing 336 Craven, Wayne 41n42 The Creation of the World (Gwreans an Bys, Cornish play) 51–2 Crescenzi, Piero de’ Liber ruralium commodorium 172–3 crystal symbolism of 234–7, 238 Cunegund of Halberstadt 147n20

Matelda’s goddess-like status 210–13 Mechthild’s Mountain of the Virtues and Dante’s Mount Purgatory 218–21, 234 vision of cosmic wheel in Liber and Commedia 217–18 vision of rose in Liber and Dante’s Paradiso 221–4 Paradiso influence on Pearl 208 David, King 40–1 Davis, Carmel Bendon 85 The de Brailes Hours 309n143 Deleuze, Gilles 196n2, 243–6, 247, 254, 323 Derrida, Jacques hegemony of phallogocentric ‘old root’ concept 4–5, 27–8 re. age of COVID-19 and pathway to recovery 336 re. apocryphal tradition 55 re. Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve 64, 67, 78 re. Benedictine St Gall monastery garden 31, 32 re. Canticum de Creatione 73, 74 re. Cixous’s theory 49 re. Gertrude’s and Mechthild’s texts 172, 190, 191, 193–4 re. Herrad’s Hortus Deliciarum 97 re. Jantzen’s theories 143 re. Kristeva’s theories 81 re. Noli me tangere episode 42–3 re. Pearl and Mechthild’s Liber 202, 204, 208, 245 re. Wampole’s theory 179 Digby Mary Magdalene play 42n46 Dinshaw, Carolyn 51 DiTommaso, Lorenzo 264, 265 Donovan, Claire 309n143 The Dream of the Rood 302 Dunn, Geoffrey D. 274n40 Dunstan, A. C. 54n88 Durandus, Guillaume Rationale Divinorum Officiorum 164 ‘dwelling’ concept 304–6, 318

‘Dame Matilda’s Hymn’ (‘Le laude di Donna Matelda’) 225–6 Daniel see Book of Daniel Dante, Alighieri Commedia and Mechthild’s Liber Specialis Gratiae Dante’s knowledge of Mechthild’s writing 210–11, 217, 225 Dante’s Matelda as poetic reincarnation of Mechthild 214–16

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Index Ecclesia 11, 32n20, 37, 38, 109n90, 127–8, 132, 133 ecocritical studies of medieval literary texts 19n45 Eden ‘cosmic garden’ 6–7, 8 Hildegard’s view of 128–9, 132, 134–6 as place of ‘ennui’ (R. P. Harrison) 49, 54–5, 78, 266, 313–14 post-Edenic trials and Epic of Gilgamesh garden 8 recapture of and garden of The Song of Songs 10 reclaiming of and ‘imaginative theology’ 155–6 reshaping of in Helfta nunnery 156, 186 see also Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; Eden and the framing of Eve; Paradise Eden and the framing of Eve chapter overview 21 discussion of issues Cixous on feminine unconscious vs masculine laws 25–6, 27, 29 Derrida on hegemony of phallogocentric ‘old root’ 27–8 MacCannell on landscapes and power-structures 27, 28, 29 Soja on spatiality and power-plays 26–7 Eden’s deceptive veils creation of first garden by God (Genesis 2:10) 29–30 Eve’s birth from Adam and male vs female birth-giving 32 Eve’s responsibility for human fall into original sin 31 model of Persian paradise garden 29–30 monastic gardens 30 St Gall Benedictine monastery gardens Pl. 1, Pl. 2, 30–1, 33 walled gardens’ carcerality and male-imposed exile from maternal realm 31–3

366

Mary’s walled garden Mary as ‘second Eve’ 33–4 Mary’s disempowerment and Soja’s ‘deceptive ideological veils’ 34–5 Virgin Mary as fantasy of maternal power 35–6 walled gardens and fecund-butsealed-up woman trope 36 medieval treatments of Song of Songs garden allegorisation of poem 36–7, 38–9 Bernard of Clairvaux’s commentary 37–8, 39–40, 47 Virgin Mary as Bride in allegorised poem 39–40 prevalence of biblical women in walled gardens Bathsheba 40–1, 42n46 Jezebel 41–2, 47 Mary Magdalene 42 Susanna 41 walled gardens and buried ‘body’ of female sexuality 42–3 re-reading of Eden - contemporary approach challenge of patriarchal texts and feminism 43–4 Cixous on Eve’s countering of the Law 48, 49 Cixous on patriarchal law and female wild unconscious 45, 49 Harrison on Eve 48–9 Kennedy, Solnit and Kahn on Eve 44–5 Kristeva on Eve and the Creation 46–7 Kristeva on Virgin Mary 45–6, 47 re-reading of Eden - medieval/early modern era 49–50 Apocalypsis Mosis (Vita Adae et Evae) 53, 54, 56–7 ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ 52–5 Auchinleck manuscript 53n87, 57–72, 74–5, 77–8

Index see also Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve Canticum de Creatione 53n87, 58, 72–4 Forman’s apocryphal treatises 50 Gwreans an Bys (The Creation of the World, Cornish play) 51–2 Milton’s Paradise Lost 50 unreining in/of Eve 57–8 wild unconscious reined back 74–5, 77–8 efflorescence as defined by Elaine Miller 259 see also under Irigaray, Luce Elisabeth of Shönau 118, 228 Embach, Michael 116n111 enclosed gardens (horti conclusi) concept 16–17 Piero de’ Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorium 172–3 scholarship on 19n44, 83n13 feminist scholarship on 18–20, 20n48 see also ‘cosmic garden’ concept; gardens/gardening; monastic gardens; paradise gardens Engelhardt, Christian Moritz 90n30 Engh, Line Cecilie 285–6 Epic of Gilgamesh 7–8 Epistle to the Galatians (5:22) virtues enumerated by St Paul 257n214 Epistle to the Romans (11:23-24) Paul’s use of plantgrafting metaphor 184 Ettinger, Bracha L. 5, 79 see also matrixiality Eugenius III, Pope 118 Eusebius crypt (Rome) 270 Evans, Michael 111 Eve birth from Adam’s side 32n20, 46, 130n144, 196 The Birth of Eve (Bible Moralisée) Pl. 3, 32n20 as embodiment of Christic love 68, 69, 71 evil, association with 77–8 Hildegard’s representation of 129–31

Mary as ‘new/second Eve’ 33–4, 78, 198, 262 menstruation pains as punishment for transgression 123 as scapegoat for human misery 274 as ‘seminal creature’ (R. P. Harrison) 73 striving for knowledge and Philosophia 109–10 and Susanna 261, 279 see also ‘Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve’ (‘Adam Books’); Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve; Eden and the framing of Eve

367

Fein, Susanna 58–9, 201n25 female mysticism 81, 147n19, 180–1 female sexuality in Helfta texts 189, 191, 193 and The Song of Songs 10–11, 37–8, 39 and the Virgin Mary story 35 and vulvic representation of Christ’s wound 87n24 walled gardens and buried ‘body’ of female sexuality 42–3 see also Susanna’s garden dilemma feminist scholarship enclosed gardens (horti conclusi) 18–20, 20n48 medieval romance 20n47 medieval studies 336 post-Lacanian philosophy 2n4 re-reading of patriarchal Eden narrative 43–4 Field, Rosalind 197n5, 197n6 Finnegan, Mary Jeremy 247n182 First Epistle to the Corinthians (7:9) ‘It is better to marry than to be burnt’ 281–2 (11) veils for all non-virgins 277 fish symbolism of 239–40 florilegia 55, 145, 153n36 Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus Deliciarum 98–9, 101, 104 ‘flourishing’ etymology of term 145 see also under Jantzen, Grace M.

Index Forman, Simon 50 Foucault, Michel ‘heterotopia’ concept 16, 171–2 ‘master’s discourse’ 275 Tertullian and ‘technology of the fleshy self’ 274–5 Fountains Abbey 309, 311 Freeman, Elizabeth 311 Freudian psychoanalysis 274

overall conclusion 193–4 conversational theology Cistercian community 147–9 close collaboration between Helfta sisters 149–51 conversational theology on Augustinian model 151–2 visionary and literary activity 92, 148–9 gardening and natural world Cistercians and gardening 153–4 hermeneutics of communion and flourishing 152–3 landscape as language and sacred imaginary of flourishing 154–5 landscapes and gardens as spectral intertextuality 155 gardens, landscapes and spiritual greening ‘imaginative theology’ and garden as reclaimed Eden 155–6 influence of wider landscape on community 156–7 physical garden and spiritual greening (Gertrude) 157–60, 163 physical landscape and spiritual greening (Mechthild) 160–3 green garments and greening of the flesh green, symbolism of colour 164–5 green in Gertrude’s text 164–5, 166–7 green in Mechthild’s text 164–5, 166, 168–70 Minne and green colour 165–6 Veronica’s veil and Christ’s human flesh 170–1 greening Christ and enclosed gardens of the soul Christ, the cross and thorn hedges in Gertrude’s text 172–5 Christ-as-divine-mother in Gertrude’s text 177–9

Galatians see Epistle to the Galatians Garber, Rebecca 130 Garden of Eden see Eden; Eden and the framing of Eve Garden of the Hesperides 7 gardens/gardening garden rituals in ancient cultures 7n15 therapeutic effects of 1, 334–6 see also ‘cosmic garden’ concept; enclosed gardens (horti conclusi); monastic gardens; paradise gardens Gardner, Edmund Garrett 216, 218 Garí, Blanca 170–1 Gaulin, Jean-Louis 153 genealogical trees (patrilinear genealogy) 71–2, 74, 91, 133, 187–8, 196–9, 201, 243–4 Genesis see Book of Genesis Geoffrey of Vinsauf 107 German medieval romances 181–4 Gertrude of Hackeborn 243n168, 247 Gertrude the Great see Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn chapter overview 22–3, 92 collaborative visionary works 141 contemporary theories on female divinity and existential flourishing 141–7 Helfta convent 141, 142, 147–9, 151, 153, 183 ‘nuns’ as ‘gardeners for Christ’ 99n68

368

Index Christ-in-and-as-tree in Mechthild’s text 175–6 Christ’s self-confessed maternity in Mechthild’s text 177 ‘garden heterotopia’ 171–2, 179 Legatus Diviniae Pietatis (Gertrude) Bernard of Clairvaux, references to 153n36, 160 Christ, the cross and thorn hedges 172–5 Christ-as-divine-mother 177–9 collaborative nature of the book 150 Gertrude’s admission to struggle with new language 190 Gertrude’s contribution 150 Gertrude’s self-grafting onto Christ 189–90 green garments 164–5, 166–7 green imagery and ‘imaginative theology’ 156 honey metaphors 173 influence of wider landscape on garden 156–7 Latin text and translations 148n21 Mechthild’s appearances 177 physical garden and spiritual greening 157–60, 163 plant-grafting images 180, 183 references to natural world and gardens 154, 155 tree, horticultural syntax and mysticism 180–1 Liber Specialis Gratiae (Mechthild) Bernard of Clairvaux, references to 153n36 Christ-in-and-as-tree in enclosed garden 175–6 Christ’s self-confessed maternity 177 collaboration with other sisters 150 green garments 164–5, 166, 168–70 ‘imaginative theology’ and green imagery 156 Latin text and translations 148n21

Mechthild’s drinking from vine-tree in Christ’s sacred heart 191–3 Mechthild’s ‘little silver house’ vision 183n128 Mechthild’s soul as hare sleeping in Christ’s lap 182n126 Mechthild’s veneration for Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas 185 Mechthild’s vision of Christ as tree with three intertwining fronds 186–7 Mechthild’s vision of Christ with tree grafted onto feet 187 Mechthild’s vision of Mary with tree grafted into womb 187–9 Mechthild’s visions 150 Minne, representation of 166, 192–3 physical landscape and spiritual greening 160–3 plant-grafting images 180, 183 references to natural world and gardens 154, 155 tree, horticultural syntax and mysticism 180–1 Veronica’s veil and Christ 170–1 trees, roots and grafting ‘grafting’ and the divine in Gertrude’s text 189–90 ‘grafting’ and the divine in Mechthild’s text 185–9, 191–3 ‘grafting’ metaphor in Middle High German romances 181–4 ‘grafting’ metaphor in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 184 ‘grafting’ viewed as contra natura 184–5 root as ontologically female 179–80 root/tree as bridge between earth and heavens 179–80 tree, horticultural syntax and mysticism 180–1 Gibson, Joan 116n111 Ginsberg, Warren 196, 208, 209–10, 214

369

Index Glancy, Jennifer A. 303 Gospel of John (8:1-11) stoning of adulteress episode 319 (19:17) ‘And bearing his own cross’ 174n96, 174n98 (20:15) Noli me tangere episode 42, 175n99, 180 (20:17) Mary Magdalene 42 (21:6) miracle of the fish 240 Gospel of Luke (2:41-50) Presentation to the Elders 168–9 (18:15-17) ‘Suffer children to come to me’ 254 (23:26) Christ and the cross 174n98 Gospel of Mark (5:31-34) Haemorrhoïssa (bleeding woman) 170–1 Gospel of Matthew (1:1-24) male genealogy of Christ 133 (1.17) disciples as ‘fishers of men’ 240 (12:40) Jonas in the whale’s belly 240 (13:46) ‘pearl of great price’ story 254 (16:24) Christ addressing his twelve disciples 175 (20:1-16) parable of the vineyard 253, 258 (27:32) Christ and the cross 174n98 Gottfried von Strassburg Tristan 181–2, 183, 184 ‘grafting’ metaphor see under trees Greek mythology Hera’s Garden of the Hesperides 7 Green, B. 8–9, 11 Green, Monica 328n216 Green, Rosalie 90n30 ‘green’ colour symbolism of 164–7 Gregory IX, Pope Decretales 251 Griffiths, Fiona J. on communal reading of Herrad’s Hortus 108–9

on Herrad as ‘a woman who was not “feminine”‘ 91 on Herrad’s Hortus and ‘florilegium’ term 99 on Herrad’s Hortus as ‘neither affective nor visionary’ 94–5, 97 on Herrad’s Hortus as ‘woman’s book’ 95 on Herrad’s self-representation as ‘bee of God’ 104n75, 104n76, 104n77, 106n82 on Herrad’s writing as belonging to male authorship tradition 95, 101 on Hildegard’s possible influence on Herrad 116n111 on monastic women and Gregorian reforms 93n40 Grimes, Laura M. 150, 151, 153n36, 177, 183 Guattari, Félix 196n2, 243–6, 247, 254, 323 Guillaume de Lorris 98, 159n55 Gwreans an Bys (The Creation of the World, Cornish play) 51–2 Haemorrhoïssa (bleeding woman) 170–1 Halpern-Amaru, Betsy 265–6, 267, 268, 269 Harrison, Anna 150n28, 151 Harrison, Robert Pogue ‘the best is in front of us [gardeners]’ 99 Eden as place of ‘ennui’ 49, 54–5, 78, 266, 313–14 Eden as stasis of pleasure and perfection 128 Eve, in defence of 48–9 Eve as first human rendered ‘seminal creature 73 garden as place where death ‘sets things in motion, including our desires’ 231 garden ‘repose’ as ‘orientation’ 158 ‘gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose’ 18 gardens as both ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ 99

370

Index gardens as ‘counterforce to history’s deleterious forces’ 17–18 gardens as ‘gateways to other worlds’ 231 gardens as ‘speech acts’ 36, 48–9 gardens’ ‘human authorship’ 36 ‘If death is the price one pays for fruitfulness, so be it’ 49, 315 ‘penumbral depths’ belonging ‘as much to the garden as to the mind’ 316 ‘What holds true for the soil’ passage 18 Hartmann von Aue 182 Hatt, Cecilia A. 195n1, 201n24, 206n37 health Gardens and Health (National Gardens Scheme report) 1 and gardens/gardening 1, 334–6 Heidegger, Martin 304 Heinrich von Veldeke 182 Helfta nunnery 22–3 see also Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn Heloise (Héloïse d’Argenteuil/du Paraclet) 286, 287, 288, 291, 292–3 Henry of Huntingdon Anglicanus Ortus 328–9 Hera Garden of the Hesperides 7 Herrad of Hohenbourg about Herrad abbess of Augustinian independent nunnery 89–90 not a visionary 92, 95 about Hortus Deliciarum content, date and nature of manuscript 22, 90–1, 94 engagement with/reshaping of hegemonic male discourse 91–3, 97 garden hermeneutics and patrilinear genealogy 91 male reconstruction of manuscript and ‘eye squinting’ 93–4 as means of providing female theological education 92, 94

poems attributed to Herrad 94 rationality/theology vs devotional femininity 91–2, 95 “woman’s book” issue 95–6 women writers’ acquisitive literary practice and Marie de France 95–7 flowers, fertility and author as gardener florilegium methodology 98–9, 101, 104 Garden of Delights title as act of female naming 98 Herrad’s assertion of her authorial authority 101–2 Herrad’s prologue (folio IV), text and analysis 100–2 hortus deliciarum as femalecoded sacred and fecund space 102–3 ‘maiden in the rose garden’ motif and Le Roman de la Rose 98 Herrad as ‘bee’ of God Herrad’s agency as female author 103, 108 honeycomb and bee metaphors 103–8, 115, 223 honeycomb cellae and cellulae of memory 107–8 memory-making and femalecoded concept of flourishing gardens 108 Philosophia and communal making and reading collective reading of the Hortus 108–9 communal reading, memoryformation and female imaginary 113 folios on history of monastery 111–12 Herrad’s ‘O nivei flores’ poem 112–13 Philosophia and femalecoded re-voicing of sacred story 109–11 see also under Griffiths, Fiona J. hetaira figure 212

371

Index ‘heterotopia’ concept 16, 171–2, 179 Hildegard of Bingen about Hildegard abbess of Benedictine nunnery of Rupertsberg 89–90, 113–14, 137 contemporary renown 115–16 criticisms of the Church 118 doctrinal orthodoxy and female perspective 116 Hirsau monasticism and women’s monastic space 114–15 ‘humility topos’ and erasure of authorial agency 118–19 natural world, visionary insights and the feminine 116–18 Sapienta, re-appropriation of 109n90 ‘Sybil of the Rhine’ 113 tree imagery 117 visionary 92, 113, 115, 116–17 Hildegard’s correspondence with Bernard of Clairvaux 117, 118 Elisabeth of Shönau 118 Mainz prelates 135–6, 137 Pope Eugenius III 118 Hildegard’s works (other than Scivias) de Causae et Curae 328n216 de Physica 235 medical works 132 Ordo virtutum 134 Symphonia 134 Scivias book of visionary insights 22, 119–20 copies and original manuscript 130n145 Hildegard’s subject-position and Kristeva’s ‘abject’ 120–1 Kristeva’s ‘communion de la femme et la fleur’, ‘belle fanaison’ and the ‘abject’ 124–5 menstruation as hidden knowledge and generative potential 123–5

Prologue on her call to writing 125–6 second vision, Church corruption and the ‘abject’ 121–3 Word as viriditas 126 viriditas concept Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia 126–7 ‘greening’ God and garden imagery 127–8 in Hildegard’s medical works 132 Hildegard’s self-representation as female warrior (virago) 136, 137–8 Hildegard’s self-representation as ‘materna viriditas’ 132, 137, 192 viriditas in Scivias Eden as ‘belle fanaison’ 132 Eden as productive place of process 128–9 Eden re-imagined in Rupertsberg cloister 134–6 fifth vision and God as balsam tree 127–8 purification via ‘pearl’ of Virgin’s womb 131–2 second vision and representation of Adam, Eve and Mary 129–31 viriditas, virginitas and greening of Mary 133–4, 136 viriditas and the Virtues 133 Virtues in thirteenth vision (symphony) 134–5, 136–7 Hirsau monasticism 114–15 Hollywood, Amy 81n11, 87n24, 197n5 Holsinger, Bruce W. 137n177 Holy Rood legend 53, 72 ‘honey’ and ‘bee’ metaphors 103–8, 115, 173, 223 horti conclusi see enclosed gardens (horti conclusi) Hortus Deliciarum (Herrad of Hohenbourg) see under Herrad of Hohenbourg

372

Index Hospital Sisters, Mechelen (Low Countries) 84 Hozeski, Bruce 130n144, 145 Hubrath, Margarete 183 Hucheon (or Huchown) 307–8, 309 Hugh of St Victor 116 human imaginary see imaginary and patriarchy Hume, Cathy 59, 66n131, 67 Humility (Virtue) 137 humility topos 118–19 hymns ‘Dame Matilda’s Hymn’ (‘Le laude di Donna Matelda’) 225–6 ‘Sumens illud Ave’ 34

paradise gardens and Christian Paradise 9 patriarchal ancient households and fear of garden’s loss 8–9 woman’s role in man’s loss of cosmic garden 8 patriarchy and The Song of Songs garden beyond grand narratives 9–10 Song garden and poetics of spousal passion 10 Song garden as matrixial space and masculine allegorisation 10–11 womb as originary garden (Irigaray) and patriarchy 11–12 rethinking medieval texts hortus conclusus as heterotopia (Foucault) 16–17 Irigaray on suppression of female imaginary 12–14 Jantzen’s femalecoded philosophy of flourishing 14–16 Spirn on landscape as dialogic language 17 scholarship and this study feminist investigation 18–20, 24 focus on intersectionality of gender, faith, ecology and the sacred 20, 24 hortus conclusus, feminist studies of 20n48 medieval gardens, studies of 19n44 medieval literary texts, ecocritical studies of 19n45 medieval romance, feminist studies of 20n47 structure of study: conceptual/ spiral approach 20–1, 24 structure of study: overview of chapters 21–4 Innocent III, Pope De sacro altaris mysterio 165

imaginary and patriarchy Gardens and Health (David Buck’s report) 1 horticultural landscapes and climate emergency 2 imaginary and patriarchy Lacanian and post-Lacanian theories 2 natural world, patriarchy and the feminine Borchardt, floral world and the feminine 2–3 Derrida on hegemony of phallogocentric ‘old root’ 4–5 Irigaray-Marder Through Vegetal Being debate 3–4 patriarchy and enclosed gardens Christian imaginary and exile from matrixial origins 5 Christian theology and women’s subordination (Irigaray) 5–6 ‘lost garden’ in male medieval imaginary 6, 8 patriarchy and grand narrative origins of gardens cosmic gardens across cultures 6–7 Epic of Gilgamesh garden 7–8 Garden of Eden 6–7, 8 Garden of the Hesperides 7

373

Index The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger ‘The dwelling of man is not built without hatred of nature’ 304–5 In the Beginning, She Was ‘Cut off from her - or Her’ quotation 33 ‘discourse of between-men’ and lost origins 33, 67, 173 ‘discourse of between-men’... ‘presumed to belong to world of nature’ 284 language as ‘a means to appropriate things’ 261, 275, 293, 330 ‘life freezes in the expectation of a better beyond’ 78 literary ‘goddess’ figure in male imaginary 212 man as ‘prisoner of his own productions’ 32–3, 43 ‘Men construct[ed] a world of their own on a forgetting... of her’ 143 narrative ‘no longer animated with her life’ 71 obliteration of woman’s voice 284–5 patriarchal structuring as ‘artificial encoding’ 282, 283 psychoanalytic model and boy-child’s separation from mother 144–5 ‘self affection’ and ‘return to her own body’ 320 speech ‘appropriated only on the side of the man’ 264 stifling of female bodily discourse 13–14 ‘La Mystérique’ learning to ‘speak woman’ 12–13, 81n11, 259 men able to relinquish their own subjectivity 311 mystical discourse and gender 307 visionary experience and ‘the dry desolation of reason’ 307

Innocent IV, Pope 251 Irenaeus, Saint 34 Irigaray, Luce ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ womb as originary garden 11–12 ‘Divine Women’ women, transcendence and male imaginary realm 143n7 Elemental Passions ‘efflorescence’ and female-coded dwelling 306, 318 ‘efflorescence’ and Jantzen’s ‘flourishing’ 144n8, 206–7 ‘efflorescence’ and male constructs of divine women 212 ‘efflorescence’ vs patriarchal arborescent thinking 240 ‘efflorescence’ vs patriarchal genealogic tree 243 ‘efflorescence’ vs woman-as-gift discourse 13 ‘flower cut off from itself … by the erectness of the gaze’ 213, 223–4 ‘Growth suspended in ecstasy’ in male imaginary 222 ‘I also have roots and from them I can flower’ 224 ‘I am positioned by your desire’ 269 ‘Let me flower outwards too’ passage 279–80 ‘mystic rose’ concept 224 necrophilic demands of male imaginary 281 ‘out of the earth and blossom, following the rhythm of my growth’ 325 woman as efflorescent being ‘‘buried in the depths of your memory’ 295 woman as ‘extrapolated reflection’ and male necrophilic impulses 296 woman as ‘projection of... history’ 295

374

Index post-Lacanian feminist philosopher 2n4 Sexes and Genealogies lost garden and male medieval imaginary 6 ‘Woman’s not becoming God is a loss’ 5–6 ‘Sexual Difference’ ‘envelope’ term 264 woman deprived of ‘the tissue or texture of her spatiality 266 woman ‘finds herself defined as a thing’ 267 Through Vegetal Being ‘from concentration to contemplation’ passage 326 failure to ‘harmonize power of nature with divine power’ 207n41 flourishing and vegetal becoming 5, 19, 206 garden giving ‘impression of permanence and safety’ 333 ‘Listening to the uniqueness of another existence’ passage 339 meeting the non-human as ‘another living being’ 326 ‘secret processes of growth’ and the feminine 3–4 ‘Women on the Market’ ‘locus of [patriarchal] imprints’ 268n23 Isaiah see Book of Isaiah Isidore of Seville 200n19

‘flourishing’ vs Irigaray’s ‘efflorescence’ 144n8, 207 ‘flourishing’ vs patriarchal genealogic tree 243 Helfta texts and feminist philosophy of flourishing 167 imaginary of flourishing as conscious feminist choice 146 ‘imaginary of natality’ and ‘symbolic of flourishing’ 142 individualism, patriarchy, and imaginary of death 145 male ‘necrophilic’ imaginary vs female discourse of flourishing 22, 142–3, 154, 224, 275 necrophilic domination of Christthe-Saviour trope 321 philosophy of flourishing and abolition of injustices in this life 271–2 psychoanalytic model and boy-child’s separation from mother 144n9 Japan women and gardens in Heian period 7n15 Yono Park, Tokyo, in time of COVID 334 Jean de Meun 98, 159n55 Jeffrey, David Lyle 308n142, 319 Jesus see Christ Jezebel 41–2, 47 John see Book of Revelation; Gospel of John Johnson, Ella 177n105 Johnson, M. D. 50n75 Jones, Sara ‘Report on a Pilot Study of the Garden as a Place of Health and Well-Being’ 334n2 Jorgeson, Karen Jo 270 Joyner, Danielle B. 91, 93–4, 103n74 Julian of Norwich 81n11, 198n10 Jung, Jacqueline E. 235, 236

Jacobus de Voragine Legenda Aurea 72 Jaeger, C. Stephen 288–9 Jager, Eric 70n141 James, Elizabeth 83n13, 138n178 Jantzen, Grace M. ‘feminist and womanist theology’ 322 feminist philosophy of flourishing for new religion 14–16 ‘flourishing’ subsumed into grand narrative of salvation 307

Kahn, Paul W. 45, 54–5 Katherine, Saint 59 Kellogg, Alfred L. 324

375

Index Kempe, Margery The Book of Margery Kempe 209, 218n72 Kennedy, Helena 44, 45 Kerr, Julie 153 Kings see Book of Kings Kirkconnell, Watson 50n75 Kirkpatrick, Robin 226 Kline, Barbara 233 Kristeva, Julia ‘About Chinese Women’ on Eve and the Creation 46–7 ‘Le bonheur des Béguines’ ‘belle fanaison’ 77, 125, 132, 138–9, 144–5, 333 ‘communion’ between woman and flower 77, 78, 79, 138 ‘communion’ between woman and flower (Herrad) 103, 104 ‘communion’ between woman and flower (Hildegard) 124–5 ‘communion’ between woman and flower (Mechelen nuns) 83, 84, 87, 88, 89 ‘communion’ between woman and flower (Mechthild and Gertrude) 145–6, 155, 167 gardening as ‘ancestral feminine art’ 88–9 Mechelen nunnery garden-like artefacts 22 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection abjection defined 120–1, 122 Revolution in Poetic Language chora, pre-thetic energies and becoming 79, 80n7, 82, 86, 138n178 energy of fluctuation and poetic language 65 ‘the influx of the semiotic’ 64–5 ‘Stabat Mater’ Christianity’s construction of Mary as Virgin Mother 35–6, 45–6, 47, 80 femaleness of mysticism 81 moment of conception and becoming 79–80

woman’s not becoming God as loss 6n12 Kusters, Liesbet 156, 180 Lacan, Jacques 2 landscape as language 17, 129, 154, 155, 304 and power-structures 27, 28, 29 Langenstein, Henry of 113n101 Latin hymn (‘Sumens illud Ave’) 34 ‘Le laude di Donna Matelda’ (‘Dame Matilda’s Hymn’) 225–6 ‘laurel tree’ connotations 314 Legatus Divinae Pietatis (Gertrude the Great) see under Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn Leonine verse 262, 297–8 Levine, Amy-Jill 302n121 Liber de Sinthomatibus Mulierum (The Trotula) 327–8 Liber Specialis Gratiae (Mechthild of Hackeborn) see under Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn; Pearl and Mechthild’s Liber ‘lily’ connotations 133, 167, 329 Lochrie, Karma 87n24 Lollard movement 56–7, 253n201, 308n142, 319n185 London Charterhouse 228, 228n112, 229 Luke see Gospel of Luke MacCannell, Dean 27, 28, 29, 43, 64–5, 180–1, 193 McLean, Teresa 9, 105 McNamer, Sarah 64, 91–2, 95, 259 Magnani, Roberta 210n48 Maimonides, Moses Guide to the Perplexed 185 Mainz prelates 135–6, 137 male genealogy see patrilinear genealogy (genealogical trees) Marder, Michael 185 Through Vegetal Being (with Irigaray) 3–4, 5, 13, 19, 206 Margaret, Saint 59 Marie de France

376

Index Espurgatoire S. Patrice 102 Lais de Marie de France ‘Prolog’ (lines 9-33) 96–7 Mark see Gospel of Mark Martin, Dennis D. 227–8 Martin, Priscilla 208n44 Mary, Virgin Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (Auchinleck manuscript) 59 bee as symbol for Marian sexual and spiritual purity 104, 106 as Bride in allegorisation of The Song of Songs 11, 39–40, 106, 107 concept of virginal maternity 33–4, 220, 274 construction of as Virgin Mother (Kristeva) 35–6, 45–6, 47, 80 with crystalline womb in Visitation scenes 235, 236 enclosed garden and disempowerment 33–6 enclosed garden in popular representations 98, 175 in green garments 167, 169–70 Hildegard’s representation of 130, 131, 133–4, 136 ‘Il Sogno della Vergine’ (Simone dei Crocefissi) Pl. 5, 187n144 lily’s association with 329 as mediatrix in Purgatory 219–20 as ‘new/second Eve’ 33–4, 78, 198, 262 not attaining godhood herself 5–6 not capturing imagination ‘as martyrs did’ 274 ‘pearl’/’unioun’ terms associated with 200 and plant-grafting metaphors in Helfta texts 187, 196–7 plants as symbolic images in Marian piety 310 Sapienta as 109n90 scholarship on representation of in medieval era 34n25 Mary Magdalene 42, 47, 59, 187 Digby Mary Magdalene play 42n46

material garden hermeneutics in women-authored works chapter conclusion 138–9 chapter overview 21–2 Eve’s reburial and association with root of evil 77–8 female-coded garden hermeneutics and reworking of sacred stories 78 Kristeva’s femme et la fleur 77–83 see also Herrad of Hohenbourg; Hildegard of Bingen; Kristeva, Julia; Mechelen nunneries maternity/the maternal biblical discourses of 15 and Cixous’s theories 25, 48 and Derrida’s ‘old root’ 28 and Gertrude the Great 172, 177–9, 191, 193 and Harrison’s theories 48 and Herrad 109 and Hildegard 132 and Irigaray’s theories 12, 13, 32–3, 43, 144, 212 and Jantzen’s theories 16, 143, 144 and Kristeva’s theories construction of Mary as Virgin Mother 35–6, 45–6, 47, 80 female mysticism 81 poetic language and ‘feminine’ drives 65, 82 and Life of Adam and Eve (Auchinleck manuscript) 21, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72 Mary’s virginal maternity 33–4, 220, 274 and Mechthild 172, 177, 191, 197, 209, 217, 221 figure of Minne 166, 192–3 and Pearl 199, 209, 259 matrilinearity 133 matrixiality about concept and Ettinger’s theory 5, 79 and Cixous’s theories 48 and colour ‘green’ 166 and cosmic gardens 8 and Gertrude the Great 158, 193

377

Index matrixiality (cont’d) and Irigaray’s theories 11–12, 14, 33 and Kristeva’s theories 79, 80, 82, 83 and Life of Adam and Eve (Auchinleck manuscript) 21, 69, 77 and Mechelen, Herrad’s, Hildegard’s gardens 139 and Mechthild of Hackeborn 176–7, 191, 193, 197, 217 and The Pistil of Swete Susan 321 and The Song of Song garden 11 Matter, E. Ann 37, 38n34 Matthew, Saint 160 see also Gospel of Matthew Meaux (Melsa) Abbey 309, 311 Mechelen nunneries Besloten Hofjies (horti conclusi) as artefacts Pl. 4, 22, 83–5 enclosures and complex diachronic female utterances 85–6 lozenge patterns and reclaiming of the vulvatic 86–7 seasons, love-relationship with Christ and female imaginary 87–8 unconscious and female coded ancestral art 88–9 Mechthild of Hackeborn see Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn; Pearl and Mechthild’s Liber Mechthild of Magdeburg 148–9, 156n47, 166, 192n156, 216 medicinal plants 327–9 medieval literary texts ecocritical studies of 19n45 medieval romance Christic romance heroes 145 feminist studies of 20n47 Middle High German tales 181–4 Melsa (Meaux) Abbey 309, 311 memory metaphors for 107 menstruation

‘floures’ (‘flowers’) meaning menstrual flow 125, 145, 328 Haemorrhoïssa (bleeding woman) 170–1 Hildegard’s view of 123–5 Mesopotamia Epic of Gilgamesh mythical garden 7–8 Metlitski, Dorothy 238n155 Miller, Elaine P. 258, 259 Milton, John Paradise Lost 50 Minne (goddess-figure) 165–6, 167, 192–3 misogyny 15, 109, 274, 278, 304, 309, 321–2 monasteries as bee-hives 105–6, 115 Hirsau monasticism 114–15 Mountgrace monastery 228n112, 229n118 monastic gardens 30 St Gall Benedictine monastery gardens Pl. 1, Pl. 2, 30–2, 33 Monroe, Elizabeth 93n40, 101 Moore, Carey A. 265 Mountgrace monastery 228n112, 229n118 Mozley, J. H. 293–4 Murdoch, Brian 50, 53, 56n95, 58n102, 63–4, 72 The Myroure of Oure Ladye 228 mystery plays 51 mysticism female mysticism 81, 147n19, 180–1 National Gardens Scheme Gardens and Health (report by David Buck) 1 Natura 126–7 Nemes, Balázs J. 153n36, 183 Neoplatonism 127 New Testament 42 see also Book of Revelation; Epistle to the Galatians; Epistle to the Romans; First Epistle to the Corinthians; Gospel of John;

378

Index Gospel of Luke; Gospel of Mark; Gospel of Matthew Newman, Barbara ‘The Artifice of Eternity’ Pearl and Dante’s Divina Commedia 208n44 Pearl-Maiden’s ‘brilliantly overdetermined’ ways 201 From Virile Woman to WomanChrist ‘cosmic force of Ecclesia’s preaching’ 132 holy women’s questioning of God’s right to punish 110–11 religious women’s offer of ‘their sufferings’ 220 God and the Goddesses Dante’s Beatrice 214 Dante’s Matelda 210–11, 214 female personifications of Love 123n130 goddess-figures opening ‘safe space’ for exploration of Christian faith 209 goddess-figures’ role in transforming concept of God 214 Hildegard of Bingen and deific embodiment 127 ‘‘imaginative theology’ 155–6, 159n55 Minne in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s work 166 Natura 127 Sapienta 109n90 Hildegard’s Scivias end of work as ‘concert’ 134 Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace Dante’s knowledge of Mechthild’s Liber 214n63 divine feast in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival 205n34 Mechthild’s father 243n168 Mechthild’s Liber anticipating Pearl 249n192

Mechthild’s ‘little silver house’ vision 182–3 Pearl and Dante’s Divina Commedia 208n44 translation of ‘floruerant’ 176n101 Medieval Crossover crossover between the secular and the sacred 183 ‘The Seven-Storey Mountain: Mechthild of Hackeborn and Dante’s Matelda’ Pearl and Dante’s Divina Commedia 208n44 Sister of Wisdom Hildegard of Bingen and religious establishment 119 Hildegard of Bingen and sapiential tradition 116 Noli me tangere episode (Gospel of John) 42–3, 175n99, 180 Old Testament 8, 41–2, 261, 272 see also Book of Daniel; Book of Genesis; Book of Isaiah; Book of Kings; Book of Psalms; Book of Samuel; The Song of Songs Orans figure 270–1 Origen of Alexandria 37, 38 Orme, Nicholas 251 Ovid Metamorphoses 314n165 pairidaeza (Persian term) 9, 29 Paquelin, Louis 148n21, 150n25, 156–7, 160n59, 217n71 Paraclete nuns 286, 287, 288, 292–3 Paradise medieval representations of 233, 238 see also Eden paradise gardens and Christian Paradise 9 and Garden of Eden 29–30 Pastoureau, Michel 165, 166, 323n200 Patience 226n102

379

Index patriarchy see imaginary and patriarchy patrilinear genealogy (genealogical trees) 71–2, 74, 91, 133, 187–8, 196–9, 201, 243–4 Paul, Saint 160 see also Epistle to the Galatians; Epistle to the Romans; First Epistle to the Corinthians Pearl and Mechthild’s Liber chapter overview 23 anonymous Pearl-poet and Mechthild of Hackeborn 195–6 female hermeneutic vs patriarchal genealogical tree 196–9, 201 female-coded garden hermeneutics 258–9 ‘pearl’/’unioun’ and ontology of union 199–201 spectral intertextuality between Liber and Pearl 201–2, 242, 258 Mechthild’s Liber Specialis Gratiae affirmative poetics of flourishing 207–8 ‘best seller’ in late medieval Europe 209 child as ‘becoming-woman’ (Deleuze/Guattari) 243–6 child as ‘becoming-woman’ (Mechthild’s trajectory) 242, 246–8 child as ‘becoming-woman’ (Mechthild’s vision of twoyear-old girl) 249–52 ‘crystal’ symbolism 234–5, 236, 237 divine visage with sunrays 205–6 double-vision techniques 198n10 gardens, desires and paradise 230, 231, 233–4 gestation from root of Virgin’s womb 196–7 mystical theology predicated on female-coded principles 209–10

physical/metaphysical gardens as safe spaces for imaginative exploration 209–10 rivers, fish and divine union 237, 238–41, 242 ‘unioun’ with Christ 199, 200n19 vineyard parable 255–8 virtues of saints in terms of pearls 200–1 Mechthild’s Liber Specialis Gratiae and Dante’s Commedia Dante’s knowledge of Mechthild’s writing 210–11, 216–17, 225 Dante’s Matelda as poetic reincarnation of Mechthild 214–16 Matelda’s goddess-like status 210–13 Mechthild’s Mountain of the Virtues and Dante’s Mount Purgatory 218–21, 234 vision of cosmic wheel in Liber and Dante’s Commedia 217–18 vision of rose in Liber and Dante’s Paradiso 221–4 Mechthild’s wider influence ‘Dame Matilda’s Hymn’ in Boccaccio’s Decameron 225–6 influence on medieval English literature 226 texts with references to her and Carthusian connection 228–30 translations and circulation of Liber 227–8 Pearl child as ‘becoming-woman’ (Deleuze/Guattari) 243–6 child as ‘becomingwoman’ (Pearl-Maiden’s trajectory) 243, 248–9, 250–1 Christ-as-Lamb’s wound and heavenly Jerusalem 197, 272 ‘crystal’ symbolism 234–7 Dante’s Paradiso’s influence on Pearl 208

380

Index The Dreamer and the PearlMaiden Pl. 6 Dreamer’s double-vision 197–8 gardens, desires and paradise 230–3, 234–5 illustrations preceding poem 241–2 mystical theology predicated on female-coded principles 209–10 ontology of union and femalecoded body 200 ‘pearl of great price’ story 254 Pearl-Maiden and virgins in heaven 198–9 Pearl-Maiden as Christ’s ‘queen’ 198 Pearl-Maiden emerging from rocky cliff-face 220 Pearl-Maiden in Christ’s parage 196 Pearl-Maiden’s ‘brilliantly overdetermined’ ways 201 Pearl-Maiden’s flourishing unanticipated by Dreamer 206–8 physical/metaphysical gardens as safe spaces for imaginative exploration 209–10 ‘precious pearl’ (abject, rooted and divine) 208 rivers and fish 237–8, 241–2 rootedness and buried bodies 202–10 ‘rose’ metaphors 223–4 structure and date of poem 201n24, 201n25 theories about author’s identity 230n120 vineyard parable 253–5, 258 Pearson, Alison 83n13, 84n15, 86n21 Peck, Russell A. 306n133, 308, 319n185, 320, 321–2, 329 Peterborough Abbey Library Verba Floris Judicis de Susanna versifice 293 Petrus de Riga Susanna poem in Aurora 294–7, 298, 299, 300, 305, 309

phallogocentrism phallogocentric framings 79 phallogocentric grand narrative 59, 68 phallogocentric Law 70 phallogocentric ‘old root’ see under Derrida, Jacques Philosophia 109–10 The Pistil of Swete Susan 125n133, 262, 297, 306–9, 316–31 plague 253 ‘plant-grafting’ metaphor see under trees Plate, Liedeke 44, 92, 97, 99, 146n17 ‘posthuman turn’ 193 post-Lacanian philosophy 2, 5 Prado-Vilar, Francisco 324 precious stones 237, 238 see also crystal Psalms see Book of Psalms Purgatory doctrine of 220 see also under Dante, Alighieri Putter, Ad 230n120 Revelation see Book of Revelation Rigg, A. G. 294 Ritchey, Sara ‘fascination with non-real trees’ 152 on female monastic space, benefits of 114–15 on female spirituality and enclosed garden 117 on Hildegard not forgiven for founding her own institution 137 on Hildegard’s Scivias 135, 136n170 on Hildegard’s use of viriditas and virginitas concepts 127n135, 133 on ‘spiritual arborescence’ 19–20, 198 on Stirps Jesse 188 on tree of sacred genealogy as ‘cognitive map’ 197 Rogoff, Irit 27n7 Le Roman de la Rose 20, 98, 159n55, 321–2

381

Index romance see medieval romance Romans see Epistle to the Romans Rome catacomb frescos Catacomb of Praetextatus 272–3 Catacomb of Priscilla, capella graeca 271–2 Eusebius crypt 270 roots see trees ‘rose’ metaphor 221–4 see also Le Roman de la Rose Royle, Nicholas 155 Rubin, Miri 220, 274 Rudolph von Ems Alexander 182 Parzival 182n126 Ruggles, D. Fairchild 185n136 Rupert of Deutz 116 Rupertsberg nunnery 22 see also Hildegard of Bingen

(4:12) ‘My sister, my spouse is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up 10, 37, 41n42, 164 (4:13-14) ‘Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates’ 164 (5:1) ‘I have eaten the honeycomb with my honey’ 103, 173 (5:1) ‘Let my beloved come into his garden’ 85 (7:2) ‘Let us get up early to the vineyards’ 10 (7:8) ‘thy breasts shall be as the clusters of the vine’ 10 allegorisation of poem 10–11, 36–7, 38–9 Augustine’s association of Bathsheba as Bride 41n42 Bernard of Clairvaux’s commentary 37–8, 39–40, 47 garden and poetics of spousal passion 10 Herrad’s Hortus Deliciarum, comparison with 102 plants as symbolic images 310 Virgin Mary as Bride in allegorised poem 11, 39–40, 106, 107 The Speculum devotorum, or Myrowre to Devout Peple 228 Spirn, Anne Whiston 17, 55, 129, 154, 155, 304 Staley, Lynn on Alan of Melsa’s Tractatus 309– 10, 311, 311n150, 312n156 on Fountains Abbey literary circles 309n144 on The Pistil of Swete Susan 316, 319n185 on Susanna story 262n2, 268n24, 273n37, 285 Stanbury, Sarah 197, 198n10, 199, 200n21, 201n24, 201n25, 202 Stevenson, Jane 294n95, 295, 295n99, 297–8, 299, 301, 304 Stirps Jesse (Tree of Jesse) 133n159, 187–9, 196, 200 ‘Sumens illud Ave’ (Latin hymn) 34 Susanna’s garden dilemma chapter overview 23–4, 41 comparison with Eve 261

St Augustine’s Abbey (Canterbury) 293 St Gall Benedictine monastery gardens (Switzerland) Pl. 1, Pl. 2, 30–2, 33 Samuel see Book of Samuel Sapientia 109n90 ‘sapiential’ tradition 116 Scivias (Hildegard of Bingen) see under Hildegard of Bingen Seth 53, 54n89, 56, 69, 71, 72 sexuality see female sexuality Simone dei Crocefissi ‘Il Sogno della Vergine’ Pl. 5, 187n144 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 226n102 Smith, Kathryn A. 276 Soja, Edward W. 26–7, 31–2, 34–5, 57, 143 Solnit, Rebecca 44–5, 47 Solomon 36, 41n42, 54n89, 72 The Song of Songs (1:16) ‘The beams of our houses are of cedar’ 323n199 (2:14) vaginal ‘clefts in the rock’ 10 (4:1) ‘Thy lips, my spouse, are as a dropping honeycomb’ 103, 173

382

Index hermeneutics of flourishing and trees 261–2 biblical Susanna Daniel’s narrative 262–3 foregrounding world of men 263–5 pre-Christian folk tale 265 Septuagint (Alexandrine) version 265–7 ‘Theodotion’ version 267–9 Church Fathers and Susanna function of story in patristic thought 273–4, 285–6 St Augustine’s de Bono Conjugari and Susanna’s lowlier position 282 St Augustine’s de Sancta Virginitate and Susanna’s purity 281–2 St Augustine’s de Sancta Virginitate on women and marriage 282–3 St Augustine’s Sermon 343 on Susanna as example of marital chastity 283–5 Tertullian and Foucault’s ‘technology of the fleshy self’ 274–5 Tertullian on women as ‘gateway to the devil’ 274 Tertullian’s de Corona and Susanna’s ‘modest’ veiling of herself 275–9 Tertullian’s de Cultu Feminarum and Foucault’s ‘master’s discourse’ 275 Tertullian’s de Virginibus Velandis on ‘fructification’ of creation 280 Tertullian’s de Virginibus Velandis on veil for all women 277, 278 Tertullian’s phallocentric language of flourishing vs Irigaray’s efflorescence 279–81 Early Christians and Susanna catacomb depictions (Rome) and Theodotion version 270, 272

female flourishing and spiritual leadership 271–2, 273 fresco in capella graeca, Catacomb of Priscilla 271–2 fresco in Catacomb of Praetextatus 272–3 fresco in Eusebius crypt fresco 270 Susanna as Christic 272–3 Peter Abelard’s Susanna Abelard’s affair with Heloise and castration 286, 289, 291, 292 Abelard’s antagonistic relationship with Bernard de Clairvaux 286, 287, 289 Abelard’s arraignments for heresy 287, 289 Sermo 29, de Sancta Susanna 287–93 Susanna as matrona and cloistered chastity 287–8 Susanna’s and Abelard’s silences 288–9 Susanna’s story as warning against dangers of sexuality 289–93 Susanna in medieval poems garden as place of dwelling 304–6 garden poetics and Alan of Melsa’s Tractatus metricus de Susanna 294, 297, 306, 309–16 garden poetics and The Pistil of Swete Susan 125n133, 262, 297, 306–9, 316–31 Latin poems 293–4 Susanna under female gaze in Willetrudis’s poem 297–304, 305, 320 Susanna under male gaze in Petrus de Riga’s poem 294–7, 298, 299, 300, 305, 309 Verba Floris Judicis de Susanna versifice 293 see also Book of Daniel Syon Abbey 161n61, 227, 229n113 The Myroure of Oure Ladye 228

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Index Tasioulas, Jacqueline 50, 53, 63–4, 72 Tertullian de Corona and Susanna’s ‘modest’ veiling of herself 275–9 de Cultu Feminarum and Foucault’s ‘master’s discourse’ 275 de Virginibus Velandis on ‘fructification’ of creation 280 de Virginibus Velandis on veil for all women 277, 278 Foucault on Tertullian and ‘technology of the fleshy self’ 274–5 Irigaray’s ‘efflorescence’ vs Tertullian’s phallocentric language of flourishing 279–81 women as ‘gateway to the devil’ and religious misogyny 274 Theiss, Alissa 181n123 Theodotion 267, 268, 269, 270, 272 ‘thesaurus’ term 107 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 185 Thomas the Apostle see Acts of Thomas thorn hedges and crucifixion 172–4 Tkacz, Catherine Brown 273n35 trees arboreal hermeneutics of flourishing 261–2 arborescence Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘arborescent schema’ 196n2, 243–6, 247, 254, 323 Ritchey’s ‘spiritual arborescence’ 19–20, 198 Christ-in-and-as-tree 175–6 genealogical trees (patrilinear genealogy) 71–2, 74, 91, 133, 187–8, 196–9, 201, 243–4 ‘grafting’ metaphor as contra natura 184–5 in Gertrude’s Legatus Divinae Pietatis 180, 183, 189–90 in Mechthild’s Liber Specialis Gratiae 180, 183, 185–9, 191–3 in Middle High German romances 181–4 in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 184

Hildegard on being the tree growing from Adam’s mouth 117 ‘laurel tree’ connotations 314 in The Pistil of Swete Susan 323–5 roots Bachelard on subterranean ‘root’ within human imaginary 176, 179, 189 Derrida’s phallogocentric ‘old root’ see under Derrida, Jacques Wampole on rootedness 28n11, 141n1, 179–80, 181, 187, 193n161, 206, 243–4 root/tree as bridge between earth and heavens 179–80 tree, horticultural syntax and mysticism 180–1 Tree of Jesse (Stirps Jesse) 133n159, 187–9, 196, 200 Tree of Knowledge 30, 48, 72, 176, 196, 261, 324 Tree of Life in apocryphal tradition 53, 72, 196, 257n214 in Book of Genesis (2:10) 30 exile from placental ‘tree of life’ 33 and links between Eden and evil 54–5 in Mechthild’s Liber Specialis Gratiae 176, 186, 187, 234 and Susanna 261 trees of virtues and vices 257n214 The Trotula Liber de Sinthomatibus Mulierum 327–8 Tyler, Elizabeth Muir 298 ‘unioun’ term 199–200 Vandenbroeck, Paul 83n13, 86, 88 Verba Floris Judicis de Susanna versifice 293 Veronica, Saint 170–1 vineyard image as representing the church 253n201

384

Index parable in Mechthild’s Liber 255–8 parable in Pearl 253–5, 258 virago 137 virga 133–4, 137, 188 Virgin Mary see Mary, Virgin virginitas 133 viriditas see under Hildegard of Bingen Virtues in Hildegard’s work 133, 134–5, 136–7 trees of virtues and vices 257n214 visionaries women visionaries 117 Vita Adae et Evae (Apocalypsis Mosis) 53, 54, 56–7 Vitalis of Savi 298 Voaden, Rosalynn 142

Waldron, Ronald 195n1, 198n12, 204n32, 208n42, 230n120, 235n143, 241n165 Wampole, Christy 28n11, 141n1, 179–80, 181, 187, 193n161, 206, 243–4 Whitford, Margaret 305 Willetrudis (possibly of Wilton) ‘Susanna’ poem 297–304, 305, 320 Willetrudis of Hohenvart 298n110 Williams, Thomas 110 Wilton nunnery 297–8, 301 Winkworth, Margaret 148n21, 167 Witham Charterhouse 228 Wolfram von Eschenbach 182 Parzival 205n34 women visionaries 117 Wycliffe, John 226, 230, 308n142, 331

al-Wahshiyya al-Filahat al-nabatiyya 185n136

Yoshikawa, Naoë Kukita 156, 187n144, 192n157, 209, 230, 252n200, 256n211

385