Flora Unveiled

292 i Flora Unveiled

replace, the biblical narrative. Nevertheless, his work suggests the lingering appeal of con-
cepts associating the earth and nature with women that had been the hallmark of the
pagan world.
Alan of Lille wrote two poetic works that were strongly inf luenced by Bernard: De
Planctu Naturae (The Plaint of Nature) and the Anticlaudianus. In De Planctu
Naturae, the goddess Natura, who functions as God’s viceroy, complains to the poet
that whereas all the other animals propagate themselves according to her laws, human-
ity is given over to lust and fruitless perversions such as extramarital sex, homosexual-
ity, sodomy, and masturbation— symbolized by a rent in her garment. Unlike Bernard,
who never provides a physical description of Natura, Alan describes Natura’s attire,
including her undergarments, in detail. Her crown and outer garments consist of the
firmament and creatures of the air, sea, and land, whereas her most intimate apparel is
represented by plants:

I did not establish by any authority that would give certainty what fancies, shown by

way of pictures, played on the upper parts of the shoes and the underclothing that lay

concealed beneath the outer garments. However, ... I  am inclined to think that a

smiling picture made merry there in the realms of herbs and trees. There trees, I think,

were now clad in coats of russet, now tressed with leaves of green, were now bringing

forth young, fragrant flower buds, now showing their age in the growing strength of

their offspring.^14

Decorated with an ever- changing panorama of herbs and trees growing, blossoming,
and fruiting, Natura’s undergarments are redolent of her generative powers, yet free of
carna lit y.

The Romance of the Rose

In Capellanus’s treatise, Venus is identified with a tree, just as Mary is in the Apocrypha
(Pseudo- Matthew and Ecclesiaticus), the Koran, and in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Miracles of
Our Lady.^15 In the context of the Courtly Love tradition, flowers in general— and roses
in particular— came to symbolize sexual love. For example, in one of the illuminated
Tacuinum sanitatis manuscripts from Northern Italy, which were Latin translations of an
Arabic medical treatise, we find an illustration of a rose bush with a Lady seated beside her
standing husband in the foreground (Figure  11.1A). The Lady hands her spouse a pair of
roses from a mound of blossoms in her lap.
Although they are white roses, symbolizing modesty, the gesture is meant to suggest
the intimacy of their relationship. Roses were the symbol of Venus, and, in the fifteenth-
century illustration shown in Figure  11.1B a nude Venus, whose sexual power radiates
from her vulva, is shown holding a rose and wearing a rose garland. Directly below her,
courting couples amuse themselves to the strains of a harp within a hortus conclusus lined
with rose bushes.^16