The serpent and the rose, archetypal representations of corruption and beauty, provide an approach for examining aspects of how good and evil were represented in religious writing in the medieval period in the Iberian Peninsula. The serpent, the creature which tempted Eve in the garden of Eden, has been represented in many forms through Christian history. He is Leviathan,‘that crooked serpent’from Isaiah and, in the Book of Revelation, is the dragon against which the woman of the Apocalypse fought. He is Lucifer, the fallen angel, and the tempter who appeared to Christ in the wilderness. In literary manifestations, he gives shape to the worm which penetrates the rose in the Roman de la Rose [Romance of the Rose]. In his various guises, he represents temptation, evil, and death. He evolved into the epitome of sin crushed under the immaculate heel of the Virgin.

The rose also appears in many forms in secular and religious poetry (Spitzer 1950: 138). It represents beauty and perfection but it also signals how beauty withers and fades. It may signal sexual purity but also sexual union, as in the Roman de la Rose (Poirion 1973: 118). Yet its very form suggests interdependence between the thorn and the flower. The perfumed bloom and the thorny plant were soon a prefiguration of Mary to show her relationship to sinful humanity. Later, the rose began to be applied to her Immaculate Conception, a doctrine which declares her to have been sinless from the very first moment of her existence in her mother’s womb. The doctrine began to be debated in the Middle Ages, even though it was only recognized as a dogma on 8 December 1854. The nature of the stem and its difference from the flower signals how creation, once pure but now tainted by sin and death, bears a new, purer manifestation of itself.