The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century

Here G. situates the Hortus manuscript within a number of specific twelfth-century movements, all of them of interest to contemporary scholarship: monastic reform and proliferation, the roles and status of women, female literacy, and the development of Scholastic theology. Was the Hortus deliciarum an anomaly among texts from women's circles, or was it part of a larger trend that has been heretofore unexplored? G. suggests that the manuscript does not fit into the generalizations offered by contemporary feminist thought: that medieval women's texts are primarily prophetic and/ or mystical, for instance, or that female education declined in the advent of Scholasticism.