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Chapter 4. From Nectar To Honeycomb: Constructing The Hortus
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4 From Nectar to Honeycomb: Constructing the Hortus In his discussion of honey making as an analogy to composition, Seneca leaves unanswered the question of what the bee actually did to transform nectar into honey: the process of mellification remains, ultimately, a mystery. In the same way, although Herrad describes herself as a bee and the Hortus as a honeycomb in her prologue, she does not make explicit the details of her work on the manuscript—exactly how the textual flowers of her sources were transformed into the honeycomb that she describes. The silence in her prologue concerning the sources of the Hortus extends to the manuscript’s visual program, its organization, and its physical structure , as well as the collaborators (including Relinde) who must certainly have helped her in her work. Yet despite Herrad’s silence on these practical matters, it is possible to piece together a picture of what work on the Hortus may have entailed from what is still known of the manuscript—its contents, their order, and the overall structure of the book. These allow some idea of the processes by which the Hortus must have been constructed , the stages of planning and organization and the types of resources, both material and human, that it required, and even a sense of the immediate context of the workshop in which the manuscript was produced. Insofar as they can be determined, these details support the striking authorial claim that Herrad made in her prologue to the manuscript, confirming that she was the mastermind of the Hortus project. Organization: A ‘‘Single Sweet Honeycomb’’ The first clue to the composition of the Hortus comes from Herrad’s description of the manuscript as a ‘‘single sweet honeycomb’’ (HD no. 2). Like her bee metaphor, the honeycomb image was coded with important From Nectar to Honeycomb: Constructing the Hortus 109 information concerning the manuscript’s structure and organization, topics that Herrad does not explicitly address, but that were nonetheless carefully planned. As Carruthers points out, the honeycomb was a common metaphor for the organization of knowledge and was especially important in connection with the cognitive processes of memory training and recall.1 The natural structure provided by the constituent cells of the honeycomb symbolized the organization and storage of knowledge, and its sweetness the pleasures of learning and divine wisdom. As such, Herrad’s use of the honeycomb metaphor for the Hortus conveyed her sense both of the book’s order and coherence and of its ultimate purpose: the education and spiritual edification of the women of Hohenbourg. Moreover, it underscores the essential unity of the Hortus, suggesting that Herrad saw the book as a coherent theological system, which shared with the honeycomb a certain order, symmetry, and logic. Like individual cells in a honeycomb, the many texts of the Hortus had been brought together to form a single structure, whose unity was ensured through the overarching structure of salvation history. Each of the manuscript’s folios, from the Creation to the Last Judgment, contributed to this narrative, which was centered on the person of Christ and the work of salvation brought about by his incarnation and crucifixion. Herrad’s fidelity to the outline of salvation history places the Hortus among other contemporary works of theology, including Honorius Augustodunensis’s Elucidarium and Peter Lombard’s Sentences , sources on which she relied heavily, as well as Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis and Hildegard’s Scivias. Salvation history was equally signi ficant for Rupert of Deutz, who saw in its progression from creation through redemption a way to understand the Trinity. As with other salvation histories, Herrad’s presentation contains roughly four sections. It begins with a typological reading of the Old Testament , followed by a largely narrative account of the person and the work of Christ and an allegorical reading of the Church as the sponsa Christi, and culminates in a consideration of Last Things. This fourfold division does not take into account the unusually distinct series of texts taken from Peter Lombard’s Sentences (fols. 264r–94r) and the pseudo-Clementine Recognitiones (fols. 295r–308v), which follow the eschatological section of the manuscript. Nor can it be taken to represent the proportional emphases of the Hortus. Obviously, the narrative presentation of Christ’s life formed the focal point of the manuscript, as it does of salvation history in general. Indeed, based on her examination of the images, Green suggests that the Hortus is a ‘‘great triptych...