Premodern Plants 3031464087, 9783031464089

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Premodern Plants Edited by

v i n n a r di z z i

Premodern Plants

Vin Nardizzi Editor

Premodern Plants

Previously published in postmedieval Volume 9, issue 4, November 2018

Editor Vin Nardizzi Department of English University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

Spin-off from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 9, issue 4, November 2018 ISBN 978-3-031-46408-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Editor’s Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1 Vin Nardizzi: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:404–409 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0109-z ‘Farewel my bok’: Paying attention to flowers in Chaucer’s prologues to The Legend of Good Women ....................................................................................................................... 7 Gillian Rudd: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:410–419 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0099-x Vegetal continuity and the naming of species.............................................................................................. 17 Lara Farina: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:420–431 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0100-8 The sacrificial herb: Gathering prayers in medieval pharmacy ............................................................... 29 Sara Ritchey: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:432–443 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0098-y Written in trees .............................................................................................................................................. 41 Tom White: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:444–454 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0102-6 Fruit and rot: Vegetal theology in Perceforest ............................................................................................ 53 Brooke Heidenreich Findley: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:455–466 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0101-7

Before and after plants .................................................................................................................................. 65 Jessica Rosenberg: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:467–477 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0103-5 Libertine botany: Vegetal sexualities, vegetal forms .................................................................................. 77 Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:478–489 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0105-3 Centerpieces ................................................................................................................................................... 89 Michael Marder: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:490–495 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0106-2 Writing with plants ........................................................................................................................................ 95 Danielle Allor and Haylie Swenson: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:496–510 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0108-0 Is Dante a cosmopolitan? .............................................................................................................................111 Mary Elizabeth Sullivan: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2018, 2018: 9:511–523 (11, December 2018) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0107-1

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Editor’s Introduction

Vin Nardizzi Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 404–409. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0109-z

In the Afterword to this special issue, Michael Marder employs the figure of the ‘centerpiece’ to describe the essays on premodern plants that we have ‘gathered here.’ In this conceit, the essays come into focus as ‘Beautifully lush and precisely arranged’ flowers, as if we had set them for display in a vase on postmedieval’s dining room table. The floral centerpiece, for Marder, is a ‘productive selfcontradiction’: it is an ‘artefact’ that is ‘aesthetic, redundant, dispensable’ and – because it is typically located in the middle of a table – it is a ‘pivotal point around which everything else turns.’ It thus proves an apt emblem for our issue’s double focus: ‘Plants and medievality.’ In Marder’s formulation, these are ‘the centerpieces of the human relation to the world and to our own history, at once gratuitous embellishments and unsurpassable elements, the ‘‘fundamentals’’ of life, thought, and time.’ Marder’s philosophical writings on plants – and especially his attention to the vegetative soul in Aristotelian taxonomy and its legacies – inspired our decision to edit this special issue (Marder, 2013). And now his comments about its contents inspire how we introduce it. But whereas Marder sees these seven wonderful essays as a centerpiece of cut flowers, we glimpse instead a representation of such a centerpiece. We view Ó 2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 404–409

Chapter 1 was originally published as Nardizzi, V. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 404–409. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0109-z.

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Introduction

them, in other words, as if they were a still life painting, perhaps akin to this early example of the genre, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase (Figure 1). According to Svetlana Alpers, an eminent art historian of the Dutch Golden Age, ‘still lifes isolate and attend to objects. Each object is displayed not for use, or as a result of it, but for the attentive eye’ (Alpers, 1983, 95). In the essays gathered here, our contributors attend to premodern plants in ways that, by contrast, encompass both aesthetics (poetry, fiction, gardening, contemplation, and decoration) and utility (herbals, practical manuals and scientific texts, and gathering prayers). We hope that such attention will prompt readers to further explore the discourses and the material practices associated with premodern plants. In their own ways, our contributors attend to what we regard as the subject of floral still life painting: life itself, which is to say vegetal life (Marder, 2013, 22; Nealon, 2016, x). This is perhaps a counterintuitive statement to make about this genre of painting, since the aim of the floral still life is deception, not reality. As the art historian Anne Goldgar explains, ‘A floral still life gives the opportunity for the impossible: the preservation of what will certainly fade. Indeed, such a picture allows a fantasy of a desirable but never attainable reality in its presentation of flowers that bloom at different times of year – again, a gathering together of riches against the commands of time’ (Goldgar, 2007, 98). And yet, in so flagrantly and gorgeously refusing the passage of time, the floral still life also attempts to capture – to still – the elusive movements (to the naked human eye) of vegetal life. Tellingly, in other pictorial traditions, such representations are called nature morte: to behold vegetal life, one must also see nature dead (Petry, 2016). Certainly more morbid a designation than is still life, the French phrase nature morte nonetheless reminds us, as Marder does, that the ‘life of plants is situated on the brink of death, in the zone of indeterminacy between the living and the dead’ (Marder, 2013, 53). Here, our contributors shine a scholarly light on that zone for postmedieval’s readers. *** Dear readers, we ask that you imagine a still life. On a flat surface, there is placed a delicate, ornate vase overstuffed with roses (for Lara Farina), tulips, fritillaries, irises, carnations, narcissi, and daisies (for Gillian Rudd). Hovering around the vase and its blooming flowers are some butterflies and other insects (for Brooke Heidenreich Findley and Jessica Rosenberg), all of which index the effects of rot and decay. Under what conditions, you might wonder, did we gather these precise flowers? (Sara Ritchey might.) And did we consult seventeenth-century florists’ manuals for a better sense of how to arrange or compose, in that word’s multiple senses, nature so artfully? (This is a question for Tom White.) Finally, is there a science to such art that can be articulated in the absence of human categories for desire and embodiment? (This one is for

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Figure 1: Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase on a Ledge with Further Flowers, Shells and a Butterfly. 1609–10, Netherlands. Ó The National Gallery, London.

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Natania Meeker and Anto´nia Szabari.) Even though none of our contributors focuses on such paintings, the conceit of the still life nonetheless generatively opens onto the botanical matters to which they do attend in these pages. Below is a series of descriptions for these flowers and other vegetal items as they appear in the table of contents; readers should consult it first so that they can better nose around this special issue, as if they were bees – like the one in Bosschaert the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase – gathering up all the intellectual pollen. The daisy: In the first chapter, Gillian Rudd scrupulously compares attention to this flower in the two Prologues to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. What, she wonders, do we see (and perhaps also miss) when we contemplate the (literary) flower? The rose: In the second chapter, Lara Farina re-opens the case concerning the name of the rose. By what kind of logic, she asks, does naming operate in premodern herbals, and why does plant life seem to prompt human beings to generate so much of it, so many words for and about plants? Gathering prayer: In the third chapter, Sara Ritchey investigates the ‘gathering prayer,’ a premodern genre of spiritual saying that pickers articulated as they collected herbs. What can these prayers tell us about the ontology of plants in the premodern imagination, and how might this understanding reconfigure a Foucauldian account of the signature? Plant manual: In the fourth chapter, Tom White examines relations between medieval grafting treatises and other texts (literary and philosophical) that accompany them in manuscript. How might grafting – a practice that organizes time, plant matter, and human labor – also serve as a conceit that illuminates ideas about matter itself in these manuscripts? Rot: In the fifth chapter, Brooke Heidenreich Findley tracks figurations of vegetal decay in the prose romance Perceforest. Essential to further growth and regeneration, decay is coded as spiritually valuable. How, she explores, does Perceforest establish a politics on the basis of rot? Lifespan: In the sixth chapter, Jessica Rosenberg focuses on the futurity of plants – their ripening and rotting – in manuals for grafting orchard fruit. Since grafting attaches one plant to another, Rosenberg elaborates what it means to think about such futurity as the recursive memory of touch between plants. Libertinage: In the seventh chapter, Natania Meeker and Anto´nia Szabari examine vegetal life in libertine science and literature from the seventeenth century. Such writings imagine vegetality as queer, so what, they wonder, might this tradition afford contemporary theorizations of sexuality and environmentality? After Michael Marder’s Afterword, we are delighted to include the superb review essay that Danielle Allor and Haylie Swenson composed. It provides a

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current state of the field for critical plant studies; it also contextualizes and perhaps challenges how our contributors think and write about premodern plants. In it, Allor and Swensen critically engage a suite of must-read books published in a range of disciplines: Prudence Gibson’s The Plant Contract (2018), Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder’s Through Vegetal Being (2016), Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory (2015), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2016). If this special issue’s chapters comprise a floral still life, then this review essay proves a veritable scholarly bouquet.

About the Author and Issue Editors Vin Nardizzi is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (2013) and is working on a new project called ‘‘Marvellous Vegetables: Plants and the Poetry of Description in the English Renaissance.’’ He is grateful to Karol Pasciano for her keen editorial eye and helping him arrange these flowers (E-mail: [email protected]). Robert W. Barrett, Jr. is Associate Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 (2009) and of articles on the Chester Whitsun plays’ engagement with (among other topics) Welsh difference and Pentecostal translation. He is working on a book about the enmeshment of human and plant bodies in the drama of medieval Cornwall and England (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Alpers, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gibson, P. 2018. The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life. Boston, MA: Brill. Goldgar, A. 2007. Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Irigaray, L., and M. Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Kohn, E. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Marder, M. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Nealon, J.T. 2016. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Petry, M. 2016. Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition. London: Thames and Hudson. Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wohlleben, P. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books.

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Original Article

‘Farewel my bok’: Paying attention to flowers in Chaucer’s prologues to The Legend of Good Women

Gillian Rudd Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.

Abstract Chaucer is no botanist. Typically, flowers enter his poetry as similes for female beauty (the Knight’s Emelye), more rarely as indiscriminate clusters of colour signalling courtly landscapes (Parlement of Fowls, Book of the Duchess). The daisy of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women is an exception; venerated by Chaucer’s dream-persona, it receives accurate, detailed description before being personified in his dream as Alcestis. Chaucer is by no means unique in this superficial approach to flowers: intriguingly, flowers in general gain only a fleeting mention under trees in Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies XVII.vi.21, where we learn flores are so named because they ‘quickly drop [defluere] from trees.’ However, following Michael Marder, superficiality offers a useful paradigm for thinking with plants. Dilettantism becomes attention, enabling associations that privilege present over past – flowers over roots. Fleeting flowers seem scarcely available to us as subjects of empathy, let alone rights or justice: arguably more remote even than trees, they pose different questions to ecologically invested critics, while the ease with which they are (superficially) understood offers clues to how literary critics may join debates about the way green spaces and entities are valued. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 410–419. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0099-x

Readers of Chaucer are familiar with his dream narrator-persona, who seems forever in quest of literary inspiration and forever missing it, even when dropped by an eagle into stories of famous men, shoved by Scipio Africanus into gardens  2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 410–419

Chapter 2 was originally published as Rudd, G. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 410–419. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0099-x.

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of love, or taken on introspective hunts by canny puppies and men in black. Each of these failures results in a poem, but not, it seems, in any lasting enlightenment. The Prologue to The Legend of Good Women may offer a reason why this is: when spring comes and birds call, our narrator is easily distracted from the books which he feels offer entry to all knowledge and leaves his library to rejoice in the season. ‘Farwel my bok and my devocioun’ is the cry in line 39 of the F version of the Prologue, which in G.39 becomes ‘Farwel my stodye, as lastynge that sesoun!’; he heads out to find a daisy.1 One might characterise this as Chaucer’s narrator shifting from meditation to reverie – enacted in terms which match the contrast between Cartesian inside meditation and Rousseauian outside reverie drawn by Michael Marder and Patricia Vieira in their exploration of philosopher and poet phytophilia (Marder and Vieira, 2013). Chaucer’s narrator surely regards himself as both philosopher and poet, so the match is serendipitous. If we pursue the comparison across Chaucer’s other dream poems, we find that he, or at least Geoffrey, habitually exchanges interior for exterior study. In The Book of the Duchess, the insomniac dreamer falls asleep over a book, only to dream of leaving his bed-chamber to join a hunt, which he then promptly loses before wandering down a flowery path to a glade where he finds and interrogates a man sitting under a tree. In The Parlement of Fowles, the dreamer is also deep in a book, this time an account of the Dream of Scipio rather than Ovid, before he, too, sleeps and dreams of being outdoors, this time confronting a walled garden through whose gate Scipio so unceremoniously shoves him. Even in The House of Fame (which is unusually set in December, not May), the dreamer eventually exchanges indoors for outdoors, as he leaves the temple of glass at the end of the first book to find himself in a desert from which he is rescued by a splendidly verbose eagle who waxes lyrical on the fact that Geoffrey can hardly expect to find matter for poetry, still less understanding of love and life, given that he never hears news of his near neighbours, let alone that of people (specifically lovers) in other countries; all he does when he returns home from work is bury himself in a book (644–60).2 Significantly, such bookhabits are ‘in stede of reste and newe thynges’ (653), which tacitly point to the contrast between indoor reading and external experience. ‘Reste’ here takes on connotations of recreation, not just bodily ease, implying that the mind needs to be refreshed through new occupations and bodily exercise, rather than simply swapping one form of study, ‘reckenynges’ (653), for ‘another book’ (657). The House of Fame is the most internal of Chaucer’s dream poems, and, in the context of a discussion of the benefits of taking our (scholarly) lead from plants, it is perhaps no coincidence that is it also unfinished. In contrast, the Geoffrey of The Legend of Good Women Prologues seems eager to stop work as soon as spring arrives, although there are differences between them. Where the Geoffrey of F leaves behind his book, the G-persona abandons study, and while the two may be closely linked, they are by no means

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1 All citations of The Legend of Good Women refer by version and line number to Chaucer, 1988a.

2 All citations of The House of Fame refer by line number to Chaucer, 1988b.

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synonymous. The distinction between the two is even more relevant when one considers the actions of this poet-persona once he is outdoors. His sole aim is to seek out the daisy, his favourite flower, and then lose himself in admiration of it. Now, daisies are not the kind of flower one finds growing solo, something both versions acknowledge in the use of ‘thise floures’ in the plural (F.41; G.42) as the object of the narrator’s affections. However, the wider search for daisies, in the plural, almost immediately becomes a quest for just one; the shift is explicit and complete in F where Geoffrey walks the meadow ‘To seen this flour’ (F.48, emphasis mine) but more gradually effected over two lines in G: ‘To sen these floures agen the sonne sprede / When it up ryseth by the morwe shene’ (G.48–49, emphasis mine). Although it is possible that the singular pronoun is being used generically here, by the time we reach line G.52, the text is comfortably in the singular, focusing on the action of a particular specimen as the sun moves west (‘Thanne closeth it, and draweth it to reste’) in terms which are both botanically accurate and lightly anthropomorphic. Although we know that every daisy does this, the effect in each version of the text is to ensure that our mental image is no longer of a clump of flowers in the grass but of one individual daisy furling its petals. The individualism is secured by the increase in the level of anthropomorphism in subsequent lines, as fear of the dark is given as the motive for this closure. Even though G initially avoids the full personification effected by F’s use of the feminine pronoun in the famous phrase ‘so hateth she derknesse’ (F.63), it nevertheless cites an emotional response as the motive for this reaction: ‘so sore it is afered of the nyght’ (G.53). Thus, in each text a general appreciation of a common flower found in clumps becomes a specific focus on one individual flower’s reaction to setting of the sun. It is worth pausing a moment on this detail. Inclining towards light, opening petals, following the track of the sun, and furling petals as night falls are all familiar reactions of heliotropic plants, and such response is surely analogous to the selective sending out of roots to richer areas of soil to which Marder draws our attention in his discussions of plant thinking. The question of how far such response can be viewed as evidence of active thought remains a matter for discussion; as Marder comments, the dominant attitude of Western philosophy has been to dismiss such reactions as simple passive response: ‘Vegetative intake of nutrients and exposure to sunlight are taken to be symbolic of a passive mode of living that does not pursue any objectives whatsoever’ (Marder, 2013, 1). However, through his narrative persona, Chaucer gives his readers a picture of a poet responding to the sun and season in ways very similar indeed to that of the flower he so eagerly seeks. The addition of emotional motive to the daisy only confirms a similarity already suggested by the action of the human in this scenario: that is, both plant and poet are inspired by the atmospheric changes of spring to act in specific ways. The G text further strengthens that association when, as we have seen, Geoffrey declares that he deserts study ‘as lastyng that sesoun’ (G.39). Used on its own, ‘sesoun’ commonly indicates an unspecific but

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normally short period of time, a while, the time one might imagine spent outside admiring flowers in the spring time. Prefaced with ‘that,’ the word becomes specific, implying that study is abandoned for the whole season of spring itself. Book-learning is to be replaced by recreation outside, abstract study by contemplation of the thing itself. If, then, we accept Geoffrey’s response as that of a thinking being, why is the reaction of the daisy not thought likewise? And if a plant may be credited with thought, why not also with emotions? Indeed, it is perhaps more accurate to say that if thought, then inevitably also emotion, particularly since the emotion concerned, fear, is one we tend to regard as closer to instinct than the more complex one of hatred. Even there, the F Prologue is ahead of us, as it presents ‘hateth’ as a consequence of ‘fere’ (F.63). Earlier I suggested this was a mark of anthropomorphism, but perhaps now we may regard these words not as indicators of the poet rendering the plant human by imaginatively bestowing it with considered motives and emotions, but instead as poetic language providing a way for humans to perceive the sentience the plant already possesses. Now that the flower is revealed to be more like the person than previously supposed, it is worth exploring if the poet may also be described as more plantlike than expected. This essay began with a reference to Marder and Vieira’s consideration of the type of attention espoused by Rousseau compared to Descartes, and the suggestion that—in deciding to desert his books, leave his chamber, and go outside—Chaucer’s poet-persona shifts from Descartian meditation to Rousseauian reverie. The analogy holds good for a while, for just as Rousseau continues ‘to wander nonchalantly from plant to plant and flower to flower’ (Marder and Vieira, 2013, 41), Geoffrey is up and out in the morning, ‘walkynge in the mede’ (F.47; G.47) in order to find his favourite flower ‘ayein the sonne sprede’ (F.48; G.48). The more generalised tone of the G Prologue is apparent here, as Geoffrey seems to spend the whole day wandering around ‘thus walkynge in the grene’ (G.50) until the sun sinks west and he moves on to comment on the way an individual daisy closes until the next day dawns. 20 lines suffice to cover the poet’s love of the flower, including the details of its white and red colouring, its daily opening and closing, and his appreciation of its ability to be just as pretty and fresh in winter as in spring (G.40–60). This appreciative, but nonetheless superficial, attitude is surely akin to that of the reveries which ‘barely graze the surface of their botanical objects, leaving just enough breathing room for non-appropriative love’ (Marder and Vieira, 2013, 41), and the similarity with Rousseau continues as Geoffrey, too, seems easily distracted from consideration of several daisies and digresses into concerns about trespassing not on actual earth, but on the metaphorical ground of topics better expressed by other poets. From that, he moves to his own project of translating and re-telling stories from the ancients and thus has both wandered, and taken us, a long way from the actual flowers in the field which sparked that particular line of thought. Here, then, is the ‘absence of depth’

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commented upon by Marder and Vieira, but also, in that pursuit of potentially fertile lines of thought, a pattern similar to the roots that spread through the soil in pursuit of minerals. Interestingly, the G Prologue retains the concept of this seasonal roaming more consistently than does F. True to his word that study is set aside for the season, the G narrator tells us that the dream encounters with the God of Love and Alceste, who is also a daisy personified, occur almost at the end of May. It seems Geoffrey has spent the whole month outside, wandering the meadows, looking for daisies, returning indoors only when the sun sets and the flower shuts. What he has not been doing is sitting in earnest contemplation before a specific daisy, which is the level of personal devotion and reverence claimed by the F-Prologue narrator. In this (possibly earlier) version of the Prologue, Geoffrey spends more time talking about the actual flower, using emotionally charged terms to express his admiration for what is, after all, a very common plant. The ‘gret affeccioun’ (F.44; G.44) for the daisy, which contrasts with the heartfelt ‘reverence’ he has for books (F.32–33; G.31–32) in both versions, is superseded only eight lines later in F by the more powerful ‘all reverence,’ as Geoffrey expands upon the effect that finding his favourite flower has on him. It is perhaps surprising, then, to discover that the F narrator spends less time than his G counterpart wandering the meadows. Rather than passing full days rambling outside, the F narrator seems to pop out in the morning, find a daisy and give it due reverence before, it is implied, going back indoors, only to issue ‘whan that hit ys eve,’ run joyously to find his flower, and watch it curl its petals as the sun sinks in the west (F.60–63). Moreover, instead of spending nearly a full month in this way, it is on the first of May that the F-Prologue Geoffrey both deserts his books and experiences his dream. Yet, despite such toing-and-froing and such early entry into the dreamworld, this Geoffrey is not more flighty than his G counterpart. What he lacks in hours, he gains in focus as, where in G we are told only in general terms of the flower’s habit of closing its petals, here in F Geoffrey goes out purposely ‘To seen this flour, how it wol go to reste’ (F.62). His attention, and thus ours, is tuned to a specific plant at a specific moment. He then takes time to extol the virtues of his chosen object of devotion and reflect on the emotional impact this small flower has, invoking human lovers who know how to write about the sentiments (F.69), before embarking on the kind of address that would not be out of place in a love lyric: ‘She is the clernesse and the verray lyght / That in the derke world me wynt and ledeth’ (F.84ff.). This is hardly the superficial brushing of the soul’s surface that typifies Rousseauian reverie and seems to be the dominant mode of the G-Prologue’s daily, but unrecorded, walks. However, the Geoffrey of the F Prologue exemplifies plant thinking in a different way: by remaining on one spot and holding himself physically in the present moment of May 1st. This is far from stultifying; although his body remains in one place, his mind wanders and his attention shifts from observing

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the physical movement of the tangible flower before him to the more abstract and arguably over-blown description of the emotions and associations it stirs. For the space of 136 lines (F.64–200), the poem and the poet simply stay in that meadow in the dusk, allowing the associations of the daisy to run riot, weaving across anxieties over poetic predecessors and contemporaries, to current court politics, back to the effects of the daisy, out to spring and bird-song and anthropomorphic avian potted romances. In the midst of all this, Geoffrey brings the poem back to the daisy through an acknowledgment of the affective force of his floral devotion on his ‘besy gost’ (F.103). The result is to recall the ‘gledly desir / That in myn herte I feele yet the fir / That made me to ryse er yt were day’ (F.105–7) and to initiate a section of panegyric on the daisy (F.115–24). The description teeters towards the extreme, and indeed may be deliberately comic, but this passage also includes simple, direct attention which, while almost certainly indebted to Machaut and Deschamps, nevertheless suggests a further way that Chaucer’s dream narrative anticipates Rousseauian reverie. The point here is that Geoffrey dwells on the attributes of the particular specimen of daisy he has before him, paying ‘extreme attention to [its] singularity’ as it gradually uncloses in the sun and then lets its perfume loose (Marder and Vieira, 2013, 41). Attention is also paid to the grass in which the daisy grows, which is short [‘smale’ (F. 118)], as well as soft and sweet. There are other flowers in it too, we gather, an inclusion which helps create this as a real landscape, an actual meadow, but it is unambiguously the daisy whose perfume surpasses all the other scents in the field and consequently attracts remark. From this point of focus, the description wanders off again into the conceit of the earth itself being glad of the passing of winter and the birds mocking the fowler in their relief at having escaped his snares. Even that is in keeping with the concept of attentive yet superficial reverie, in which thoughts arise unbidden and may be pursued at will or dropped. So it is that F offers an accurate reflection of how our thought-processes actually work, as the narrative moves seamlessly from observed botanical fact, through sensory appreciation, to imaginative response. Here we have a reverie within a day-dream; a dilettante poet spending time with his favourite flower. In G, that carefully described meadow is not in the real world but part of the dream landscape, which makes the extravagant comparison asserting the daisy’s superiority to all others more ambiguous than in F. Not only is the passage now describing the meadow in which he dreams he walks, rather than the one in which he actually roamed when awake, but it is also slightly re-cast, with the result that it is no longer definitely the daisy which surpasses all the scents and beauty of others, but, plausibly, the overall effect of this (now) dreamscape meadow, embroidered as it is with a multitude of flowers. This indeed is the familiar meadow of literature, particularly dream visions, encountered in The Romance of the Rose as well as The Book of the Duchess, as well as many a tapestry and manuscript illustration, but while that may make it more familiar,

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it necessarily renders it less particular. One might go so far as to say that a meadow dotted with small, not entirely identifiable flowers (and probably the odd rabbit or two) now epitomises the notion of a medieval landscape in our cultural imagination. The meadow is a little more specific than that in the G Prologue, in that it neatly re-presents the flower-strewn couch on which our dream-narrator has fallen asleep, but that device is more likely to heighten our awareness of literary conceit than of botanical life. That said, the fact that Geoffrey has ordered his bed to be decked in flowers ‘For deynte of the newe someres sake’ (G.100) surely presents us with a prime example of our paradoxical relation to the flowers, in which appreciation is evidenced by cutting them—albeit more often these days to admire them in a vase than lie them on a flower-strewn couch. Perhaps that is an over-sentimental response to flowers, which are only part of the plant as a whole and are indeed, as Isidore of Seville reminds us, called flores because they are designed to fall (Barney et al., 2006, 324). It may be a quibble to worry over whether those flowers fall naturally or are picked. Similarly, the personal attention bestowed by Geoffrey on the daisy in F is displaced in G and becomes a scene of veneration performed by the ladies who accompany the god of Love rather than an act of individual devotion on the part of the poet-persona. The ritual is elaborate enough: first the ladies kneel and then they dance round the flower in a ring, singing a balade which has the refrain ‘Alceste is here, that al that may disteyne’ (G.209, 216, 223). Such elaboration has the consequence of raising the question of whether the flower around which they dance is in fact Alceste. Although there certainly was a flower there, as that was what Geoffrey was looking at, and although initially Alceste is explicitly said to look like a daisy, not to be one (G.156), by line 196, it is no longer entirely certain whether ‘this flour’ is a literal flower, metaphorical woman, or indeed both. The amplification ‘which that I clepe the dayseye’ (G.196) does little to help, given that our poet-narrator is as free to call a woman a flower as he is to personify a daisy. What this does exemplify, however, is precisely the kind of sliding away of attention that seems inevitable when contemplating flowers and which we saw the F Geoffrey fall prey to during his waking contemplation. Associations arise, allusions come to mind, the mind, indeed, wanders. And yet even as it does so, it notes details, such as, here, the way the petals of a daisy spread out from a yellow centre, like a crown, which is transmuted in the dream to become part of the description of Alceste’s coronet and golden hair net. Such matters of realism or credibility are hardly an issue in the G text, however, since we are now fully within a dream text and so prepared for unaccountable transitions, idealised landscapes, the appearance of gods and personifications. The actual daisy is no longer the centre of our attention. Despite my suggestion here that Chaucer’s poet-persona Geoffrey might be described as exemplifying phytophilia, it is immediately obvious that the very terms in which these Prologues work lay the poem and the poet (not to mention

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the critic) open to the counter-argument that in fact what is exemplified here is the longstanding habit of presenting plants as ‘perpetual stand-ins’ (Marder and Vieira, 2013, 44). This is even more the case given that the actual daisy is displaced and replaced in both versions by the figure of a woman. Alceste, dressed in green and white, absorbs the daisy, commanding both the poet’s attention and finally commissioning his next work, but she is only an approximation to the daisy, not the personification of it. Her green and white garb implies the flower, and indeed some lines are taken up with the description of the gold netting in her hair, upon which she wears a white coronet interwoven with small flowers, which leads into the assertion that she is ‘lyk a daysie for to sene’ (F.224; G.156). The poet repeats the detail about the gold, saying that this in particular creates the similarity between lady and flower, and indeed the repetition probably ensures that we pause to visualise the yellow centre of a daisy and so accept the likeness, but the comparison is revealed to be a little forced, even if it is also conventional and inevitable. At this point, attentive readers or botanists, even amateur ones, may note that this lady seems to lack the red which is a specified feature of the actual flower at the start of the poem. In that absence lies a suggestion that the personification that overwrites the flower is also an approximation, and with that may come hope for the continued, if unremarked, presence of the real daisy. Certainly in both Prologues, when we reach the point where the company of ladies catch sight of the daisy, we can no longer be sure the flower they kneel before is the plant upon which Geoffrey bestowed so much attention. The language betrays a level of hesitancy, ‘This flour, which that I clepe the dayesie’ (F.293; G.196), which permits us to wonder whether the object of veneration here is not rather the woman than the flower. Both have been called the daisy in the poem, but now it is the narrator-poet who applies the name, rather than the general populace, the ‘men […] in our toun’ (F.43; G.43) who coined the term at the start of the poem. We are no longer dealing with a colloquial name for a familiar flower, but have strayed into the very ‘metaphysical instrumentalism’ and ‘fetishizing mysticism’ that Marder and Vieira seem keen for us, like Rousseau, to rebuff (Marder and Vieira, 2013, 39). As Marder admits, ‘To be sure, plants ‘‘as such’’ will forever elude us’ (44), and in these Prologues we may see such elusiveness in action. Geoffrey’s initial veneration, which required no dialogue or reciprocal exchange, but rather rejoiced in the intangibility of the pure flower qua flower, is displaced within the dream by a conversation that amounts to a confession. The plant has disappeared behind the woman, who herself is effaced by being called a flower, allegorised out of being even a figure in mythology. Chaucer is not a botanist; his interest in flowers is primarily literary, where they serve mainly as decoration or material for allegory. Most of the details he includes in his attentive descriptions of the daisy in the two versions of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women serve to provide the basis for the

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symbolism that eventually subsumes the flower: the whiteness of the petals is a sign of purity; the shunning of the dark, proof of the virtue that turns away from sin; the ability to spring fresh each morning signifies both fidelity and resurrection. Nevertheless, the modes of attention his two narrator-personae adopt illustrate the advantages of the apparently inattentive reverie, which encourages the body to walk and the mind to wander. This is the strength of a dilettantism that allows one to note details without dwelling on them in such depth that one is led to evaluate, define, or allegorise them. Small flowers may be admired, appreciated, loved, even, and also left intact, or perhaps gathered for a couch which remains a bed strewn with flowers and only secondarily an instigator of dreams. Moreover, if these Prologues have blossomed when read in the light of Marder’s call to think like a plant, they also offer an indication of the consequences of our habitual attitude towards plants. Surprised by the god of Love, Alceste, and the company of women, the F Geoffrey remains ‘knelying by this flour, in good entente, / Abood to knowen what this peple mente’ (F.308–9). His proximity is resented by the god of Love, who makes his displeasure clear by asserting that he would rather have a worm so close to his flower than Geoffrey (F.318), an insult that, crucially, retains the horticultural tone of the exchange. However, when Geoffrey challenges him to explain why he is so unwelcome, the flower is transmuted into a saint’s relic, and while this change retains the applicability of an undesirable worm (liable perhaps to consume the artefact), it removes the flower from the conversation. The narrator of the G Prologue loses sight of the flower earlier than his F counterpart does, as he is leaning under a branch as he watches the assembled company sit down in an ordered circle after their dance. The daisy slipped his attention a good while before, and although he, too, is compared to a worm, this time the worm is distasteful simply for being seen by the god, with no mention of a flower for it to be close to or not (G.244). In each case, the final appearance of a daisy in the text is when the god of Love reminds Geoffrey that Alceste was transformed into a daisy in acknowledgement of her self-sacrifice in favour of her husband. Geoffrey accepts and adopts this association, thus redefining his previous reverence for a red and white flower anyone may find in the grass, as an admiration for the virtues Alceste represents and an affection for what is now ‘her’ flower. A reprise of her appearance confirms this shift of emphasis through its focus on the white coronet, now explicitly interpreted as representing wifely virtue. This time, the description does include the red, which was missing previously, but attributing its presence to Mars, who provided the colour in lieu of rubies, is unsatisfactory. Appropriately so, as it drives home the point that Geoffrey has discovered exactly what people mean when they venerate flowers: they mean they transpose them into symbols for abstract human virtues, overwrite them with allegorised women, and finally stop seeing them entirely as their attention shifts away from physical flowers in actual grass to stories about humans, their relations to each other, and the interventions of gods. It is of

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course Alceste, not the god of Love, who comes up with the idea that a fit punishment for Geoffrey’s defamation of love and women is the composition of the Legend. Given the way the Prologue has collapsed the woman and the flower together, it would be nice to think that, after all, it is a literal daisy and not deified Alceste who reproves Chaucer, but, if so, he, and surely also his readers, are too blinkered to realise it.

About the Author Gillian Rudd is a Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, where she teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature, women’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, and children’s literature. She is the author of Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Texts (2007) and has published widely on natural landscapes and identity in late medieval English literature. Since 2010, she has served as an Advisory Editorial Board Member of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism for ASLE-UK (E-mail: G.A.Rudd@ liverpool.ac.uk).

References Barney, S., et al., trans. 2006. The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chaucer, G. 1988a. Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, eds. A.S.G. Edwards and M.C.E. Shaner. In The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson et al., 587–603. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chaucer, G. 1988b. The House of Fame, ed. J.M. Fyler. In The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson et al., 347–75. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Marder, M. 2013. Plant intelligence and attention. Plant Signaling & Behavior 8(5): e23902–1–5. Marder, M., and P. Vieira. 2013. Writing Phytophilia: Philosophers and Poets as Lovers of Plants. Frame 26(2): 37–53.

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Original Article

Vegetal continuity and the naming of species

Lara Farina Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA.

Abstract This essay takes up Karen Houle’s suggestion that we address the ‘conceptual monoculture’ at work in the naming of plants (Houle, 2017, 158). While Houle’s work considers the linguistic hegemony exercised by modern botany, my focus is on premodern attempts to identify species of plants and ‘contain’ them in language. I argue that such a history is incomplete without considering the ways in which plants inscribed themselves in the cultural artifacts that record and represent them, particularly language-artifacts like words and books. In medieval herbals, encyclopedias, romances, and treatises, the vegetal often escaped its scientific, philosophic, and/or poetic locution, most notably by a tendency to mass and merge. Vegetal ‘inscription’ is here not vocalization per se (pace Marder, 2017, 115), but rather an effect on the form and content of human discourse. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 420–431. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0100-8

Phylogenetic families, the primary categories we devise for plants and through which they subsequently appear to us, are fundamental to our modern relations with botanic life. The marking out of species orients and universalizes bioscience, propels the trade and horticulture of garden and crop plants, and fuels political discourses of belonging and justice (through, for example, the tropes of ‘native versus invader species’ and ‘threatened versus secure species’). Species-identification channels our affective responses to green beings, often making it easier to be dispassionate about their more particular fates, and it is so embedded in our modern languages that efforts to name plants any other way than by species are difficult, even silly. Yet this difficulty is precisely why we should try our hands – and tongues – at a lexicon of  2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 420–431

Chapter 3 was originally published as Farina, L. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 420–431. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0100-8.

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alternative groupings, one with flexibility of scale and context. An unchallenged, universal vocabulary of familial relations only ossifies the ways we perceive and interact with verdant lives and environs. As Karen Houle has recently argued, both a diversity of naming habits and an attention to their differing effects are crucial for the ‘linguistic justice’ we owe to vegetable things (Houle, 2017). Admittedly, radical alternatives to our linguistic ordering of green worlds may need to come from ‘non-Western’ traditions. But it is also worth considering the vegetable kingdoms of pre-Linnaean Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (all of which populate the archive of early ‘Western’ natural philosophy). As I have argued elsewhere, European medieval culture supported some queer ideas about the genealogy of plants, including ones that sabotage the imperative of sexual reproduction (Farina, 2017). Further, while ancient and medieval botanists certainly perceived plants through logics of ‘kind,’ they proceeded without the modern restriction of species groups to the sole criterion of producing fertile offspring. Looking at the ways in which plants bunch and divide in medieval language and visual representation can help us rethink the hermeneutics of speciation that we so invariably apply to flora. For the sake of a posthuman history of vegetal form, we must also consider how premodern plants themselves co-authored their inscription in groupings at various scales. I propose that this ‘phytography,’ to use Patricia Vieira’s term for a process in which plant-life impresses itself on representational media (Vieira, 2017), left its mark on both the content and the form of the naming of the vegetal in premodernity. In what follows, I trace some of the ways in which plant matter worked against linguistic species-marking by clustering into masses, forms that override difference and thus resist closure, verging on the infinite.

Botanomass More so than animals, plants have a tendency to mass in Western perception and thought. Not only do the green beings of art and literature submerge and meld into settings of ‘forest’ and ‘field,’ plants and their products have a long history of indexing matter itself. In the works of Aristotle, ‘matter’ is ‘tkg’ [hyle], the name given to wood, especially timber for building and carving. The linguistic association between trees and the stuff of cosmic manufacture persists in the Latin ‘materia,’ which denotes both ‘matter, stuff, materials’ and ‘wood for building, timber’ (Marchant and Charles, 1952, s.v. ‘materia-ae’). Similarly, the Attic Greek for ‘mass’ is ‘lafa’ [masa, ‘barley-cake’], from which the Latin ‘massa’ [‘kneaded dough’] derives. ‘Massa,’ – the ground, merged, and pliant seeds of grain-crops – came to describe mineral and animal matter as well as vegetable stuff. Lumps of cheese, gold, money, land, and even, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the undifferentiated matter of ‘chaos,’ were marked out by the word for a glob of grain (Lewis and Short, 1879, s.v. ‘massa-e’). Hyle, materia, masa, and massa, words of theory with roots in the soil, all tied the abstract idea of basic matter to memories of field and forest. Though recent

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1 See, for example, Marder (2013), Hall (2011), and Miller (2002). Nealon, in contrast, argues that plants are the life-form closest to ‘pure immanence’ in Aristotle’s writings (Nealon, 2016, 36).

scholarship has often noted the low status assigned to plants in Classical-era hierarchies of being and ensoulment,1 for Aristotle and other early philosophers, creation itself was only thinkable through vegetation’s ability to signify raw ‘matter.’ The ancient association of vegetable life with the constitutive mass of the universe continued into both the Latinate and vernacular arts of the Middle Ages. While Latinate medieval philosophers adopted Aristotle’s conception of the ‘vegetative soul’ as the most basic phenomenon of living things, translations of Latin encyclopedias are replete with visual imagery linking floral growth with matter’s very potential to take shape – to become formed into anything, living or not. Consider, for example, illuminations in the vernacular manuscripts of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s monumental encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (c.1240–1250), translated into French by Jean Corbichon (1372) and into English by John Trevisa (1397). Huntington Library MS 27523, a large deluxe volume with 19 miniatures, is an especially suggestive copy of Corbichon’s version. Its first folio is decorated with a magnificent four-panel illustration, three panels of which show God creating the heavens, oceans, and earth, followed by one portraying Corbichon presenting his manuscript to his patron, the bibliophile French king Charles V.

Figure 1: San Marino, Huntington Library MS 27523 (Livre des Proprie´te´s des Choses), fol. 1r, top half. Early 1400s, France.

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In all four panels, the acting figures and their creations stand before a background of scrolling, feathery, gold foliage, painted on top of black or red. This contiguous, foliate vegetation is both outside the created realms – which are measured out by God’s divine instrument and tightly circumscribed by His words – and inside the phenomenal world that Jean, Charles, and others inhabit (Figure 1). The vines’ gold paint recalls the Timaeus’s comparison of the ‘receptacle’ of creation to gold that can be crafted into any shape but still retains the name ‘gold’ (Plato, 1977, 69). In his attempt to describe this medium of pure, formable, but unformed matter, Plato writes, ‘the receptacle [is] not air or fire, but invisible and formless, all-embracing, intelligible but hard to grasp’ (70). The golden vines leafing through pre-Creation space in the Huntington Library manuscript are similarly behind but beyond the linguistic measurement that gives things form. They hint at the vegetative matter (hyle) that appears in a form but is yet, like Plato’s gold, a medium of its own. Some will doubtless object that the leafy ground is just expensive decoration for a book-loving patron. Or that the background shows not an ether full of tendrils but hanging tapestries, which so often accommodated or copied Arab tastes for ‘garden-pattern’ rugs. But even as manifest in textiles, these vines would point to vegetation as the essential material of the phenomenal realm. Bartholomaeus borrows Isidore of Seville’s listing of ‘Vesta’ as a name for ‘earth,’ which Corbichon translates with the French ‘veste’ [‘clothing’] (XIV.i), and Trevisa renders with ‘danesca,’ either a corruption of de veste or possibly a variant of the just-coined English word ‘damask’ (‘damasque’ in French): he writes, ‘[Earth] is yclepid danesca for he stonde steadfaste oþer for he is ycloþede with treen, herbes, and gras’ (Trevisa, 1975, 691).2 The manufacture of the created world is here revealed by the fabrics in which are worked the subtle, scrolling forms of flora. Perhaps it is the very status of the background plants as decoration that allows them to gesture toward matter’s raw potential, as they are unrestricted by more precise meaning. Their connection with the stylized vines filling up the Huntington manuscript’s borders both promotes the sense of vegetative omnipresence and recalls the creation of the book itself, and indeed of any work, from this environ of hyle. The illuminations of Huntington MS 27523, only one example of vine-backgrounds found in a late medieval encyclopedia,3 display the contiguity of vegetable matter through any adjacent space: plant-stuff is in the air and on the ground, in the red and in the black, inside and outside narrative time, filling both scenes and surfaces of representation. One need only think of Chaucer’s nest-like House of Rumor for a literary equivalent to late-medieval illustrators’ floral atmosphere. In The House of Fame, Chaucer’s dream-quest for the material source of poetic language, the House of Rumor is the poem’s ultimate location of ‘tydynges’ (648), functioning

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2 Isidore cites ‘Vesta,’ the Roman goddess of flocks, as another name for Ceres, but his discussion conflates the name with ‘vestis,’ [‘coverings, clothes’] (Isidore, 1911, VIII.xi; Lewis and Short, 1879, s.v. ‘vestis’). See also Barthe´le´my (1485). ‘Damask’ was first used to designate the figured cloth in the late fourteenth century (MED, 2013, s.v. ‘damask’), when the Northern European import of brocaded fabrics was increasing. 3 The vine motif can also be found in several of the miniatures in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam MS 251, for example.

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4 All citations of Chaucer’s work refer to Benson’s edition by line number (Chaucer, 1987). 5 An adjective meaning both ‘strange’ and ‘clever,’ but in noun form a reference to female genitalia, as in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale (3275). 6 All four terms refer to wicker baskets of various kinds. ‘Panyers’ were baskets for raising dough or holding bread.

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as a kind of receptacle for language creation.4 This ‘queynte’5 place of production appears as entwining, encircling vegetation (1925): Mad of twigges, falwe, rede, And grene eke, and somme weren white, Such as men to these cages thwite, Or maken of these panyers, Or ells hottes or dossers; […] And eke this hous hath of entrees As fele as of leves ben in trees In somer, whan the grene been; (1936–40, 1945–47) A mass of vegetable parts, the house is both made of plants (literally) and like a plant (metaphorically), as well as a kind of Ideal prototype for hyle-works (‘cages,’ ‘hottes,’ and ‘dossers’) and massa-shapers (‘panyers’).6 This tree is like a tree. It is also like trees in other forms. The vegetable receptacle’s twiggy stuff winds through both the thing represented (the House) and the representing medium (metaphoric language), much as the Corbichon illustrations transverse planes of representation. Appropriately, the poem’s narrator dubs the structure a ‘Domus Dedaly, that Laboryntus ycleped ys’ (1920–21). Walking through a maze of hedge, it’s hard to know inside from out. Literally a-mazed, the dream vision’s narrator, the striving but dull ‘Geffrey,’ finds himself overwhelmed by both media and matter, which morph continually and accumulate into the piles and piles of stuff occupying his account. The poetic ‘tydynges’ he encounters are painted on glass, engraved in metal, spoken about in a lecture, performed as drama, and figured in architecture before Geffrey finally perceives them in their most rudimentary form as a cacophony of ‘gygges’ [‘squeaks’] and ‘chirkynges’ [‘creakings’] in the House of Rumor (1942, 1943). When these sonic elements of Rumor re-emerge as words, Geffrey can only relate them in a long list ‘Of loos, of lore, and of wynnynges, / of hele, of seknesse, of bildynges / Of faire wyndes, and of tempests, / Of qualm of folk, and eke of bestes,’ and so on (1965–69). Looking for a singular source of production inside the mass of plant-matter, all Geffrey can perceive are endless clumps of language in formation. The episteme is Turtleweeds all the way down, and the vegetable receptacle resists dissection into causes and effects. Plants themselves encouraged, maybe even demanded, word-piles from their human analysts in the Middle Ages. Medieval herbals, which attempt to isolate plants into species in order to catalogue recipes for ‘simples’ (medicines derived from one kind of plant) in fact attest to the difficulty of eidetic reduction and to the accumulation of botanic names in reference works. Entries in herbals almost invariably begin with a long list of synonyms, citations, and translations. In the most widely-copied medieval text on plants, the Herbarius of pseudo-Apuleius, the Latin name of the plant is followed by synonyms in Greek, Egyptian, Persian,

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Italic, Punic, and Dacian, as well as by names gleaned from the supposed works of particular ancient authorities. Any given language might provide the herbal with multiple synonyms so that, for example, an entry for ‘Verbena’ might list the following aliases: hierabotanen, peresterion, diosatim, trigonion, sanguinaria[m], collesis, sideritis, thesefonion, demetria, pancroma, penpethar, erisceptron, verminatia[m], licinia[m], lustrago, columbina[m], militeria[m], vertepediu[m], and berbina.7 This list does not include the European vernacular names that could be listed in herbals, nor the Sanskrit, Syriac, and Arabic names that fill the pages of medieval Andalusian translations of Dioscorides’ foundational herbal, the Peqi tkg1 iasqijg1 [Peri hyles iatrikes].8 Of the Arabic herbals, Oliver Kahl notes a ‘ridiculously high number of synonyms and pseudo-synonyms,’ evidencing a history of compounded translation and transliteration (Kahl, 2014, 39). Plants inscribed themselves in such an abundance of nomenclature that, though herbals themselves are like glossaries, actual glossaries were needed to supplement them. Like herbals, these too could be massive lists: the fourteenth-century Alphita has over 1,200 entries.9 Indeed, plants seem to have exhausted their medieval biographers, much like they do poor Geffrey, who never finishes his tale. Dioscorides’ Peri hyles iatrikes is a hefty work discussing over 600 plants, and Pliny’s Naturalis Historia contains sixteen books on the vegetable kingdom (versus four on animals). Andalusian herbals ballooned out even further, with some logging in over 5,000 entries (Ragep and Wallis, 2014). Faced with a seemingly endless world of greenery, catalogers laid hold of the clippers at hand. Herbals limit themselves to medicinal plants. The encyclopedist Trevisa, lacking this pragmatic restriction, opts for only ‘trees and herbes of þe whice mencioun is ymade by name in holy writte in text oþer in glosse’ (Trevisa, 1975, 882). Yet despite these attempts at linguistic and textual containment, plants made people repeat themselves throughout the Middle Ages. The work of medieval physicians, natural philosophers, encyclopedists, translators, poets, and artists burbles with multiple names, metaphors, frames, and modes of representation when the subject matter is vegetation. Even marginal annotation in herbals tends towards repetition, with various readers each inscribing a plant’s name in an apparent effort to memorize by writing. It is common to see folia of herbals with both a repeated header and the plant name written in different hands in the margins. These pages materialize a kind of human/botanic chorus. The vegetal artifact – be it book, fabric, basket, building, maze, or other manner of ‘queynte’ thing – runneth over, piling up into endless lists, infinite creep(ers), a mass of material. The floral impetus for verbal repetition continues today. Talking about gardening with my neighbor, I once mentioned Spiderwort. After more description, she eventually replied, ‘Oh, you mean Widow’s Tears!’ And, of course, there are more names: St. Lucy’s Flower, Wandering Jew, Tradescantia, Virginia Spiderwort, Secretia, Purple Heart, Purple Queen, Spider Lily, Blue Jacket, Inch Plant….

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7 This list is taken from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 130, fol. 35v, an eleventhcentury herbal from Bury St. Edmunds. 8 In Latin, De materia medica; it is the earliest surviving herbal, written in the first century CE. See Collins (2000). 9 Found in Oxford, Bodleian MS Arch. Selden. B.35. See Stannard (1964).

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Specimens and clones

10 Pavord describes the struggle of apothecaries to match found specimens with entries in herbals (Pavord, 2005, 5). On the debate over utility, see D’Aronco (2003). Cockayne opined that nineteenthcentury botanic nomenclature was no more organized than that of the eleventh century (Cockayne, 1864–1866, lvi).

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Plants mass in premodern representation, and by doing so, they swell the artifacts in which their being is evidenced. They leafed out herbals, encyclopedia, and glossaries; ran riot in margins and backgrounds; and left their interlocutors overwhelmed by a sense of near-infinite magnitude. But, as if the pressure of this mass worked its own alchemy, plants also merged in ways that confounded stable demarcation by language. If Shakespeare told us that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, medieval herbals and literary works suggest that not only does the rose indeed have many other names but also that a variety of plants may be dubbed a rose. For this reason, modern readers of early herbals have found them notoriously inaccurate; attempts to reconcile living specimens of plants with the names, descriptions, and illustrations in herbals are frustrating and occasionally futile. Pronounced ‘useless’ as field guides, the works have been defended by some as aide-memoires, etymological endeavors, or simply reasonable attempts at sifting through a botanic vocabulary that is as confusing today as it was in the Middle Ages.10 Nevertheless, many of what we now consider to be different plants were labeled as one under headings like ‘cinquefolium,’ ‘bishopswort,’ ‘mugwort,’ and the like. Artemisia and Cetaurea are split into ‘major’ and ‘minor’ kinds, and other herbs into masculine and feminine varieties, but these splits did little to shrink the lists of synonyms. Rather, they increased the potential for conflating two or more species (at least according to modern taxonomies). A further complication for premodern botanists was that plants could become other plants; the simple passing of time could let an individual plant lay claim to being more than one species. Of course, any vegetation that changed with the seasons raised problems for illustrators of herbals, who almost always chose only one seasonal form of the plant to represent its appearance. But some popular works of natural philosophy, most notably the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, also claimed that a number of plants could morph into completely different species over the course of their lives. De plantis notes species-defection primarily in plants under cultivation, with some being changed through horticulture and others changing themselves: basil, for example, will become thyme if moved to the Persian Gulf area, but nut-trees just change into other trees when they are old (Aristotle, 1984, 1259). Differing conditions of age, location, nutrition, or modification can alter a plant right out of its home category. Trevisa cites these remarks in relation to the practice of grafting, noting that the humoral powers of the graft change the stock itself into the ‘liknesse and kynde’ of the graft (Trevisa, 1975, 889). While plants often seem much closer to minerals and ‘elements’ than to animate life in premodern natural philosophy, the material lability given to them in these accounts

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distinguishes them from the former. If metals were like plants, we might say, alchemists’ coveted transmutation of lead to gold might just happen on its own. So a rose today might be something else tomorrow, unless conditions continue to support its rose-ness. Yet even when they do, a slipperiness still haunts premodern botanic naming. In poetic representations of enclosed gardens, themselves iconic spaces of human mastery over verdure, plant specimens are often vehicles for misidentifications, including those at the heart of satire. Misrecognition is a central motif in the phytophilic Roman de la Rose, for example; there, an impressionable and fey narrator (L’Amans) falls in love with his rose only after gazing into the fountain of Narcissus. The ‘rose’ that the narrator sees is a reflection within a reflection, revealed by two crystals at the bottom of the mirrored pool. Enrapt in the image of his own eyes made into sparkly gems, L’Amans perceives through them the lady as flower – beautiful, immobile, and mute. But if the redounded gaze mistakes a woman for a plant, we might also wonder if the plant itself is beyond recognition. The fountain has already been claimed as the property of another plant, the narcissus, and the narrator should see himself reflected in it. Comically, however, the delusional lover is predisposed to misreading: after seeing the fountain’s inscription, he recites the entire story of Narcissus’s self-absorption and death, but then irrationally decides that he has nothing to fear from a look at the watery mirror. His mistaken self-image (his erroneous belief in his own exceptionality) is the context for his identification of rose bushes and his subsequent selection of the perfect bud as the Rose (de Lorris, 1994, 26). Is his singular Rose actually a narcissus (which may or may not be Narcissus poeticus)?11 Given the Rose’s description in only the most general terms (as sweet-smelling and beautiful) and its subsequent disappearance behind endless rounds of human talk (L’Amans must converse with personified intermediaries like Fair Welcome, Rebuff, and Evil Tongue, among others), the plant’s most signature feature is its productive ambivalence. Like Chaucer’s House of Fame, Guillaume de Lorris’ portion of the Roman de la Rose is unfinished by its author, but it would be fitting if its plants had the last laugh. As ambivalent beings, they are the audience for and source of the joke at the narrator’s expense. L’Amans wants to read the garden as if it were an encyclopedia or herbal:12 he is fond of enumerating species in lists, with special regard for ‘domestic varieties’ – trees planted for shade, fruit and nut trees, and plants that provide spices (de Lorris, 1994, 22). The trees, he tells us […] fu loing de l’autre asis Plus de cinc toises ou de sis Mes moult furent et lonc et haut Et por le leu garder de chaut, Furent si espes par deseure, Que li soleus en nesune eure

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11 ‘The infrageneric phylogeny of Narcissus still remains relatively unsettled, the taxonomy having proved complex and difficult to resolve’ (Wikipedia, ‘Narcissus (plant)’ 2.2). 12 Many illustrations of the romance depict either L’Amans or Narcissus reflected in the fountain, but in one manuscript showing the Rose’s reflection, the fountain looks remarkably like an open book (BNF, MS Fr. 12595, fol. 13v).

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Ne pooit a terre descendre, Ne faire mal a l’herbe tender. (Kaluza, [1891] 1928, 1358–66) 13 A ‘toise’ is about six feet (Hindley et al., 2000).

14 On the debate, see Huot (1993) and McWebb (2007).

15 See Zurkow et al. (2015) for a sample of posters.

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[… were spaced just as they should be, more than ten or twelve yards13 separating one from another, and yet the branches were long and high and so dense up above in order to protect the place from heat, that the sun could never penetrate to the earth and damage the tender grass.] (de Lorris, 1994, 22) Clearly marked off from one another, removed from time and climate, and limited to the useful, the garden’s plantings are exercises in hermeneutic containment. They assume the flowering or fruiting forms that would enable encyclopedic/herbal identification. But the narcissus/rose signals that the garden plants may not be as they seem, and the medieval botanist knows that the nut trees and herbs may go rogue if time enters the scene. Further, the entire garden is claimed by a specter of botanomass in the form of the God of Love (Amors). The god appears clothed entirely in a robe of flowers, the plants woven, like figured silk, into the shapes of birds, lions, leopards, and other animals. Crowned with a ‘chaplet of roses’ and also surrounded by parrots, nightingales, larks, and titmice, Amors is an amalgam of plant, animal, and angel, whose body (thanks to the orbiting birds) has no definitive limit (de Lorris, 1994, 15). This hulk of hyle is also mobile and aggressive, sending his erotic arrows through the narrator’s eyes and altering the lover’s very constitution with his ‘medicine.’ While our narrator selects a singular rose as the object of his affection, he is also in love with Love, whose sprawling, penetrating matter makes a mockery of botanic difference. It is Love that sends the narrator in and out of massy hedges and around a garden in which human figures (via allegory) have been reduced to being embodiments of their names. It would take the Rose’s second author, Jean de Meun, another 17,724 lines of poetry to ‘complete’ Guillaume de Lorris’s unfinished text (itself 4,058 lines) and deliver the rose to L’Amans. One could say the poem got away from Guillaume, and then got away from Jean, even though the Rose as plant features little in Jean’s continuation. What started as a botanic merging in the abstracted rose/narcissus ends as a mass of words. Or perhaps I should say that this merging continued as an even bigger mass – the romance was one of the most widely copied and hotly debated texts in medieval Europe.14

Phytographia ‘Emulate the Kudzu’ exhorts one of the posters in Dear Climate, an ongoing art project imagining new kinds of human attunement to our changing global environs (Zurkow et al., 2014–).15 The slogan proposes a radical shift in our

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relationship with one of the most reviled of modern botanic species. Regarded as ‘invasive,’ ‘non-native,’ and prone to reaching monstrous size, the kudzu vine animates urban legends about sprawling vegetal mass.16 While ‘emulation’ of this hulking greenery seems novel, a look at premodern accounts of plants suggests that people have been emulating something like ‘the Kudzu’ for much of Western history. In a variety of representations, vegetal being leads poets, illustrators, philosophers, and scientists toward a sense of contiguous, alwaysincreasing, labile matter that exceeds naming and other forms of containment. This sense, in turn, seems to have inspired cultural artifacts which themselves mass, so that the form of the work partakes in the quality of infinite mattering. The golden vines of the Livre de Proprie´te´s, Trevisa’s earth-blanketing vegetal fabric, the twiggy mazes and baskets of the House of Fame, the woven-together God/Garden of Love – all are both space and force. They reinterpret the philosopher’s ‘materia’ as active being, as generative excess. The force of vegetal mass registers even in attempts to whittle it down to manageable size with species names. I myself had originally intended to write histories of particular species for this essay. But what impressed me most in my work with herbals was their seemingly ceaseless compulsion toward nominal listing, their propensity to grow endlessly. And as I wrote, I felt a similar urge to pile up examples, to do justice to the magnitude of vegetal being. As the work got away from me, it . . .

16 See Finch (2015) on tales of ‘the vine that ate the South.’

About the Author Lara Farina is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. She is the author of Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing (Palgrave) and of articles on practices of reading, sensory history, and queer theory. She has recently published an article on medieval and modern ideas about vegetal sensation (in Veer Ecology, ed. J.J. Cohen and L. Duckert) and is working on a book about haptic reading (Email: [email protected]).

References Alphita. Late 1300s. Oxford, UK, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B.35. England. Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barthe´le´my l’Anglais. (Bartholomeus Anglicanus). 1485. Le Proprie´taire des choses, trans. J. Corbichon, ed. P. Farget. France: Guillaume le Roy. https://books.google.com/ books?id=nC42I-qKL-0C&source=gbs_navlinks_s Chaucer, G. 1987. The House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

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Chaucer, G. 1987. The Miller’s Tale. Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Cockayne, O., ed. 1864–1866. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. 3 vols. London: Longman, Green, et al. Collins, M. 2000. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions. London and Toronto, ON: The British Library and University of Toronto Press. Corbichon, J., trans. Early 1400s. Livre des Proprie´te´s des Choses. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS 27523. France. Corbichon, J., trans. c. 1415. Livre des Proprie´te´s des Choses, illuminated by the Master of the Mazarine Hours. Cambridge, UK, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 251. Paris, France. D’Aronco, M.A. 2003. Anglo-Saxon Plant Pharmacy and the Latin Medical Tradition. In From Earth to Art: The Many Aspects of the Plant World in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C.P. Biggam. Amsterdam, Netherlands, and New York: Rodopi. de Lorris, G. 1994. The Romance of the Rose, trans. F. Hogan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. de Lorris, G., and J. de Meun. 1400s. Roman de la Rose. Paris, France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS Fr. 12595. France. http://romandelarose.org/App. html#book;Francais12595. Farina, L. 2017. Curl. In Veer Ecology, eds. J.J. Cohen and L. Duckert. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Finch, B. 2015. The True Story of Kudzu, the Vine that Never Truly Ate the South. Smithsonian Magazine (September), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/. Hall, M. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hindley, A., et al. 2000. Old French–English Dictionary. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Houle, K.L.F. 2017. A Tree by Any Other Name: Language Use and Linguistic Responsibility. In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, eds. M. Gagliano, J.C. Ryan, and P. Viera, 155–72. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Huot, S. 1993. The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Isidore of Seville. 1911. Etymologies, ed. W.M. Lindsay. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Online version, ed. W. Thayer, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/ texts/isidore/home.html. Kahl, O. 2014. The Text and its Philological Character. In The Herbal of Al-Ghafiqi, a Facsimile Edition of MS 7508 in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, eds. J. Ragep and F. Wallis, 35–50. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kaluza, M., ed. [1891] 1928. The Romaunt of the Rose from the Unique Glasgow MS, Parallel with its Original Le Roman de la Rose. Chaucer Society First Series, no. 83. London: Oxford University Press. Lewis, C.T., and C. Short. 1879. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. www. perseus.tufts.edu. Marchant, J.R.V., and J.F. Charles. 1952. Cassell’s Latin Dictionary. New York: Funk and Wagnall’s.

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Marder, M. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. 2017. To Hear Plants Speak. In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, eds. M. Gagliano, J.C. Ryan, and P. Viera, 103–25. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. McWebb, C., ed. 2007. Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology. New York and London: Routledge. MED (Middle English Dictionary). 2013. Ann Arbor, MI: Regents of the University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Miller, E. 2002. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nealon, J.T. 2016. Plant Theory: Bio-Power and Vegetable Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pavord, A. 2005. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Plato. 1977. Timaeus and Critias, trans. D. Lee. London: Penguin. Ps.-Apuleius, and Ps.-Dioscorides. Late 1000s. Herbarium dioscorid. Ex herbis femininis. Oxford, UK, Bodleian Library, MS 130. Bury-St.-Edmunds, England. Online: https:// digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/9b1c79b5-7c6b-466d-90b0-b05febc76642. Ragep, J. and F. Wallis, eds. 2014. The Herbal of Al-Ghafiqi, a Facsimile Edition of MS 7508 in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Stannard, J.A. 1964. Fifteenth-Century Botanical Glossary (Huntington Library MS HM 64). Isis 55(3): 353–367. Trevisa, J. [1397] 1975. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerurm: A Critical Text. 2 vols, ed. M.C. Seymour. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Vieira, P. 2017. Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing. In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, eds. M. Gagliano, J.C. Ryan, and P. Vieira, 215–33. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Wikipedia. n.d. Narcissus (plant). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(plant) Zurkow, M., et al. 2014. Dear Climate. www.dearclimate.net/ Zurkow, M., et al. 2015. Unthinking Survivalism: Inner Climate Change. postmedieval 6(4): 439–456.

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Original Article

The sacrificial herb: Gathering prayers in medieval pharmacy

Sara Ritchey Department of History, University of Tennessee–Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA.

Abstract This essay examines the plant-gathering prayers that appear throughout thirteenth- and fourteenth-century treatises on medicine and pharmacy as an avenue into uncovering possible late medieval European configurations of the human relationship to plant matter. Although herbals and recipe books might on first glance suggest a relationship of human dominion over the plant world, one in which humans treasured plants for their instrumentality in medical matters, nevertheless the presence of scattered prayers indicate a current of discomfort with this evaluation. Plant-gathering prayers offered scripts for humans to express gratitude for the role plants played in human health and they required humans to recognize the divine creation of – and presence in – plants. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0098-y 1 The Tractatus de herbis is edited as Ps. Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis, Tractatus de herbis: Ms London, British Library, Egerton 747, by Iolanda Ventura (2009). English translations of the Tractatus here and elsewhere are the author’s.

The verdant illustrations coloring the 106 folia of the Tractatus de herbis inscribed in London, British Library, Egerton MS 747 present plants as instruments, the means of human health.1 Copied in southern Italy around 1300, the Tractatus de herbis provides a series of simples alphabetically arranged and outlined according to the plant’s complexion, synonyms, type, habitat, powers, and the preparations required to enhance the plant’s desired

 2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 432–443

Chapter 4 was originally published as Ritchey, S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 432–443. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0098-y.

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effects.2 This botanical taxonomy brought order to the seeming disarray of plant life, affirming a hierarchy based on a scriptural promise: ‘I have given you every herb-bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat’ (Gen. 1:29). Humans realize this promise, the treatise suggests, by maximizing vegetal utility and establishing firm knowledge of the natural world. Basing the text almost entirely on Matthaeus Platearius’s book of simple medicines, Circa instans, the compiler of the Tractatus de herbis claimed a vast authoritative tradition, supplementing the treatise with excerpts from Isaac Judaeus’s Liber dietarium universalium et particularium as well as from Dioscorides, Apuleius Platonicus, Galen, and Macer Floridus. But while engaging in this citationalism, the Tractatus also represented a wholly new approach to the creation of knowledge about plants. It was, after all, the first extant herbal treatise since Late Antiquity to include plant paintings rendered from real life observation (Collins, 2000, 254). In this, it offered readers detailed and accurate illustrations of plant leaves, roots, flowers, and fruits. Each plant is depicted as if it had been spread and flattened, as a specimen. Offered for human observation, the plants are stripped of their original habitats, isolated and lifeless on the page. Thus, the rubicund petals of the rose (Ps. Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis, 2009, fol. 83r), portrayed both in buds and fully blossomed, combine ancient pharmaceutical knowledge with careful observation:

2 The authorship of the treatise is uncertain. The name Bartholomeus Mini de Senis appears in a colophon on fol. 106, but it is written over an erasure.

The rose is cold in the first degree and dry in the second. In medicine both dry and green roses can be used. Some pick them after maturity, but they do not keep for long. They ought to be picked when the leaves have not yet completely opened and grown a little ruddy; if they are white, or black, or colorless they should not be used in medicine because this shows that they were old and wasted before the picking time. Pick them just as stated, they should be dried a bit in the sun and they can be preserved for three years. From fresh roses, one can make many things. But dried roses should be used in medicine, when one encounters rose in a recipe, because they are better when they are crushed. From roses one can make a rose honey, rose sugar, rose syrup, rose oil, and rose water. [Rosa frigida est in primo gradu, sicca in secondo. Rosa sicca et viridis competunt usui medicine. Quidam colligunt post maturitatem, sed non tamen diu servatur. Debent autem colligi, dum non habent folia omnino exparsa et aliquantulum subrubea. Si autem sunt subalbida aut nigra aut pallida, non sunt apponenda in medicinis, quia significatur vetustate consumpta aut ante tempus collecta. Collecte autem sicut dictum est, debet desiccari ad solem aliquantulum, et possunt servari per triennium. De rosis viridibus fiunt multa. Sicca autem rose debent poni in medicinis, cum receptio rose invenitur, quia melius conteruntur. De rosis autem fit mel

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rosarum, zucharum rosarum, sirupus rosarum, oleum rosarum et aqua rosarum.] (Ps. Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis, 2009, 682–3) The treatise goes on to explain that roses are valuable for curing fainting, lientery, and vomiting. The foliations of MS Egerton 747, therefore, represent a complete translation. On its pages, plants are translated into subjects of human knowledge and health. But the epistemological tradition represented by the Tractatus de herbis, and by medieval pharmacology more generally, also discloses a quiet tension, an undercurrent of uncertainty regarding the ethics of asserting human dominion over plant life. Occasionally in medieval herbals, humans converse with plants. Throughout medieval pharmacological treatises, plant desire disrupts the presumptive human domination over them. Their appearance questions human colonization of vegetal realms and resists human designs on their being and properties. On those occasions when humans are scripted to address plants in medieval pharmaceutical and surgical texts, these scripts consistently elicit from humans a gesture of deference, submission, and gratitude. When plants elicit words from humans, they converse in prayer.

Gathering prayers Plant resistance is articulated in medieval gathering prayers, in which the herbgatherer performs rituals and prayers while uprooting a prescribed plant. Gathering prayers suggest a yearning for a lost ethnobotanical relationship, a search for human connection to plant life beyond the strictly instrumental. Gathering prayers call upon a healthcare practitioner to align plant materiality with human bodily materiality through the vocalization of gratitude and submission. Gathering prayers transform plants into medicines, recognizing them as substances with the capacity to redirect vexing issues of human embodiment. Stacey Langwick has observed that humans often regard plants as a form of matter that, through the medium of a healer, can be called upon to influence relations critical to embodiment (Langwick, 2011, 5). A longing for plant connection was expressed by Hildegard of Bingen, who imagined the presence of divinity incarnate and accessible in the earth’s plant matter, such as the grass ‘when heaven freshens its green’ [viriditatem infundit] (Hildegard, 1998, 122). Her Physica examined the scriptural promise of human dominion over plants, arguing that, when Adam was created from the elements of the earth, plants and humans were perfectly aligned: ‘because they sensed that he was living, they worked with him in all his manner, and he did the same with them. And the earth gave its greenness according to the race, nature, mores, and all the needs of humans’ [‘quia eum vivere sentiebant, et obviam omnibus conversationibus eius cum illo operabantur, et ipse cum illis. Et terra dabat

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viriditatem suam secundum genus et naturam et mores et omnem circuitionem hominis’] (Hildegard, 2010, I.49). The penalties of Adam’s sinfulness, however, tarnished plants’ ability to respond directly to human desire. In a fallen world, they required persuasion because ‘the earth has useful herbs that extend the spiritual needs of humans, but they are distinct from them’ [‘Terra enim cum utilibus herbis ostendit circuitionem spiritalium morum hominis eos discernendo’] (I.49). Plants, according to Hildegard, ‘reach out’ to human spiritual needs. They connect humanity to divinity as mediators, indeed as the very vehicle of divine incarnation in earthly matter. But in a fallen world, in which plant life no longer responds immediately to human desire, they require a plant ethics premised on the recognition of their divine creation, their spiritual potency. We can see this recognition in a pair of prayers in a medical miscellany from the Meuse Valley, which are contemporaneous with Hildegard’s poetic homages to viridity. The prayers are addressed to the earth and to all herbs and serve as a prompt to be uttered by the medical practitioner who intends to employ herbal remedies. For example, the prayer to the earth reads: Your majesty generates every kind of herb for the sake of healing, bestowing them on every race. Give to me this medicine of yours. Come to me with your powers. Whatever I do with this, may the outcome be good. May you grant healing to whomever I give [these herbs], and to whomever takes them from me. (Wallis, 2010, 70–1) [Herbas quascumque generat tua maiestas salutis causa tribuis cunctis gentibus. Hanc mihi permittas medicinam tuam. Veni ad me cum tuis virtutibus. Quidquid ex his fecero, habeat eventum bonum; cuique easdem dedero, quique easdem merito a me acceperint, sanos eosdem praestes.] (McEnerney, 1983, 176) The prayer does not presuppose that the plant willingly offers its healing properties, that it will automatically take effect on the human. Rather, it imagines that the practitioner who wishes to use the plant’s properties must first ask, pleading that it share its bounty. This request positions the human not as lord over the vegetal realm, but as a supplicant [‘quod te supplex rogo’] (McEnerney, 1983, 176). In London, British Library, Harley MS 1585, a medical compendium that includes a series of herbals, this prayer is illustrated by a doctor with arms outstretched to the earth in a gesture of pleading. (See Figure 1.) The image, on folio 24v, reinforces the prayer’s resolve that humans must ask the plant for the gift of its life, that they must express gratitude for its sacrifice. The prayer to all herbs makes a similar request. It addresses the ‘majesty’ of herbs, which it hails as a ‘gift’ from earth to all people. The practitioner communes with the plant, stating, ‘On you [mother Earth] conferred the medicine of health, and majesty, so that you might be a most useful aid to the

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Figure 1: Dea sancta tellus  British Library Board, British Library, Harley MS 155, fol. 24v.

whole human race. I, a suppliant, beseech and entreat. Come hither with your powers, because he who created you has given me leave to gather you’ (Wallis, 2010, 71) [‘medicinam sanitatis in vos contulit maiestatemque ut omni generi humano sitis auxilium utilissimum. Hoc supplex exposco precorve. Huc adestote cum vestris virtutibus quia qui creavit vos ipse permisit mihi ut

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colligam vos’] (McEnerney, 1983, 185). Here, herbs are credited not only with healing properties useful to human health, but also with majestas. With these words, the supplicant recognizes plant autonomy. The prayer’s presentation of the human relationship to plant life rejects the strict instrumentality of the Tractatus de herbis, in which humans uproot the plant without attention to the fact that it is only by killing the plant that their own lives may be prolonged. Indeed, due to the plant’s sacrifice, the prayer suggests that humans owe gratitude and even gifts to the plant kingdom and to the creator. It closes with the words, ‘I will offer fruits to you and give you thanks, in the name of the majesty that commanded that you be born’ (Wallis, 2010, 71) [‘ponamque vobis fruges et gratias agam per nomen maiestatis qui vos iussit nascit’] (McEnerney, 1983, 185). What gift can humans give to plants that might recompense them for their properties, their life? What fruit might satisfy their sacrifice? Later medical authorities explored these questions, offering insight into human reciprocity with vegetation and further developing the position of plants as intermediaries. In fact, vegetable mediation is evident even in a brief passage inscribed (parts of which were later erased by disapproving readers) in the Tractatus de herbis.3 For example, the instructions for betony (fols. 13v–14r) proclaim that the herb protects the soul and body of humans, keeping them safe at night. The herb ‘is called holy by everyone’ and, as a divine intermediary, demands that humans procure it in a distinct fashion: You should gather [it] in the month of August, and before you gather speak over it and with a devout heart pray, ‘Herb betony that was first discovered to exist by Asclepius, I beg you by means of this prayer, you who are called lady of all herbs, and through him who ordained in you whereby you should be created and work in so many remedies, namely forty-seven in number, deign to help me in all the things that I wish for.’ [Colliges mense Augusto et antequam colliges dic super eam et precatio devote corde, ‘Herba bectonica, que primitus inventa fuisti ab Scolapio, tibi quero propter precatio ista, tu qui es vocata domina omnium herbarum et per ille qui te precepit, qui create fuisses et ad multi remediis operata, videlicet per numerum 47, tu dignares me adiuvare et ad omnia que tibi voluero.’] (Ps. Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis, 2009, 284)

3 Parts of these instructions are erased in the manuscript, suggesting that later readers consider such invocations to holy plants as inappropriate. On this erasure, see the introduction to the facsimile of MS Egerton 747 in A Medieval Herbal (Collins, 2003, 21).

Like the prayer to all herbs in Harley MS 1585, this one positions the human as supplicant. The plant’s properties are contingent on human cooperation, on the perfect execution of this formula. Having forfeited their total dominion over plant life by sinning, it implies that humans must now commune with plants through prayer. The plant’s efficacy for human wellbeing hinges upon the performance of gratitude for its sacrifice and recognition of its divinely-ordained healing power.

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Gathering prayers circulated among university-trained physicians who absorbed, and sometimes transmitted, them and commented on their efficacy. While scholastic physicians often attributed gathering prayers to old ladies [vetulae] and other empirical practitioners, it is significant that they did not jettison them entirely and instead chose to transmit them in their medical compendia (McVaugh, 2003; Crisciani and Agrimi, 1993). For example, Teodorico Borgognoni (d. 1298) recommended that practitioners seeking to cure fistula gather root of agrimony ‘while saying the paternoster’ (Borgognoni, 1546, fol. 159r). John of Gaddesden’s Rosa medicinae (c. 1305–1317) included a remedy for nosebleeds in which the practitioner is directed to uproot the herb shepherd’s purse while reciting the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ and then chant a versicle that called upon Christ’s holy blood to unleash the plant’s efficacy (Hunt, 1990, 27). A remedy prescribed by the so-called ‘Four Masters’ proclaims that the herb centum genera heals ficus and cancer: ‘if that herb is gathered on Ascension Day in the early morning before the sun is risen, on one’s knees, saying the pater noster, and suspended from the patient’s neck, it cures ficus and cancer. Also, maidenhair collected in the same way on the Sabbath cures ficus and cancer’ (McVaugh, 2003, 332). Another example can be found in Thomas Fayreford’s (fl.1400–1450) Commonplace Book, which provides a script for a gathering prayer that can be used in uprooting any herb. Fayreford directs practitioners to perform a brief ritual before gathering the herbs: Whan th[o]u gederet ane herbe to mannes helpe, go thryes aboute hym and sey this: ‘Y take the herbe yn the name of the fader and the sone and the holy gost. And Y pray to my Lord God that thys herbe be god and virtues to the medicine that Y have ordeyned hym to.’ And sey thre paternosters & iii ave marias. And whan thou hast gedred thyn herbys al the yer or a sesonne, gyfe thys blessynge upon hem and sey thus. (British Library, Harley MS 2558, fol. 63v; transcribed by Olsan, 2003, 359) Once the herbs have been gathered, Fayreford instructs the practitioner to recite the following blessing: Almighty, you who have granted virtue to various herbs, deign to bless and sanctify these herbs. And just as you gave to your apostles the power to trample upon serpents and scorpions, so wherever medicine from these herbs will be provided, let every infirmity and weakness be expelled and your benign grace be given to sickness. (Olsan, 2003, 359) Uttering these prayers, the herb-gatherer was both priest and practitioner, consecrating the herbs while commanding them to dispense healing grace within the body. The gathering prayer suggests a perspective on vegetation in which plants’ therapeutic efficacy depends on affective transformation within the human, that is, on human gratitude and human recognition of the divine imprint within plants.

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This triangulated relationship between plant matter, human bodies, and divinity is most poignantly expressed in a gathering prayer included in Gilbertus Anglicus’s Compendium medicinae. In a remedy for conception, the physician directs practitioners to gather the herbs consolida major and consolida minor before the third hour of the vigil of St. John the Baptist, repeating the Lord’s Prayer three times while pulling them up by their roots. Then he instructs the practitioner to extract, in silence, the juice from the herbs and to write in the juice of the herbs a phrase in a gibberish impervious to human understanding: ‘dixit dominus crescite. F. Uthihoth. F. maltiplicamini. F. thahechay. F. et replete t errant, f. amath’ (Anglicus, fol. 287v; transcribed in Handerson, 1918, 35). If a man wears the words around his neck he will conceive a male child. Through this vegetable performance, the plant becomes a vehicle for prayer, the very material of prayer. The plant’s body inscribes the words of prayer, which are then worn, so that they become part of the body of the patient. Its material body, uprooted from the earth, is resurrected in the body of the patient, who achieves healing, and thus life.

The therapeutic logistics of plant prayers How did such vegetal utterances work? While scholars such as Matthew Milner and Maaike van der Lugt have focused on speech’s performative power in the central Middle Ages, noting the primacy of the words uttered at the moment of matter-altering consecration, plant gathering prayers did not transubstantiate plant matter (Milner, 2013; van der Lugt, 2013). They did not make God’s body, previously absent, suddenly present in the plant. Instead, gathering prayers assisted patients and practitioners in recognizing what was already there. Scholastically-trained medical practitioners explained the mechanics of plantgathering prayers by insisting that plant efficacy stemmed from their complexionate qualities, not from the prayer words uttered in their presence. If such prayers had any physiological merit, physicians argued, it was in their capacity to alter the affective state of the individual patient. Prayers helped patients believe that a remedy would work, enhancing their confidence that a physician’s methods would cure them. For example, when Henri of Mondeville discussed ligatures of agrimony, he made reference to Constantine the African’s twelfthcentury translation of Qusta¯ ibn Lu¯ca¯’s treatise on ligatures, On Incantations, Adjurations, and Suspensions around the Neck (Wilcox and Riddle, 1995). When no remedy seemed possible, prayers and incantations provided medicine for the imagination: Constantine briefly proves a proposition in which all the ancient philosophers and physicians agree, that the power of the soul alters the

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complexion of the body, as is manifest to those who consider it wisely: as Plato says, ‘when the human understanding believes that something is helpful even though it is not in itself helpful that thing will help the body merely because of the mind’s imagination.’ (McVaugh, 2003, 342) Henri of Mondeville thus constructed herb-gathering prayers and other medical incantations as a problem of belief; if a patient was skeptical of a physician’s remedies or felt hopeless about their own possibility for healing, then the prayer would supplement the materia medica by acting upon the patient’s imagination and thus disposing the body toward transformation, toward trust in the healing process (Laist, 2013, 12). For Henri, then, it was not the plant itself that was potentially efficacious, but the prayer or ritual performance that accompanied the plant. The plant-prayer performed a kind of restructuring of the patient’s imagination, causing him to see the plant differently, as capable of reversing the most persistent illness. That is, for Henri, prayers aided the healing process by causing patients and practitioners to believe and act as if plants retained a curative power that was only unleashed in the presence of human recognition, human request, and gratitude. Other authors meditated more directly on the rationale of plant-gathering prayers. Caesarius of Heisterbach, for example, emphasized the special relationship that plants have to the divine body. In his massive corpus of miracles, the Dialogus miraculorum, Caesarius relates the tale of a young monk who suffered from a head rash [‘scabie capita’] that would not yield to any of the prescribed remedies of doctors. The monk, Adam of Locheim, finally approached the Virgin Mary, who informed him of a perfect cure. She sent him to a nearby valley to gather the fruit of a certain tree [‘Fructus ligni fusilis’], with which she instructed him to wash his head three times, once in the name of the father, once in the name of the son, and finally in the name of the spirit (Caesarius, 2009, 3.7.24, 1369–75). Since it was Mary who intervened, one might wonder why she did not simply provide a miracle cure, as she did in so many of the other healing stories Caesarius related. What need had Mary for plant matter to provide healing, when she could simply intercede with her son on Adam’s behalf? The young novice in Caesarius’s Dialogue posed a version of this question to his monk interlocutor. Mary’s reliance on plant matter is ‘no wonder,’ the young novice learned; after all, ‘‘‘the almighty created medicines out of the earth’’ (Eccl. 38.4), which refers to the savior from the flesh of the virgin’ [‘‘‘Altissimus de terra creavit medicinam,’’ id est ex carne virginis salvatorem’] (Caesarius, 2009, 3.7.24, 1372). ‘That Mary is earth,’ he continues, ‘the Apostle states, ‘‘he was made from a woman.’’ What wonder then if with her are all the healing medicines, since she is the garden of spices’ [‘Quod Maria terra sit […] Et Apostolus dicit eum, ‘‘factum ex muliere.’’ Quid ergo mirum si apud ipsam sunt medicamenta sanitatum, quae hortus est aromatum?’] (1372). Here, Caesarius reads Ecclesiasticus to support a particular understanding of the

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biomechanics of herbal efficaciousness. There is no wonder in her plant-prayer remedy, for Caesarius, because divinity was already incarnate in plant matter. Betony, agrimony, rose, and all the other efficacious herbs do not point to or represent divinity. That is, they do not conform to Foucault’s signature, in which sympathy resides in resemblances between plants and humans (Foucault, 1994, 28–32). Rather, Caesarius’s sympathy is ontological. For him, plants are divine presences, points of access to the divine substance. Indeed, Caesarius goes on to criticize the medical establishment for its general failure of imagination, its failure to recognize the incarnational healing properties of plant matter, and for its insistence on the blunt physicality of human and plant matter, its imperviousness to the divine. Lambasting the physicians of Montpellier, Caesarius charges them with a failure of sight, a failure of recognition. Their transactional approach to plant life occluded the presence of the divine word within plant being. Hence, the words of prayer in plant-gathering and herbal rituals did not draw on the status of speech acts and their ability to alter qualities. Rather, prayer words spotlighted the ontology of plant matter; they consisted of an ethics of gathering, an expression of gratitude for their life. Herb-gathering prayers suggested that plant life was part of a divinely-created cosmos that, like human bodies, would be resurrected; moreover, plants were the very engine for bodily resurrection. By sacrificing their lives, they promoted human health; they became part of the body that would share in eternity.

‘I beg you with this prayer’ The gathering prayer for the herb betony in the Tractatus de herbis points to latent anxieties within medieval pharmacology, as do the scattered prayers throughout the academic texts of medieval physici. In this way, the prayers reveal the locations of alternative constructions of knowledge about medicine and pharmacy. Although herb-gathering prayers were eventually marginalized out of authoritative practice, they illuminate past possibilities, past constructions of human orientation toward plants. The efficacy of plant-gathering prayers relied on their ability to alter the subject, the speaker. They enabled the speaker to see the plant for what it was, for the role it played in transforming death into life. When the gatherers performed the prayer, they were reconstituted momentarily as subservient, as supplicants. By uttering the prayer, the gatherer became subject to the plant, open to transformation into the plant, absorbing its powers. Doing so, I argue, made the divine experiential for practitioners. Herb-gathering prayers enabled divinity to become a constitutive, palpable component of therapeutic practice.

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About the Author Sara Ritchey is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee– Knoxville, where she teaches courses in the history of medieval medicine, gender relations in medieval Europe, late medieval religious and cultural history, and historical methods. She is the author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (2014). Her current book project, entitled ‘Salvation is Medicine’: Spiritual Exercises and Bodily Effects in Late Medieval Healing Communities, investigates the construction and transmission of therapeutic knowledge in female religious communities (E-mail: [email protected]).

References A Medieval Herbal: A Facsimile of British Library Egerton MS 747. 2003. Intro. by M. Collins and list of plants by S. Raphael. London: British Library. Borgognoni, T. 1546. Ars Chirurgia Guidonis Cauliaci. Venice, Italy: Apud Juntas. Caesarius of Heisterbach. 2009. Dialogus Miraculorum [Dialog u¨ber die Wunder], ed. and trans. N. No¨sges and H. Schneider. Turnhout, Belgium: Fontes Christiani. Collins, M. 2000. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions. London: British Library. Crisciani, C., and J. Argimi. 1993. Savoir me´dical et anthropologie religieuse. Les repre´sentations et les fonctions de la vetula (XIIIe–XVe sie`cle). Annales. E´conomie, Socie´te´, Civilisations 48(5): 1281–1308. Foucault, M. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Handerson, H. 1918. Gilbertus Anglicus: Medicine of the Thirteenth Century. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Medical Library Association. Hildegard of Bingen. 1998. Symphonia: A Critical Edition of Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationem, ed. and trans. B. Newman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hildegard of Bingen. 2010. Physica: Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum: Textkritische Ausgabe, trans. T. Gloning and R. Hildebrandt. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Hunt, T. 1990. Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts. Suffolk, UK: Brewer. Laist, R. 2013. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. New York: Rodopi. Langwick, S. 2011. Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McEnerny, J. 1983. Precatio terrae and Precatio omnium herbarum. Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie 126(2): 175–87. McVaugh, M. 2003. Incantationes in Late Medieval Surgery. In Ratio et Superstitio: Essays in Honor of Graziella Federici Vescovini, eds. G. Marchetti, O. Rignani, and V. Sorge,

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319–45. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Fe´de´ration Internationale des Instituts d’E´tudes Medie´vales. Milner, M. 2013. The Physics of Holy Oats: Vernacular Knowledge, Qualities, and Remedy in Fifteenth-Century England. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43(2): 219–45. Olsan, L. 2003. Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice. Social History of Medicine 16(3): 343–66. Ps. Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis. 2009. Tractatus de herbis: Ms London, British Library, Egerton 747, ed. I. Ventura. Edizione Nazionale: La Scuola Medica Salernitana, 5. Florence, Italy: Edizioni del Galluzzo. van der Lugt, M. 2013. The Learned Physician as Charismatic Healer: Urso of Salerno (Flourished End of Twelfth Century) on Incantations in Medicine, Magic, and Religion. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87(3): 307–46. Wallis, F. 2010. Prayers to the Earth and All Herbs. Medieval Medicine: A Reader, 70–1. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Wilcox, J., and J. Riddle. 1995. Qusta¯ ibn Lu¯qa¯’s Physical Ligatures and the Recognition of the Placebo Effect. Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 1(1): 1–50.

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Original Article

Written in trees

To m W h i t e Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Abstract The medieval horticultural manual the Godfridus super Palladium directs its readers in the art of grafting and maintaining trees. The text was translated from Latin into Middle English in the fourteenth century by Nicholas Bollard, whose own treatise on planting and grafting is found alongside the super Palladium in a number of surviving manuscripts. These works seek, at least in part, to codify past practices and accumulated knowledge, rendering a future that is predictable and productive. Yet both the super Palladium and Bollard’s Craft of Grafting and Planting are replete with micronarratives of nonhuman matter that connect them to a range of natural philosophical and literary traditions. Many of these directives are also scalable: initially specific to trees and plants, they also resonate with contemporary and modern philosophical debates on temporality, the potential transformations of matter, and the thresholds and limits of life. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 444–454. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0102-6

In the Middle English translation of the Godfridus super Palladium, a fourteenth-century treatise on horticulture, a remarkable passage directs the reader on how ‘To make that wrytynge or peynture shal ben sene in the [kernellis of a peche].’ This process requires a human hand to prize open the ‘skalys’ of the kernels and then ‘writ with cinopre, or peynte a word or a marke’ there. Easy enough, it would seem. Yet this is only the first stage of a process that combines human force and craft with natural growth and multiplication. ‘Diligently berie [the kernels] in the erthe aʒen & let hem abyde there tyl they

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Vol. 9, 4, 444–454

Chapter 5 was originally published as White, T. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 444–454. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0102-6.

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ben treis,’ the reader is instructed. Once they have grown into trees, all the kernels in the resulting fruit will, we are told, bear this same ‘synge’ (127–37).1 For all its implausibility, its lack of utility, this directive is in many ways characteristic of the super Palladium’s investment in the materials and temporalities of vegetal life. The inscribed kernels exemplify the workings of natural artifice that populate horticultural manuals, encapsulating, on a small scale, the complex imbrication of nature and culture that resonates in contemporary ecological theory.2 We can also note the association the treatise makes here between the technologies of inscription and horticulture; surrounded by directives on the grafting of fruit trees, this passage seems to recur to the etymology of that term in Old French grafe [‘stylus,’ ‘pen’] and Greek graphein [‘to write’]. In its economy of expression, the instruction that the inscribed kernels simply be afforded the time and space to ‘abyde’ until they are fruit-bearing trees dramatically condenses the duration between human action and arboreal result. This short, seemingly self-contained narrative projects a future in which the kernels will have grown into trees. And yet, the commitment that is being asked of the reader – the work of horticulture and the work of waiting – cannot be so easily elided, not least because the attendant processes are detailed elsewhere in the treatise and the late medieval horticultural writing tradition. To make these ‘marke[s]’ appear, the reader must plant the seeds in the right kind of soil and at the right time of year, protect and insulate the fledgling shoots, and care for the young trees. We know as well that things might go wrong or turn out differently to how we intended: directions on how to guard against inclement weather, on how to bring dying trees back to life, or how to transport them from one location to another are also included in late medieval horticultural texts. These works purport to codify human control over vegetal life, yet they also cannot help but invite the reader to consider whether the relationship of cause and effect on which they are ostensibly founded can ever be entirely stable or predictable. Can arboreal matter be so easily inscribed both with and within human systems of knowing? In an essay on the ‘poetics of practicality,’ Lisa H. Cooper argues that the copying and reading of medieval ‘how-to texts’ offered not only practical utility, but also aesthetic and imaginative enjoyment for readers interested in the representation of ‘possible future[s]’ (Cooper, 2007, 504). Horticultural manuals are especially invested in the capacious, though also potentially disorientating, realm of the ‘possible future.’ Imaginative and speculative engagement with its eventful stories of material transformation, and with the temporalities and lifespans of arboreal life, seem just as integral to the super Palladium as its potential instrumentality. Directives like that for making ‘wrytynge or peynture’ appear in peach pits are not simply moments at which the fanciful or even deceitful intrudes in the workings of an otherwise useful practical text, then. Instead, they provide a way of examining the intricacies of

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1 Citations of the Godfridus super Palladium are by line number to David G. Cylkowski’s edition (1994), from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e.Musaeo 116. 2 For a similar framing and account of early modern horticultural manuals, see Bushnell (2003).

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late medieval horticultural writing, as well as its intimations of how humans often must ‘bend themselves toward matter’ (Mitchell, 2014, 133).

The ‘privy werkyngis’ of arboreal matter The author of the super Palladium has been identified as Gottfried von Franken, a Franconian who clearly had not only read widely on horticulture and agriculture, but also travelled widely around Europe (Braekman, 1985, 19). His work was translated from Latin into a number of European vernaculars, surviving in over 50 manuscripts. The Middle English translation was made around the middle of the fourteenth century, likely by Nicholas Bollard, a Benedictine monk of Westminster (Braekman, 1985, 19). Bollard’s own treatise, containing further information on the planting and grafting of trees and the alteration of the properties of fruit, is usually found alongside the super Palladium in the surviving manuscripts. The form of Bollard’s Book of Planting and Grafting invokes scholastic parallelism: it comprises three chapters, each subdivided into six further sections. The limited scholarly attention that has been paid to the super Palladium and Bollard’s Craft has emphasized their indebtedness to Latin and Greek traditions of agricultural and horticultural writing, as well as to an oral tradition of ‘practical know-how’ passed down ‘from generation to generation’ (Braekman, 1985, 26). As its title makes clear, the Godfridus super Palladium was inspired by the fourthcentury Opus agriculturae of the Roman writer Palladius, a work in 12 books specific to the months of the year, each with directions and tasks to be completed in the house, cellar, barn, orchard, and field. An additional thirteenth book focuses on the grafting of trees. The Opus agriculturae is perhaps best known to scholars of medieval English as the source text for ‘On Husbondrie,’ the translation of Palladius’s work made for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in around 1442. In its focus on the effective management of an oeikos (Greek for ‘household,’ and the etymological root of ‘ecology’), ‘On Husbondrie’ aligns itself with the work of those political theorists who, since Aristotle, had framed agricultural and horticultural expertise as ‘the equivalent of expertise in statecraft’ (Wakelin, 2007, 45). The strict management of the aristocratic oeikos finds its counterpart in the poem’s strict management of its own form and literary materials. Its intricate rhyme royal stanzas and extensive textual apparatus ostentatiously point up the importance of discerning control in this ‘exercise in classical scholarship’ characteristic of fifteenth-century humanism (Wakelin, 2007, 44). The earlier prose super Palladium is a very different entity, though, and while its title helps the work lay claim to a form of textual authority, it belies the extent to which it fragments and reorganizes Palladius’s text and introduces a range of new material. The text consists of a short introduction followed by 67 sections: a list of desired outcomes and the accompanying directions on how

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they are to be achieved. The super Palladium states in its opening lines that it will speak ‘pleynly inow’ regarding its subject matter (4). Specialized vocabulary is used occasionally, but the text is far from abstruse. As in other forms of practical and instructional writing, sequences of imperative verbs address the reader as a ‘potential actor’ (Orlemanski, 2011, 196). The 67 sections of the text vary in length and detail, but the sheer range of information they present is striking. Many of these narratives (on the maintenance of plants and trees, or the storage and preservation of wine) seem relatively unremarkable and quotidian. Others, such as those on the grafting of fruit trees, are more eye-catching in their claims of what can be achieved. A handful are arrestingly non-utilitarian. One direction, for instance, records how ‘To make perlis or othere dyuers thyngis to growe withinne an appil.’ This amounts to the human force required to insert the pearl or ‘othere […] thyngis’ in a fruit that has ‘somewhat growyn.’ Once this has been completed, ‘som notable signe’ as to where the fruit is on the branch is required, so that it can be found again once it has ripened (67–74). As Cooper notes, to focus on those elements of medieval practical writing that seem ‘compelling’ or ‘quirky’ to modern readers risks a certain ‘ahistorical bias’ towards an idea of the literary that their medieval readers would not necessarily have shared. Nevertheless, the varied and occasionally ‘exuberant’ catalogues of directions and possible results that constitute many medieval instructional texts do have their own kind of formal appeal. Further, these works often appear to ‘relish’ their own frequent ‘verbal flourishes’ (Cooper, 2007, 498). For all its opening claim of formal and lexical plainness, the super Palladium provides some good examples of the kind of textual ‘exuberance’ and ‘verbal flourishes’ that permeate late medieval practical writing: from the pearls or other ‘dyuers thyngis’ that can be made to appear in fruit, to the remarkable results to be achieved through grafting, to the direction in which a rudimentary form of humoral theory is incorporated into the text, suggesting a corporeal affinity or intimacy between the arboreal and human. ‘To make applis of a tre hole & sound ʒif they begynne to roten or rusty’ requires a cut to be made in the bark when ‘the humour therof is sumwhat out, let donge hym wel and stoppe aʒen dilygently his wounde with cley’ (110–15). Further, in its intimations of its author’s travels, its skepticism of the efficacy of certain practices, and its frequent imperatives that the reader ‘wete wel’ or ‘note wel’ what is being said (28, 83), the super Palladium does possess what we can think of as a distinctive narrative voice. Taking up Cooper’s refusal to read late medieval practical texts solely in terms of their potential instrumentality, Julie Orlemanski has further examined the ‘pleasures of literary form and fantasy’ they offer (Orlemanski, 2011, 195). As Orlemanski writes, the ‘split’ between ‘textual and practical meaning’ that is often apparent in late medieval how-to texts is not simply the result of their failure as a piece of technology, but is rather the occasion for readers to ‘enjoy, value and “work through” the referential comportment of text to world’

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3 Accompanying the super Palladium’s reflexive framing of its ‘mater’ are a number of references to a natural philosophical tradition in which trees and plants are the subject of detailed discussion. The text refers to Isidore of Seville, Avicenna, and ‘Bok of Plantys’ (De plantis), a work attributed to Aristotle in the Middle Ages, though likely composed by Nicholaus of Damascus. In his Craft, Bollard emphasizes that the planting of trees is predicated on an understanding of Ptolemaic and Aristotelian theories of generation from decay (Braekman, 1985, 30).

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(Orlemanski, 2011, 199). Orlemanski’s focus is on late medieval physiognomy, but horticultural manuals offer a similar opportunity for their readers to enjoy their formal and narrative features, as well as to ‘work through’ a range of questions, particularly regarding the complexities of material transformation. In fact, the opening lines of the super Palladium intimate as much, stating that the text will forego what is familiar or ‘comune’ [‘commonly known’] regarding the ‘settynge of treis,’ in order to examine the ‘privy werkyngis touchynge that same mater’ (2–3). Middle English ‘privy’ could denote not only something physically concealed (an inscribed seed sprouting beneath the soil perhaps), but also the unforeseen or unpredictable (MED, ‘privy,’ 1.a, 3.b). Similarly, ‘werkyng’ encompassed a range of meanings in Middle English, from the more general senses of action and physical labor still current in Modern English, to more specialized meanings in terms of skilled work or craft and effectual force, as well as in natural philosophy and alchemy, and in the description of the motion of celestial bodies (MED, ‘werking(e),’ 4.a, 6, 7.a, 2.d). The super Palladium’s statement of its ‘mater’ also directs us towards the intersection of late medieval practical writing, natural philosophy, and poetic accounts of the relationship between matter and form. As Kellie Robertson has demonstrated, Middle English matere could refer ‘either to a physical substance (either prime matter or elemental matter) or to an “immaterial” activity.’ However, matere also had ‘more common and more specialized textual meanings’ largely lost to Modern English. Matere ‘regularly referred to […] the literary subject matter of a work,’ establishing a ‘homologous relation between textual matter and physical matter’ (Robertson, 2010, 112). This ‘homologous relation,’ the sense that the subject matter of a work might possess its own weight and liveliness, and that this might be the occasion for thinking carefully about the relationship of matter and form, seems just as apt in the super Palladium. The synecdoche of Greek hyle and its Latin counterpart materia – prime matter, but also ‘wood, woodland’ or ‘timber’ – was at the heart of a long philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle via Isidore of Seville and other medieval natural philosophers, in which wood was equated with prime matter and carpentered wood was a paradigmatic example of formed matter. However, by narrating some of the possible ‘privy werkyngs’ of that ‘mater,’ horticultural texts intimate some of its manifold capacities. The resistance, recalcitrance, and entropy of ‘mater’ – characteristics that are often at the forefront in horticultural texts – are reminders that it is never simply acquiescent to human designs. As J. Allan Mitchell, drawing on Vile´m Flusser’s The Shape of Things and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, writes, the resistance of objects and their materials ‘continually “provokes” us to take up an orientation towards things themselves, and, consequently, they are spurs to obsessive human industry’ (Mitchell, 2014, 133).3 The directions on the grafting of trees in particular provide the opportunity to reflect on the properties and potentialities of arboreal matter, as well as on how

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agency is distributed across diverse bodies in late medieval practical writing. Further, readers of the super Palladium and Bollard’s Craft may well have been familiar with a natural philosophical tradition running parallel to the familiar synecdoche of hyle and materia: in the work of Adelard of Bath, Guillaume of Conches, and a number of other medieval thinkers, the grafted tree provides a thought-provoking test case for questions regarding the elemental substance of trees and plants, and of how distinct bodies can be joined in new arrangements that not only survive, but flourish. Though they would not have expressed it in quite the same terms, many medieval writers seem alive to the fact that grafting ‘foregrounds the plasticity and receptivity of vegetal life[,…] its openness to the other at the expense of fixed identity’ (Marder, 2016, 15). With these connections and the super Palladium’s reflexive framing of its ‘mater’ in mind, we can think further about the extent to which horticultural manuals provide an occasion for ‘working through’ a range of natural philosophical questions regarding the properties, affordances, and even creativity of trees and plants. And while I am wary of repeating a familiar move in the history of Western metaphysics by too quickly abstracting away from the specificities of vegetal life on its own terms, the scalability of these narratives of material transformation to broader discussions of the ‘nature of matter’ seems key to the wide and enduring appeal of late medieval horticultural writing (Robertson, 2010, 106).

Co m p i l i n g p r a c t i c a l i t y, re c o u n t i n g w o n d e r The Middle English super Palladium survives in at least 13 manuscripts dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The range of texts alongside which it was copied and bound – from other works on planting and grafting, to astrological tables and calendars, to Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment for Princes – is instructive. By turning to the compilation of these texts, it is possible to consider the ‘literariness’ of practical writing not just as a property of its ‘verbal flourishes’ and formal and textual ‘exuberance,’ but also as an emergent property of its interaction with surrounding texts in a manuscript (Cooper, 2007, 498). One manuscript in particular provides the opportunity to consider how the ‘codicological interactions’ of texts can produce their own forms of literary effect and theoretical provocation (Bahr, 2015, 188). In Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e.Musaeo 116, a fifteenth-century anthology, the super Palladium follows copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe and The Book of John Mandeville. For all their differences, these works are similarly invested in the narration of ‘possible future[s],’ and convey an abiding concern with the role of practical or instructional information, the acquisition of knowledge, and the observable and calculable world.

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4 This copy of Mandeville’s Book is one of two surviving manuscripts of the ‘Bodley Version.’ This version condenses and reorganizes the text, in order to emphasize its ‘marvelous anecdotes’ (Higgins, 1997, 24). 5 Citations of the Bodley version of Mandeville’s Travels are by page number to Seymour’s 1963 edition.

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Chaucer frames his treatise on the astrolabe, and justifies its plain style, by writing that it was composed for his young son, Lewis (Chaucer, 2008, 1–5). Nevertheless, its popularity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is testament to the increasing demand for practical and scientific writing in the vernacular. Notwithstanding The Canterbury Tales, the Treatise survives in more manuscripts than any other of Chaucer’s works. The form of Chaucer’s treatise has much in common with the super Palladium: after the description of the astrolabe in the first section of the text, the second section comprises a list of desired outcomes, followed by explanations as to how they are to be calculated. As J. Allan Mitchell writes, the astrolabe initially seems a distinctly ‘humancentric’ instrument, one that makes ‘the whole world pivot on a lone individual.’ Yet by assembling text, object, subject, stars, and cosmos, Chaucer’s instructional manual narrates a more complex sense of distributed agency than any simple story of human mastery can convey, reminding its readers as it does so that ‘Calculating and coordinating are functions not of human cognition alone but of the collective agency of diverse bodies’ (Mitchell, 2014, 56). The similarities between the super Palladium and Chaucer’s Treatise are not only formal; while both texts can be read in terms of their ‘apparent instrumentality,’ they are also indicative of the ‘intimacies,’ cosmic and terrestrial, that are central to late medieval practical writing and its representation of various forms of ‘collective agency’ (Mitchell, 2014, 56). The fourteenth-century travel narrative The Book of John Mandeville differs markedly from the super Palladium and Chaucer’s Treatise in its form and narrative scope.4 However, it does share an interest with the super Palladium in the properties, affordances, and ‘privy werkyngs’ of vegetal life. In his account of his travels across Latin Christendom to Jerusalem and beyond, and the various cultural practices and natural and supernatural phenomena he encounters, Sir John describes a wide array of trees, plants, and carpentered objects. He notes that the inhabitants of the island of ‘Calamassus’ ‘make here housis and here shepis of redis [reeds] and alle here othere necessaries, as we don here of okys and of othere treis’ (137).5 Similarly, in his description of the wide variety of fruit trees and the ‘rychely arayed’ tables of the ‘Grete Cane’s’ palace and court (125–27), Sir John provides further ‘glimpses of the material elaborations of culture, where diverse properties and practices substantiate the human’ (Mitchell, 2014, 122). In Egypt, Sir John encounters ‘stedis and placis wher the erthe beryth freut vii. tymys in the yer,’ as well as the ‘applis of paradys,’ a fruit that bears ‘the figur of the Holy Cros’ in its core (35). He then describes the lignum aloes, the ‘tre that men callid aloes that comyth out of paradys,’ that also features in the super Palladium (37). As he travels further east, Sir John encounters the ‘ferly’ [wonder] of the phantom trees in Prester John’s lands, which also appear in the Roman d’Alexandre (101). Sir John also describes the Dry Tree, the ancient oak that has existed ‘syn the fyrste begynnyng of the world.’ He recounts the belief that the Dry Tree lost its

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leaves after the death of Christ, as well as the ‘dyuerse prophesies’ that it shall flower and bear fruit again once a ‘lord and prynce of the west […] conquere [s] the Holy Land’ (49). Yet Sir John’s account also reminds us that its allegorical or symbolic function does not exhaust its insistent materiality. As in the super Palladium, the arboreal matter described in the Book always ‘divulges something about itself […] that cannot be subsumed into allegory or wrested from the mundane’ (Cohen, 2015, 13). Sir John’s description concludes with an appropriately open-ended statement of the Dry Tree’s sundry properties: ‘And many othere vertues hath that dreie tre’ (49). The author of the super Palladium does not claim to have roamed as widely as Sir John, but he does record that he has traveled to Greece, Brabant, Calabria, Thuringia, and Salerno. Like Sir John, he reserves judgment on the efficacy of certain practices he has witnessed and vouches for others. In a passage that particularly resembles Sir John’s narrative voice, he asks the reader to ‘note wel’ that, while he was in Athens, he was taught ‘a wondyrful thing.’ If a small melon is bound in a stone or wooden mold that is ‘al graue [engraved] withinne,’ with the image of ‘a manys hed […] or sum other fygure,’ the fruit will ‘grow aftyr that forme’ (Gottfried, 1994, 154–61). Gottfried’s experience in Athens might seem slightly tame in comparison to Sir John’s accounts of the ancient Dry Tree, the wonders of Prester John’s lands, or the grand architecture and carpentry of the Great Khan’s court. However, at many points, the super Palladium does seem to share with Mandeville’s Book an approach to wonder or the ‘wondyrful thing’ not as something to be transcended or explained away (reductively or otherwise), but rather as something to ‘dwell upon’ (Prendergast, 2013, 247). Like the direction for making a pearl appear in the core of an apple, might we think of the passage on the ‘wondyrful thing’ as its own kind of mimesis, as a facsimile or modelling of the ‘creative impulses’ that many medieval thinkers held to be inherent to the natural world (Cohen, 2015, 170)? The super Palladium’s account of this ‘wondyrful thing’ also invites comparisons with late medieval popular romance, a genre which, like Mandeville’s Book, is ‘permeated by an aesthetic and a sensibility that stressed the variety and diversity of nature’ (Daston and Park, 1998, 34). The ‘ympe’ [grafted] tree of the fourteenth-century Breton lay Sir Orfeo is the most obvious instance of an overlap between horticultural practice and romance worldmaking. From the familiar, domesticated space of an orchard, the ‘ympe’ tree provides a portal to an alternate dimension, a realm ruled by a fairy king, where the familiar physical laws of cause and effect seem to have been suspended, and where the properties of natural materials have the power to disturb even the most familiar of temporal schemes: the precious stones adorning the fairy king’s castle shine ‘as bright as doth at none the sonne,’ rendering day and night all but indistinguishable (Sir Orfeo, 1995, l. 372). We might also think more generally, though, about how horticultural texts represent and narrate a sense of eventful, even wondrous change that also occurs

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6 Citations of John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum are by page number to Seymour and Ligey’s 1987 edition.

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in romance: the appearance of ‘dyuers thyngis’ or a long-hidden ‘synge’ where we might not expect to find them; the conjunction of two or more living bodies to produce a new, though potentially unstable assemblage; or the transformation of a corpus (vegetable, animal, or human) from one state to another. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has demonstrated so compellingly, for all their formal and generic differences, the ‘disparate literary and scientific texts’ of the medieval age often share an important feature: these texts do not so much abstract matter as ‘place materiality into action’ (Cohen, 2015, 139). Like other forms of practical writing, horticultural manuals are ostensibly structured according to the principle that an action outside of the text, in the world, ‘stands as the complement and realization of one’s reading’ (Orlemanski, 2011, 196). The lowly place of vegetal life within the scala naturae, the hierarchical ‘great chain of being’ that structured medieval thought about the cosmos, would seem to lend it to instrumentalization. In the Aristotelian world view that underpinned the scala naturae, vegetal life partakes only in the first of the three kinds of living soul: nutritive, sensitive, and rational. As John Trevisa writes in his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, vegetal life is ‘yhud,’ it has ‘no soule of feelynge’ (882–3).6 The endurance of this kind of compartmentalization of vegetal life is clear. The ‘habitual instrumentalization of the entire plant kingdom’ has reached a grim nadir in 21st-century ‘neoliberal biopolitics’ and its interlocking regimes of hybridization and homogenization of vegetal life in the pursuit of ever-growing profits (Sandilands, 2017, 18, 21). Yet Trevisa also writes that plants and trees are ‘dyuers in substaunce, in vertu, and in worchynge,’ a statement that sets the scene for a broad-ranging catalogue of vegetal life that revels in its astonishing variety and vitality as well as in its admirable resilience (883). That Book 17, on herbs, plants, and trees, is the longest of De proprietatibus rerum seems appropriate: it is verdant, even overgrown at many points. As Michael Marder has demonstrated, for all the enduring influence of the Aristotelian three-part distinction of living soul, the ‘open-endedness’ of vegetal life ‘encroaches’ on even the most orderly of classificatory or metaphysical schemes (Marder, 2014, 35). While somewhat more bounded in their scope than Book 17 of De proprietatibus rerum, horticultural manuals like the super Palladium and Bollard’s Craft are another place where the ‘open-endedness’ of vegetal life is a spur to further contemplation of its ‘dyuers […] worchynge.’ The ‘possible future[s]’ invoked by practical writing are open-ended, too. The possibility always exists that something will occur that refuses or even exceeds human intention, and while some results can be more confidently predicted than others, they can never be guaranteed. The kind of industry or craft described is not a site of straightforward human mastery, but frequently one of a ‘feedback loop between active objects and reactive, self-correcting subjects’ (Mitchell, 2014, 133).

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Inscribed in the passage detailing how to make ‘wrytyng or peynture’ appear in peach kernels and at various other points in the super Palladium, I argue, is not simply the prospect that matere will neatly bear up whatever designs we impart to it. The text also evokes our dependence on wood and plants for what John Mandeville calls the ‘necessaries’ of human existence (not least for books and manuscripts: wooden boards, paper, ink, pigment, and dyes are all dependent on vegetal matter), as well as the intricacies and eventfulness of material transformation, and the animacy, perhaps even creativity, of vegetal life.

Ac knowledgment With thanks to Vin Nardizzi and Rob Barrett for their invitation to contribute to this special issue and to Chris Law for his useful comments on critical plant studies.

About the Author Tom White is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and contributing editor of the Glasgow Review of Books. This essay is part of a larger project on medieval and early modern horticultural writing and the Capitalocene (E-mail: thomas. [email protected]).

References Bahr, A. 2015. Miscellaneity and Variance in the Medieval Manuscript Book. In The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, eds. M. Johnston and M. van Dussen, 181–198. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Braekman, W.L. 1985. Bollard’s Middle English Book of Planting and Grafting and Its Background. Studia Neophilologica 57(1): 19–39. Bushnell, R. 2003. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chaucer, G. 2008. A Treatise on the Astrolabe. In The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. L. D. Benson et al., 661–683. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cohen, J.J. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cooper, L.H. 2007. The Poetics of Practicality. In Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. P. Strohm, 491–505. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Daston, L. and K. Park. 1998. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books. Gottfried von Franken. 1994. A Middle English Treatise on Horticulture: Godfridus super Palladium, ed. D.G. Cylkowski. In Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. L.M. Matheson, 301–330. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press. Higgins, I. 1997. Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Marder, M. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. 2016. Grafts: Writings on Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. MED (Middle English Dictionary). 2013. Ann Arbor, MI: Regents of the University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Mitchell, J.A. 2014. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Orlemanski, J. 2011. Physiognomy and Otiose Practicality. Exemplaria 23(2): 194–218. Prendergast, T. 2013. Canon Formation. In A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. M. Turner, 239–52. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Robertson, K. 2010. Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto. Exemplaria 22(2): 99–118. Sandilands, C. 2017. Vegetate. In Veer Ecology, eds. J.J. Cohen and L. Duckert, 16–29. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Seymour, M., ed. 1963. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels. Early English Text Society, OS. 253. London: Oxford University Press. Seymour, M. and G.M. Liegey, eds. 1987. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Sir Orfeo. 1995. The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. A. Laskaya and E. Salisbury. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Wakelin, D. 2007. Humanism, Reading and English Literature, 1430–1530. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Original Article

Fruit and rot: Vegetal theology in Perceforest

Brooke Heidenreich Findley Division of Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University–Altoona, Altoona, PA, USA.

Abstract In the French prose romance Perceforest, an extended passage describes the Creator as a tree bearing the world’s creatures on its branches like fruit. The fruit draws nourishment from the tree as from a breast before coming to ripeness, falling to the ground, rotting, and eventually being resurrected in a new form. The imagery of fruit and rot evokes Eucharistic and alchemical traditions, suggesting a vegetal model of death and resurrection. In Perceforest, rot is an essential part of a cyclical cosmos, while bodies that refuse to rot are dangerous and must be destroyed. By purging the British forests of unrotted bodies, the hero Gallafur restores the vegetal cycle of decay and rebirth, and shows himself to be worthy of the throne. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 455–466. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0101-7

Wo r l d - t r e e a s C r e a t o r G o d In a remarkable passage of the fifteenth-century French prose romance Perceforest, the narrator describes the Creator God as a divine fruit-bearing tree: Ha! Gentil Ouvrier auquel toute creature animee et sans ame pent, en especial toy, homme, qui as ame, sens et raison en toy depar si Excellent Ouvrier, auquel tu pens en autelle maniere comme le fruit pend a l’arbre et prent nourrec¸on par la chaleur qui en luy est aussi comme la mamelle, par  2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 455–466

Chapter 6 was originally published as Findley, B. H. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 455–466. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0101-7.

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ou la substance luy vient dont il se nourrist tant qu’il vient a meurison. (Perceforest, 1999, 221)

1 All Old French translations are mine.

[Ah, Noble Fashioner from whom all creatures hang, those with souls and those without, and especially you, man, whose soul, understanding, and reason come from the most Excellent Fashioner. You hang from [the Fashioner] as fruit hangs from a tree, taking nourishment from his heat as from a breast, through which comes the substance that nourishes [the fruit] until it comes to maturity.]1 The ‘Fashioner’ of this passage is both creator and world-tree, bearing all creatures in its branches and ‘nursing’ them until they come to maturity. This imagery of breastfeeding and reproduction quickly changes to one of death and decay: tant qu’il vient a meurison par droit eaige en convoitant tousjours la meilleure fin, par quoy il puist refourmer de luy mesmes son semblable en jectant sa despouille a terre que prestee luy a, qui reva dont elle vient, par quoy par la pourreture Nature la subtille en rec¸oit la semence qui par dedens estoit enclose, qui est ainsi comme l’ame de l’omme, et l’enclot es entrailles de la terre sans empirer par la vertu que le Soubtil Ouvrier luy a donnee, et le fait tant porter qu’il en renaist au temps nouvel ses samblables. (Perceforest, 1999, 221) [until it comes to maturity at the proper age, always seeking the best end, in order to form another like itself. Then it throws its husk to the ground from whence it came, and as it rots subtle Nature receives the seed that was enclosed within, which is like the soul of man. Nature encloses this seed in the womb of the earth without harming it, by the power that the Subtle Fashioner gave her, and carries it until in the new season similar creatures are born.] By evoking the tree’s ‘breast,’ the fruit’s impregnating ‘seed,’ and the earth’s ‘womb,’ this passage describes plant reproduction in animal terms. However, the divine tree has capacities that exceed those of any animal. It is hermaphroditic, able not only to ‘breastfeed’ its offspring like a human or an animal (the Middle French term ‘mamelle’ can be used for both a human breast and an animal’s teat), but also to impregnate the earth beneath it with its ‘seed.’ Such images seem to imply that plants can behave like animals, but the end of the passage reverses the metaphor, suggesting instead that animals may sometimes behave like plants. Through an equivocation between man and fruit (though I have translated ‘il’ as ‘it,’ it is also ‘he’), the passage makes the surprising claim that a buried corpse will behave like a buried fruit: it will rot, and in time a similar creature [‘samblable’] will grow from its ‘seed.’

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Fruit and rot: Vegetal theology in Perceforest

The following pages clarify the theological meaning of this vegetal metaphor, explaining that the plant springing from the body’s rotted ‘fruit’ will be a heavenly one: He´! seul homme, qui es la plus noble creature entre les creatures […] tu chie´s et vas morir et la terre reprent ta despouille qu’elle t’a prestee aussi comme du fruit ou est la semence, c’est a dire ton ame qui toute nue demeure, par laquelle ton semblable doit renaistre, non pas en terre, mais es cieulx. (Perceforest, 1999, 222) [Ah! Man alone, most noble of all creatures […] you fall and die and the earth takes back the husk it lent you, as it does with a fruit containing a seed. That seed is your soul, which remains naked, and through which your likeness will be reborn, not on earth, but in heaven.] From the soul-seed, the ‘knot of being,’ a heavenly body will spring.2 At the resurrection of the body, the romance postulates, humans will behave like plants, purified and reborn after rot. The vegetal theology of breastfeeding, putrefaction, and rebirth outlined in this passage is particularly appropriate to Perceforest, a romance in which plants and plant growth play a central role. Set in a pre-Arthurian Britain portrayed as forested and undeveloped, Perceforest links the establishment of courtly civilization with the management and clearing of forests. As I have argued elsewhere, the role of the eponymous king is analogous to that of a good forester who manages and cultivates his realm, while the action of cutting back tangles and clearing pathways is a metaphor for carving out a civilization in a wilderness (Findley, 2016). This passage, however, introduces a different vegetal metaphor, that of the compost heap. It juxtaposes imagery of breastfeeding and rot, two themes that I will examine throughout this essay. The immediate context of the passage is one of death and its aftermath: Perceforest has been neglecting his role as forester king because of his grief at the untimely death of Alexander the Great, to whom he owes his throne. The Creator Tree passage introduces the chapter in which Perceforest finally shakes off his melancholy with the help of a wise hermit, Dardanon, who advises him to stop weeping for the dead and concern himself with the living (Perceforest, 1999, 237). Juxtaposed with these events, the image of the divine tree portrays death as a necessary and cyclical part of life, signaling that the king must learn the place of death in a well-ordered cosmos. Death is not a final end, not because of any explicitly Christian afterlife (the characters in Perceforest live before the birth of Christ, but practice a vaguely Christian deism), but because rot is necessary for a new beginning. Death occurs at ripeness, the ‘proper age,’ and is never too soon (Perceforest, 1999, 221). The mourning Perceforest can accept his friend and sovereign’s death by imagining it in plant terms. Being plantlike, the romance suggests, is something to aspire to.

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2 The French poet Francis Ponge refers to the seed as a ‘knot of being’ (cited in Marder, 2013, 63).

Findley

The tree of the Perceforest passage is both cosmos and God, creation and creator – not one creature but a system of detachable, ever-changing parts. Its ability to shed parts without injury to the whole, and to produce life from rot through the seed’s death and rebirth, are seen as divine. As plant philosopher Michael Marder has argued, following Hegel, the plant enjoys a unique status as an assemblage of parts that can be shed and regrown: ‘Its parts […] transcend the distinction between ‘‘part’’ and ‘‘whole’’; in their externality to one another, they are both members of a plant and independent entities in their own right’ (Marder, 2013, 84). This gives vegetal life a particularly close relationship with death: ‘The externality of parts in relation to the whole and to each other engrains death itself into vegetal life. […] The plant […] is a novice in the sphere of living’ (Marder, 2013, 83). The Perceforest passage uses similar imagery to show how humans are both individuals and part of a great cosmic cycle of life and death, mortal yet able to be resurrected. While Perceforest figures humans as ripening and rotting fruit, Heidegger contrasts the ripening of fruit with human death: ripening is the fulfillment of the fruit, while the human experience of being [Dasein] ends in unfulfillment (cited in Marder, 2013, 98–99). Vegetal life is founded on death. Born from rot, the plant is a living manifestation of a corpse: ‘the grave covered by a flowerbed is always already opened’ (Marder, 2013, 67). The plant’s ‘bi-directionality of growth, striving at once toward light and toward darkness’ marks its dual existence in the greenness of the world above and the dank corruption of the world below (Marder, 2013, 63). Yet the Perceforest passage goes further, making the surprising claim that vegetal rot has a divine function. In so doing, it evokes Eucharistic and alchemical traditions. As I will discuss below, medieval and early modern alchemical thought affords a central role to the creative power of putrescence. However, the Eucharist is the most readily available example of divine rot, in which plants are ‘sublimated into the divine body,’ through the fermentation of grapes and wheat into wine and bread (Marder, 2013, 33). The Eucharistic overtones of the Perceforest passage are central to understanding its meaning: they are the crux at which life and death intersect.

Breasts and Eucharistic feeding Perceforest’s world-tree ‘breastfeeds’ its fruit: the tree itself, not the fruit, plays the role of nourishing breast. This arrangement both references and displaces commonplace imagery that associates breasts with fruit and women with fruitbearing trees. According to Marilyn Yalom, ‘with their breasts represented like udders or like fruit on a tree, women have traditionally been conflated with the animal and plant kingdoms’ (Yalom, 1998, 16). Artemis of Ephesus provides a striking example of the blurring of lines between goddess, animal, and tree: ‘The original Ephesian Artemis was adorned with clusters of large dates – symbols of

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fertility – which later came to be mistaken for multiple breasts’ (Yalom, 1998, 16). In the Song of Songs, the beloved is similarly described as a tree with fruity breasts: ‘There you stand like a palm/Your breasts clusters of dates/Shall I climb that palm/And take hold of the boughs?/Your breasts will be tender/As clusters of grapes’ (quoted in Yalom, 1998, 29–30). Yalom also notes the preponderance of fruit-like breasts in medieval and early modern love literature, with different sources comparing them to apples, peaches, and pears (Yalom, 1998, 54–5). Courtly heroines in medieval French literature sometimes sport fruity breasts, like the Old French Philomena: ‘autressi come deus pomettes/estoient ses deus mamelettes’ [‘just like two little apples/were her two little breasts’] (Chre´tien, 1909, 36.161–2). The comic text Aucassin and Nicolette apparently parodies such a description by comparing its heroine’s breasts to ‘two walnuts’ [‘deus nois gauges’] (Aucassin, 1984, 80). A different tree-woman, one whose vegetal qualities are not sexualized, is the Virgin Mary. In Guillaume de Deguileville’s fourteenth-century poem Pe`lerinage de l’aˆme, the Virgin Mary is portrayed as a tree and Christ as her fruit. Deguileville’s poem is one of a number of medieval Christian texts that portray a cosmological tree, often associated with the cross. As Eleanor Greenhill shows, such texts equivocate between tree, cosmos, and godhead by proposing an ‘identification […] of the Logos with the Cross’ (Greenhill, 1954, 333). The cosmological tree links heaven and earth, and sometimes provides a ladder to heaven. Located at the center of the universe, it harks back to an ancient Semitic tradition of the umbilicus terrae, the navel of the world (Greenhill, 1954, 335). Christ is both flower and fruit of the tree/cross, coming to ripeness and then, at the crucifixion, falling to earth (Greenhill, 1954, 353–4). Deguileville’s poem creates a variation on this theme by including two trees: a dry tree representing the cross, and a green tree representing Mary. The green tree bears the apple that is Christ, but does so in a way more befitting human reproduction, carrying it for nine months within its trunk (Deguileville, 1895, 197.5978–9). Breastfeeding imagery is associated not with the Mary-tree, but with Christ, the apple. When the apple is nailed to the dry tree, its juice runs down, and all are invited to drink as at a mother’s breast: Venes, succies, n’est rien si douls! Faites que¨ yvres soies tous De la grant amour qu’a vous a! Mere ne ve¨istes piec’a Qui si tost sa cote fendist Pour enfant qu’elle nourrisist Et pour mammelle li donner Comme tost s’est laissie fourrer Et son escorce trespercier Pour vous faire son jus succier. (217.6603–12)

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[Come, suck, there is nothing so sweet! Make yourselves drunk with the great love he bears you! More readily than a mother opens her tunic for a nursing child, to give him the breast, so [the apple] allows himself to be ravaged, and his skin pierced, so you can suck his juice.]

3 Karl Steel suggests dividing descriptions of rotting corpses into three categories: dry, dusty, and wet. In this, he partly follows Maurice Bloch and Georges Bataille, who oppose dry rot to wet rot (Steel, 2013, 95). Steel adds the category ‘dusty,’ explaining, ‘a dusty death […] leaves no remainder’ – the body is imagined to crumble away to nothing (96).

The association of breastfeeding imagery with the crucified Christ, and in particular the image of Christ offering blood from the wound in his side as a mother offers milk from her breast, has been discussed at length by Caroline Walker Bynum. She offers numerous examples, both textual and iconographic, of Christ’s ‘Eucharistic feeding of Christians with liquid exuded from his breast’ (Bynum, 1991, 205). In one fifteenth-century painting, Christ gestures to the wound in his side while Mary holds her naked apple-like breast (Bynum, 1991, 208); in another, Mary nurses a Christ child while the crucified Christ expresses blood from his breast into a cup (Bynum, 1991, 209). Cementing the parallel, medieval science held that breast milk was transmuted blood: ‘a fourteenthcentury surgeon wrote that milk is blood ‘‘twice cooked’’’ (Bynum, 1991, 214; see also Orland, 2013, 41–2). While Bynum establishes the connection between breastfeeding and Eucharistic feeding, Deguileville’s poem makes both vegetal. For Deguileville, as in Perceforest, the vegetal is a metaphor for the divine. While Perceforest lingers on the imagery of rot, here the Christ-apple disintegrates by becoming liquid, as the fruit is pierced, split open, and destroyed to yield its juice. Might the apple’s becoming liquid be read as a form of wet rot?3 Though the apple’s juice is fresh, the Eucharistic wine is fermented, and milk is ‘cooked blood.’ To what extent does the imagery of wetness imply a process of death and decay?

Rot and rebir th Matthew Paris’s chronicle offers one particularly graphic account of a body’s becoming liquid through rot. After his death, King Henry I’s corpse was wrapped in ox-hides and ‘remained […] for a long time unburied’ before being taken to its final resting place in Caen: His body was set down in the church in front of his father’s tomb, when a black and horrible liquid began to seep through the ox-hides. Collected in pots placed beneath the bier […] this liquid aroused great horror in those who saw the sight. (cited in Bagliani, 2001, 327) The liquid emanating from Henry’s corpse is collected in pots in spite of the ‘horror’ it inspires, perhaps because of the respect due it as a part of the king’s body. Such activity is dangerous, for the putrescent corpse is not only horrifying, but deadly. Matthew reports that the doctor hired to preserve Henry’s corpse

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‘died because of the foul odor […] the last of the many victims of King Henry’ (Bagliani, 2001, 327). Henry’s corpse had time to seep and flow because he died far from his chosen burial place. As Bagliani documents, the need to transport corpses of important individuals from their place of death to their final resting place resulted in a number of gruesome practices. Corpses of those who died far from home might be eviscerated, dismembered, or even boiled to separate the flesh from the bones, before being carried to their chosen burial places. Such practices, Bagliani argues, reveal an anxiety about rot: they were an attempt to separate the nonputrescent parts of the corpse from the putrescent parts, and to identify the deceased individual with the former (Bagliani, 2001, 329). In a papal bull dating from 1299, Boniface VIII condemned such practices, calling them ‘utterly abominable,’ and recommended instead a double burial to give the corpse time to rot naturally: Let them be given Christian burial at the place of their death, and let there be a period of waiting until their bodies have crumbled to dust, [so that then] they can then be carried to the place they chose for burial. (cited in Bagliani, 2001, 333) By requiring that bodies be buried and allowed to ‘crumble to dust,’ Boniface insists on the importance of rot. The bull contrasts the natural, peaceful process of decay with stark images of dismemberment: ‘savagely empty[ing] the body of its entrails,’ ‘cutting it up into bits,’ ‘boil[ing] it up over a fire’ (Bagliani, 2001, 333). Such practices nonetheless persisted, and papal dispensations for dismemberment of important corpses continued to be issued long after Boniface’s bull (Bagliani, 2001, 337). The view that rot is necessary, even desirable, is not unique to Boniface: it is also a hallmark of the ancient and medieval science of alchemy. In alchemical thought, putrefaction is a necessary stage in the process of regeneration for plants, metals, and humans alike. Alchemy studies the process whereby imperfect materials undergo death and decay so as to be reborn as a perfect material, gold (Linden, 2003, 16). One of the necessary stages in the production of the philosopher’s stone is putrefaction, which is understood in plant terms: ‘the ‘‘seeds’’ of metals […] must also die if they are to be reborn as more perfect forms’ (Linden, 2003, 17). As Paracelsus explains in his early sixteenth-century Of the Nature of Things: It may bee said that all things are naturally generated of the Earth by means of putrefaction. For Putrefaction is the chiefe degree and first step to Generation. […] Putrefaction produceth great matters, as of this wee have a most famous example in the holy Gospel, where Christ saith: Unless a grain of Wheat bee cast into the Earth, and be putrefied, it cannot bring forth fruit in a hundred fold. Hence also we must know that many things

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are multiplyed in putrefaction so as to bring forth excellent fruit. For putrefaction is the change and death of all things, and destruction of the first essence of all Naturall things; whence there ariseth a regeneration, and new generation a thousand times better. (quoted in Linden, 2003, 152) For Paracelsus, the alchemist’s task is to make metals behave like plants: growing, ripening, and decaying. Just as rain and sun make the earth bear fruit, so it is possible ‘through the wise and skilfull Art of Alchymy, to make that which is barren, fruitfull, and that which is crude, to ripen, and all things to grow, and to be increased’ (Linden, 2003, 155). Indeed, Paracelsus states that through the alchemist’s art, gold may be so ‘exalted’ that it will grow like a tree: It is possible also that Gold, through industry and skill of an expert Alchymist, may bee so far exalted that it may grow in a glasse like a tree, with many wonderfull boughs and leaves. (Linden, 2003, 155) Paracelsus describes how to bring gold to this ‘exalted’ state. He instructs readers to dissolve it with acids into a powder and then water the powder as one might a plant: This doe so long untill thou seest the Gold to rise in the glass and grow after the manner of a tree, having many boughs and leaves: and so there is made of Gold a wonderful and pleasant shrub, which the Alchymists call their Golden hearb and the Philosophers Tree. In like manner you may proceed with Silver and other Metalls. (Linden, 2003, 155) For Paracelsus, the most ‘exalted’ state of metal is a plant-like one, in which it grows and puts out branches and leaves. Just as metals may behave like plants, so may humans at the resurrection, being miraculously reborn from their own rotten bodies: For because a naturall man is of the earth, the Earth is also his Mother, into which hee must return, and there must lose his natural earthly flesh, and so be regenerated at the last day in a new celestiall and purified flesh. (Linden, 2003, 157) In terms that closely echo the Perceforest passage – which was written less than a century earlier, across the medieval-early modern divide – Paracelsus describes human resurrection using the metaphor of rot and vegetal growth. For Paracelsus as in Perceforest, the maternal earth functions as a womb, a place of decay and regeneration. Decay is a mystical process that gives rise to new life – a life that is, at its origin, vegetal.

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Refusing to rot: Doritos and preserved bodies What happens when bodies refuse to rot? Both feminist thinker Ladelle McWhorter and Perceforest ask this question, and both arrive at similar answers. A brief section of McWhorter’s Bodies and Pleasures, entitled ‘Becoming Dirt,’ offers an example of thinking through rot as a medium for life. On a quest to grow the perfect tomato, McWhorter recounts how she gains a ‘high regard for dirt’ (McWhorter, 1999, 167), learning to think of it as much more than an ‘inert platform’ for plant life (McWhorter, 1999, 165). In so doing, she also critiques the Platonic disdain for matter, chaos, and the seemingly irrational process of decay. Plato’s chora, McWhorter suggests, is associated with dirt (‘great expanses of fields and furrows, vast tracts of nothing but dirt’ [McWhorter, 1999, 166]). But while for Plato, the irrational, primordial feminine, that which ‘drives all created things to eventual dissolution and destruction’ is to be feared (McWhorter, 1999, 166), McWhorter suggests a different view: It’s not that some external force (like Plato’s demiurge) comes on the scene and subdues dirt temporarily and carves life forms out of it, only to have dirt reassert itself and drag the beautiful forms back down. It’s that the dirt’s activity gives occasion for the play of beautiful things. Life never surpasses dirt, because life rides on dirt’s coattails. Life has no vehicle of its own. Whatever discreteness, integrity, and identity living things may have, it all comes from the activity of that undifferentiated, much maligned stuff we call dirt. (McWhorter, 1999, 167) McWhorter eventually comes to see dirt as kin to her own body, an insight that alters her sense of self. Finishing a bag of Doritos, she considers composting the crumbs and reads the list of ingredients on the bag (Yellow 6, Red 40…): Nope, I thought, can’t feed that crap to my dirt. I threw the bag of crumbs in the trash and reached for that one last chip. It was halfway to my mouth before I was struck by what I’d just said. I looked out the kitchen window at my garden, my trenches, my dirt, and then my gaze turned downward toward my Dorito-stained hand. Dirt, and flesh. Suddenly it occurred to me that, for all their differences, these two things I was looking at were cousins – not close cousins, but cousins, several deviations now removed. I haven’t purchased a bag of Doritos since. (McWhorter, 1999, 167) Care of her dirt leads McWhorter to reconsider the care of her own flesh. She asks what it would mean to treat her own body as well as she treats her compost. Even as she recognizes the kinship between flesh and dirt, she also identifies something that has no place in that web of relationships: processed food. Yellow 6 and Red 40 don’t belong in a compost trench: not candidates for decay, no good at rot, they also have no place in life.

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Like McWhorter, Perceforest argues that life is created by decay. Conversely, that which does not decay does not live. While the image of the cosmic tree with which I started places death and decay at the center of a cyclical cosmos, other sections of Perceforest suggest the problems caused when decay is removed from the equation. Like McWhorter’s Doritos, the decay-free world as Perceforest portrays it is artificial, too-bright, treacherous. In one particularly revealing passage, a spirit calling himself the king of Faerie tries to tempt the virtuous knight Gallafur with descriptions of an earthly paradise. This paradise manifests itself as a beautiful garden in which all seasons but winter are present at once, and trees impossibly bear buds, flowers, and fruit all together: ‘Les arbres y sont tousjours fueillus, et […] ilz sont chargie´s en tous temps de boutons et de fleurs, de fruit vert et meur’ (Perceforest, 2015, 47) [‘The trees are always leafy […] and always laden with buds and flowers, green and ripe fruit’]. Women, too, can be found in abundance: born from flowers, already ripe for love (Perceforest, 2015, 49). What is missing from this paradise is any form of death or decay: the trees never lose their leaves, the fruit never falls or rots, buds open to flowers that give birth to women, but never wither or die. In fact, the spirit promising this evergreen paradise is a demon, and his purpose is to distract Gallafur from destroying a monument to death – the tomb of the enchanter Darnant. This is one of a series of ‘haunted places’ that Gallafur must expurgate – traces of battles between Perceforest’s followers and the people who held the forests before them, all of whom the romance calls evil enchanters or demons. Each of these haunted monuments involves undecayed corpses: four knights sit headless on their horses, and the body of an old woman is pinned to a tree with a knife. As long as the corpses of Perceforest’s enemies remain, miraculously preserved, their spirits will haunt the forest. A great tree, known as the Pine of the Strange Marvel, is a particularly interesting haunted site. The corpse of an old woman is pinned to the tree. After Gallafur pierces the corpse with his sword, the corpse crumbles to dust; a tempest arises, and the tree, too, is destroyed: ‘L’arbre estoit esrachie´ hors de terre et desrompu par pieces qui estoient jettees par la place’ (Perceforest, 2015, 311) [‘The tree was torn from the ground and broken into pieces that were scattered over the area’]. Bearing no fruit, a place of death but not decay, the pine is the inverse of the cosmic tree. It has also been a site of constant disruption, causing problems for knights throughout the romance: an inscription challenges them to pass the night there, but when they do, evil spirits arrive and carry them off. Haunted places like the pine are Perceforest’s equivalent of McWhorter’s Doritos: alien bodies and otherworlds that refuse to decay, and as such, also refuse to live. Like Yellow 6 and Red 40, the enchanted corpses don’t disintegrate, and thus never go away. Only after being expurgated by Gallafur’s magic sword can each corpse finally crumble to dust. Gallafur will eventually

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succeed Perceforest as king and restore his realm; thus, decay also plays a central role in the establishment of a new king and the regeneration of his kingdom. In different ways, then, Perceforest advocates both vegetal restraint and vegetal abundance. It not only idealizes the king’s taming of the forests through pruning and clearing, but also shows the importance of decay and the proliferation of growth that arises from it. In fact, the two are related, as the restraint shown by the king allows vegetal growth to be what it must be: fertile, cyclical, and rotten at the core. Gallafur’s virtue and chastity permit him to resist the delights of the false earthly paradise, purge the forest of its haunting spirits, and force their undecayed bodies to crumble to dust. By restoring the cycle of growth and decay, he shows himself to be worthy of the crown.

About the Author Brooke Heidenreich Findley is an Associate Professor of French and Women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University–Altoona, where she also teaches courses in medieval literature and culture. Her research focuses on ecocriticism, feminist theory, and Arthurian romances. She is the author of a number of articles and a book, Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative: Gender and Fictions of Literary Creation (2012). Her current project explores ideas of masculinity, wildness, and civilization in the medieval French romance Perceforest (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Aucassin et Nicolette. 1984. ed. J. Dufournet. Paris, France: Flammarion. Bagliani, A.P. 2001. The Corpse in the Middle Ages: The Problem of the Division of the Body. In The Medieval World, eds. P. Linehan and J.L. Nelson, 327–41. New York: Routledge. Bynum, C.W. 1991. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone. Chre´tien de Troyes. 1909. Philomena, ed. C. de Boer. Paris, France: Librairie Paul Geuthner. Findley, B.H. 2016. The King’s Tree Body: The Taming of the Wilderness and the Ecology of Kingship in Perceforest. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46(2): 233–62. Greenhill, E.S. 1954. The Child in the Tree: A Study of the Cosmological Tree in Christian Tradition. Traditio 10: 323–71. Guillaume de Deguileville. 1895. Le Pe`lerinage de l’aˆme, ed. J.J. Stu¨rzinger. London: Nichols & Sons.

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Linden, S.J. 2003. The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Marder, M. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. McWhorter, L. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Orland, B. 2013. Why Could Early Modern Men Lactate? Gender Identity and Metabolic Narrations in Humoral Medicine. In Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices, ed. J.G. Sperling, 37–54. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Perceforest. 1999. Part II, Vol. I of Textes Litte´raires Franc¸ais 506, ed. G. Roussineau. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz. Perceforest. 2015. Part VI, Vol. I of Textes Litte´raires Franc¸ais 631, ed. G. Roussineau. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz. Steel, K. 2013. Abyss: Everything is Food. postmedieval 4(1): 93–104. Yalom, M. 1998. A History of the Breast. New York: Knopf.

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Original Article

Before and after plants

Jessica Rosenberg Department of English, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, United States.

Abstract This essay explores how early modern English gardening books train their readers to encounter the future. These works are plotted with the rhetoric of anticipation, teaching planting in an environment of risk, promise, disappointment, and decay, and folding readers and gardeners into the inhuman rhythms of plant time. Through an investigation of ideas about lifespan, memory, and survival in the works of orchardists William Lawson and Ralph Austen, I show how these practical engagements with planting imagine a version of time that depends as much on the recursive attachments of touch as the linear progress of sequence. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 467–477. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0103-5

To write about premodern plants is to tell a history of the future. Anyone who has spent time with gardening books, modern or premodern, has become accustomed to the rhetoric of anticipation: these books train us to encounter plants in an ambient environment of risk, promise, investment, disappointment, decay. Plants themselves, as Aristotle formatively characterized them, are quintessentially growing beings, unbounded by the teleology in which other creatures are formed. Habits of thinking-forward provide the imaginative conditions of living with (or writing poetry about) plants, beings with whom we keep pace only in overreaching our own rhythms. In this paper, I consider the habits of thought and language associated with these projective temporalities by asking how early modern gardeners thought about the problem of lifespan. The measurement in question here is specifically lifespan, not life expectancy, a modern statistical calculation distinct from the Ó 2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 467–477

Chapter 7 was originally published as Rosenberg, J. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 467–477. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0103-5.

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forms of thought we encounter in early modern works on planting and cultivation. Instead, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century plant-futures work with conjecture, fiction, similitude, and touch to emerge at the edge of an epistemological practice we might recognize as prediction. The tree they grapple with, in turn, absorbs a dynamic mixture of temporalities – futurological, nostalgic, memorial, recursive, cyclical. The futures of premodern plants never only look forwards; at any moment, they enfold past, present, and future within them. At the center of my discussion is the orchard-keeper, clergyman, and writer William Lawson, whose A New Orchard and Garden was first printed in 1618 and then expanded and reissued a dozen additional times through the seventeenth century. The promise of an ‘end’ echoes through Lawson’s treatise: ‘the end of trees,’ in both the table of contents (Lawson, 1618, sig. A4r) and marginal notes (35–6), names the purpose of planting and the purpose of his text, as well as the well-formed shape of a fruit-tree’s life, in time (its lifespan) and in space (the ideal reach of its branches). Lawson notes that these two qualities are the most difficult for a new gardener to learn: where to prune and how long to expect a given tree to live set a limit for what might be clearly conveyed in language. Lawson’s interest in the appointed term and scope of the tree runs counter to his investment, expressed at other points in his treatise, in ‘infinite profit’ (10) and ‘infinite twigs’ (24) – corollaries of an unbounded future of accretion and addition akin to the capacities that Michael Marder calls the ‘bad infinities’ of plant temporality (Marder, 2013, 107–12). At the same time, Lawson and other orchard-keepers struggle with a concept largely alien to Marder’s conception of plant heterotemporality: term, or span. Though it names a temporal quantity, span is a quantity we usually understand as distance measured in space: a familiar way for thinking about the length of a life. But, following its likely etymology, ‘to span’ means not just to reach across but – like a spanner – to yoke, tighten, or confine. To have a span in this sense is to be subject to grasping or holding, and its primary quality is as much finitude as extension. As Iago sings, ‘A soldier’s a man; / O, man’s life’s but a span’ (Shakespeare, 2006b, II.iii.65–6). Span becomes a site from which early modern plant-thinkers find common ground between humans and trees, but it also offers a vantage from which that comparison fails. Citing Cicero, who writes in De Senectute that we should plant trees so they should outlive us, Lawson deploys arboreal longevity as both exhortation to plant and memento mori, a reminder of the tender brevity of human lives. Ultimately, the temporalities I consider in this essay place trees and humans in alternate and uneven forms of relation, defined sometimes by similitude and sometimes by human exceptionalism. Many of the associations between humans and trees reflect the marks each bear of nobility – their uprightness, their vertical reach towards the heavens, their relatively long lives. But the connections that appear in Lawson and other handbooks on fruit-trees are more mundane, more

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temporally dynamic, and more ambiguous in relation to the identity of a given tree or human person. Trees and humans both keep time in their bodies; we grow, ripen, wither, and rot in measure with time. Plants thus intersect with human timescales but also slip by and beyond them. Therefore, while much of the homologous thinking about humans and trees I discuss here accords with Foucault’s account of the shaping role of similitude in the Renaissance episteme (Foucault, [1966] 1994), these twisting timescales complicate the identity of both human and tree, as temporal projection, recursion, and stalling re-order the connected lives of fruit, branch, or root. Among the motivations behind this paper is a desire to take seriously the provocation of this issue’s title – what does it mean to think about premodern plants rather than, more familiarly, premodern understandings of plants? Do plants belong to history – or, if we mean to write a new history to which plants belong, what must that history look like? I have therefore taken a special interest in how early modern horticultural writers understood plants to write their own histories – their modes of inscribing memory, event, and anticipation in ways that may or may not be legible to human beings. One possibility opened up by Lawson’s text is a time measured not in terms of space but in terms of feel; such a way of thinking reshapes the future, but also asks us to consider what happens if we trace a sensorially-defined boundary between species and kinds. If we measure time not in terms of space but in terms of feel, we encounter a kind of history that, in its registration of contact and even fatal injury, includes the possibility of receptivity, of a pressure that pushes back.

The age of trees It matters that trees live a long time. In his 1618 A New Orchard and Garden, William Lawson describes the long game at the core of orchard-keeping: IT is to be considered: All this Treatise of trees tends to this end, that men may loue and plant Orchards, whereunto there cannot be a better inducement then that they know (or at least be perswaded) that all that benefite they shall reape thereby, whether of pleasure or profite, shall not bee for a day or a moneth, or one, or many (but many hundreth) yeares. (Lawson, 1618, 49) The end of his treatise, the end of planting orchards: both projects are authorized by the longevity of trees, the more-distant endings of their arboreal lives. An orchardist planting a fruit-tree as a sapling bets not only on his own patience but also on the tree’s lifespan: the longer-lived the tree, the more numerous the fruit and the greater the profit. Lawson devotes a full chapter to a discussion of the age of trees, an argument he cites explicitly three other times including in the very last lines of A New

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1 Steven Smith shows that that tripartite division of human lifespan was proverbial (compare the riddle of the Sphinx, or the painting by Titian), but not as common as a seven-stage understanding, like that expressed by Jaques in As You Like It (Smith, 1976).

Orchard, where a reminder of the lifespan of trees consummates his advocacy for orchard keeping. An orchard-keeper, he writes, takes joy not only from the blessings he sees in his lifetime but also from bequeathing to his heirs and successors ‘such a worke, that many ages after your death, shall record your loue to your Country’ (Lawson, 1618, 59). Invoking the ‘length of time your worke is like to last,’ to end the treatise with the endings of trees, Lawson casts trees as a ‘record’ of ‘love,’ the orchard as an archive of devotion (Lawson, 1618, 59). Lawson’s imaginative work in this section of his treatise aims to expand readers’ perceptions beyond the compass of their own lives, directing attention toward the complexity of a tree’s being in time. His investment in the future poses a practical problem: how does one know the age of a tree or how old it will grow? Lawson writes that the ‘most durable is alwayes the best’ (Lawson, 1618, 49), but what is the durability of a particular tree? The question poses a knotty problem of longevity and imagination: since trees outlive humans, how could an orchard-keeper measure the value of what he plants? While the relative puniness of human life may be Lawson’s best argument for investing in trees, this asymmetry places a limit on how a planter of trees could predict their eventual profit. To measure the age of a tree, Lawson suggests estimating its thickness and asking the exceptionally elderly, but this only gets him so far. This curiosity opens up one of the most fascinating digressions in Lawson’s treatise, as he musters an inventory of examples to place the arc of arboreal life in a cosmos of similitude and homology, proceeding according to a method he describes as a combination of conjecture and comparison. If he knows that his trees are a hundred years old, ‘and yet want two hundred of theyr growth before their lease increasing,’ he then concludes that its period of growth extends 300 years (Lawson, 1618, 50). Their full life, therefore, extends 900 years: ‘we must needs resolue, that this three hundred yeare, are but the third part of a trees life, because (as all things liuing besides) so trees must have allowed them for theyr encrease one third, an other third for theyr stand, and a third part of time also for theyr decay’ (Lawson, 1618, 50). In the course of calculation, Lawson notes in parentheses that ‘we must coniecture by comparing, becase no one man liueth to see the full age of trees’ (Lawson, 1618, 50). Following the tripartite shape of earthly life, Lawson projects human understanding nearly a millennium beyond the experience of a single human life. Lawson’s style of thought draws out a cosmology dense with analogy and extrapolation, one that extends well beyond his initial intention to persuade readers to plant. Within the method of comparative conjecture, the lifespans of human, plant, and animal are measured not against each life’s appointed endpoint or deadline, but according to a certain achieved equipoise: each phase, he writes, must be in balance. Lawson extends this tripartite pattern across the world of living creatures, concluding that ‘Euery liuing thing bestowes the least part of his age in his growth, and so must it needs be with trees’ (Lawson, 1618, 50).1 The reasoning from similarity that generates Lawson’s final ‘must’ suggests

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a shared belonging to a single order of life, ratified citizenship among ‘euery liuing thing’ and subjection to the norms of lifespan that go with it.2 However, Lawson’s treatise is ultimately driven by the relative brevity of human life, shortened since the flood by sin and self-abuse. Soft, fleshy, fragile, and lacking in self-government, humans suffer from a distinct lack of durability in Lawson’s account. Trees’ lifespans offer an argument in contrast. Calling on a litany of exemplary ancient trees, Lawson casts the landscape itself as a museum of old growth, a display of trees’ longevity in which the extreme age of trees evokes a deep arboreal time – woody kin to the depth of geological time – that is similarly humbling to Lawson and other tree-keepers. In Sylva, published half a century later, John Evelyn reprints Lawson’s conjectures on the age of trees, expanding the inventory of ancient examples and slipping from a discussion of age to one of trees of immense size.3 As Evelyn leaps from massive English oaks to distant plane trees, the anxious future of England’s timber industry echoes almost imperceptibly through his long catalog of large, ancient trees (Evelyn, 1664). Lawson offers a pragmatic variation on what we might call an arbor longa, vita brevis tradition, a longstanding Renaissance and classical interest in longlived trees that also placed them in the company of other durable creatures. Lawson evokes this tradition in naming ‘the Hart and the Rauen’ as beings that also ‘farre exceede man in the length of yeares’ (Lawson, 1618, 51), a geriatric menagerie that also appears in Donne’s First Anniversary. There, beside the marginal note ‘Shortnesse of life,’ a comparison with the ‘Stag, and Raven, and the long-liu’d tree’ underscores the decayed state of human life in the present (Donne, 1995, 9): ‘There is not now that mankinde, which was then / When as the Sunne, and man, did seeme to striue, / (Ioint tenants of the world) who should suruiue’ (112–5).4 Each kind of creature possesses an appointed term, or span – a course proper to it, however altered in this fallen age by abuse or poor government. Trees were often seen as exempt from the fallen brevity of human life. John Smith, echoing Lawson in his 1670 English Improver, Reviv’d, extends this line of thinking to distinguish the effect of the fall on the appointed lifespans of human beings and trees: ‘although for Mans sins the Earth was cursed to bring briers and thorns, yet we do not read that the lives of Vegetives were therefore shortned, but that every Plant according to the spirit of the species, by the good will and providence of God, lives to the time first appointed at the Creation’ (Smith, 1670, 77; cited in Thomas, [1983] 1996, 217). The

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2 This cosmological balance diverges from Francis Bacon’s more materialist argument, in his History Naturall and Experimentall, of Life and Death, that the relative durability of kinds of matter depends on their tenderness and moisture, by the principle that ‘age is a great but slow dryer’ (Bacon, 1638, 27). 3 John Evelyn’s long inventory invokes the catalogs of trees identified as a genre by Curtius and witnessed in Ovid, Chaucer, and Spenser (Curtius, [1948] 1963). 4 Bath places Donne’s allusion in the context of the ‘Oldest Animals’ tradition and its association with the Magnus Annus, the period of time in which stars cycle back to their stations (Bath, 1981). In ancient times, long-lived humans could observe the whole cycle.

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5 It is in this sense an entitlement of a piece with Laurie Shannon’s account of the course of kind and the ‘race’ run by creatures in their appointed time on earth (Shannon, 2013, 106–7).

appointment of span to creatures is better understood not by duration but by decorum; it belongs to them as a primary property.5 In Lawson’s thinking, the life of any individual tree might likewise be plagued by an original wound. Each tree gathers in its body a mixed temporality, carrying the material memory of its past – removals, disorder, or other injury – along with, at any instant, the potential for future growth and fruit. Like the other kinds of material that Jonathan Gil Harris has described as ‘untimely matter’ (Harris, 2008), each tree registers a dynamic palimpsest, layered with material memories of previous contact – a complexity that challenges any conception of the tree’s temporality as a steady arc towards future gain and increase. The word Lawson uses for lasting but not visible wounds is ‘taint,’ a trauma remembered materially within the tree. Relocation and contact cause damage that is initially invisible: ‘though sometime some such will grow, but not continue long: Because they be tainted with deadly wounds, eyther in the roote or the toppe. (And a Tree once throughly taynted, is neuer good.)’ ‘[T]he heart being tainted,’ he goes on, ‘he will hardly euer thriue; which you may easily discerne by the blacknesse of the boughes at the heart, when you dresse your Trees’ (Lawson, 1618, 17). The version of time named by taint does not so much slip away as it sticks around. Lawson is fascinated with touch, and much of his energy is devoted to protecting trees from being touched: ‘all touches,’ he writes, are ‘hurtfull,’ and, rather than be pressed in ‘the throng of his neighbours,’ each tree should be planted at a distance such that ‘euerie tree be not annoiance, but an helpe to his fellows: for trees (as all other things of the same kinde) should shrowde, and not hurt one another’ (Lawson, 1618, 23). Each time it recurs in Lawson’s treatise, ‘taint’ names a latent injury archived in a tree’s roots, trunk, or branches. The Oxford English Dictionary locates the origin of Lawson’s sense at the intersection of two distinct etymologies: first, as a version of ‘attaint,’ a blow, or hit in tilting; and second from ‘tinctus,’ being tincted, dyed or tinged, with color (OED, 2017, s.v. ‘taint,’ 1a, 4). The word’s other senses follow from this collision: a stain, blemish, or dishonor; a corrupting influence; a latent disease; and, eventually, an inherited racial stain. In these latter cases, the event of ‘attaint’ is made durable through the stain of tincture, implying a lasting woundedness that is also always about to happen, still in potential. Taint thus merges touch, the present moment of contact, with the lasting, visible stain of hue. As a violation made durable, ‘taint’ looks both forward and backward: a present condition echoing past a wound and a bleak omen, a sign of next year’s death. Lawson invokes another kind of taint to explain the diminished lifespans of modern human beings – one that, like the primal injury experienced by trees, is a memory of touch, archived in the body. Man’s body, he writes, ‘is nothing (in a manner) but tender rottennesse, whose course of life cannot but, by any meanes, by counsell, restraint of lawes, or punishment, nor hope of prayse, profite, or eternall glory, be kept within any bounds’ (Lawson, 1618, 51). (Trees, being of

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‘a solide substance’ and ‘from the beginning disburdened of all superfluities,’ easily live to twice the age of humans [Lawson, 1618, 51].) Tender rottenness is not only a sensory quality in the present. Like the originary wound that ‘taint’ represents, ‘tender rottenness’ serves as a kind of memory or storage device for the defilement that defines postdiluvian human life. With their tender rottenness, humans are not like trees. Instead, for Lawson, the fallen, fleshy state of humans offers an argument in contrast, indexing just how long trees – untender, unrotten – might live. Complicating this opposition of long arboreal and corrupt human life, the phrase ‘tender rottenness’ appears again a few pages later in Lawson’s treatise – not in relation to humans or to trees, but to fruit. Fruit being kept in store should be delicately handled, ‘turned once in a moneth softly,’ and covered with chaff or bran for warmth, because ‘frost doth cause tender rottennesse’ (Lawson, 1618, 54). In our soft fleshiness, we are much more like fruits than like trees. What changes when we understand this resemblance not through form or uprightness but through wounding and texture? Jean Feerick identifies Lawson as an example of early modern homological thinking about human and plant flesh, showing the correlations between sap and blood, scions and eyes, and wounded skin and engrafted bark (Feerick, 2009, 84–5). If we take seriously the fleshiness of both humans and trees, Lawson’s ‘tender rottenness’ adds another fold to this fabric of similitude. ‘Tender rottenness’ names a property very much in time, but also concretely – or fleshily – in relation: a touch, give, or squish with overripeness. Like the reversible touch that Merleau-Ponty named the tactility of flesh (Merleau-Ponty, 2002), tenderness is not a property in itself, but a quality that emerges only relationally, in contact and proximity. To be rotten, meanwhile, marks a way of being in time – a moment on a declining arc of change and decay. It is in rotting and ripening that human time – like fruit time – is measured: as Touchstone says, ‘from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot’ (Shakespeare, 2006a, II.vii.26–7). In this way, Lawson’s consistent interest in the touch of trees complicates the husbandman’s orientation towards future profit, placing humans and trees together in a dynamic, recursive, and non-linear timeframe. Lawson’s tactile imagination extends beyond the instrument of the orchardman’s hand to see the tree touching itself from the inside, a material latency and suggestion of feeling that reaches future and past.

After life There is a paradox within the idea of lifespan: due to corruption or injury, the time appointed to each creature may never be filled. It might also, by the intervention of art, be extended. In Sidney’s Arcadia, the plasticity of arboreal span – the time that art can add – offers an occasion for lament. While time itself

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6 The growing literature on grafting in early modern England includes Bushnell (2003), Feerick (2009), Jacobson and Nardizzi (2011), and Nardizzi (2009). I pass over here the close associations between grafting and writing, which has built both on the etymology (from graphein, to write) and on the associations drawn by Derrida in Dissemination, Glas, and elsewhere.

revolves, the time of mankind does not: ‘The very trees with grafting we can cherish, / So that we can long time produce their time: / But Man which helpeth them, helplesse must perish’ (Sidney, 1962, 127). The passage plays on the failure of repetition. Suspended in the echoing hollow between ‘helpeth’ and ‘helplesse,’ human beings have no means to help themselves against the attacks of time. ‘Time,’ too, changes meaning in the fifth line, slipping from adverb to object. In its second appearance, ‘time’ denotes not time as such but the appointed time of a given tree: its term, or span. With these curtailed revolutions, the comparison between humans and trees confronts an absolute limit. To learn to be human means mourning the possibility of becoming a tree. By invoking grafting, Sidney adds a new twist to this now-familiar thought: trees outpace humans not just by virtue of their long spans, but by their ability to outlive their span. But what is it that grafting, by cherishing trees, has produced?6 To take the allusion seriously, the extension of span refers not to the tree but to the production of future fruit, such that the promise of grafting multiplies rather than resolves the problem of span. Grafting does not immortalize the tree so much as it immortalizes a type of fruit. In this solution to the ‘tender rottenness’ of human beings, the stock has been forgotten along the way. What kind of memory, then, does grafting produce? What kind of span? Early modern debates about the ability of grafts to produce hybrids turn on just this question: Does the engrafted fruit ever carry a memory – say, a touch, or taint – of the stock that feeds it? Writing a generation later than Lawson, the orchardist Ralph Austen argues forcefully against such influence, explaining that the engrafted scion ‘governs’ the fruit it produces, and always ‘bring[s] forth fruit answerable to their owne natures and kinds’ (Austen, 1658, 15). Governance does not designate any single positive fact about the world, but has the structure of a future guarantee, the promise of a string of similar fruits. Though Austen, like Lawson, is invested in the future of fruit-trees, his conception of governance replaces an attachment to the tree – to the particularities of its matter and its history of embodied experience – with an attachment to what the tree produces. Austen operates by a logic of conjecture driven by a comparison of fruit-trees not with humans but with themselves – more precisely, by the similarity among fruits. This conception of fruit identity exists independently of the material life of any given fruit, and proceeds instead ‘from the specific, or distinct intrinsecall Forme, of each particular Plant, which the God of nature hath fixed in it as a Law, which nature never violates, but keeps in all kinds of Creatures’ (Austen, 1658, 30). In a broad sense, Austen’s natural law of intrinsical form replaces the ‘generall rules’ that appear throughout Lawson’s treatise (Lawson, 1618, 17ff.): the earlier writer’s guidelines for practice and advice regulate the body and habits of the gardener; Austen’s law resides without human interference in the natural world, where it is kept by nature, inviolate, in all creatures. As a memory

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device, Austen’s grafts favor the identity of the fruit over the being of the tree; nature keeps the letter of the law but not the flesh of the fruit. The success of grafting as a memory function thus turns on a prior violent erasure – but this is a forgetting that seems, at points, to give Austen pause. Like Lawson, Austen also turns to a conjectural experiment, one that throws a hypothetical tree into future time. Soon after asserting governance as an unfailing law, Austen makes concessions, admitting that it might permit ‘some small alteration’ or ‘addition’ to the grafted fruit according to ‘the nature of the stock on which it (at present) growes’ (Austen, 1658, 16). Austen then offers a conjectural experiment that might produce a compound fruit, or ‘commixture of kinds.’ ‘If the thing be possible in Nature,’ he writes, ‘the likeliest way that I apprehend is this’: ‘To graft one fruit upon another, many times over, every yeare a different kind,’ and the next year, and the next year, he elaborates, before concluding vaguely, ‘and thus every yeare to set graft upon graft for divers yeares together’ (Austen, 1658, 23). Upon figuring this monstrously augmented tree, Austen is able to imagine ‘some alteration, and commixture in the top branch and its fruit’ (Austen, 1658, 23). This augmentation may be simple in conception, but its successful completion remains elusive: Austen ‘[has] it upon tryall,’ he writes, ‘but is not yet come to an issue’ (Austen, 1658, 23). It is unclear when such a trial might ever come to an issue: only after ‘divers yeares,’ he writes, might the ‘top branch and its fruit’ undergo commixture (Austen, 1658, 23). Austen’s vague deferral of his experiment’s time frame is in fact constitutive of the putative procedure: the ‘top branch’ is a shifting signifier, moving from scion to scion with every yearly renewal. In this way, the experiment’s unbounded frame imitates the cyclical repetition of vegetable growth, deferring the end of planting in favor of what Lawson called ‘infinite twigs.’ The thought experiment represents a striking transgression of Austen’s logic of governance. If an engrafted apple governs when it receives the sap of a crab, surely it would govern even if that sap were equal parts pear, crab, and cherry. Rather than deny the sap any contribution to the form of the fruit, Austen moves into a different way of imagining the future. Austen’s vision of this infinitely grafted tree forces his attention away from the sovereignty of the fragmented branch and turns his gaze towards the whole tree. The compound tree is reimagined as a series of conjunctions, through which the passage of sap may ‘have an influence into the fruit of the last graft to cause some commixture’ (Austen, 1658, 23). Against the abstract principle of governance, Austen offers a material account of influence, as his reasoning literalizes the flow of the sap through the series of grafts and into the fruit, informing the fruit as it enters it. At some point, the distance traveled by the sap is so great that it cannot be forgotten; rather than the elusive ‘innate form’ of fruit or tree, the conjunctions themselves are remembered in the imaginary compound fruit.

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I wonder whether, in making space for this kind of influence into the tree, Austen is not admitting an attachment to the tree – a cathexis distinct from the husbandman’s desire for well-governed and untainted future fruit. Austen’s compound fruit holds on to the conjunctions that have come before; it admits some memory of that assemblage of joints, the accrued history of branch against branch. Mimicking a tree’s annual accretion of rings, the compound tree inscribes years of contact into the final fruit, archiving both human and vegetable labor in the tender, rotten being of the fruit’s final form. In this way, it preserves some of the finitude, mortality, and particularity that, as Michael Marder writes, ‘makes the love of plants possible’ (Marder, 2013, 112). Such an understanding renders the tree (to recall Sidney’s language) an entity available for cherishing. This version of vegetable attachment does not imagine the time of the plant outside of human interference; indeed, in Austen’s case, the compound tree is a fully collaborative and artificial creature. Nonetheless, the collision of these multiple timescales encourages us to question what it means to be attached to a tree – to want to hold onto or to grasp it, even when, as Lawson writes, ‘all touches [are] hurtfull’ (Lawson, 1618, 23).

About the Author Jessica Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern literature and culture, and science and literature. Drawing on the history of the book and the history of science, her research examines the formative connections between poetry, print, and the natural world in early modern England. Her current project, Botanical Virtues: Horticulture and Textual Culture in Early Modern England, traces the plants, flowers, and trees ubiquitous in the poetic and practical books published in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She has essays published or forthcoming on husbandry, poetry, and household management; the virtues of plants; and the poetics of instructional books (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Austen, R. 1658. Observations upon Some Part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Naturall History as It Concernes, Fruit-Trees. Oxford, UK: printed by H. Hall, for T. Robinson. Bacon, F. 1638. History Naturall and Experimentall, of Life and Death. Or, Of the Prolongation of Life. London: Printed by J. Haviland for W. Lee and H. Moseley. Bath, M. 1981. Donne’s Anatomy of the World and the Legend of the Oldest Animals. Review of English Studies 32(127): 302–8.

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Bushnell, R. 2003. Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Curtius, E.R. [1948] 1963. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask. New York: Harper and Row. Donne, J. 1995. The First Anniuersarie. An Anatomie of the World. In Vol. VI of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, eds. G.A. Stringer et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Evelyn, J. 1664. Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees. London: Printed by J. Martyn and J. Allestry. Feerick, J. 2009. Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus. South Central Review 26(1&2): 82–102. Foucault, M. [1966] 1994. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage. Harris, J.G. 2008. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jacobson, M., and V. Nardizzi. 2011. The Secrets of Grafting in Wroth’s Urania. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, eds. R. Laroche and J. Munroe, 175–94. New York: Palgrave. Lawson, W. 1618. A Nevv Orchard and Garden. Or the Best Way for Planting, Grafting, and to Make Any Ground Good. London: Printed by B. Alsop for R. Iackson. Marder, M. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nardizzi, V. 2009. Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets. Renaissance and Reformation 32(1): 83–106. Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online). 2017. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/. Shakespeare, W. 2006a. As You Like It, ed. J. Dusinberre. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, W. 2006b. Othello, ed. M. Neill. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shannon, L. 2013. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sidney, P. 1962. Arcadia. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. Ringler. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Smith, J. 1670. England’s Improver Reviv’d Digested into Six Books. Savoy, France: Printed by T. Newcomb for the Author. Smith, S.R. 1976. Growing Old in Early Stuart England. Albion 8(2): 125–41. Thomas, K. [1983] 1996. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Original Article

Liber tine botany: Vegetal sexualities, vegetal forms

´nia Szabari Natania Meeker and Anto Departments of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Abstract This article unearths a tradition of libertine botany that emerges in the seventeenth century with the writings of Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), and moves forward subterraneanly into our own, more ecologically-focused times. This tradition imagines vegetal life, in the flexible and formally inventive pleasures it enables, as a model for human sexuality, thereby countering the tendency to impose human categories (such as gender difference) on plant life. Vegetality functions here as a scene of queer animacy, in which affects and sensations are mobilized across different kinds of bodies and diverse modes of being. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 478–489. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0105-3

Introduction: libertinage meets botanique Timothy Morton, in a 2010 column on ‘Queer Ecology,’ writes that ‘Tree hugging is indeed a form of eroticism. […] To contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies is to imagine pleasures that are not hetero-normative, not genital, not geared toward ideologies about where the body stops and starts’ (Morton, 2010, 280). We might find in Morton’s formulation a distant echo of what we call here a libertine botany. In the early modern period, many authors envisioned modes of intimacy involving botanical entities – including plants,

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Vol. 9, 4, 478–489

Chapter 8 was originally published as Meeker, N. & Szabari, A. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 478–489. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0105-3.

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seeds, and gardens – even if (and perhaps in part because) plants were considered largely nonsexual. We examine in this essay the dimension of preLinnaean botany that assumes and explores these sensuous interconnections linking plants to their human observers, as well as the offshoots that this tradition is able to send ‘forward,’ beyond the dissemination of a vision of plant sexuality as vaguely analogous to that of animals (and the consolidation of this figural schema via Carl Linnaeus’s classificatory system). The erotic life of libertine plants is not a dim or muted reflection of human desires or subject positions. Instead, it instantiates a material flexibility that includes and invokes humans in the pleasures it makes possible. What might a libertine botany entail? Libertinism or, in its French mode, libertinage, is famously hard to define. As Jean-Pierre Dubost argues in his classic article on ‘Libertinage and Rationality,’ ‘Anyone attempting to explore the complex and diverse universe of libertine literature must sooner or later admit that ‘‘Libertinage does not exist’’’ (Dubost, 1998, 52). Moreover, as Dubost declares a bit later on, ‘Libertinage has no strictly philosophical core’ (Dubost, 1998, 56).1 Botany, on the other hand, is subject to much more rigorous (and indeed ‘official’) forms of (self-)definition. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclope´die (1751–1772) gives the following definition of botany (from the article ‘Botanique,’ written by Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton): ‘The study of vegetation makes up the first part of this science and is the basis for all the others; for one must begin by examining the nature of plants in general, before dealing with each plant in particular’ (Diderot and d’Alembert, 2017, 2:340). Botany here is a mode of scientific knowledge based in a relationship between whole and parts; libertinage is the absence of both system and systematicity, the dissolution of orthodox belief in narrative. How might these two tendencies be conjugated, if indeed they may? The answer lies in part in the working out of a vegetal erotics that cuts across different modes of narrative speculation, literary and proto-scientific. While botanists in the seventeenth century slowly discovered vegetal sexuality, plant life was often taken during this period as the site of an unsexed yet productive libidinal economy. In his proto-science fiction narratives, Journey to the Moon and Journey to the Sun, Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) describes imaginary encounters with fantastic extraterrestrial plants that prove to be erotically and affectively seductive while partaking in autonomous, exuberant, and excessive forms of generation. Only a few decades earlier, botanist Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641) had imagined plant life as animated by desire yet without interiority – a zone of proliferating sensory possibilities that often baffle human knowledge, even as they evoke human interest. We read La Brosse and Cyrano as standing at the origin point of a critical and speculative materialism that prioritizes plant life, both figurally and literally.2 They bring botanique into conversation with libertinage.

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1 For Dubost, libertinage is a fundamentally literary or narrative enterprise, rather than a philosophical one.

2 We use the term ‘speculative’ to acknowledge that many of the vegetal pleasures – or indeed modes of animation – that this tradition imagines are invisible or otherwise imperceptible to the human observer.

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3 Chen ‘draws upon recent debates about sexuality, race, environment, and affect to consider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘‘wrong’’ animates cultural life in important ways’ (Chen, 2012, 2).

4 Miller and Kelley have studied, in different keys, the association of botany with femininity (Kelley, 2012; Miller, 2002). This assocation is not only normative; it is also subject to forms of de´tournement that allow different models of feminine subjectivity to emerge.

5 It is important to note here that Galenic theory took both male and female bodies to be capable of producing and ejaculating semen. See Simons on this point (2011).

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If a sexuality is produced in this context, it is not through the fixed attribution of particular kinds of sensations, affects, or postures to specific bodies, gendered and/or sexed. Instead, vegetality functions here as what Mel Chen has called a scene of queer animacy, in which affects and sensations are mobilized across different kinds of bodies and diverse modes of being.3 We can characterize libertine botany as an intervention in those ‘animacy hierarchies’ promulgated within Aristotle’s fourth-century BCE notion of the tripartite soul and through the latter’s long afterlife (Aristotle, 1957; Chen, 2012, 13). La Brosse and Cyrano prioritize the vitality of the plant in part by materializing the Aristotelian vegetal psyche. Since their approach to the erotic plant body does not move in the direction of an increasingly humanized or humanoid plant, the vegetal pleasures that they envision are deeply material but still formal; plants invade and terminate the heterosexual romance plot rather than sustaining and extending it. Alongside the tradition of using plants to anchor gendered subjectivity or to transmit desires that come to inhabit gendered subjects – a tradition that will find fulsome eighteenth-century expression in the ‘plant marriages’ of Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin – we locate another, radical botany, one that takes a distinctly libertine approach to multiplying pleasures at the limit of what we might recognize as subjectivity itself. Our focus here will first be on botanically-invested writings from the seventeenth century, and we will move into a discussion of the ways in which the ‘enlightened’ vegetality of the eighteenth century picks up and reflects on the queer botanies of a somewhat earlier period, while also, more often than not, domesticating the queer fascination with animated matter that eludes anthropomorphic description. We see in early modern libertine botany neither a recuperation of marginalized sexualities nor a turn to a kind of feminine or proto-feminist vegetality (as later studies of the practice and theory of botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have sometimes emphasized).4 This kind of rehabilitative ethical investment depends on an association of plant and human sexuality that libertine botany in fact works not just to complicate but to explode. The models of vegetal reproduction that Guy de La Brosse and Cyrano deploy might strike modern readers as masculinist, but the sexuality that they imagine presents a seminal mechanics as more a matter of position in space than of gender.5 The particular motions, modes, and mobilizations sketched by La Brosse and Cyrano are made available by plants to humans and other bodies; any one of these might be assumed (or not) by any other proximate body (or set of bodies), given a certain level of flexibility. Thus, we find in their works too a contingent dynamic of pleasure and sensation that allows for communication across different kinds of beings even as it resists modes of identification (and sympathy). Ultimately, we want to show the way in which it is not human sexuality that organizes plant sexuality for these thinkers, but plant sexuality that allows for human pleasures to assume new contours and forms. Sexual

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pleasure comes to be at the intersection of text, matter, and affect (or text, plant, and human).

Ve g e t a l f o r m a n d v e g e t a l p l e a s u r e s i n L a B r o s s e a n d Cy r a n o How might erotic pleasure be had or expected in an encounter with a plant? Early modern botany, when it was not focused on classification, was actively negotiating the Aristotelian inheritance of the ‘vegetative soul,’ which provided a rationale for the ‘natural’ taxonomical distinctiveness of plants, even as Aristotelianism came under increasing attack by mechanism (Gaukroger, 2010, 188–96). La Brosse and Cyrano, who are influenced by Epicureanism as well as a Paracelsianism carried over from the sixteenth century, are, in a certain sense, marginal figures within the history of science, despite La Brosse’s crucial significance as the founder of the Jardin du roi (now the Jardin des plantes) in 1640. They both affirm an animating, fiery libido that pervades plants in particular (as well as other kinds of beings on occasion), even as they arguably engage in a radical revision of the Aristotelian models that they vehemently critique. La Brosse and Cyrano make good on the promise that lies dormant or occluded in dominant Aristotelianism by parsing it through both Paracelsian and Epicurean filters. A second philosophical approach important to La Brosse and Cyrano in this effort is Epicurean atomism, especially as transmitted through the long poem, De rerum natura, written by Lucretius in the first century BCE. Indeed, already in the late sixteenth century the French essayist Michel de Montaigne had activated both of these sources to animate the plants that he describes: Aristotelianism on the one hand, especially as transmitted through the natural theology of the medieval Catalan scholar Raymond de Sabunde, who depicted plant movement as autonomous, and Epicureanism as culled from Lucretius on the other. If Aristotle’s plants were already able to set themselves in motion (about as much, Aristotle explains elsewhere, as an embryo in the uterus (Aristotle, 1942, 497), Cyrano and La Brosse magnify this affective and affecting capacity of the plant; their plants are thoroughly material yet also ensouled (in the case of La Brosse) and infused with a kind of animating material fire (an idea that owes a debt to alchemy). They are also astonishingly flexible forms. In De la nature, vertu, et utilite´ des plantes (his major botanical work), La Brosse rehearses the received opinion that plant seed [semence] represents the masculine ‘virtue’ of generation that acts upon the ‘matrix’ of the soil (La Brosse, [1628] 1678, 79).

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6 All translations of La Brosse are the authors’.

Even they have their seasons when they fall in love, a certain sticky humor appears between the bark and the wood [of trees], which is called sap, revealing their amorous desires, and at this time only, not in other seasons, can they be transplanted into another [plant], and thus they imitate animals that mate and mingle when the seed frothing and animated excites and tickles them. (La Brosse, [1628]1678, 79)6 Plants thus are composed in part of matter that is excitable; the ‘seed’ is the active agent (within the plant) of this auto-erotic titillation. More specifically, complicating the implicit gendering of the seed-matrix schema, La Brosse defines the plant as hermaphroditic (in that plants contain in their seed both the masculine and feminine principle of generation) and describes four general ways in which plants propagate themselves. These include ‘by seed’ (most commonly); by offshoots; by ‘fleshy and fibrous bulbs and tubes’; and through parasitic forms of generation (that he does not name as such), as in the case of the mistletoe, dodder and moss. In the first instance, the soil serves as the ‘matrix’ for the seed, but the plant itself can become its own matrix, when propagating by offshoots (i.e., when the branch is the matrix) or in plants like mistletoe (guy in French) and moss, for which trees serve as the matrix (La Brosse, [1628] 1678, 108–112). In this description, although ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories are applied, the sexes, the seed, and the matrix are not subjectivities but functional operations. Generation always occurs by inserting something inside something else – a kind of emboıˆtement that undoes the inside/outside distinction – and the sap serves as a sign of ‘amorous desire’ or libido. Generation has various causes, but no part, or at least no observable one, is either essentially ‘seed’ (or animating matter) or inherently ‘matrix’ (or container). Remarking that most (but not all) plants reproduce by seed, La Brosse describes this as the most common form of propagation: It needs to be noted that the grain or seed has three parts, two of which are visible and one is invisible and only manifests itself through its action. The first one is the body of the seed, which is the flour in wheat, rye, barley, beans, peas and others that we have named ‘mother germ,’ always inside an envelope as if in the kidneys, transforming into milk during reproduction and thus providing nourishment; the second one, which is the germ, like the yolk of the egg nourishing the white from which the chicken is formed. […] The third one is the invisible Artisan, whose seat is the germ, which manifests itself to us because the germ separated from the mother germ, as in ants, does not vegetate, nor does it vegetate when mixed together with all its parts. (La Brosse, [1628] 1678, 104–5) This description also reveals a mechanism that is in part observable, in part invisible except for its ‘action’ upon other, visible parts of the plant. Here again,

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‘male’ and ‘female’ are relative, positional categories, and it is the action of parts together, rather than the absolute value of any part, that leads to generation. Cyrano’s botanically-inflected fiction, with its eroticization of vegetal matter, owes much to La Brosse’s mechanistic and alchemical model, especially in the equation of the seed with fire. Cyrano preserves the emphasis on a flexible, functional sexuality and couples it with an explicit investment in form as a means of transmitting particular affects and pleasures. In the Journey to the Moon,7 the narrator lands on top of an apple tree when he first arrives on the moon, his face spattered with the apples that he has squashed. He soon discovers that he has arrived in Earthly Paradise and on top of the Tree of Life (in a parody of the biblical text) (Bergerac, [c.1650] 2007, 16). This garden is self-generating and maintaining, unlike the biblical Eden created by God and inhabited by Adam and Eve. Next to a grove of oak trees, the narrator sees two meadows, where ‘flowers toss in the breeze [… and] seem to be chasing after each other to escape the wind’s caress’ (Bergerac, [c.1650] 2007, 18). The plant world appears to be animate and to participate in an erotic game, while the fiction gives concrete life to what is here described as an impression or a mental image: a garden composed of and by sensitive and animated plants not unlike those described by La Brosse. Toward the end of the Journey to the Moon, the narrator encounters a lunar philosopher who claims that cabbages not only have sensations but are also rational. The defense of this argument culminates in a description of the marvelous reproductive capacity of cabbages: Indeed it seems that he [i.e., God] has more necessarily provided for the birth of the vegetable than for that of the reasonable creature, since he has placed the generation of a man at the whim of his father who could, as his pleasure decreed, either beget him or not, and yet he refused to treat the cabbage with the same severity; instead of placing it in the father’s discretion whether or not to engender his son, God, as if more fearful that the race of cabbages might perish than that of men, constrains them to give themselves to each other whether they are willing or not, quite unlike men, who at best can engender in their whole lives only a score or so, while cabbages can produce four hundred thousand of their kind per head. (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2007, 78–9)

7 The work as a whole, conventionally referred to as L’Autre monde, may be divided into two parts. The first one, Les E´tats de la Lune, has been translated by Andrew Brown as Journey to the Moon (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2007). We will provide our own translations for the second part, Les E´tats et Empires du Soleil, or Journey to the Sun (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2004).

The cabbage signals its animate and animating power (as well as its affective grip on the philosopher who refuses to eat it) by its capacity to reproduce itself a` l’infini. It also gestures in enigmatic ways to homoerotic or queer sexuality. The cabbage is its own hyper-effective reproductive engine, in need of no paternal authority and no partner. The vegetal sexuality that is depicted here is unorthodox and without parallel in human society yet astonishingly productive. Although inassimilable to human models, it nonetheless exerts a power on the human observer who contemplates it and speculates about it. Dyrcona (the

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8 We note that in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s and Lowell Duckert’s collaborative work the vortex becomes the very shape of ecocritique (Cohen and Duckert, 2015, 20; 2017, 3).

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name given to the narrator in the Voyage to the Sun) will soon find himself even more fully in the grip of this erotic and exotic vegetation. Shortly after landing on the sun, having returned from his first lunar journey, Dyrcona meets a being that takes on the form of a plant, at least temporarily. Falling asleep in a desolate landscape, he finds himself upon awakening under what appears to be a very tall tree, at least according to its shape and the shapes of its parts; its bark is made of gold, its branches of silver, its leaves of emerald, and its fruits (similar to pomegranates) made up of a ‘swarm’ [essaim] of large rubies (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2004, 218). One fruit detaches itself from this marvelous plant and gradually acquires a human-like body; this small figure calls himself king of what turns out to be a society of atom-like particles. The tree itself falls apart only to recompose itself as ‘seeing, feeling, and walking’ little men dancing festively around Dyrcona (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2004, 218–221). The dance of the parts of the tree creates a kind of vortex or tourbillon (possibly of Cartesian inspiration) that is ‘agitated’ by the observer Dyrcona as it also ‘agitates’ him,8 constituting an interaction or exchange between bodies that is pleasurable to both parties, almost certainly erotically so. Dyrcona describes: As soon as these little men began to dance, I seemed to feel their excitement and movement in me, and my excitement and movement in them. I was not able to look at this dance without feeling that all parts of my body were pulled from my place, as if by a vortex moved by its own vibration and by the excitement of each and every one, and I felt the same joy spreading over my face that was spread over theirs by the same movement. (Cyrano de Bergerac, [c.1650] 2004, 219–221) This image evokes both the capacity of matter to communicate forms through contact and the idea of a sympathetic animation of which the exact principles will be recounted somewhat later in the text. In this scene, it turns out to be possible to incite and transmit affect through the adoption of particular postures – or the mimicry of specific forms, including vegetal forms (themselves particularly changeable). Thus, the arboreal ballet that the narrator observes brings to him the kind of delight that is characteristic of the petits hommes who make up the elements of the tree itself. All matter is thus swept into the same vibration or shaking (branle, a term with erotic connotations that also designates a dance). The plants (which are plants only in shape and posture, not in essence) turn out not only to be able to revitalize Dyrcona, as the tree of life did on the moon, but to engender in him a sympathetic feeling of delight and, perhaps, also erotic desire. In their animation, they animate him in return.

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Dyrcona and the little men share in a collective pleasure that is immanent to matter, thanks to the mediation of vegetal form.9

Enlightened models of vegetal sexuality and the libertine inheritance How does this early modern libertine botany travel into modernity? As important physiological discoveries were made about both vegetal and animal bodies in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers struggled with (and succeeded in) reasserting the animacy hierarchy within a largely analogical paradigm. When, following William Harvey’s studies of blood circulation in animals and Stephen Hales’s 1727 Vegetable Staticks, plant and animal physiology were increasingly rendered as hydraulic, plants also took on a heightened passivity. Hales surmises that the movement of sap in plants is guaranteed by the sun, which pulls the fluid out of the plant (Hales, 1727, 66–7). Here the plant is made into a container that relies on external forces for its movement, a model that the materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), probable author of L’Homme-plante (La Mettrie, [1748] 1996), will use to reaffirm and in fact solidify the partial passivity of the plant. In this paradigm, plants lack autonomous movement; instead they rely on the sun for circulation and the winds (or any accidental outside cause) for reproduction. Yet there is an undercurrent in La Mettrie’s writing that continues to stress animation in plants.10 L’Homme-plante reverts to an older, mechanist and libertine paradigm from time to time, as when La Mettrie suggests that in the end heat (generated by the heart or the sun) causes ‘everything in the universe to germinate, grow, flower, and multiply’ (La Mettrie, [1748] 1996, 79). In this cosmic view, the images of generation are not simply vegetal metaphors for the mechanisms of nature; rather, they level the differences among categories of beings and allow us to see, as the pamphlet’s provocative title promises, man (and indeed the entire physical world) as vegetation. La Mettrie, who adopts and satirizes the Linnaean system of classification of plants by their sexual organs, with its dependence on the human-plant analogy, emphasizes the analogical movement of plant and human bodies in copulation: ‘Plants are male and female, and shake like man does in copulation’ (La Mettrie, [1748] 1996, 80). Thus, La Mettrie returns, from within an analogical paradigm in which human (and animal) sexuality dominates, to an older, more horizontal model that identifies forms of animation cutting across the entire physical world. Such subterranean libertinism also appears in the work of the English polymath Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802, grandfather of Charles). At the end of the eighteenth century, Darwin published his two-part poem The Botanic Garden (1791), in which he uses poetry to make botany available to a general

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9 We can compare La Brosse’s and Cyrano’s eroticized yet largely asexual botany to the fascination with botanical sexlessness in poems by English poet and satirist Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) and treatises by English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) in England, who, as Marjorie Swann has argued, similarly allowed for the creation of an imaginary vegetal realm in which male subjects could find erotic satisfaction (Swann, 2012). 10 La Mettrie’s Epicureanism is of interest in this context.

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11 Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook emphasizes the way in which Darwin uses botany as a disciplinary mechanism for women at the same time as she shows how Darwin’s poem is cut through with paradox and tension (Cook, 2000). 12 See Peter Ayres for a discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s animalization of plants, including the attribution of a brain or common sensorium to parts of the plant (Ayres, 2008).

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audience, notably including women. This agenda and his adoption of the Linnaean classificatory system, which the poem fleshes out in great erotic detail, both inflect Darwin’s sexual politics in the poem; The Loves of the Plants, the second part of The Botanic Garden, uses the analogical comparison between plant and human sexuality as its central metaphor.11 Yet, when we parse the poem and the copious footnotes that accompany it, Darwin’s investment in an older, libertine model becomes clear, even as this investment is expressed in the context of a Linnaean framework that tends to close off or shut down its more radical effects. Darwin firmly believes that plants generally are a lower order of animals.12 This designation of the plant as an animal is, of course, indebted to the analogical paradigm that permeates the Enlightenment. However, unlike others who reassert the divide separating vegetal and animal forms of life, Darwin – in a more Epicurean and libertine mode – renders the animation of matter as consistent across the physical world. He thus claims that plants move autonomously, in an animal-like way. Darwin’s garden (not unlike his cosmos) is mechanical through and through – animated by mechanisms including those particular to plants. Art, as he understands it, is not specific to human beings but is also to be found in such contrivances as the Venus fly trap, the power of plants to contribute to processes of rejuvenation, and vegetal versions of human mechanical devices and technologies like spinning, weaving, the hot-air balloon, and paper (Darwin [1791] 2007, 17, 32, 44–6). Darwin also points to the ‘monstrous’ status of some plants – visible in their excessive number of petals or lack of nectaries that seem to hinder reproduction (Darwin [1791] 2007, 13) – and so intimates that the garden does not always operate according to the logic informing human social and sexual institutions (and, perhaps, gestures ‘forward’ toward the vagaries of natural selection and genetics). From this vantage, Darwin’s botanical poetry is not reducible to the projection of human consciousness onto the physical world (even human consciousness modified by or made more plant-like through an encounter with vegetative life). Moreover, Darwin’s poetry becomes a continuation of the Epicurean project, in which poetry makes the invisible world come into being (animates it, in other words). Darwin sees the natural world as an artfully enabling mediation, such as poetry, which he also compares to the camera obscura (Darwin, 2007, 8). Plants, for Darwin, engender the technologies that allow us to be affected by them. Even so, this libertine affective involvement in animated matter is at least partially foreclosed by the trope of plant marriages that, even as they were considered scandalous by social conservatives at the time, connote the norms governing human heterosexual reproduction and social life. Darwin thus both evokes the libido of matter – its auto-affective and selfmoving attributes – and domesticates or tames this non-human animation in the service of a more Romantic view, according to which human affects and values can organize the physical world.

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In recent years, discussions in science studies, anthropology, philosophy, and literary and film studies have stressed the way in which the consideration of plants can awaken a set of new possibilities for our human ethics, politics, and culture. We hope to add to these conversations by showing how plant life participates in forms of mediation and theories of animated materiality during a period when the concept of matter and the physical world were intensely discussed and scrutinized. The early modern thinkers whose works we have explored demonstrate that plants can function as technologies of affect and animation, even as they recede from the values and social ideals that we may try to project on them. This paradoxical doubleness of plants is the hallmark of a materialist botany in a libertine mode. Excavating this marginalized tradition allows us to rethink our relation to plants in a way that is not determined by an analogy to human sexuality and that precedes both an Enlightenment instrumentalization of the natural world and a Romantic idealization of it. By thus defining and emphasizing a libertine botanical thought, we highlight a paradigm that has implications for our own ecological thinking. We might again contemplate Morton’s idea of an intimacy unbound by ideological limits or sexual norms – a queer intimacy, indeed. For Morton, this relationship is an instantiation of a connection to the ‘mesh’ of the living and non-living within the random process of natural selection (Morton, 2010, 275). At the same time, Morton’s critical position generates an aesthetics that is resolutely postRomantic and post-Kantian. How flexible is libertine botany in this context? Can we use the libertine extension of vegetable psyche across an atomist cosmos to posit an erotic relation to animated matter as the basis of a subject position (both human and non-) that affirms pleasure, posture, style, encounter? What affective technologies do plants make possible or activate today?

About the Authors Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has just completed, with Antonia Szabari, a co-authored book entitled Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction from Early to Late Modernity (forthcoming from Fordham University Press in 2019). She is the author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism and the French Enlightenment (Fordham, 2006) as well as of a series of articles on topics ranging from libertine materialism to plant horror (E-mail: [email protected]). Anto´nia Szabari is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her work concentrates on early modern French political culture, especially the fragility and contestability of the public

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sphere. Her first book, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in SixteenthCentury France, was published by Stanford University Press in 2010. Currently, she is at work on a monograph on sixteenth-century French politics in the Ottoman Empire and its ‘anti-diplomatic’ tendencies: from utopias to aggressive millenialism. More recently, she has turned to imaginary societies that are botanically and (often) ecologically inflected in a recently completed booklength manuscript, co-authored with Natania Meeker, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction from Early to Late Modernity (forthcoming from Fordham in 2019) (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Aristotle. 1942. Generation of Animals, Loeb Classical Library no. 366, trans. A.L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1957. On the Soul. In Bk. II of On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Loeb Classical Library no. 288, trans. W.S. Hett, 66–139. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ayres, P. 2008. The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins at the Dawn of Plant Science. London: Routledge. Chen, M. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, J.J., and L. Duckert, eds. 2015. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, J.J., and L. Duckert, eds. 2017. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cook, E.H. 2000. ‘Perfect’ Flowers, Monstrous Women: Eighteenth-Century Botany and the Modern Gendered Subject. In ‘Defects’: Engendering the Modern Body, eds. H. Deutsch and F. Nussbaum, 252–79. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Cyrano de Bergerac, S. [c.1650]. 2004. Les E´tats et Empires de la Lune; Les E´tats et Empires du Soleil, ed. J. Pre´vot. Paris, France: Folio. Cyrano de Bergerac, S. [c.1650]. 2007. Journey to the Moon, trans. A. Brown. London: Hesperus Classics. Darwin, E. [1791]. 2007. The Botanic Garden. Part II. Containing the Loves of the Plants. Teddington, UK: Echo Library. Diderot, D., and J. le Rond d’Alembert, eds. [1751–1772] 2017. Encyclope´die, ou dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des arts et des me´tiers, etc, eds. R. Morrissey and G. Roe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, ARTFL Encyclope´die Project. http:// encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. Dubost, J.-P. 1998. Libertinage and Rationality: From the ‘Will to Knowledge’ to Libertine Textuality. Special issue on Libertinage and Modernity. Yale French Studies 94: 52–78. Gaukroger, S. 2010. The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hales, S. 1727. Vegetable Staticks: Or, an Account of Some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables. London: Printed for W. and J. Innys and T. Woodward. Kelley, T.M. 2012. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. La Brosse, G. [1628]. 1678. De la nature, vertu et utilite´ des plantes. Paris, France: Rollin Baragnes. La Mettrie, J. [1748]. 1996. Man as Plant. In Machine Man and Other Writings, 75–88, ed. and trans. A. Thomson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Miller, E.P. 2002. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Morton, T. 2010. Guest Column: Queer Ecology. PMLA 125(2): 273–82. Simons, P. 2011. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Swann, M. 2012. Vegetable Love: Botany and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century England. In The Indistinct Human in the Renaissance, eds. V. Nardizzi and J. E. Feerick, 139–59. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

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Afterword

Centerpieces

Michael Marder Department of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 490–495. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0106-2

Whatever it describes, medieval either lags behind or runs ahead of itself, unless, immanently unstable, quivering in its nonidentity, it lags behind by running ahead. In the middle, between the polar opposites of antiquity and modernity, it is enunciated on the verge of vanishing, when it seems that the intermezzo between the two extremes is over and when modernity is ready to give historical movement a dominant, hegemonic thrust. Medievalism, along with the periodization in which it is encrusted, is the middle age, the age or the time of the middle, the in-between panoramically overviewed from the standpoint of the end both of that period and of the entire tripartite historical division. While modernity’s self-understanding coincides with the concept it fashions for itself, medievalism belongs, according to its locution and to the specific scheme wherein it participates, to what it is not. We are accustomed automatically to regard the middle as less significant than beginnings and ends. A mere continuation, determined by the wind blowing in its sails from behind and the teleological rope pulling it from ahead, the middle is a place and time of a seamless passage from start to finish, from genesis to eschaton. In fact, however, it is the very temporality of time, the temporalizing  2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

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Vol. 9, 4, 490–495

Chapter 9 was originally published as Marder, M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 490–495. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0106-2.

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stretch, a stretching out dotted with discontinuities, breaks, interruptions, already not at the beginning and not yet at the end, lacking the guarantees of ever getting to the preprogrammed destination. Without this internally ruptured stretching out there is no time; the beginning and the end are immediately one and the same; space is all there is. Which is to say that the time (age, season; saeculum, aevum, tempestas) of the middle is time ‘as such.’ As I have highlighted in my philosophy of vegetal life, the spatiotemporal position of plants is in the middle, so much so that they are the figures of this stretching out between the extremes (Marder, 2014). The paradigm case here is the bifurcation of a germinating seed that, thanks to its graviotropic sense, grows up and down simultaneously, knowing where to send roots and where to develop a shoot. Goethe’s notion that metamorphosis is the very essence of vegetal being (hence, a plant is nothing but constant becoming, transformation, self-alteration) further confirms the conception of the plant-as-middle (Goethe, 2009; Marder, 2015, 186). It follows that ‘the Middle Ages’ are the ages of plants; we would have lost a crucial dimension of the theme were we to parse out the construal of and attitudes toward plants in medieval cultures without keeping in mind the general medievality of the flora. The sad fate of the middle, at least in the broadly Western contexts, has been on the one hand oblivion, when compared to beginnings and ends, and on the other hand conversion into mediations, means, and finally instruments for externally posited goals. So, the Middle Ages have been understood as a transitional link between antiquity and modernity, a vanishing historical mediator that prepares the grounds for the latter, while still rooted in the mindset of the former. Plants, too, function at best as mediators between organic nature and the inorganic world they make edible, or else concoct cures for various diseases and stimulants for the central nervous system. At worst, they are the means for animal and human survival, stockpiles of potential timber and reserves of breathable air. Thus, the vegetal middle cedes to the logic of instrumentality, especially rampant in all types of relations in late modernity. A paradigm of usability, of opportune, appropriate use and enjoyment into which entities may be inserted or which they may enjoin, is at the core of medieval thought. So, I have titled the relevant section of The Philosopher’s Plant on Augustine, Avicenna, and Maimonides ‘Medieval Plant-Instruments’ (Marder, 2014, 59–112). Augustine, for instance, distinguishes use from enjoyment, uti from frui, as the proper relations to the world and to God, respectively.1 On a surface reading, the medieval relation to the middle is itself in a middling, mediating spot between an ancient teleology and a modern instrumentalism, to which it is supposed to pave the way. Isn’t Augustine’s distinction a forerunner to Kant’s ethical philosophy, predicated on the contrast between the use of things and the respect due to persons? Does it not unfold the ancient, Aristotelian teleology into that permeating the critique of practical reason?

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1 See, for instance, Confessions VII.xviii.24: ‘I have sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy [fruor] you’ (Augustine, 2009; Marder, 2014, 64)

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Afterword

And yet, medieval instrumentality is more than a hinge articulating utility’s two conceptual regimes. ‘Enjoyment’ (frui: from the Latin verb fruor) is intimately bound to fruit (‘I enjoy’ [fructus sum]), to coming to fruition, to the ripeness of the right moment, when, in an inversion or an ecstatic perversion, the enjoying subject is ready to be enjoyed by God. In this, it is probably more teleological than the routines of use. Utilization is not, after all, the exploitation of resources; instrumentality ought to be thought or heard on a musical basis, working with or playing instruments in need of an ongoing fine-tuning. Use is a practice, an exercise, an engagement with and in difference, the experience honing, in a virtuous circle, a greater capacity for discernment. Medieval instrumentality is far from instrumentalism, and plant-instruments are infinitely more than mere tools, through which we would be able to accomplish our goals without relating to them. Prior to the rise of instrumental rationality, instrumentality is this halting, hesitant step from through to to – the step to be repeated, time and again, to be replayed backwards and retraced, the step, in short, beyond which there is no advancing. In her meditation on gathering prayers in medieval pharmacology included in this special issue, Sara Ritchey demonstrates that the curative properties of plants are not reason enough to transform them wholesale into the means at human disposal, in this case the means to healing. The desire to ‘maximiz[e] vegetal utility’ paradoxically coincides with the prayerful ‘vocalization of gratitude and submission.’ Here, then, is the case-in-point of medieval instrumentality: in the Augustinian vernacular, use is never totally free of enjoyment, as creation invariably points back to the Creator, while incarnate beings (whether human, vegetal, or of other varieties) harbor spiritual realities in excess of their materiality. More than that, the crux of matter and spirit, the intersection of the world and the other-worldly, is the leitmotif of medieval symbolism and thought. Actual beings are in the middle between these realms, situated in their interstices. On the cross, in the theandric personage of Jesus, and everywhere the medieval gaze is directed, the middle is at the foreground. This axiom holds for the most mundane of phenomena as well. Brooke Findley notes that, in the French medieval romance Perceforest, the classical movements of vegetality, including even decay, lead the reader straight to God and to genesis: ‘vegetal rot has a divine function,’ accentuating the possibility of rebirth and the renewal of creation. Plant death and resurrection foreshadow and enact in advance the drama of Christ’s death on the cross (made of dry wood, of course) right in the middle of exuberant nature, in the arboreal milieu. ‘Written in Trees,’ by Tom White, draws our attention to the medium of writing and how writings about plants, for instance in medieval manuals such as Godfridus super Palladium, involves the writing of the plants themselves. The fecund overlap of graphic/graftic spaces becomes evident in the ‘association the treatise makes […] between the technologies of inscription and horticulture.’

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Plants and the knowledges regarding their cultivation flourish in the unruly middle between nature and culture, in the so-called excluded middle disrupting fixed formal logical structures. Medieval plant-writing is in accord with the tenets of plant-thinking, which refers to the intersection of vegetal intelligence and human thinking about plants. The tendency of vegetal life toward the middle proves exceptionally disruptive not just for human cognition operating with rigid systems of classification and hierarchical assemblages. (Let’s recall, in this respect, the infamous scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being, frequently standing in a metonymic relation to medieval thought.) Contrary to our expectations, identification with the middle fails to mitigate the extremes between which it is ensconced; rather, it troubles their symmetry and puts in question the very notion of an identity. The middle is still more extreme than either of the extremes, insofar as it welcomes an unorganized or a loosely organized multiplicity. Natania Meeker and Anto´nia Szabari seize upon this insight in their consideration of vegetal sexuality in terms of ‘libertine botany.’ Ultimately, plants confuse the categories male and female, offering the alternative of ‘excitable’ vegetal matter that revels in ‘autoerotic titillation.’ Following Freud, we might say in consonance with what the authors mean by libertinage that plants are polymorphously perverse, their sexuality neither subservient to a purely reproductive rationale nor centered on one set of reproductive organs (the flowers), but productive of dispersed pleasures, states of agitation, excitations, and vibrations. Shaking and being shaken are the affect and the passion traversing the middle. Jessica Rosenberg touches upon the time of the middle, or the middle qua time, equally vital to vegetation and medievality, in her discussion of the span – as in lifespan – reaching across and tightening around. At stake is the scope of spanning, the manner and the extent of touching and grasping that translates into the longevity or the brevity of a life, of the time that slips between one’s fingers or that accretes between the rings of a tree trunk. And that is not to mention the similitudes, interspersed with ineluctable differences, between vegetal and human temporalities fleshing out an image of time precisely as the interval, the interlude between birth and death or germination and decay, interactive or interpassive, never empty, let alone continuous. The place of the middle, however, is not necessarily in the middle. In effect, overshadowed by beginnings and ends, the middle is, like plants and the period known as medieval, the place and time of displacement. It is always on the move – toward the margins. Gillian Rudd attends to the marginality of flowers in Chaucer, while keeping to the essentially superficial nature of plant-thinking. Grazing the surface of things, between inside and outside (also at the level of experience), may be a way of proceeding that remains faithful to vegetal being, and especially to flowers. With Chaucer’s flora, Rudd slips in and out of the book, or, better, shows how, in Chaucer’s books, dreamers slip in and out of books and find themselves on flowery paths or in walled gardens. In this

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essential superficiality there is a crossing, too, between the human and the vegetal, so that ‘the flower is revealed to be more like the person than previously supposed’ and ‘the poet may also be described as more plant-like than expected.’ Many previously unthinkable things become possible in the middle: dreamy forays into the book emerge to the sunlit outside world; journeys into the poet and her or his imagination encounter a plant; and, vice versa, excursions into the vegetal environment discover nonhuman personhood. Lara Farina’s attempt to put a positive spin on vegetal biomass – indeed, on medieval vegetality as biomass – situates it in a strange middle without beginning and end, if not without margins. Plants as biomass are in the middle of nowhere, decontextualized but also providing the very context for the context, the backdrop (say, the background for illuminations filled with golden foliage). There are piles and piles of unorganized vegetal stuff and, for Farina, this explains why ‘plants themselves encouraged, maybe even demanded, wordpiles from their human analysts in the Middle Ages.’ Promising as this association may be, it risks anachronistically projecting the modern translation of matter into mass onto premodern thought and culture. For all its semantic vegetal roots traceable in one way or another to ‘a glob of grain,’ mass is a measurable, quantified, mathematized notion of matter that has no place in actual existence. It is a far cry from the Platonic receptacle, in which everything, including the places themselves, took its place. Nothing happens in mass and nothing happens to it. The medium of life, the living milieu, the vegetal middle evanesces in its midst. ***** The confluence of the superficial and the essential in the middle is evident in a certain artefact that, more often than not, contains flowers, namely a centerpiece. Placed at the center of a table, it is a lavish adornment, ‘merely’ aesthetic, redundant, dispensable. In another sense, a centerpiece is the part indisputably important to the whole, the pivotal point around which everything else turns. The productive self-contradiction inculcated into the word hints at its speculative, dialectical character, in the same breath saying and unsaying itself, affirming a privileged position and erasing it. Surely – readers may object – the center is distinct from the middle, which is subject to decentering, to being exiled to the margins. But neither is the center immune to such relegation. Caught in the middle between mutually exclusive significations, centerpieces are decentered, regardless of how perfectly they are positioned in the middle of the table. Essentially superficial and superficially essential, they illuminate vegetal ontology from this ambiguous and motile place. Plants and medievality are the centerpieces of the human relation to the world and to our own history, at once gratuitous embellishments and unsurpassable elements, the ‘fundamentals’ of life, thought, and time. Medieval plants are doubly so. The surfeits of allegory and symbolism in the medieval writings on

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plants flip into the naked literality of vegetal ontology, the spiritual aspects of physiology and material processes. So, from the end of this special issue of postmedieval, I invite you to revisit the middle, to circle back to the centerpieces that are the essays framed between my afterword and the editors’ introduction. Beautifully lush and precisely arranged, they go via apparent side roads to the heart of plant being, inseparable from its historical and environmental contexts. Centerpieces indeed: the texts gathered here go right to the middle of this being and abide in its milieu.

About the Author Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of phenomenology, environmental philosophy, and political thought. He is the author of Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013) and The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014). His most recent project, Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics (forthcoming in 2018), aims at understanding the political and ecological implications of Heidegger’s work without ignoring his noxious public engagements (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Augustine, S. 2009. Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Goethe, J.W. 2009. The Metamorphosis of Plants. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marder, M. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. 2015. The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth. Performance Philosophy 1(1): 185–94.

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Writing with plants Danielle Allora and Haylie Swensonb a

Department of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. Independent Scholar, Austin, TX, USA.

b

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 496–510. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0108-0

Gibson, Prudence. 2018. The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life. Critical Plant Studies 3. Boston, MA: Brill. vii+183 pp., $144. ISBN: 9789004360549 Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. 248 pp., $28. ISBN: 9780231173872 Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 288 pp., $29.95. ISBN: 9780520276116 Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2015. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 168 pp., $19.95. ISBN: 9780804796750 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 352 pp., $19.95. ISBN: 9780691178325 Wohlleben, Peter. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books. 288 pp., $29.95. ISBN: 9781771642484 Ó 2018 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals

Vol. 9, 4, 496–510

Chapter 10 was originally published as Allor, D. & Swenson, H. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 496–510. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0108-0.

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In Patience, after Jonah disobeys God, after he flees to the sea rather than preach to Nineveh, after a whale swallows him and holds him in its stinking belly for three days and nights, after it vomits him forth onto a beach, after Jonah preaches to Nineveh of its coming destruction, after the people of Nineveh fast and repent and are spared by God, after Jonah, fuming and indignant, rejects God for making him into a liar, after Jonah walks into the desert in a rage – then, the plants appear. Jonah builds an arbor from grasses and herbs, and God causes woodbine – honeysuckle – to grow over Jonah’s makeshift shelter. ‘God of His grace ded growe of þat soyle / Þe fayrest bynde hym abof þat euer burne wyste’ [God of His grace grew from that soil the fairest woodbine above him that man ever knew] (Patience, 1982, ll. 443–44).1 The woodbine shelters Jonah from the burning sun, its leaves sending sweet-smelling cool breezes over his body, and he relaxes into its shade. The next night, God sends a worm to wither the woodbine. Jonah, weeping at its loss, rails at God because he now finds himself at the mercy of the elements. God chides him:

1 English translations here and elsewhere are the authors.’

Þou art waxen so wroth for þy wodbynde, And trauayledez neuer to tent hit þe tyme of an howre, Bot at a wap hit here wax and away at anoþer, And 3et lykez þe so luþer, þi lyf woldez þou tyne. (Patience, 1982, ll. 497–500) [You grow so angry for your woodbine when you never worked for even an hour to tend it. It grew in an instant and left in the next, and yet you’re so worked up you would destroy your life.] Although Jonah takes the woodbine for granted when it is there, he sorely misses it – and the protection from the harsh climate it affords him – when it is gone. This story, in which a plant’s contributions to human survival are simultaneously minimized and bitterly lamented, might well be a cautionary tale from plant studies, the burgeoning field that seeks to account for the role of plants in interconnected ecologies of human and nonhuman life and thought. Critical plant studies is a young and rapidly developing field. It has been most closely associated with philosopher Michael Marder, whose book PlantThinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Marder, 2013) has been followed rapidly by The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Marder, 2014), Grafts: Writings on Plants (Marder, 2016), and (with Luce Irigaray) Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (Irigaray and Marder, 2016), among others. Briefly stated, Marder’s plant metaphysics proposes a philosophical orientation towards cooperative growth embedded in environments as an alternative to the dominant Western metaphysical tradition of psychic interiority, subject-object binaries, and abstraction. His phrase ‘plant-thinking’ refers to ‘an essentialism-free way of thinking that is fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical’

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(Marder, 2013, 152). Most of all, Marder desires to undertake ‘the task of grafting human cognition and other processes onto their analogs in plants, and vice versa,’ a process which he hopes will allow ‘two kinds of thinking to blossom or come to fruition together’ (Marder, 2016, 17). In other words, Marder’s project embraces the vegetal parts of the human, and finds (admittedly sometimes uneasy) kinship with other posthumanisms and speculative realisms. Marder is not the first to discuss plants and philosophy. Elaine P. Miller’s The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine takes up the task of constructing an alternate philosophical genealogy, one where the soul is vegetative rather than animal, from Kant to Nietzsche (Miller, 2002). Matthew Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany similarly surveys global philosophical traditions to argue for the more-than-human personhood of plants (Hall, 2011). The medieval period features little in any of these efforts, however, except as a foil for supposedly more enlightened approaches to the vegetal world. Matthew Hall refers to the ‘PlatonicAristotelian backgrounding of plants’ which persists throughout the Western metaphysical tradition in order to justify ‘the untrammeled use of plant resources’ (Hall, 2011, 48, 25). Marder’s The Philosopher’s Plant, which critiques, occasionally polemically, the position of twelve philosophers (from Plato to Irigaray) on plants, devotes three chapters to figures from the long Middle Ages: Augustine, Avicenna, and Maimonides. All three are said to participate in a system of metaphysics that Marder criticizes for the ways it has ‘devalued, instrumentalized, and rendered banal’ plant life (Marder, 2014, xv). But, as Hall reminds us, ‘plants are the most abundant form of life in nature that humans encounter’ – indeed, ‘it is the visible presence of this plant biomass which enables the presence and continued existence of human beings’ (Hall, 2011, 3). This is true both now and in the past, of course, as even a brief survey of medieval studies reveals. For plants have long been a topic of study in premodern fields, and there is already a thriving crop of excellent scholarship on forests, trees, and gardens that has explicated the important role of plants in medieval and early modern culture and history. For example, Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization investigates the role forests play in Western culture, stopping by the Middle Ages on its way through the spread of Western literature (Harrison, 1992), while Corinne J. Saunders explores the medieval and early modern forests of romance in The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Saunders, 1993). More recently, two monographs have connected early modern England’s timber shortage with the literature of the period: Jeffrey S. Theis’s Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation explores the interplay of forests – and pastoral texts about them – with English identity formation, and Vin Nardizzi’s Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees argues that early modern plays imaginatively engaged with anxieties about resource scarcity (Theis, 2009; Nardizzi, 2013). Anne Barton’s

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posthumously-released The Shakespearean Forest collects her lectures on the forests of early modern playwrights (Barton, 2017). Outside of a particular focus on forests and trees, other recent works examine plant life more broadly: Gillian Rudd’s Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature reads late medieval English literature through a series of chapters on trees, wilds, and gardens and fields (Rudd, 2007); Lynn Staley finds the garden topos central to England’s self-construction of identity in The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (Staley, 2012); Peggy McCracken asks how human-flower hybrids refract hospitality through nature and gender in the Roman d’Alexandre (McCracken, 2012); and Carolyn Dinshaw writes on how the trans-species intimacies of the foliate heads known as the Green Man feature in queer medievalisms (Dinshaw, 2017). Much more work on medieval plants is flourishing in conferences, dissertations, and book projects that have yet to be published. This exciting body of work promises to extend the temporal imagination of plant studies beyond contemporary environmental crisis and the deep time of evolutionary change to include historical time as well. Over the next pages, then, we outline the shape of current theoretical work on plants outside of medieval studies in the hope that such a survey will be useful to a medieval plant studies still under construction. What perhaps is most exciting about these theoretical approaches to plants is their speculative commitment to plant life in itself, alongside a commitment to the idea – familiar to any medieval student of Aristotle – that human and plant lives are fundamentally continuous. The books considered here range from philosophy to anthropology to art history to popular science writing, but we have identified three prominent characteristics of these writings on plants: they emphasize interconnection and entanglement; they suggest that the questions we ask of plants are intimately related to the questions we might ask of life itself; and they propose that the question of how we access the world of plants, especially through language and representation, must be repeatedly interrogated.

Interconnection and Entanglement The writers under review consistently remind us that one of the premier lessons of the plant world is against solipsism: interconnected and entangled selves are the only kind of selves it is possible to be. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, seeks to tell stories of entangled life outside of progress narratives: within precarity, after disturbance, after decay. Tracing the botanical and cultural history of the matsutake mushroom, Tricholoma matsutake, Tsing proposes an ontology of a ‘‘‘third nature,’’ that is, what manages to live despite capitalism’ (Tsing, 2015, viii). Admittedly, the matsutake mushroom is a fungus, not a

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2 Both humans and plants respirate – that is, they take in oxygen from their surroundings and combine it with glucose to produce energy, releasing carbon dioxide in the process. But plants also perform photosynthesis, which fixes carbon dioxide from the air to form glucose, releasing oxygen. Marder and Irigaray emphasize the interplay of human and plant breath: humans inhale oxygen processed by plants, and plants take in carbon dioxide exhaled by humans (and other animals and plants).

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plant. But even if they aren’t strictly plants, the matsutake – which Tsing meticulously follows across three continents – embody the kinds of entanglements that plant studies seeks to trace. Human disturbance of forests creates conditions that allow matsutake to thrive, and matsutake, in turn, allow trees to flourish in otherwise inhospitable places by breaking down the soil into nutrients that the trees can access. In this way, the mushrooms are just one example of the ‘possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance’ (Tsing, 2015, 4). Following the matsutake, as Tsing does, through the precarious work of mushroom pickers in the Northwest United States, where they are picked up by the supply chains that pull matsutake into networks of exchange, reveals that surprising entanglements can flourish even in the wreckage of capitalism. Tsing encourages us to pursue contaminations, the necessary consequence of collaborations; we must avoid the capitalist alienation that severs relationships and strictly categorizes living beings into rigid categories of species and individual. Instead, we must ‘watch [categories] emerge within encounters’ (Tsing, 2015, 29). Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray also stress the ways in which plants can teach us about the interdependence of human life with everything else; learning from plants how to relax into this dependence offers, for these authors, the potential of a new phase of human life. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives is an epistolary exchange between Marder and Irigaray, divided into two halves with identical chapter titles; the chapters are full of both theoretical and autobiographical reflections. For her part, Irigaray chronicles her expulsion from social and professional circles after the publication of Speculum of the Other Woman, her book critiquing psychoanalysis and Western philosophy’s treatment of women; she was removed from her teaching post at University of Vincennes and ostracized by Lacanians. Irigaray then sought a connection with nature to replace the stifling logocentric structures of her philosophical training: ‘Instead of teaching me how to cultivate my breathing,’ she writes, ‘my culture had taught me how to suspend my breath in words, ideas, or ideals – something that led me to breathe in an artificial way and left me breathless when I was expelled by and from my cultural background and indeed no longer believed in its values’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 20). She learned to breathe again with the help of the ‘aerial placenta’ of the trees in parks in Paris: ‘Through air, I participated in a universal exchange from which my tradition cut me off. Thus, I was alone and not alone. I took part in a universal sharing’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 21, 22). This breathing, which occurs necessarily alongside the reciprocal breath of plant life,2 has the potential to allow humans to climb out of the trap of the Western philosophical tradition, which depends on ‘suprasensitive ideals that have harnessed our energy without allowing for its growing and its sharing between us’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 95). Breathing, on the other hand, ‘allows for facing and dealing with emptiness without dying or falling into nothingness’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 97).

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Breathing does not allow us to fall apart into separate bodies and souls, but keeps us within ‘a world that takes into account our identity and subjectivity as they are’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 100). For Irigaray, bodies ‘as they are’ are ‘sexuated’ bodies – that is, ‘we were born from a union between two differently sexuate beings [. . .] sexuation is the condition of our human existence and development’ (Wheeler, 2017, 178). Irigaray acknowledges that, because it takes place in ‘our culture,’ ‘our sexuation is subjected to a logic that is abstract and based on dichotomies’ (to its detriment) (Wheeler, 2017, 178). However, Irigaray too often reproduces this binary and essentialist thinking in Through Vegetal Being, typically reducing sexual difference to ‘the duality of complementary but opposite sexuate parts’ – that is, ‘the woman and the man’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 67). A more expansive argument might find more fluid possibilities in the sexualities of the world of plants, which – as Irigaray notes – ‘is not sexuate as we are’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 79). But who is this we? It’s difficult to believe that the expansive possibilities that Irigaray and Marder argue are offered by contact with plants would be constrained by sexual binaries that don’t even capture the expanse of human experience. As queer theory and trans studies remind us, ‘The idea that ontology is sexed is made coherent only by positing an impassable and inflexible limit between the sexes, and consequently by the denial of the irreducibility of experiences that question or traverse the sexual binary’ – namely, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming experiences (Johnston, 2015, 618). This oversight is unfortunate because the interconnected relationships that Irigaray and Marder argue plants offer us could productively enable us to rethink these very binaries of gender and sexuality. Marder explains how understanding nature (and ‘vegetal nature’ in particular) ‘is impossible outside the cultivation of humanity as a relation – a sharing of the world or of worlds – at least between two’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 111). Marder reflects on how pollution has disrupted the reciprocal relationship between plant and human breathing – air pollution triggers allergic reactions to pollen. His own experience with severe allergies while growing up in Moscow led him to realize ‘that my physical allergies were caused, more or less directly, by the prevalent intellectual allergy to the complexities of vegetal life’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 131). He argues that we must acknowledge ‘the unpayable debt we owe to plants’ and draw ‘inspiration from this generosity with every breath we take’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 133). This inspiration comes from the relationship that plants have to their environment; he writes that ‘the elements extend hospitality to vegetal existence, which, in turn, nourishes the elements and convokes other kinds of vitality’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 140, emphasis original). But the Western metaphysical tradition ‘has sanctioned nothing other than inward growth and, therefore, a growth that is already stunted and that fails to learn from plants’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 174). Marder relentlessly characterizes

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plants as generous and benevolent; any disruptive interactions with plants (such as his allergies) are attributed to global capitalism impinging upon the nurturing relationship plants and humans would otherwise have. Humans will only be capable of growth like plants’ when ‘our psyches, inseparable from our living-breathing bodies, are extended, striving to an exteriority no longer exclusively human’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 177). We need to grow like this, drawing cooperatively on ‘the energy of an encounter’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 186), because late capitalism and Western metaphysics have forced us into violent and destructive means of acquiring energy: ‘behind the so-called subject-object split of modernity is a more profound divide between the energizing and the energized, the storehouse of energy and those who can tap into it at any moment’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 186). Plants, on the other hand, provide inspiration for a type of energy that ‘is nonextractive and nondestructive; the plant receives its energy by tending, by extending itself toward the inaccessible other, with which it does not interfere’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 185). Marder asks that ‘the soul itself would not be restricted to a space of subjective interiority but would span the times and spaces between the living, whether they are plants, animals, or humans,’ which he calls the ‘intersoul’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 210, emphasis original): ‘The cultivation of intersouls would mean nurturing the differences between the living, where the times and spaces that separate them retain their asynchronous and heterotopic specificities’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 210). The emphasis on critical memoir throughout Through Vegetal Being helps to displace the ‘hermetically sealed universe of logos’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 215) by repeatedly orienting the book toward actual encounters with plants. This focus on the authors’ first-person experiences is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Through Vegetal Being, though its contribution could be strengthened by more serious attention to the multiplicity of experiences that bodies oriented to plants render possible. At points, readers may find themselves frustrated with the tendency towards essentialism exhibited by both authors – not only in terms of gender, as we have discussed, but in Marder and Irigaray’s insistence that plants almost universally model a generous and communityoriented ethos, even though plant life, like all life, consumes and competes. Nevertheless, engaging with Through Vegetal Being might prompt a medieval plant studies to examine more closely how medieval bodies would have experienced intimacy with plants.

Ve g e t a l L i f e Marder and Irigaray trace a common path among these books about plants: the idea that plants are central to life itself. Where Marder and Irigaray argue that plants bestow the ‘gift of life’ on other beings through their boundless generosity

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and openness to others (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 207), Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that plants are a kind of master trope for current biopolitical thinking. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life takes up the critical neglect of plants in current discussions of biopower by tracing the plant through the major figures in the genealogies of biopolitics: Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari. Nealon argues, contra the assertions of most animal studies scholars, that it is plants, not animals, that form the constitutive other of humans in the development of theories of biopower: ‘the vegetable psukhe of life is a concept or image of thought that far better characterizes our biopolitical present than does the human-animal image of life, which remains tethered to the organism, the individual being with its hidden life and its projected world’ (Nealon, 2015, 106). Concerning Foucault, Nealon argues, the ‘forgotten other of our biopolitical conception of life is most assuredly not the animal, insofar as animality is the subtending paradigm for our era of humanist, neoliberal biopower – where it’s all appetite and appropriation all the time’ (Nealon, 2015, 11, emphasis original). Animals are thoroughly incorporated into biopower because ‘animalhuman analogies to individual consciousness, suffering, vision, desire, and communication tend to focus all discussion on individual living beings as the only biopolitically compelling entities, the only life forms worth the name’ (Nealon, 2015, 27). As Miller and Marder have argued, plants may lose parts of themselves with little fuss and still remain wholes, which is something that escapes most animals. As with Marder, Nealon returns to the role of plants in classical Greek thought: specifically, Plato’s and Aristotle’s familiar characterizations of the tripartite soul that places plants just above the threshold of life, allotting to the vegetable world the qualities of growth and reproduction. But in tracing the contours of this conception through Heidegger to Derrida, Nealon argues that plants form the essential but little-noticed background to Derrida’s work on animals. Where Derrida characterizes life as rendered possible by ‘the finite temporality of mortality’ (Nealon, 2015, 54) and follows the shared vulnerability of humans and animals to their environment and to death – the tragedy of the individual being – plants do something else. That something else is the vegetable physis, the raw growth of plants, ‘a power of emergence that remains indifferent to this or that form of ‘‘life,’’ to this or that individual being or its world’ (Nealon, 2015, 60). For Derrida, ‘plant life functions as an intense figure for this distributed, violent power of emergence on which everything depends’ (Nealon, 2015, 79). Unlike Marder and Irigaray, who argue that plants are nurturing, generous figures, Nealon characterizes the plant world as ‘crushing in its indifference’ (Nealon, 2015, 74). Nealon turns last to Deleuze and Guattari, whose figure of the rhizome cements Nealon’s argument that plants in theories of biopower serve as figures of flow and emergence against the defined individual existences of animals and humans. Rhizomes are not what will set subjects free; instead, rhizomes are the continuous, simultaneous, mutual

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determination of individual and environment. Since Aristotle, ‘these swarms of molecular emergence have functioned as one of the privileged names of ‘‘vegetable life’’ throughout the history of Western philosophy’ (Nealon, 2015, 95). Nealon concludes that ‘Life is an interlocking assemblage of forms and processes, a series of doings, as Deleuze and Guattari insist; it is not a hidden world possessed by an individual organism’ (Nealon, 2015, 114). Nealon’s lucid account of the neglected importance of plant life to biopolitical thought serves as an important reminder to look beyond kingdom Animalia in our conceptions of how life becomes politicized – both now and in the premodern texts we study.

Te c h n o l o g i e s o f A c c e s s At this point, it should be clear that plants offer humans different ways of being in the world, some of which tantalizingly promise a path forward through anthropogenic climate change and capitalist alienation – if only we can access them. But in order to bring plants out of the background, as Hall has suggested, and into the spotlight where they can effect change on human ways of being in the world, we need to cultivate technologies of access: first to the plants themselves, and then to the new lifeworlds that community with plants may lead us to. In The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life, part of Marder’s book series on Critical Plant Studies, Prudence Gibson argues that contemporary bioart has begun the process of forging these technologies of access between humans and the vegetal natural world. The plant contract that Gibson outlines in her monograph describes ‘an effort to un-mute nature, via plant science and art showing evidence that plants communicate to one another via emissions’ (Gibson, 2018, 2). It is ‘a method of telling stories about plants and art together’ that finds in aesthetics ‘a way of drawing connections between species and things’ (Gibson, 2018, 18). The ‘plant and art hybrids’ that Gibson describes over the course of her book are ‘provocateurs in an art-science discourse’ (Gibson, 2018, 14). Examining a series of art projects, from wastelands to Green Men and from robot-plant hybrids to ecofeminism, Gibson traces the potential of art and narrative to catalyze new modes of perception and new strategies of coexistence. For example, Gibson describes the work of Australian artist Cat Jones, whose installation Somatic Drifts uses a live feed of participants to superimpose other bodies over their own – bodies of other genders and other species, including plants. Effective art, for Gibson, should create a ‘disruption’ by which viewers ‘become more aware of the influence of one species upon another, rather than relying always on the effects of human life on the vegetal world alone’ (Gibson, 2018, 58). By digitally collapsing images of participants with the images of other bodies, including plants, Jones’s work extends the human body into felt community with others.

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Where Gibson emphasizes the possibilities of bioart as a tool to expand human perception and empathy, Tsing considers anthropology an especially important technology of access because of its command of narrative: ‘To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? [. . .] To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history’ (Tsing, 2015, 37, emphasis original). The stakes of the stories that Tsing uncovers are high – the progress narrative of modernity does not help us survive, and Tsing charts its devastating effects. However, other stories, especially those of entangled life, can teach us how to recognize the ‘latent commons,’ the spaces of collaborative survival in capitalist ruination (Tsing, 2015, 135). Tsing’s mastery of this technique is evident throughout The Mushroom at the End of the World, but a particularly clear articulation of it occurs as she describes the practice of peasant forest (satoyama) revitalization in Japan, in which ‘Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design’ as ‘human activities’ are considered ‘part of the forest in the same way as nonhuman activities’ (Tsing, 2015, 152). Tsing argues that ‘to appreciate [this] assemblage, one must attend to its separate ways of being at the same time as watching how they come together in sporadic but consequential coordinations. Furthermore [. . .] the polyphony of the assemblage shifts as conditions change’ (Tsing, 2015, 158). We have to ‘listen politically,’ which means listening ‘to detect the traces of not-yetarticulated common agendas’ (Tsing, 2015, 254). If Tsing’s book is one example of this sort of listening, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World is another. Originally published in German in 2015 as Das geheime Leben der Ba¨ume, The Hidden Life of Trees became a New York Times bestseller when the English translation was published in 2016. The book consists of thirty-six short chapters, each dealing with some aspect of tree life, and is bolstered with a foreword by conservationist Tim Flannery and a concluding note by forest scientist Suzanne Simard, who has discovered a fungi-tree network that she dubbed the ‘wood wide web.’ The book’s goal is to build a bridge between humans and trees: to allow humans to better understand the lifeworlds of trees as communicative, social, and feeling, so that humans will be better stewards of forests. In Wohlleben’s view, this largely means leaving forests alone to manage themselves. The book aims ‘to show just how vital undisturbed forests and woodlands are to the future of our planet and how our appreciation for trees affects the way we interact with the world around us’ (Wohlleben, 2016, xi). Knowledge about tree lives can accomplish this because ‘When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines’ (Wohlleben, 2016, xiv). Trees can sleep, count, tell time, feel pain, nourish their children, warn other trees of predators, learn, remember, and sense their environments.

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With a combination of narrative from his experience as a forester and references to scientific discoveries within the last two decades, Wohlleben builds a case for trees as social, feeling creatures. Forests, he argues, are ‘superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies,’ places in which the members follow the rule of ‘nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 3). By cooperating, trees can ‘establish a consistent local climate’ by ‘creat[ing] an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 4). Trees have senses and exchange information about predators through pheromones and underground fungi filaments that ‘network an entire forest’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 10) – the wood wide web. Furthermore, tree ‘well-being depends on their community’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 17), so they help one another. Trees learn, rationing water even in times of plenty after having experienced a drought. Tree parents ‘are in contact with [young trees] through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients,’ a process that Wohlleben likens to ‘nursing their babies’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 34). Wohlleben seeks to enlighten his readers about these marvelous facts because he believes that ‘When the capabilities of vegetative beings become known, and their emotional lives and needs are recognized, then the way we treat plants will gradually change’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 244). He asks that we use wood ‘as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 243). Wohlleben’s insistence that trees be allowed to flourish without the interference of humans runs counter to the ideas expressed by Tsing, who argues that disruption is a constant in all interaction and that humans are not necessarily exceptional contributors to ecosystems. This difference is representative of some of the major fissures between these books: namely, the role that humans should take with respect to the plant world. The books considered in this review are all ultimately questioning both the experience and the representation of plant life – how should we approach plants in actuality and in our philosophizing about them? Should we embrace the messy, interconnected nature of living alongside plants, or should we leave plants to grow without interference? Does writing about plants bring us closer to them or just seal ourselves away within language and representation? Some authors emphasize the ways signification blocks our access to the real lifeworlds of plants, while others find representation, if done correctly, is perfectly capable of producing alliances between plants and humans. What most of these authors share, however, is a commitment to embodied experience, as each devotes attention to describing the simplicity and impossible complexity of human

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contact with plants. Even Wohlleben, who argues that old growth forests should be left alone, admits to the benefits of human intimacies with forests. One of the most troubled and potentially problematic technologies of access is language and representation. Wohlleben cheerfully uses metaphor to build his bridge between humans and trees, referring to the forestry practice of calling trees’ relationships with their parents ‘upbringing’ and referring to the trials a young tree might experience – such as drought, high winds, and deep shade – as ‘tree school’ (Wohlleben, 2016, 32, 43). Tsing also defends the ability of narratives and fables to know the world, even within the discourse of science. Other authors, however, are more cautious. Gibson, for example, warns that ‘a robust plant-art ontology must resist abstraction and the urge to transcend, to idealise and to sublimate’ (Gibson, 2018, 170). Art that does not ‘affirm the material, the sensorial’ alongside ‘the symbolic life of plants’ risks reifying the separation between humans and plants (Gibson, 2018, 170). We must be ‘careful of our language as artists and writers, as well as scientists, or we do more damage than good’ (Gibson, 2018, 92). Marder and Irigaray are similarly cautious, even suspicious, of language, which (in Irigaray’s words) ‘has not allowed for a complete blossoming of our humanity’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 80). Irigaray argues that naming a tree and fixing it as a static, singular object is an act of domination – she gives the example of calling a birch tree a birch when it is so many different ‘living and changing’ beings over the seasons (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 49). Marder argues that in order to exist with nature in any real way, we must ‘first take an apprenticeship in its nonverbal languages’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 161): ‘the way living beings express themselves in spatial configurations and along their lifetime, in conformity with the seasons and the places they inhabit’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 162). Otherwise, we risk ‘drowning the silence of vegetal life in the empty chatter of speech’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 172). Turning the world into codes or numbers, Marder argues, ‘expresses a preference for understanding the world over living in it, for turning it into an object of intellect over existing within its elemental milieu’ (Irigaray and Marder, 2016, 191). Eduardo Kohn’s theory of semiosis as life and life as semiosis builds a bridge between representation and experience. Kohn’s 2013 book, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, is based both on his fieldwork among the Runa people of Ecuador and on the semiotics of nineteenth-century American pragmatist Charles Peirce. He argues that ‘our social theory [. . .] conflates representation with language’ and so stymies our interactions with the world (Kohn, 2013, 8), locking us within an understanding of semiosis – symbolic language – that has ‘the propensity [. . .] to jump out of the broader semiotic field from which it emerges, separating us, in the process, from the world around us’ (Kohn, 2013, 43). Against this regime of signification, Kohn argues (following Peirce) that representation is, in fact, the default mode of life, and that symbolic representation, i.e. language, emerges from lower-order

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3 Kohn makes clear that these tropical rainforests are an intensification of such principles of mutual representation, not a radical break; thus, these principles hold everywhere, no matter how much we would like to ignore them.

interactions with the world, which are, in and of themselves, signs. Peirce’s broad definition of a sign – as Kohn quotes, a sign to Peirce is ‘something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (as cited in Kohn, 2013, 29) – allows all sorts of beings and even evolutionary lineages to serve as interpretants, which interpret ‘the way in which a prior sign relates to its object’ (Kohn, 2013, 33). In this sense, all living beings are ‘outcomes of an evolutionary process of ever-increasing alignment with these proliferating webs of habits,’ which in effect constitute life (Kohn, 2013, 62). Kohn gives the example of the anteater, whose snout comes to capture ‘certain features of its environment, namely, the shape of ant tunnels’ (Kohn, 2013, 74). As a result, ‘What differentiates life from the inanimate physical world is that life-forms represent the world in some way or another, and these representations are intrinsic to their being’ (Kohn, 2013, 9). These representations need not occur within a mind – indeed, Kohn asks us to acknowledge that ‘introspection, human-to-human intersubjectivity, and even trans-species sympathy and communication are not categorically different’ (Kohn, 2013, 87). This brings us to the assertion at the title of Kohn’s book, that Forests Think – for Kohn, ‘thinking’ refers to this process of semiosis that all life shares. The ongoing play of mutual representation that constitutes the tropical rainforests of A´vila means that ‘these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans’ (Kohn, 2013, 72).3 Kohn’s anthropology beyond the human serves as a technology of access to other living beings by arguing that there is no representational gap that must be leapt by humans hopelessly caught within language. Instead, although symbolic thought does carry the danger of solipsism, it is simultaneously inextricable from the broader semiotic web it occupies, and there is direct continuity between representation, life, and thought. For a medieval plant studies, this should serve as a reminder to turn to materiality not as the opposite of the textual record we study, but as always co-imbricated with it. *** At the end of Patience, Jonah is furious at God for not destroying Nineveh but withering his woodbine. It’s no little thing, Jonah says; it’s ‘lykker to ry3t’ (Patience, 1982, l. 493). It’s about justice. But God asks of Jonah: why are you so mad that I’ve destroyed the woodbine, which you didn’t even take care of? Can you imagine how I would feel if I destroyed Nineveh, which I made and have cared for? In effect, God asks: can you imagine being responsible for everything as if you had made it? You, too, would practice mercy rather than destroy what you have loved. Those who don’t have to clean up their own messes are quick to make them: Be no3t so gryndel, godman, bot go forth þy wayes, Be preue and be pacient in payne and in joye; For he þat is to rakel to renden his cloþez

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Mot efte sitte with more vnsounde to sewe hem togeder. (Patience, 1982, ll. 524–27) [Don’t be so angry, sir, but go on your way; be steadfast and patient in pain and in joy. For he that is too quick to rend his clothes must later sit with more discomfort to sew them together.] There’s a tension here for the woodbine: its place in the poem is almost purely instrumental, used by God to teach Jonah a lesson; but the lesson it teaches is one of intimacy and responsibility. In fact, it is the central lesson of patience in the poem. Jonah is wrong about a lot of things, but we feel deeply his protest of the woodbine’s importance – ‘Hit is not lyttel’ (Patience, 1982, l. 493), he says. If we were to construct Patience’s own theory of plants, it might go something like this: if God were like Jonah, taking plants and all that they give us for granted, then the destruction of Nineveh – the collapse of human culture and society – would not be far behind. If something is ‘not lyttel’ after it’s gone, then you have a duty to care for it while it’s still here. That’s not so different from what the six writers featured in this review are arguing today. ‘Hit is not lyttel,’ Jonah says. It is important.

About the Authors Danielle Allor is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on vegetal life and late medieval literature, arguing that late medieval authors imported knowledge-organizing and classifying strategies from natural philosophy to bolster claims to religious authenticity and literary authority. Her dissertation examines trees as material and figural systems in late medieval classification England (E-mail: [email protected]). Haylie Swenson recently received a PhD in English from The George Washington University. Her essay ‘‘Lions and Latour litanies in the Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt’’ won the Michael Camille Essay Prize and was published in postmedieval in 2013. Another essay, ‘‘Attending to ‘Beasts Irrational’ in Gower’s Vox Clamantis,’’ will appear in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Richard Godden for The New Middle Ages series (E-mail: [email protected]).

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References Barton, A. 2017. The Shakespearean Forest. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dinshaw, C. 2017. Black Skin, Green Masks: Medieval Foliate Heads, Racial Trauma, and Queer Worldmaking. In The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, eds. B. Bildhauer and C. Jones, 276–304. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hall, M. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Harrison, R.P. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnston, T.R. 2015. Questioning the Threshold of Sexual Difference: Irigarayan Ontology and Transgender, Intersex, and Gender-Nonconforming Being. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 (4): 617–33. Marder, M. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. 2016. Grafts: Writings on Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. McCracken, P. 2012. The Floral and the Human. In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. J. J. Cohen, 65–90. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books. Miller, E.P. 2002. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nardizzi, V. 2013. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Patience. 1982. In The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. M. Andrew and R. Waldron, 185–206. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rudd, G. 2007. Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press. Saunders, C.J. 1993. The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Staley, L. 2012. The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Theis, J.S. 2009. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Wheeler, A. 2017. An Interview with Luce Irigaray on Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives and Sexuate Difference. Angelaki, 22 (4): 177–81.

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Original Article

Is Dante a cosmopolitan?

Mary Elizabeth Sullivan Department of Political Science, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA.

Abstract This article attempts to answer the question ‘Is Dante a Cosmopolitan?’ or, more specifically, ‘Does Dante’s advocacy for a world empire in Monarchia constitute a cosmopolitan theory of politics?’ Cosmopolitanism grew out of fifth-century B.C.E. Greece and has gained increasing traction among both moral philosophers and political scientists in recent decades. Contemporary scholars, particularly in the field of international relations theory, often list Dante as an early advocate for global governance. Dante is offered as a stepping stone between the cosmopolitans of the ancient world and Kantian liberals. Yet none of these scholars have really explored how well Monarchia fits into this tradition. This paper examines the text of Dante’s Monarchia in light of cosmopolitan political theory. It finds that, while Dante does share some key concerns with modern cosmopolitan thinkers, he ultimately fails to provide a model (even a primitive one) of cosmopolitan ethics or cosmopolitan government. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9, 511–523. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0107-1

Although he is best known as the author of the epic poem The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri also made his mark as a politician and political thinker in fourteenth-century Italy. In his treatise Monarchia, Dante outlines a conception of global monarchy that has raised some interest among modern cosmopolitan thinkers. Arguably the first call for the real unification of political power, this unusual political treatise should be read with a mind to the historical context in which it was written. Dante contends that only a universal monarch can bring about peace and justice on this earth. It should not be surprising, however, that Dante’s fourteenth-century vision of universal justice differs significantly from

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Vol. 9, 4, 511–523

Chapter 11 was originally published as Sullivan, M. E. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2018) 9: 511–523. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0107-1.

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that of contemporary advocates of cosmopolitan morality and world government. Does Dante, in fact, deserve the title of cosmopolitan at all?

Dante and International Relations Theory The most common citations of Dante as an advocate of cosmopolitanism are found in the international relations theory literature. The basic line of argument presented in these papers is that there are two main traditions within the history of international relations theory. The first is an anarchist school, represented by Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau. The second is a cosmopolitan or ‘global government’ tradition. Here we see Diogenes, Cicero, Dante, and Kant, as well as contemporary advocates for the United Nations and other international organizations. In some cases, Dante is listed as the originator of world government theory; in other instances, he is simply offered as ‘an excellent example’ of the genre and (quite interestingly, in my view) of an idealist approach to the study of world politics. For example, Thomas Weiss states that, ‘Beginning with Dante’s Monarchia at the beginning of the fourteenth-century, there is a long tradition of criticizing the existing state system and replacing it with a universal government’ (Weiss, 2009, 259). Pierre Hassner (1994), likewise, considers Dante’s main contribution to international relations theory to be the idea that virtuous peace is obtained not by avoiding the rest of the world, but by engaging with and ultimately absorbing it. Thomas Pogge, on the other hand, argues that Dante, along with Aquinas, Marsilius, and Bodin, offers a prefiguration of the dogma, later articulated by Hobbes and others, that lasting world peace will require ‘an agency of last resort’ (Pogge, 1992, 59). The most thorough reading of Dante’s theory of cosmopolitan world government in the international relations literature comes from Arend Lijphart. Lijphart highlights Dante’s Monarchia as ‘an excellent example’ of the school that advocates ‘a social contract among the states’ as the best, and perhaps only, way out of a chaotic international system (Lijphart, 1974, 44). Lijphart also distinguished between Dante and Kant, noting that while Kant wishes individual states to maintain their sovereignty, albeit in a more orderly and constrained global system, Dante would abolish state sovereignty in favor of an absolute world government. Lijphart is also one of the few international relations scholars who includes any direct citations from the text of Monarchia. Dante’s political thought is clearly not the primary concern of this body of research; the authors simply present this bit of history as background information before moving on to the particular issues they wish to debate. There is little to no textual analysis. In fact, many of these authors do not cite the primary texts in question at all; rather, they refer to the opening chapter of Craig Murphy’s International Organization and Industrial Change, in which he

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traces the basic lineage of global governance theory. Murphy’s Introduction begins: Today’s system of self-regulating territorial governments can be traced back as far as Italy’s early modern trading states, where some of today’s oldest private fortunes began. Dante’s Monarchia, of around 1310, began the tradition of criticizing this modern—originally, strictly European— state system and advocating its replacement with a universal government. (Murphy, 1994, 1) Craig supports this claim with a reference to F.H. Hinsley’s Power and the Pursuit of Peace, which, ironically enough, is far more ambiguous about Dante’s role in the development of theories of world government: ‘Vast efforts have been made, innumerable books have flowed, from the wish to cite Dubois or Dante, Cruce´ or Sully, as forerunners of the League of Nations or the United Nations experiment’ (Hinsley, 1963, 14–15). Hinsley goes on to explain that while Dante does outline a system for world government, his aims were quite different from modern advocates of the United Nations and similar organizations (an issue I will be addressing later in this paper). Despite Hinsley’s urging of caution at the appropriation of medieval and early modern sources, contemporary scholars of world governance prefer to list Dante in their pedigree without a second thought. These scholars are not actually interested in the development of these theories so much as in their application to contemporary problems in international politics. While it is certainly forgivable that international relations scholars do not want to engage in lengthy examinations of fourteenth-century texts, I have no such qualms. Despite their scant references, these authors do appear to share a basic assumption that Dante is an early forbear of either contemporary ethical cosmopolitans/multiculturalists, such as Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor, or of modern advocates of global political intuitions, along the lines of the League of Nations or the United Nations. It is this assumption I wish to investigate more closely.

Cosmopolitanism and sodomy in The Divine Comedy One major exception I have found in these skimpy references to Dante as a cosmopolitan thinker is the work of Gregory P. Stone. Stone argues for a revised reading of Inferno 15 and its condemnation of sodomy. Stone’s reading is rooted in the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. As he interprets it, God punishes Sodom not for homosexuality, or even attempted rape, but for failing in their hospitality toward strangers: ‘the crime of the men of Sodom is more than an attempted homosexual rape; its essence lies in their treating foreigners as ‘‘aliens’’ over whom they enjoy absolute power to control as they please’ (Stone, 2005, 108). This Biblical reading is not radical by any means. The account of

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Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis does place emphasis on hospitality and our moral duty to strangers. Stone is unique, however, in contending it is this version of the ‘sin of Sodom’ that God punishes in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell. Stone argues that the true ‘sin against nature’ committed by these men, including Dante’s mentor, Brunetto Latini, is excessive patriotism, a violation of mankind’s natural unity. Part of Stone’s reading stems from the fact that, as others have noted, many of the men listed in this section of Inferno were wellknown Guelphs, a political party that favored Florence as an independent citystate. Explicit in Stone’s argument is the belief that Dante’s Monarchia likewise supports a cosmopolitan viewpoint. The sodomist-Guelph viewpoint is continually contrasted with Dante’s call for universal empire. Stone reads Dante’s political theory (as present in Monarchia, Convivio, and The Divine Comedy) as thoroughly cosmopolitan, citing in particular the endorsement of world government in Monarchia as well as Dante’s praise of the racially mixed Aeneas as evidence (Stone, 2005, 115–118). Regarding Stone’s interpretation of Monarchia, I have my doubts. Imperialism and cosmopolitanism are not interchangeable concepts. A much more detailed account of my reading of Monarchia will come later in this paper. However, Stone’s reading of Inferno 15 does have me intrigued. The idea that Dante’s condemnation of sodomists is really about the treatment of aliens in Florence and elsewhere may have some merit and certainly raises interesting questions for Dante scholars. Thus, while I dispute some of the supporting evidence Stone offers by way of his reading of Monarchia and the Valley of Princes scene in Purgtorio, I still find the heart of Stone’s argument to be worthwhile (and certainly more thorough than the International Relations scholars mentioned earlier).

Cosmopolitans: ancient and modern Before delving into the question of whether Dante’s Monarchia qualifies as a work of cosmopolitan political thought, I should first explain what I mean by cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism first comes about in fifth-century B.C.E. Greece with Diogenes the Cynic famously claiming to be ‘a citizen of the universe’ (Diogenes Laertius, 1925, VI.2.63). Early cosmopolitans proclaimed their allegiance not to a particular polis, but to mankind as a whole. A key part of their philosophical project lay in devising an ethical system that would apply to people across different cultural backgrounds. These ancient cosmopolitans often combined a unified human ethics with two other major philosophical approaches from the same time period: stoicism and skepticism. The first of these involved harboring basic doubts about what we, as human beings, could really know. This becomes a critical aspect of cosmopolitanism in that one must always accept that one’s own cultural assumptions may be wrong (or at least no

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more right than anyone else’s). Thus, classic cosmopolitans approached moral questions with an open mind; the way things are done around here may not, in fact, be the best way.1 Secondly, as Fred Dallmayr has pointed out, ancient cosmopolitans tended to withdraw from direct political action (Cicero would be an exception to this general rule). What they were actually seeking was not an actual, legal universal polis, but rather a ‘general consensus on moral norms’ (Dallmayr, 2003, 427). In keeping with the Stoic teachings, which heavily influenced early cosmopolitan thought, the object became to change one’s attitude toward the other rather than change the political system. In this way, ancient cosmopolitanism (as well as certain modern strains) could be an explicitly apolitical theory. In 1795, Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace blended the idea of a cosmopolitan moral ethic with the notion of global political order. Kant endorsed the classical cosmopolitan idea of universal human morality discovered through the use of reason. He also thought that this same human reason would lead people to seek an end to warfare through the use of international organization (Kant, 2003). A supranational organization with the ability to settle disputes between nations would not mean a complete end to individual sovereignty, only a slight diminution in return for lasting peace. Kant argued that this was a worthwhile tradeoff and one he thought many nations would gladly make. Unlike most of the ancient cosmopolitans, Kant’s theory was aimed at changing the political order. Contemporary cosmopolitans have tended to split into two schools: one continues the more classical notion of cosmopolitanism as a universal moral order, and the other follows the more political route, calling for greater use of international law and other global political organization. The former group includes such thinkers as Martha Nussbaum, Jeremy Waldron, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.2 As Dallmayr has pointed out, Nussbaum in particular has interpreted cosmopolitanism as a form of cross-cultural ethics, rather than a truly political theory. In many ways, this ethical, apolitical approach is more in keeping with the ancient Greek cosmopolitan tradition. Yet, as critics have pointed out, it often retreats from political problems rather than addressing them. Moral cosmopolitans are trying to foster global understanding but do not necessarily offer any solutions to conflict.3 An alternative approach to cosmopolitanism has been more common in the foreign policy literature. Here, scholars have been less focused on the issue of global moral understanding. Instead, they interpret cosmopolitanism in a very political way, asking to what extent we can succeed in creating a global political order. In the periods immediately following both World War I and World War II, these ideas gained serious traction among international relations scholars. A system of international organization along the lines of that outlined by Kant seemed to provide a real alternative to a chaotic international system.4 It is typically these scholars who grasp at Dante’s Monarchia as a pre-modern

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1 See Held (2003).

2 See Nussbaum (1999), Waldron (2000), and Appiah (2000).

3 See Euben (2001).

4 See Mazower (2012) and Weiss (2009).

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example of global governance theory. They call for a system in which states give up a certain measure of sovereignty to move beyond international cooperation to a realm of world government. This is notably different from simply saying that each individual should be held morally accountable by the same standard.

Cosmopolitanism and Monarchia Turning to the text of Monarchia, I must now address the extent to which it meets any of these definitions of cosmopolitanism. Dante’s Monarchia is divided into three sections. Book I offers a philosophical/logical argument for why a single temporal ruler is necessary for the achievement of world peace. Drawing heavily on Aristotle, Dante argues that humanity, as a whole, can best achieve its goals of providing for God’s will on earth and achieving salvation in the hereafter if a single ruler directs the secular aspects of this mission. Book II looks at the question of Empire from a historical perspective, arguing for the justice of Rome’s founding and the legitimacy of its political authority. Rome’s success is taken as evidence of God’s favor. Finally, in Book III, Dante elaborates on the relationship between the Pope and the Emperor. Here, he emphasizes that each has authority in his own right derived directly from the Divine Will. Neither the empire nor the papacy was created by the other or is subservient to the other. Both have independent jurisdiction, yet both can, in a situation of grave injustice, serve as a check on the power of the other. To what extent can these arguments be taken as a forerunner of modern cosmopolitan approaches? The first key argument against Dante’s inclusion as either a moral or legal cosmopolitan is his treatment of individual rights. As Thomas Pogge argues, cosmopolitan theory addresses people at an individual rather than a collective level: ‘the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons—rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states’ (Pogge, 1992, 48). Rights are granted to each person based on his or her humanity. As Robert Audi puts it, ‘It is both natural and plausible to assume that the value of nations and other social structures is derivative. Nations and other institutional structures derive their value from their role serving people […] It is people who have basic moral status’ (Audi, 2009, 372). This is at odds with Dante’s approach. Firstly, Dante is not concerned with the rights or obligations of individuals, but rather with ‘mankind considered as a whole’ (Dante, 1996, 8). This is not a mere difference in language. Dante is explicit throughout Monarchia that he is interested only in the collective telos of the human race. Individual needs and desires are, in contrast irrelevant. The superiority of a unified purpose over individual or subgroup goals forms a key part of the argument for a single monarchy found in Book I: ‘The order of the parts in relation to the single entity is better, for it constitutes the end or purpose of their relationship […] The human race […] constitutes a whole in relation to

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individual kingdoms and peoples […] and it is a part in relation to the universe’ (Dante, 1996, 11–12). The remainder of Book I discusses how to best bring about this collective purpose. There is no discussion of individual rights or obligations, only those of humanity. This is a sharp break from cosmopolitan theory, both ancient and modern. Ancient cosmopolitans were fundamentally concerned with humans as unrooted individuals. This aspect has carried over into contemporary moral cosmopolitanism as well. Thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Seyla Benhabib are similarly concerned with the rights and obligations of each human.5 Even legal cosmopolitans address individual needs and rights. For example, the U.N.’s ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ focuses on the treatment of individual persons, repeatedly beginning its statements with ‘everyone has the right…’ (United Nations, 1948). Dante, on the other hand, is concerned with the needs of humanity as a whole. This is an entirely different unit of analysis. Cosmopolitans reject the nation-state as a unit of moral worth because it is too large; Dante rejects it because it is too small. Secondly, Dante’s political theory has no sense of individual rights. Monarchia explicitly states that there should be no limits on the power of the monarch: If someone does not have the power to give to each person what is his, how will he act in accordance with justice? From this it is clear that the more powerful a just man is, the more effectively will justice be brought about by his actions. Building on this exposition we can argue as follows: justice is at its strongest in the world when it resides in a subject who has in the highest degree possible the will and the power to act … [The monarch’s] jurisdiction is bounded only by the ocean. (Dante, 1996, 17–8) Individual political and property rights do not exist in any legal or political sense. They are logically impossible under such a system (Sullivan 2007). The idea of one person having unrestrained access to use the property or persons of all others in any way he sees fit is incompatible with cosmopolitan universalism, in which all have equal rights. A political theory that denies the possibility of individual human rights in the political sphere is not cosmopolitan. A further argument against Dante’s cosmopolitanism is his complete lack of moral skepticism. As Stone (2005) noted, Dante did believe that morality was universal. The Divine Comedy shows an elaborate system of rewards and punishments meted out to people from all walks of life. This moral system is cited as further evidence of Dante’s cosmopolitanism. However, I am not convinced on this point. While Dante does believe that morality is universal, it is in the form of an unquestioning adherence to Christianity. There is no potential for multiculturalism here: For thou saidst: ‘A man is born on the bank of the Indus, and none is there to speak, or read, or write of Christ, and all his desires and doings are good, so far as human reason sees, without sin in life or speech. He dies

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5 See Nussbaum (1999).

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unbaptized and without faith. Where is this justice that condemns him?’[…] The Primal Will, which in itself is good, from itself, the Supreme Good, never was moved; whatever accords with it in that measure just. (Dante, 1961, [Paradiso] 274–5) Dante states more than once that a person can be denied the benefits of Paradise simply because of where or when they were born. Commenting on the ‘good heathens’ in Limbo, Dante says, ‘though they have merits, it is not enough, for they had not baptism, which is the gateway of the faith though holdest; and if they were before Christianity they not did worship God aright, and of these I [Virgil] am one. For such defects, and not for any guilt, we are lost’ (Dante, 1961, [Inferno] 60–61). Similarly, after entering Heaven, Dante the pilgrim is told: ‘To this kingdom none ever rose who did not believe in Christ’ (Dante, 1961, [Paradiso] 274–275).’ Thus, while it is universally applied, Dante’s theory is not cosmopolitan; it is simply a case of enforcing his own religious and moral views on all peoples. Furthermore, as explained earlier in this paper, cosmopolitanism tends to go hand in hand with skepticism. To approach moral problems in a truly cosmopolitan manner, one has to be open to the possibility that one’s own cultural tradition could be wrong on any given point or, at the very least, that other traditions may be equally right. On this count, Dante clearly fails. While he does in some cases portray non-Christians in a sympathetic manner (for example, Virgil), he still maintains a moral system in which only those of his particular religious persuasion have the opportunity to reach perfection. Moral cosmopolitans, on the other hand, see value in a variety of ethical traditions and often encourage people to look outside their own culture for the answers to moral and spiritual problems. They seek to ‘create a space in which genuine dialogue and opening of horizons are possible’ (Mehta, 2000, 623). However, one should keep in mind that Dante would not be the first ‘cosmopolitan’ to commit these two particular sins. Ethnocentrism is a near constant haunt among moral cosmopolitans. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2006) has complained, ‘Cosmopolitanism is often cosmopolitanism from above— extrapolating from existing institutions, translated into general principles. How often are cosmopolitan claims an imposition of ethnocentric norms?’ (Pieterse, 2006, 1253). In this way, Dante is not so different from some contemporary thinkers; his version of universal morality often just means that he wants everyone to adopt his moral system. Although this may not be a unique feature in Dante’s theory, it still presents a major stumbling block. His theory does not seriously consider the possibility of gaining moral knowledge from exposure to other cultures and moral and legal systems. Furthermore, Dante’s defect is more serious than those of the contemporary theorists, such as Susan Okin, that Pieterse criticizes. For Dante, it is not enough that an individual behave in accordance with universal moral standards; that individual must also believe in the one true God

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and have been baptized in the Catholic Church. This institutional exclusion goes against the very heart of a cosmopolitan approach to morality. Between Dante’s lack of concern for individual rights and his moral absolutism, I feel confident in saying that he is not, in fact, a moral cosmopolitan. The claim that he is a legal cosmopolitan, however, bears further consideration. The main point that Dante has in common with modern advocates of legal cosmopolitanism is an overriding concern for world peace and maintaining law and order on a global scale. Dante makes clear early on in Monarchia that he sees the primary goal of his political project being the maintenance of world peace: ‘It is clear that universal peace is the best of those things which are ordained for our human happiness’ (Dante, 1996, 8). Peace is considered the highest good because it is necessary for all other forms of human flourishing—particularly, Dante argues, intellectual life. Legal cosmopolitans (another term for advocates of world government) likewise see their objective as being the establishment of peace on a global scale. On this point, they and Dante do agree. Further agreement can be found in their proposed solutions. Both Dante and modern political cosmopolitans seek to bring about universal peace through the establishment of a global authority, above the level of the nation-state, which could adjudicate any disputes between the lower political units. As Dante describes his own preferred regime: ‘it is a sovereign authority set over all other in time, that is to say over all authorities which operate in those things and over those things which are measured by time’ (Dante, 1996, 4). The references to temporality in this passage are meant to contrast this secular authority with the (timeless) rule of the Church over spiritual matters (an important point I will return to shortly). Like modern legal cosmopolitans, Dante sees his world government not as a replacement for conventional political units but as an overarching authority that could step in to settle disputes. Thus, there is some evidence supporting the idea of Dante as a legal cosmopolitan. He advocates a form of world government and does so in the name of maintaining global peace. Yet, I am still hesitant to describe him as a cosmopolitan. Dante’s political theory not only fails to address universal human rights but actually denies their possibility. His universal monarch has completely unchecked power over people and their property; ‘there is nothing the monarch could covet, for his jurisdiction is bound only by the ocean’ (Dante, 1996, 18). In this way, he is very different from contemporary cosmopolitans (both moral and legal). Modern cosmopolitans make the guarantee of individual human rights a cornerstone of their theories; they would not endorse a system that provided no legal or political protections for individual rights. Nor does Dante’s political system provide for any popular political participation. The subjects of Dante’s world monarchy are utterly without protections from their government nor do they have any voice in its operation. Although modern legal cosmopolitans favor peace, it is generally not peace at any cost. Although Dante does still see his monarch as being bound by the religious and moral tenets of Christianity,

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6 See Tierney (1988) and Miller (2005).

7 See, for example, Dante (1961) [Purgatorio] XVI.106–8, VIII.22–7, and XVI.109–14.

this would not be considered a sufficient restraint by the 20th- and 21st-century cosmopolitans who cite him as part of their lineage. Furthermore, the context of Dante’s political writing is important. In Dante’s view, the primary enemy of lasting world peace is not an anarchic global system but rather the political aspirations of the papacy, whose continual disputes with both the French monarch and the Holy Roman Emperor were a source of political tension, if not outright warfare.6 Dante’s monarch is intended as a secular parallel to the Pope; thus, his specifications that the monarch will have absolute authority ‘over those things which are measured by time’ is actually a real limitation in Dante’s mind (Dante, 1996, 4). One ruler has absolute political control; one ruler has absolute religious control. Dante’s vision was not simply of a version of the United Nations with real teeth, but of a bipolar global system in which a supreme secular ruler (the monarch) and a supreme spiritual ruler (the pope) were each in a position to check the power of the other. Having a single political ruler who exercised authority over the entire globe was necessary because the Church already had such a ruler. With no secular equivalent, the balance of power between political and religious authority was off kilter. No one had the necessary power needed to check a wayward pope. Even international relations theorists who acknowledge that Dante’s theory of world government is not the same as modern cosmopolitanism seem to miss this point. They still see Dante as reacting against an anarchic global system when he was actually seeking to replace a unipolar system with a bipolar system. This is clear in both Monarchia itself and in numerous figurative discussions throughout the Divine Comedy of the need for ‘two suns’ or ‘two swords.’7 It is hard to overstate the importance of this distinction. Dante’s concept of world government was modelled on and in opposition to an existing religious institution. Furthermore, there was an assumption that these two institutions (religious and political) would often have opposing interests. While Dante’s political system contains no internal checks and balances, the unrestrained political authority of the monarch and the unrestrained spiritual authority of the pope were intended to balance one another in such a way as to avoid tyranny on either part. Contemporary international relations theorists tend to ignore this element of Dante’s political theory. His call for global government was less an expression of idealism than a response to the exigencies of real-world politics. His vision of a global political authority was not a utopian enterprise, but rather modelled on the actual workings of the Catholic Church.

Conclusion Dante’s thought does share some key characteristics with that of cosmopolitan political thinkers. He argues that morality is universal, rather than relative to one’s culture. He outlines a theory of politics that is reliant on an overarching global political authority. And his political theory is primarily aimed at achieving global

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peace through international organization. It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that some modern scholars would identify him as an early forbear of cosmopolitan political thought. Yet Dante fails to fully meet any definition of cosmopolitanism. Classical cosmopolitanism typically called for a withdrawal from active political life. It was concerned with universal ethical principles but consciously avoided questions of political practice. Dante’s theory is absolutely political. Global justice comes about through the actions of an all-powerful monarch, not through individual ethical practice. In this way, there is a sharp split between Dante and early cosmopolitans. Dante is also in sharp disagreement with both Kant and contemporary moral cosmopolitans on the question of individual rights. Dante’s theory fully allows individuals to be subsumed for the greater good of humanity as a whole. There are no individual protections and no limits on what the government can or should do. This lack of concern with rights, combined with Dante’s lack of moral skepticism, makes him a hard sell as a moral cosmopolitan in the modern sense. Finally, there is the question of legal cosmopolitanism. It is this group of scholars who are most likely to claim Dante as one of their own and for whom there is the most evidence to support such a claim. Dante does advocate for a universal world government and claims that this will be the most effective way to bring about peace. However, Dante’s vision of a world monarch is heavily shaped by the need to have a secular power that could balance the influence of the papacy. Furthermore, legal cosmopolitans, like their moral counterparts, are heavily concerned with the issue of individual rights: ‘Legal cosmopolitanism is committed to a concrete political ideal of a global order under which all persons have equivalent legal rights and duties, that is, are fellow citizens of a universal republic’ (Pogge, 1992, 49). Dante, as I have previously established, is in no way concerned with the individual or with republican government. Few of the contemporary cosmopolitans who cite Dante as an early source would actually support any form of unchecked monarchy, at the global level or otherwise. Thus, one can advocate for global government without being committed to key cosmopolitan ideas. Although Dante supports world government, it is in the form of a universal empire (based in his native Italy) that would not appeal to many of the thinkers today who consider themselves cosmopolitan. Nor is the universal morality of The Divine Comedy truly cosmopolitan, being based on Christian cosmology rather than universal human reason. This is not a critique of Dante’s politics; his views were in keeping with his time and culture. However, it is meant as a critique of modern political writers who wish to list Dante as part of their pedigree without fully looking into what that might mean. The differences between Dante’s vision of world empire and most cosmopolitans’ views on global governance are not minor, and if theorists wish to explore the history of cosmopolitan ideas, they should also acknowledge where thinkers departed from the cosmopolitan path.

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About the Author Mary Elizabeth Sullivan received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Texas A & M University in 2010. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Central Arkansas. Her research focuses on medieval political thought and the transmission of classical ideas through the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Email: [email protected]).

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