Examines the visual traditions in a lost late twelfth-century manuscript, the Hortus deliciarum, compiled by Abbess Herrad for the sisters of Hohenbourg Abbey in Alsace. Argues that the topic of time, in the context of history, astronomy, and the calendar, was of central importance to the women's education.

In The Garden of Delights, Fiona J. Griffiths offers the first major study of the Hortus deliciarum, a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law written both by and explicitly for women at the end of the twelfth century. In so doing she provides a brilliantly persuasive new reading of female monastic culture. Through careful analysis of the contents, structure, and organization of the Hortus, Griffiths argues for women's profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the period on a level previously thought unimaginable, overturning the assumption that women were largely excluded from the "renaissance" and "reform" of this period. As a work of scholarship that drew from a wide range of sources, both monastic and scholastic, the Hortus provides a witness to the richness of women's reading practices within the cloister, demonstrating that it was possible, even late into the twelfth century, for communities of religious women to pursue an educational program that rivaled that available to men. At the same time, the manuscript's reformist agenda reveals how women engaged the pressing spiritual questions of the day, even going so far as to criticize priests and other churchmen who fell short of their reformist ideals. Through her wide-ranging examination of the texts and images of the Hortus, their sources, composition, and function, Griffiths offers an integrated understanding of the whole manuscript, one which highlights women's Latin learning and orthodox spirituality. The Garden of Delights contributes to some of the most urgent questions concerning medieval religious women, the interplay of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement, to discussions concerning women scribes and writers, women readers, female authorship and authority, and the visual culture of female communities. It will be of interest to art historians, scholars of women's and gender studies, historians of medieval religion, education, and theology, and literary scholars studying questions of female authorship and models of women's reading.

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison maintains that the answer comes from ideas about art. Viewing histories as artifacts made according to the same aesthetic principles as paintings and theater, he shows that twelfth-century authors and audiences found unity not in what the reason read in a text but in what the imagination read into it: they prized visual over verbal imagination and employed a circular, or nuclear, spectator-centered perspective cast aside in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Twelfth-century writers assimilated and transformed a tradition of the conceptual unity of all the arts and attributed that unity to the fact that art both conceals and discloses. Recovering that tradition, especially the methods and motives of concealment, provides extraordinary insights into twelfth-century ideas about the kingdom of God, the status of women, and the nature of time itself. It also identifies a strain in European thought that had striking affinities to methods of perception familiar in Oriental religions and that proved to be antithetic to later humanist traditions in the West. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) have captivated and confounded observers for centuries, leading to wildly varying conclusions on the artist’s spirituality. Kurt Falk presents the first analysis of Bosch’s inner life in light of a hitherto unknown—and now lost—version of one of his seminal works, The Last Judgment, found by the author in Cairo in the mid-1930s. With an introduction by spiritual psychologist Robert Sardello, The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch presents an entirely new way of looking at this art—not through the framework of art history or the notion of a school of painting, but through the spirit. Falk’s analysis reveals the ways in which Bosch addresses creation, including the exalted and fallen spiritual worlds so prevalent in his work. The author’s conclusions are startling but persuasive: that Bosch had strong links to Rosicrucianism, that many of the paintings feature a curious onlooker figure we now understand as a spirit-witness, and that Bosch had in fact developed the capacity to clairvoyantly know the extraordinary worlds he portrays in such exacting detail. The book’s high-quality reproductions, carefully rendered in the paintings’ true colors, offer powerful visual support for the author’s theories.

Essays discuss chronicles, clarify ideas of creation temporally understood, the meaning of “simultaneous times,” or simultaneity, and the concept of “no-time.” Essays also examine time in social and political contexts, as measured by clocks, as notated in music, as embodied in memorializing stone, and as the subject and medium of consciousness.

What have a deaf nun, the mother of the first baby born to Europeans in North America, and a condemned heretic to do with one another? They are among the virtuous virgins, marvelous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Without those first courageous souls who worked in fields dominated by men, women might not have the presence they currently do in professions such as education, the law, and literature. Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman’s Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability. Their legacy abides until today in attitudes to contemporary women that have their roots in the medieval period. The final chapter suggests how 20th and 21st century feminist and gender theories can be applied to and complicated by medieval women's lives and writings. Doubly marginalized due to gender and the remoteness of the time period, medieval women’s accomplishments are acknowledged and presented in a way that readers can appreciate and find inspiring. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies, an accompanying website with educational links, images, downloadable curriculum guide, and interactive blog will be made available at the time of publication.

During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners" the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.