4 - Relocating Mechthild’s Garden Hermeneutics: The Middle English Poem Pearl

Summary

I am holy Hysse.

Hys prese, Hys prys, and Hys parage

Is rote and grounde of all my blysse.

[I am wholly His and His alone. His grace, His nobility and family line are the root and branch of all my bliss.]

THE LATE MEDIEVAL poem Pearl, considered to have been written by an anonymous male author at the end of the fourteenth century, lays claim to hermeneutic patterns often identical to those I have identified in the previous chapter, particularly those presenting themselves as female-coded challenges to entrenched and ‘rooted’ exegetical traditions within necrophilic thought. In this chapter, I trace some of these compelling patterns and posit the possibility that the Pearl-poet may well have been familiar with Mechthild's work in some of its many manifestations and drew upon it in his construction of his own female-focused and female-coded representation of the verdant route to the new Jerusalem.

The words quoted above are spoken by the Pearl-Maiden to her earthly father towards the end of the poem and point not only towards her perspective on her newly transcendent status as sponsa Christi in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, but also to her entry into a holy lineage – Christ's parage – that begins with Adam and his sons and culminates in the figure of Christ himself. Reminiscent of the genealogical trees we saw in the Auchinleck Life and the Canticum, as well as the enormous trees bearing saints and patriarchs rooted in Helfta's church, within the medieval imaginary this lineage was traditionally patriarchal and articulated visually by means of the binary ‘arborescent schema’ of the so-called Tree of Jesse. As we have also seen, this tree was often depicted as having its roots buried within the soil of Adam's burial or, sometimes, rooted in his breast or under his tongue, and always ready for its re-emergence at Golgotha as the reborn Tree of Life. As such, as Warren Ginsberg has pointed out, the term parage is, on the surface of it, a male-inflected term that is multi-evocative of the bounded Garden of Eden with its ‘rooted’ trees of knowledge grasping at its soil. In addition, it substitutes for the equally ‘bounded’ line of patrilinear descent directly from Adam to Christ.