2 - Une communion inimitable: Material Garden Hermeneutics in the Work of the Women of Mechelen, Herrad of Hohenbourg and Hildegard of Bingen

Summary

[I]l existe une communion inimitable de la femme et la fleur. Image de la fécondité et du sexe, certes, la fleur suggère l’énigme de cycles naturels, le ravissement de la vie, le mystère de la graine, mais aussi la belle fanaison, et encore l’invisible coopération de la racine, la sève, la tige et la feuille.

[There exists an inimitable communion between the woman and the flower. As an image of the sex's fecundity, certainly, the flower suggests the enigma of natural cycles, life's rapture, the mystery inherent to the seed, but also the beautiful wilting, and again the invisible cooperation between the root, the sap, the stalk and the leaf.]

THE SYNERGY Julia Kristeva proposes here in this extract between women and the dynamics of fecundity resounds loudly with much of what I wish to investigate in the second chapter of this study, re-invoking also the Edenic materiality of the hortus conclusus examined in the previous chapter. As we have seen, in Eden's reworkings in the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve the matrixial impulses of Eve, released only after her exile from the ‘sterile’ garden, reshape the linear directionality of the entire Edenic narrative, producing instead more fruitful, cyclical processes – of gestation, birth, life, death and rebirth – before being reined back in by an enclosing ventriloquised Logos. Within this moment of ventriloquism, to coin a phrase from Irigaray, ‘life freezes in the expectation of a better beyond’. The reworked narrative ultimately returns, therefore, to the stasis of ‘ennui’ identified by Harrison in his appraisal of Eden's primary position within western thought. Thereafter, Eve undergoes a literal and figurative reburial, feeding the ‘old root’ of the phallologic enterprise (in this case, Adam, his seeds and their productivity) in the usual ways. The route to – and root of – ‘salvation’ within Christian tradition, then, will spring unequivocally from Adam's seed and body; the reconstituted Logos sprouts from his tongue and those of the patriarchs as the grand narrative obliterating Eve's flourishing unfolds. As such, for a second time, it is Adam's body that gives birth, whilst Eve's is reduced to the mere ‘soil’ needed to nourish the phallic Logos-tree Adam engenders.