Setting the tone and theme for the book in her introduction, “The Erotics of Virtue,” Pearson begins with a hybrid triptych consisting of quotations from two early fifteenth-century writers, of very different stripes, and an image, itself a triptych: Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The quotations, one from Pierre D'Ailly, one of the most restless, political, and inventive ecclesiastical intellectuals of the late Middle Ages, and the other from Thomas à Kempis, the embodiment of the Devotio Moderna and the least worldly of late medieval theologians, both concern the contrast between earthly and spiritual pleasures, just as the painting frames the earthly garden of bodily pleasure with images of salvation on the left and damnation on the right.
Pearson proposes that the way all three sources entangle imagery of bodies, gardens, sin, and salvation is fundamental to understanding the embodied landscape of late medieval and early modern Christian morality. The interpretative variability of the complex elements that make up the allegorical “Gardens of Love” at the heart of the book's analytical project is what Pearson identifies as the challenge; the constant slippage between carnal eroticism and spiritual union with the divine means that not only medieval and early modern people had to grapple with ambiguity, but so too do twenty-first-century scholars attempting to situate the often bizarre and disturbing variety of literary and visual images produced in aid of ostensibly spiritual ambitions.
The book is organized into six chapters and an epilogue, which Pearson tells us will “demonstrate that visual topographies were a vital means for critiquing and negotiating bodily morality in the early modern Netherlands” (23). This rather dry statement of purpose belies a veritable avalanche of visual and textual evidence that Pearson addresses, ranging from well-known works such as the Bosch triptych to rather rough woodcuts from little-discussed incunable editions and a type of altarpiece, unique to the Netherlands, known as a besloten hofjes (enclosed garden), which combines panel-painted wings with a densely packed assemblage of painted sculptural objects in the central space. Furthermore, Pearson engages with a wide range of current scholarship from perspectives as diverse as ecocriticism, disability studies, and intersectional gender critique. In a nutshell, there is little room in this abundantly illustrated and quick-paced study for the humdrum.
This is a nuanced study of a complex and protean topic, and it covers a lot of ground, both theoretical and material. As is inevitable with such an ambitious project, there are a few wrinkles. One problematic term in the book is “tonal” eroticism (sometimes “intoned” in Pearson's formulation). In the introduction, Pearson explains that this term refers to subtle, slightly ambiguous, and indirect representations of sexual acts, and as an example gives a detail from the central panel of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, in which “a man pulls bouquets from another man's anus in an oblique yet probable allusion to sodomy” (2). It is hard to understand this as anything other than an act of anal penetration, frankly, and “subtle” or “indirect” are not the words that spring to mind here. The term then vanishes for almost two thirds of the book, finally resurfacing in chapter 5, concerning the incunable edition on the soul's pursuit of the infant Christ, “a resource for exploring the limits of morality as shaped by tonal eroticism” (198).
The term crops up repeatedly in the following discussion of the imagery (both literary and visual) of wounds and wounding, but it does not seem strictly necessary—Pearson's analysis of the religious erotics of pain and its relationship to the garden/wilderness dyad could stand on its own without the aid of this vaguely defined notion of tonality. Also distracting are the editorial errors that sprinkle the text, beginning on the first page, where the word “taut” is rendered as “taught” (an eggcorn repeated on page 299). The misattribution of The Garden of Earthly Delights to the Second Gouda Woodcutter on page 2 and the substitution of “epithelium” for “epithalamium” on page 14 get the reader off to a rough start and detract from the complex argument that Pearson lays out in the introduction. The erudition, scope, and analytical rigor of the book deserve better, but in the end, the editorial missteps do not seriously compromise the integrity of this valuable contribution to understanding the nuances of Marian and Christological imagery in the early modern Netherlands.
