ABSTRACT

In his Postmodern Geographies, Edward J. Soja posits spatiality as “simultaneously … a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life.” Spatiality is, moreover, something that is necessarily reified by the “illusion of opaqueness,” its construction and performativity serving to conceal how “human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.” Taking this perspective as a starting point, this chapter examines literary representation of a prevalent conceit within medieval spatiality: that of the hortus conclusus (or walled garden). Tracing the emergence of the hortus conclusus within a range of both sacred and secular contexts, the chapter argues for its being not only a bounded physical space but also an ideological one that simultaneously serves to construct, perform, and confirm the stasis (opaqueness) of a sacred history that often conceals the relentless gender politics at its core. As part of this analysis, the chapter also draws on the theories of Grace Jantzen and Luce Irigaray, among others, who have identified within the politics of the walled garden an all but erased poetics of the feminine in which issues of natality, nurture, and flourishing dominate. Such poetics, however, have long been overwritten by a necrophilic predilection within western Christianity for a focus on death and heroic salvation. As such, the type of spatial “simultaneity” argued for by Soja renders the medieval hortus conclusus an inherently unstable space, in spite of its policed mechanisms of enclosure. While ultimately constructed to fix in stone its (gendered) interior, the hortus conclusus is ultimately a space that escapes its own boundaries, its “excess” spilling out to reveal the real consequences of its construction and performances.