7 - Arboreal Articulation: The Testimony of Trees in the Late Medieval Religious Imaginary

Summary

During the last years of her life, Catherine Innes-Parker's intellectual passions revolved around the popular Bonaventuran text, the Lignum vitae, in all its many manifestations. In particular, her work focused on the Middle English adaptation of the Latin text, þe Passioun of Oure Lord, found in Cambridge, St John's College, MS G.20 and New York, Columbia University, MS Plimpton 256. In her work on this much understudied translation of the highly popular original, Innes-Parker left an enduring legacy in terms of how we understand the ways in which such writing and its translation were adapted to fit a new lay audience in England in the later Middle Ages.

In this essay, I wish to take up a strand of analysis left relatively unexplored: that is, how þe Passioun's central metaphorical system of the Tree of Life slots into an important and often ambiguously gendered image-set within medieval writings, the less orthodox aspects of which have largely remained silent, both within contemporary scholarship and in their own day – but which, I propose, ultimately informed the text's enthusiastic reception in England. As I shall suggest, within the inherently unstable imagistic schema to which it adheres, the original concept of the lignum vitae [Tree of Life] developed exegetically out of its Edenic roots in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Revelation, not only into a dominant – and dominating – patriarchal figura of genealogical ‘arborescent logic’ (to use a term coined by contemporary theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), but, in the works of some women writers and a number of other strongly female-coded texts, also found its voice as a different type of symbol, one more in tune with the culturally feminine concepts of nurture and flourishing. Thus, while þe Passioun appears to be utterly dependent upon the ‘logic’ of the male-identified Tree for its structuration (and thus, its directed meanings), I shall suggest that, as part of the ‘evolution’ (or mouvance) from Lignum vitae to versions of þe Passioun that so preoc-cupied the work of Innes-Parker, it was able to hollow out and ultimately give voice to a new position for itself, one, moreover, that was deeply embroiled within the poetics and dynamics of late medieval English affective spirituality.