Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity by Sara Ritchey (review)

How did medieval Christians understand the natural world? One might simply say that for the spiritually ambitious it was, like all material things, an obstacle to be overcome in the pursuit of the divine. Or one could note the medieval commonplace that nature was a book that pointed to God. Sara Ritchey considers both of these answers in this elegant and thoughtful book but ultimately provides a rather different account of early Christian attitudes toward creation, finding in the medieval texts written for and by holy women a doctrine of “re-creation” made possible by the incarnation of Christ. If, for these theologians, “nature was not a religious concern” (4), creation was. Theologies of creation and incarnation gave religious thinkers reasons to explore the relations among the flora and fauna of material creation, the human soul, and the presence of God. For many of these thinkers, the incarnation engendered the possibility of a “redeemed material order” (6). At the center of Ritchey’s exploration of treatments of the re-created order in medieval religious writing are trees: physical trees, genealogical trees, florilegia, mythical trees, roots, branches, flowers, and the wood of the cross. As the reader quickly comes to see, trees, like all created things, were understood by many medieval spiritual writers to be the media through which God made manifest incarnation and salvation. But such perception required the cultivation of a holy imagination, trained to see the potential holiness of and divine presence in the created world.

Importantly, Ritchey claims, much of this new theological thinking developed alongside new discussions of the cloister and the virginal body, both of which served as models of how God might inhabit material space and of how matter might participate in sacred re-creation. To this end, the book’s first chapter, “The Mirror of Holy Virginity,” focuses largely on the twelfth-century Speculum virginum, a text that uses discussions of virginity to meditate on how the body (and, in particular, the cloistered female body) might offer a model of the incarnational re-creation of the world more generally. The chapter opens with a discussion of the evolving understanding of natural space within twelfth-century reform, where the cloister came to be seen by many as an earthly paradise, a model of how all of material creation might reflect and foreshadow the heavenly paradise. The Speculum, with its emphasis on natural fecundity and its proliferation of arboreal and floral imagery, emerged from this context, construing the virginal body as a potential “engine of the incarnation” (47). Ritchey examines how the Speculum both “exalts the natural world within the confines of the cloister and insists that the presence of God could be found in the material it enclosed—in virgin bodies” (25).

The book’s second chapter, “Viriditas and Virginitas,” continues to examine celebrations of the incarnational potential of the virginal body, focusing primarily on the writings of Hildegard of Bingen but concluding (for the sake of contrast) with a discussion of a contemporary work that embodies a strikingly different attitude toward the place of the material world in spiritual life. For Hildegard, perhaps even more than the author of the Speculum (who emphasized simplicity rather than sumptuousness), cloistered virginity was the privileged site and image of God’s incarnational re-creation of the material world. Ritchey examines Hildegard’s “natural theology of virginity” as it emerges in the performance of the liturgy and allegorical drama (here, read first through the viridity of the morality play, the Ordo virtutum de patriarchis et prophetis, and next through the incarnational song of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum). Through a consideration of floral and arboreal passages in both of these texts, Ritchey emphasizes how, for Hildegard, the work of holy virgins in the cloister was to participate in and re-perform the incarnation through both their words and (following Mary, the exemplar of holy fertility...