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Troubadours, Romancing the Rose, and the Rebirth of Naturalism
In his letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul warned against the pitfall of fleshly desires:
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh
desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for
these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.^1For Medieval theologians, who regarded the human condition as a microcosm of
the universe, this opposition between f leshly desires and the Spirit was played out on
the cosmic scale as the clash between the transient material world, in which death
triumphs, and the celestial kingdom, in which belief in Christ brings eternal life. As
we saw in Chapter 10, the rejection of the material world in the Early Middle Ages
coincided with the trend of the illustrated herbals away from naturalism and toward
iconography and symbolism. In literature and liturgy, however, a vestige of the ancient
association of women and plants was retained in the person of Mary, who took on
many of the attributes of the pagan agricultural goddesses, with one important excep-
tion: their sexuality. During the medieval period, Mary was most closely identified
with f lowers, especially the lily and the rose. Once f lowers became emblematic of Mary,
devout Christians had a powerful vested interest in keeping them pure and chaste. The
medieval period was therefore not an auspicious time for philosophical speculations on
the role of sex in plants.
Two cultural shifts were needed before sex in plants could even be considered: a return to
naturalism in the illustrated herbals and an end to the anathematization of sex in scholarly
discourse. Only by looking at real plants could scholars begin to lay the foundations for
the study of floral anatomy. And only in a less puritanical milieu could scholars peering at