They are sealed, yet redolent of the promise that they will eventually open. Earth was the essential element of the Creation story, with man, Adam, created from the earth.Īlong with many other objects and places in the deeply erotic symbolism that the Song provides in its various translations, gardens became the paradigm of human love in vernacular poetry.5 The garden and its fountain are closed to outsiders. From ancient times to the Middle Ages, when theologians still associated women with the earth, gardens provided a powerful metaphor of two states of womanhood: land untilled represents virginity and cultivated land, fertility. Woman, like the earth, can be ploughed, dug, and watered in the sexual act. Woman, like the land, can be fruitful or barren. Both women and gardens are fertile and bear new life. The seeds sown there bloom and flourish, just like the male seed sown in a woman's womb in procreation. The earth is tilled by the gardener, seeds are sown, and the garden is watered. The lover's metaphor for his bride, an enclosed and planted space, reveals that, from time immemorial, verdant places have symbolized womanhood. The Song of Songs eulogy of the Shulamite, the beloved bride, compares her to an Eastern paradise teeming with lush vegetation, filled with exotic plants, releasing beautiful perfumes into the air, and providing shade and recreation to those inside. She is a mountain of myrrh and her shoots form an orchard (4.13). Similar to a library of the time, it was likely to be found in monasteries or cloisters, and served as a repository of knowledge, as well as a place of refuge for people, plants and wild creatures. She is also compared to other green and verdant spaces. In medieval times, the hortus conclusus was an enclosed garden where flowers, food plants and medicinal herbs were cultivated. In the Song of Songs, a garden symbolizes the young woman three times (4.12, 4.15, 5.1). I will then study the works of Gonzalo de Berceo, one of the poets most studied by Hispano-medievalists, reassessing his famous verdant space in the light of liturgical and theological sources. I will begin by situating them in one of the scriptural sources most often mined for images of the Virgin, the Song of Songs. As for the suitors, that is another story.This chapter examines two horticultural metaphors, the garden and the field, both symbolizing the body of the Virgin. In this way, she could enjoy the outdoors and all that nature offers in the confines of the garden and remain pure in the eyes of her father or husband. When kings and lords left home to go to battle they wanted to feel assured that upon their return their queen or wife remained inaccessible to rapists or even suitors, and shut their women up as tightly as they could. Purity of the bloodlines was a great concern for the medieval husband. The garden is of no actual import other than perhaps from a religious view as a paradise, and one she can not leave.įor the medieval woman the enclosed garden was designed to be her chastity belt. In paintings of the Virgin Mary it is she that symbolizes purity surrounded by her chastity belt or the wall. Purity, or the pure woman, is what it seems to distill down to. Often, though, the allegory is, the lover is God, the beloved is the Virgin Mary. Other religions have found their own interpretations or allegories in the poem. In Europe, during the medieval times the main religion was Christianity and they believed the Song of Solomon to be an allegory of the union between the church and Christ. Written by King Solomon as a nuptial song for his bride, and quite the sexy one at that, it is a dialogue between bride and bridegroom using the garden as metaphor. These now famous lines are from the Song of Solomon. 'The Hortus Conclusus provides a great place for travelers to relax after a busy day.
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