The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century

Theological Studies, Dec, 2007 by Marie Anne Mayeski

THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS: REFORM AND RENAISSANCE FOR WOMEN IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY. By Fiona J. Griffiths. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007. Pp. 381. $65.

Fiona Griffiths has produced a careful, nuanced study of the twelfth-century manuscript Hortus deliciarum, a work produced by Herrad, Abbess of Hohenbourg, for the theological education of her nuns. This manuscript, destroyed in 1870, was meticulously reconstructed by scholars directed by Rosalie Green and published in 1979. G.'s is the first book-length attempt at a coherent interpretation of the whole, situated in the concrete historical circumstances of its composition.

The introduction deserves especially careful reading. Here G. situates the Hortus manuscript within a number of specific twelfth-century movements, all of them of interest to contemporary scholarship: monastic reform and proliferation, the roles and status of women, female literacy, and the development of Scholastic theology. She also exposes her thesis and outlines her proposed demonstration. G. challenges what she calls "long-accepted models" that have shaped previous scholarship, especially on gender and geographical issues, and offers the Hortus as evidence that such models or scholarly assumptions must be significantly modified. Even standing alone, G.'s introduction, together with the notes, can well serve as a course for someone who wishes to "get up to speed" on women, monasticism, and literacy, not quickly, to be sure, but with less danger of getting lost in the voluminous literature.

Each subsequent chapter constitutes a close, careful study of the manuscript, text and images. G. first situates the Hortus within the specific history of Hohenbourg, the reform of which is directly linked to Frederick Barbarossa's intent to make amends for his father's near-destruction of the monastery. She shows how the early renewal, directed by Herrad's predecessor, Relinde, led to clarity about the resources needed for the cura monialium, provision of pastoral care for the nuns. G. then exposes the genesis of the Hortus as a response to this need and the general structure of the text, undertaken and conceived by the second reforming abbess, Herrad. In this context G. analyzes the various theological and literary sources that Herrad included and exposes how these sources both influenced her and revealed her pastoral and theological intentions. The very careful reasoning of this section (chap. 2) demonstrates G.'s excellent understanding of twelfth-century theological literature.

In chapter 3, G. investigates Herrad's self-understanding as author and wise woman by a careful interpretation of the bee metaphor Herrad appropriates. Again, G. studies Herrad's usage against the horizon of writers, classical and Christian, who preceded her in applying the practices of the bee to that of human seekers of wisdom. She extends the metaphor into her next chapter wherein she shows how Herrad transforms the material she selects for her text--both images and literary selections-into a cohesive whole. Here she is not guided by any stated intentions of Herrad but must build on her own assumptions of Herrad's purposes. She brings a wide knowledge of other medieval writers to bear and is particularly acute when she exegetes the relationship between texts and images as a set of mutual glosses. Her demonstration that Herrad's theological focus is on the sweep of salvation history is persuasive, and in chapter 5 she carefully and thoroughly analyzes Herrad's title in light of this theme.

The last two chapters return to Herrad's pastoral purposes. In chapter 6, G. mines the book's structure and the nuanced quality of its theology to deduce both Herrad's pedagogical intent and the educational level of the nuns for which it was produced. In chapter 7 she examines the reforming themes that thread together the various elements of the Hortus manuscript. This examination leads her, finally, to raise (in the conclusion) the question of whether the manuscript was intended exclusively for a female audience. She notes all the ways in which the book is made especially pertinent for women, yet affirms that both its message and its methods are mainstream, assuming that women's concerns and intellectual abilities are universal.

The book left me with a small, but persistent, question: Was the Hortus deliciarurn an anomaly among texts from women's circles, or was it part of a larger trend that has been heretofore unexplored? G. suggests that the manuscript does not fit into the generalizations offered by contemporary feminist thought: that medieval women's texts are primarily prophetic and/ or mystical, for instance, or that female education declined in the advent of Scholasticism. Each time G. cites a parallel text to suggest that Herrad's concerns and methods are echoed in others, she carefully points out the differences as well, differences that reinforce the possibility that Herrad's text is anomalous. This possibility does not vitiate G.'s solid scholarship but reinforces it. She does not force the complex evidence of this manuscript into any easy conclusions. Rather, her notes and bibliography (one-third of the volume) raise complex questions and implicitly invite her readers to join the search for a more complete picture of women's intellectual and political activities in the twelfth century.