"Rennes-le-Château and a Mother Crucified"

The Hortus deliciarum, translated as Garden of Delights is an illuminated medieval manuscript written over many years by Herrad of Landsberg, a nun who would eventually become the Mother Superior of Hohenburg Abbey, an abbey that sits on top of Mont Sainte-Odile in France.

Herrad was born at Landsburg Castle sometime between 1125 and 1130, and died on July 25, 1195, after leading the nuns of the abbey for 28 years. In an effort to educate the women in her care, she wrote this manuscript that was more of an encyclopedia that included commentary on scripture, astronomy, philosophy, Latin poems with musical accompaniment, natural history, and the history of humankind.

According to Ann Storey, a professor of art history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in an article titled “A Theophany of the Feminine” published in the Woman’s Art Journal in 1998, the Hortus deliciarum was, “considered one of the more brilliant achievements of twelfth-century art and her interpretation of ‘The Woman of the Apocalypse’ that she illustrated in her work titled ‘Woman Clothed with the Sun’ emphasized the power of the female gender. In Herrad’s drawing, Mary is giving her son Jesus to the angels for safekeeping, ignoring the menacing dragons on either side, while sporting her most prominent feature, a pair of enormous wings.

Herrad lived and worked just before the Gregorian Reforms that set out to restore religious discipline within the Catholic Church, and according to Storey “reduced the status and freedom of abbesses and other women in ecclesiastical life”. But until the reforms took hold, Storey says, “Herrad and others were able to work within the established institutions and iconography of the church to find ways to amend them to emphasize a more egalitarian message of spirituality and power, and although they encountered obstacles, they benefited from the example of powerful women who acted as their advisors”.

Another illustration included in the Hortus deliciarum was Herrad’s rendition of the Tree of Jesse, the line of descendants in the Book of Isaiah beginning with Jesse, the father of King David, the most famous King of Israel and ending with Jesus. The name Jesse means King or God’s gift and Christians believed King Jesse died without sin or as Buddhists would say, died enlightened.

The Tree of Jesse is often replicated through art in medieval hymn books, on stain glass windows, around portals, walls and ceilings of medieval churches and in smaller works such as tapestries and embroidery. During medieval times the symbol of the tree was adopted by nobility as a symbol of their family lineage, today it is known as the family tree. The Tree of Jesse illustrated by the Catholic nun Herrad within the Hortus deliciarum was not for public view, this encyclopedia with its illustrations was only for the nuns of Hohenburg Abbey and is quite different from other depictions of the line of King Jesse and King David, the patriarchs of Jesus’ family tree.

Herrad’s illustration features a large serpent fish in place of Jesse, with Jesus fishing his ancestors out of the mouth of this serpent fish as opposed to the side of Jesse's body. The serpent fish has wings, a curled tail, two paws instead of fins, and two horns upon its head, and is said to be Leviathan, the primordial sea serpent.

Odo of Cluny, a venerated Catholic saint was born near the end of the 9th century in France, and was the second abbot of Cluny, who as a child was sent to the court of his patron, the Count of Anjou, by the brothers of the monastery his parents had initially entrusted him to.

Odo was devoted to St. Martin, the third Bishop of Tours, who is the patron saint of geese and the Pontifical Swiss Guard of the Vatican, he was also devoted to the Mother of Jesus, and throughout his life addressed her always as the ‘Mother of Mercy’. Odo speaks to the capture of Leviathan, as portrayed in the biblical Tree of Jesse, and says that the line of this hook is the genealogy of Christ up to the Virgin Mary and the 12th century Christian theologian Honorius of Autun adds to the explanation in the Speculum Ecclesiae saying “ Leviathan, the monster who swam in the sea of the world, is Satan. God threw the line which is the human descent of Christ, into the sea. The bait was Christ”.

Herrad’s Tree of Jesse shows the hook of the fishing rod Jesus has cast, firmly implanted in the sea serpent’s lower jaw. On the line of this rod are his seven bearded male ancestors, and at the bottom, closest to the mouth of the serpent is the bait described by Saint Odo, Jesus’ eighth ancestor, his mother crucified.

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