Saturday, October 15, 2011

Boundaries: Medieval Women in Medieval Gardens.

by Judith Arnopp

Most of my novels feature at least one scene with a woman in a medieval garden. It may not be a key moment in the book but I like to illustrate how intricately linked high status women were to their gardens.

While I was at university I wrote a paper tracing the evolution of the medieval garden motif from its biblical roots through medieval art and on to Chaucer’s development of the garden as a literary device.

The ideal of the garden was initially evoked in King Solomon’s Song of Songs and it is there that we see the first links between the enclosed garden and womanhood.

The tradition slowly expanded to incorporate the story of the Fall from Paradise and The Cult of the Virgin Mary, until the motif expanded into secular love poetry.

Medieval literature depicts noblemen striding about the world, galloping into battle in the service of the king, embarking upon arduous pilgrimage and living and breathing upon a vastly dangerous, stimulating stage. These men are shown to be invincible, self-assured and in control and there were few limits placed upon them.

The women in this literature are portrayed very differently; they rarely travel, they never fight and are usually to be found within the vicinity of the castle walls. Their role is to marry, provide heirs and be an asset to their husband. Life for most medieval woman was closeted; we see them safe within the walls of the castle, sewing, strumming musical instruments, listening to minstrel’s songs or to tales of courtly-love.

The favoured place for these activities was the garden and many manuscripts illustrate this. We see women sitting among the flowerbeds, sometimes planting and maintaining the gardens or, more often, we find them in a lovers tryst. Other times they are shown sitting in the shade of a tree listening to a minstrel’s tales and, paradoxically, the stories they are listening to are of other women also dwelling within the safety of their own gardens.

But these fictional women were not always as ordinary as they seemed and many of them faced complex difficulties. They were invariably highborn, young and fair and most of them expressed a personal desire that, because they were subject to male authority, could not be fulfilled.

Chaucer managed to depict the plight of these women so empathetically that there can be little doubt that he was conscious of their plight. Even when projecting patriarchal prejudices through the mouths of his male narrator he managed, not to indoctrinate, but to reveal how flawed male expectations were.

In The Merchant’s Tale May is married to a decrepit, selfish old man or higher status than herself. Her needs and wishes are not considered by anyone and only the narrator takes the time to reflect upon what her reaction may have been to the consummation of her marriage. Her husband, Januarie, builds an idyllic garden in which to make love to her and the following scenes are a horrific inversion of the story of Eden. The walls that enclose May in the pleasure garden lead her to make dramatic and hair-raising choices but, instead of condemning her infidelity, Chaucer chooses to ultimately reward her with the ‘maisterie’ that, according to the tale told by the Wife of Bath, all women desire.

Emelye in The Knight’s Tale is similarly captive within a garden, and its walls serve to serve as a prison cell. She expresses the wish to follow the goddess Diana, to run freely through the woods, to hunt and remain chaste forever but she is not given the choice to do so. Hotly pursued by Palamon and Arcite who fight in mortal combat for her hand, Emelye is instead given as a prize in the male game of war.

Throughout The Canterbury Tales the garden becomes a place of imprisonment, the lovely grounds in The Franklins Tale and The Shipman’s Tale become places of sexual transaction and solicitation. In The Merchant’s Tale the garden becomes a place of sexual violence and adultery. Also The Parlement of Foules revisits this idea of feminine entrapment and the question is; why does Chaucer pick the garden, a place of peace and beauty, as the scene for feminine suffering?

In every way the woman and the literary garden are parallel; they are both fertile, they are both fragrant and decorative and they are both controlled by a male gardener. Left to their own devices they will go wild. In both art and literature the garden wall sometimes encompasses an area so vast that the garden is more like a park. This is a metaphor for the wider boundaries placed upon medieval women, even those that seem to have escaped male rule.

Eve, the first female transgressor, was sent from the safe walls of Eden on a journey that was to lead her female children to other gardens. The Virgin Mary, made perfect by the idealisation of man, is painted within her wattle walled garden, a perfect flower of femininity, the fertile, unflawed mother of the perfect child. Wherever we look in medieval art we find women and gardens, walled gardens that secure and encumber the feminine tendency to stray from the path of moral rectitude.

Women must remain in the garden and those few that do escape into the world, perhaps to go on pilgrimage like the wife of Bath, the Prioress and the second nun, can only do so because they have managed to escape from the bounds of matrimony.

Even these empowered women, the female pilgrims, are subject to limitations upon their freedom, the nuns are answerable to the male authority of the church and the lusty, unrepentant Wife of Bath must, unless she wishes to lose her independence by remarrying, remain chaste.

A medieval woman was monitored for signs of wildness just as a garden was and this provided Chaucer with the perfect allegory. A garden, cultivated like May and Emelye, is a controlled environment where the gardener maintains constant vigilance in case his flourishing flower beds should run rampant and wild seeds take hold.

There is a wonderful example of a medieval garden at Tretower in Powys and is well worth a visit. Please visit their Website.

Judith’s Webpage
Judith’s Blog
Judith’s Books

13 comments:

  1. What an interesting post! Thank you very much for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very thought provoking and informative. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Boundaries: Medieval Women in Medieval Gardens
    by Judith Arnopp, is a wonderfully insightful look into lives of medieval woman in real life and as they are portrayed by Chaucer. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow. I guess I'll have to read Chaucer again. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love your pictures! The post is an interesting take on the relationship of women and gardens. Thanks, Judith.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I enjoyed this piece because I like working in my little garden that is, fortunately, not fenced in. I learned something new as I have never noticed the metaphor in Chaucer's Tales between women and the garden. It as been a long time since I read Chaucer.
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  7. The comparison of women to flowers is a recurrent motif in literature, but I had never thought about comparing women to the whole garden. Thanks for giving me food for thought!! I am learning quite a lot with all these insightful posts.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Very intelligent and interesting post, Judy. I'm glad I read it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Lovely post, sharing it with everyone I can think of!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Wonderful post. I am especially interested in all forms of medieval gardens and a woman's role in creating those spaces. Also the role of the garden within the cloisters.
    I commend the most marvellous book to anyone interested:
    'In a Unicorn's Garden: recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens.' by Judyth A. Mcleod Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2007

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thank you everyone. Prue, i thought i'd read all the books available on medieval gardens,i will look 'In a Unicorn's garden' up, thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  12. A very interesting post. I suppose that in medieval times society as a whole was tied more closely to the land and the seasons. Given the limitations on the lives of women it is perhaps not very surprising that the only way they could experience seasonal change was in their enclosed gardens. Of course we are only talking about women of a certain class; for the rest they are a little more preoccupied with the direct outcomes of the harvest.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi again everyone!
    I'm in the US and I tried looking for this book HERE, and I cannot find it ANYWHERE! Wow!
    This DOES tend to happen with US books and UK books. A SAD situation! I AM putting this on my TBR list that I keep for myself. I have a Word document that I save and add to ALL the time! Amazon did NOT even have it AS a BOOK! Wow! Yet this is a classic for you guys! UGh! I HATE when this happens! Sounds like a great book!
    I'll keep watching for this one! Sounds SO intriguing!
    Take care everyone!
    Laurie

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.