318 i Flora Unveiled
not well be thought of as a universal condition in the plant world. A mythical
personage was brought forward to balance the inequality that is manifest between
animals and plants regarding sex, by supplying to the latter the male, or fecundating,
element.^62Greene concluded that “it should be clear that men long ago held that plants are not
asexual, but unisexual and feminine.” Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Greene
expressed some surprise^63 that this “ancient doctrine” about plant reproduction had been
overlooked by previous historians of botany:
It has been at the cost of much time and study that I have been able to gather from the
old- time botanists, and from their thoughts, as summed up and expressed by Ruel,
the ancient doctrine of the physiology of plant reproduction; and as far as my reading
has gone, not one of the historians has undertaken its elucidation. It is nevertheless an
important topic. It is always important to the history of science, or any branch of any
science, to get at the earliest views that men can be found to entertain regarding it.^64Indeed, as we have argued in this book, the origins of Jean Ruel’s “plants- as- female” para-
digm can be traced as far back as prehistoric times.
Notes- Galatians 5:16– 17, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2 0 0 7).
- Menocal, M. R. (1990), The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage,
second edition. University of Pennsylvania Press. - Porter, P. (2003), Courtly Love in Medieval Manuscripts. University of Toronto Press.
- “Capellanus” means “chaplain.”
- The structure of Hell in Dante’s Inferno can be viewed as a combination of the planar
concentric circles in Capellanus’s De Amore and the deep cavern of the underworld in Virgil’s
Aeneid. But whereas in The Inferno the lowest level of Hell is reserved for the worst sinners, in
The Aeneid it corresponds to Earthly Paradise, or the Elysian Fields. - Genesis 1:11– 12. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, augmented third edition (2007), M. D.
Coogan, ed. Oxford University Press. - Curtius, E. R. (1953), European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask,
Routledge, pp. 106– 107; cited by Dronke, P. (1980), Bernard Silvestris, Natura, and personifica-
tion. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43:16– 31. - “The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, and mortal
men cannot uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.” The Odyssey, Book 10. - Economou, G. (2002), The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature. Notre Dame Press.
- The earliest use of the term “Neoplatonism” was in the early nineteenth century. Plotinus
regarded himself as a Platonist. - Dronke, Bernard Silvestris, Natura, and personification.
- Ibid. According to some writers, Bernard Silvestris and Bernard of Chartres (famous for
his quotation about the “shoulders of giants”) were two different individuals.