The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Abstract

Feminist engagement in environmental awareness is not new, but it is always timely. Liz Herbert McAvoy’s newest book, The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary, provides an opportunity to reflect on the intersections of feminist theory and the environment in the context of medieval texts, linked at the beginning and end of the book to the current moment of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on our awareness of and involvement in the natural world. (I would add, too, increased awareness of gendered inequalities in labor and care.)The Enclosed Garden cross-pollinates interdisciplinary medieval scholarship with postmodern feminist theory to examine the representations of gardens and the environment in various medieval texts. The “imaginary” of the title refers to the Lacanian imaginary, in which meaning is produced through the imagination rather than the material conditions of existence. This imaginary is also, at its root, a tool of patriarchy, which subordinates both the feminine and the natural world in the process of consolidating its hegemony. The book’s overall argument is that the process of a patriarchal imaginary flourishing by subordinating a force coded as feminine is represented in medieval texts through the image of the enclosed or lost garden—and that, on occasion, this subordinated force can burst forth from where it had been almost buried.The chapters of The Enclosed Garden are framed by two biblical women, Eve and Susanna, with medieval and postmodern material in between. The book’s structure is explicitly nonchronological and nonlinear, opting instead for a cyclical approach that combines various authors and time periods around a particular concept. The book’s first chapter, “Out of Eden: The Framing of Eve,” addresses the position of Eve in various iterations of the Eden story. Of particular note is McAvoy’s argument that evidence of Hélène Cixous’s “wild unconscious” can be found in the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve, but is in the end quashed when, in the poem, Eve is buried under a tree, evoking the subordinated feminine that feeds the patriarchal structure. This chapter also addresses the Song of Songs, a foundational representation of an enclosed garden, which reappears throughout the book and, indeed, throughout the history of Western Christianity.The second chapter, “Une communion inimitable: Material Garden Hermeneutics in the Work of the Women of Mechelen, Herrad of Hohenbourg, and Hildegard of Bingen,” combines the intricate mixed media sculptures of gardens known as horti conclusi or besloten hofjes made by late-medieval nuns in Mechelen, with the writings of Herrad of Hohenbourg and Hildegard of Bingen, and in turn with Julia Kristeva’s theory of communion between the woman and the flower. Herrad’s book, the Hortus deliciarum, McAvoy argues, offers a private garden space itself for the use of a monastic community of women. This, along with the besloten hofjes and Hildegard’s conception of viriditas, shows religious women using the image of the enclosed garden within their own communities.McAvoy then moves to another important garden: the garden of the monastery of Helfta, where Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn lived and wrote their mystical texts, in the third chapter, “Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn: An Arboreal Imaginary of Flourishing.” Gertrude and Mechthild use garden growth and, especially, grafting as metaphors for the spiritual life, while making references to actual gardening practices of the time, such as the use of thorn hedges. This chapter argues that these texts articulate human and spiritual transcendence in connection with plants and gardens. The book’s fourth chapter, “Relocating Mechthild’s Garden Hermeneutics: The Middle English Poem Pearl,” argues for an intertextual relationship between, in particular, Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae and the Middle English poem Pearl. It also argues for a wider influence of Mechthild’s work and, consequently, her “horticulturally-refracted hermeneutics of flourishing, effervescence, and becoming” (258).Returning to a biblical woman, the fifth and final chapter, “‘Straitened on Every Side’: Susanna’s Garden Dilemma” examines the situation of Susanna in her garden, surrounded by malevolent patriarchs, in representations from fourth-century frescoes in the catacombs of Priscilla, through Tertullian, Peter Abelard, and Alan of Melsa, to the fourteenth-century poem the Pistil of Swete Susan.The Enclosed Garden is a fruitful and truly interdisciplinary text, bursting with ideas and connections drawn from and relevant to philosophy, literature, history, art history, and other disciplines. The landscape of this book is populated by Cixous, Kristeva, Mechthild, Herrad, as well as Augustine of Hippo, Rebecca Solnit, Moses Maimonides, and others. The vast and varied array of works referenced in combination with the book’s intentionally cyclical, spiral form, occasionally risks the reader losing sight of the forest for the trees. However, this also makes the book an evocative text well worth multiple readings.The tension regarding whether or not there can be an effective exit from a patriarchal Lacanian imaginary is held delicately throughout the book: some texts demonstrate the subordination of the female-coded garden, and some show a possible resistance to it. The idea that there can be another way to conceptualize the environment, through “the philosophy of flourishing and mentality of greening” (336) constitutes an important political point of the book, especially in the final words of the epilogue. Indeed, some sections do point toward the possibility of seeing things differently: particularly evocative are sections such as one in chapter 3, exploring Mechthild and Gertrude’s almost posthuman descriptions of flourishing in virtue like a tree flourishes in blossoms and leaves, suggesting a view of the human in nature that is not only outside of patriarchal structures but perhaps reaches beyond human categories altogether. In addressing these questions and tensions, this book contributes to the project of opening up the possibility of reimagining human relationships with the natural world and with one another.The Enclosed Garden provides much food for thought for any reader interested in the intersections of medieval women’s literature and history, postmodern feminist theory, and feminist ecocriticism. With each re-reading, it offers new insights and details to ponder, much like a garden itself.