ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Enclosed Gardens of the early sixteenth-century Augustinian Hospital Sisters of Mechelen, in Belgium. The Enclosed Garden (hortus conclusus) was a common feature of medieval religious devotion and literature. Baert explores this feminine dynamic in relation to the material culture of the Enclosed Gardens containing artificial flowers and figurines manufactured by the sisters of Mechelen as part of their devotional practice. The gardens are deeply sensual and speak of the eroticism of the women’s own bodies. Baert explores how such gardens are material extensions of the visual and imagistic piety that facilitated virtual pilgrimage, but here the very physical act of their creation belongs to a devotional engagement which draws upon rather than negates the body and its materiality.
