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vii Acknowledgments While developing this book, I attended an annual conference on the history of medieval Catholic doctrine and practice. The thematic strain of the meeting that year was “Nature,” making this conference an ideal opportunity to engage multidisciplinary approaches to the nebulous concept with which I had been grappling for some time. At the opening of the conference, all of the attendees—men and women, religious and secular, professors and graduate students—intermingled comfortably prior to the morning sessions, chattering over coffee and bagels, making introductions, renewing acquaintances. But once the panels commenced, a disturbing distinction emerged. We scattered into separate wings of the building along gendered lines. Down one hall, the majority of women attended the sessions on “spirituality,” which featured female scholars and addressed medieval women’s writings or women’s lives. Down another, the sessions on “theology”were attended primarily by men and featured mostly male speakers who addressed the likes of Aquinas,Bonaventure,and Scotus. We were at an impasse before a single presider had introduced speakers. During the afternoon’s keynote, a mechanism of our division became apparent. In a lovely and thought-provoking lecture, our esteemed speaker addressed the subject of nature and grace in the theology of Aquinas. The audience responded eagerly,with many pressing questions that carried us well over the allotted time frame. One of those questions came from a woman involved in pastoral education. She reframed our speaker’s presentation of Scholastic terminology and process through powerful images of a mother ’s love, asking if it might be appropriate to consider Aquinas’s formulation of the relationship between nature and grace in maternal terms. “Yes,” responded the speaker, to the collective relief of a fatigued audience who had struggled for the last two hours properly to grasp that tricky relationship and had finally, through this verbal picture, settled upon a stable framework. “But,” he continued, “that’s not theology.” Next question. That moment resonated with me. Maybe it wasn’t theology. Not in the systematic sense, at least. But then what was it? I had long been conflicted viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS about the images I repeatedly encountered in medieval monastic texts,images that I expected had something important to tell us about how women and men once comprehended God’s relationship to the natural world; how, through the world’s material, they achieved such intense love for and intimacy with this radical other they called God. But I stumbled over reconstructing and labeling this relationship, mixed up as it was in multiple modes of expression, blended between personal, experiential narratives and doctrinal assertions. And so I began to rethink how monastic communities committed to institutional restructuring communicated their ideas, their logic, about God’s being in the world and how best to heed it. This study began as a sustained meditation on a specific, pervasive image in medieval Christian art and prayer—trees. My fascination with nonreal trees, with arboreal metaphors and virtual forests, struck many as strange and unfashionable. Indeed it was. “Why trees?” I stumbled over responses, searched for an answer every time the question was posed: “They were everywhere in devotional literature.” “They indicated spiritual filiation.” “They guided the imagination from the material to the immaterial.” All quite unsatisfactory, I admit. One senior scholar quipped that surely I was missing the forest. So I directed my gaze outward and retreated from the trees. I immersed myself in questions of environmentality,in object-oriented ontology, in natural theology. But the dense forest that was slowly emerging resisted this new approach and created tension in my readings. I found myself returning once more to the unrelenting presence of trees in medieval religious writing. The study that follows represents my long reckoning with them. I hope it accounts for some of the forest as well. This book is the product of numerous conversations and friendships and many kinds of assistance—all of which have served to re-create its author. Alison Frazier and Martha Newman have been supremely generous scholars and devoted mentors to me. Together,they lit the torch that has since led my way. Alison’s exquisite sensitivity to the activity of saints’ cults awakened me to a whole new world for exploration and generated my first queries into premodern perceptions of materiality. Martha’s command of the complex dynamic between individuals, ideals, and institutions pushed me to ground culture in community and provided me with the critical apparatus to appreciate the gendered construction of my sources. Alison...

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