Sicut Apis Operosa: Honey, Bees, and Chastity in the Early Medieval World

Abstract

Honey and bees have been a long-standing didactic metaphor of chastity in Western civilization, employed by various writers across the centuries. This article delineates the changing interpretations of honey and bees in the early medieval period with a focus on how they were attached to chastity. It argues that the metaphor was gradually redeveloped and reinterpreted from the early church to the early medieval period; it also pinpoints an evolution toward a more specific usage of the metaphor within the contexts of monasticism, demonstrating how honey and bees depart from being a misconceived metaphor of passive sexual abstinence to denote active pursuit of divine wisdom in a continuous line of Christian works by Church Fathers and early medieval monastics. The article first explores how honey and bees were connected to chastity in the writings of various church fathers, then surveys how the connection continued in the works of several monastic writers.