Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art. Andrea Pearson. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 296. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xxii + 356 pp. €165

The interpretative variability of the complex elements that make up the allegorical “Gardens of Love” at the heart of the book's analytical project is what Pearson identifies as the challenge; the constant slippage between carnal eroticism and spiritual union with the divine means that not only medieval and early modern people had to grapple with ambiguity, but so too do twenty-first-century scholars attempting to situate the often bizarre and disturbing variety of literary and visual images produced in aid of ostensibly spiritual ambitions. In the introduction, Pearson explains that this term refers to subtle, slightly ambiguous, and indirect representations of sexual acts, and as an example gives a detail from the central panel of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, in which “a man pulls bouquets from another man's anus in an oblique yet probable allusion to sodomy” (2). The term crops up repeatedly in the following discussion of the imagery (both literary and visual) of wounds and wounding, but it does not seem strictly necessary—Pearson's analysis of the religious erotics of pain and its relationship to the garden/wilderness dyad could stand on its own without the aid of this vaguely defined notion of tonality.