Giardini all’italiana, giardini all’inglese, ca. 1300

This investigation into the topos of the garden in the literature of late medieval Europe, focusing on fourteenth-century English and Italian canonical authors, aims at arguing for the complexity of a theme in which the idyllic-Edenic tradition of the locus amœnus combines with a profoundly disquieting one, alluding to an afterworld inhabited by death-figures. While the diverse connotations of the garden-topos against the nature-vs-culture background are already apparent in the Old Testament, Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Apuleius, a more detailed analysis of the Decameron’s three main descriptions of gardens highlights how Boccaccio’s agenda is in radical opposition to the penitential one exemplified by such a large part of contemporaneous devotional literature and iconography. In particular, the descriptions of the garden/s where the ten Florentine youths are often gathered confirm the influence exercised upon the Decameron by the programme underlying Burlamacco’s Triumph of Death of Pisa’s Camposanto, but in an ideologically reversed perspective. In other words, the Boccaccian garden functions as the thematic setting of a cultural re-appropriation aimed at re-affirming the courtly-bourgeois, lay values of man’s existence then under attack by influential fraternal religious circles in late-medieval central and northern Italy. Conversely, in many descriptions of natural settings – more or less explicitly modified by man’s intervention – found in Middle English dream-poems such as Pearl and Piers Plowman or in romances such as William of Palerne (ca 1350), The Awntyrs off Arture at the Terne Wathelyne (ca 1400) and, especially, Sir Orfeo (ca 1300), the garden reveals itself as the ‘natural’ locale for the materialization of the marvellous. The connection becomes especially perceptible when the protagonist’s entry into the garden is followed by his/her falling asleep beneath a tree – itself a classic ‘signal’ of the supernatural, as Genesis and Æneid b. VI clearly suggest. A striking example is represented by the seemingly Edenic garden into which Sir Orfeo’s protagonist follows Dame Heurodis, mysteriously returned from the dead: even the most celestial-looking natural scenery may hide a nightmarish ‘other’ face – in this case, a castle-court inhabited by the restless and mangled corpses of the damned. The close association between the topos of the garden and that of the dream that emerges from these texts hints at the persistence of a deeply distrustful attitude – authoritatively embodied by Alain de Lille in the twelfth century – towards certain types of dreams, seen as morally reproachable and as representing the devil’s gateway into man’s mind and soul. Geoffrey Chaucer’s treatment of the garden theme plays a crucial role in at least three Canterbury tales: The Franklin’s Tale – a Breton ‘lai’ – and two fabliaux, The Shipman’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale. Within their respective generic conventions – now in an idealizing key, now in a ‘low’, mimetic one, yet rich in dark overtones – these three narratives enact love/sex relationships having the garden as their setting. This scenery thus gradually emerges as the locus for the irrational outburst of amorous passions, in their diverse manifestations, ultimately in accordance with an almost priapesque notion of nature as generation, subversive of the commonplace medieval garden image, in that it foregrounds the uncircumscribable, pre-civilized, blindly chaotic, albeit potentially fertile, visage of nature. Finally, the garden and dream/nightmare topoi appear closely connected with that of the labyrinth, particularly in the (turf) maze variety. Thus, focusing on the iconic-symbolic valence of the garden theme – consisting in allowing and making visible the access to the afterworld – eventually permits to recognize its double essence: on the one hand the idealized image of the paradise-garden, on the other, the nocturnal-nightmarish side of man’s unconscious.