HERB - period wedding flowers

[Kathleen Keeler]

Jack Goody, The culture of flowers Cambridge U Press 1993  ISBN 0-521-42484-4
is book written as a result of a noted anthropologist's interest in flowers.
It has a chapter on the Dark Ages in Europe, on flowers in Islam, of "the
return of hte rose to Medieival Europe" of "icons and iconoclasm in the
Renaissance" and "the secret language of flowers in France" (which applies to
the 1700's and since.)  There isn't a lot of "this flower means this" but
there's good documentation of how flowers were used in the Middle Ages (and
which flowers).  [Tho his extensive footnotes tend to be quirky comments as
often as they are solid documentation.]

I was particularly struck by the original Christian negative reaction to
flowers because Rome's pagans loved flowers and the Christians wanted to
differentiate themselves.  This theme recurrs, according to Goody, off and on
through until about the 12th century, flowers being sometimes acceptable and
sometimes not, for Christian ceremonies.

About the 12th C., he says the lure of flowers overtook their detractors and we
have chaplets, especially of roses, on all sorts of people, for all sorts of
ceremonies.
("a crown of roses might be offered from an inferior to a superior...as part of
feudal dues" (England and France, from 1124, especially common in 14th and 15th
C's).  It also describes chaplets of aromatic herbs worn by men of the
nobility.

I recommend the book as great fun.  And, full of things to try--surely we could
get chaplets of roses onto the King and his champions...

Anyway--rose chaplets on the heads of people at weddings, rose petals and
lilies strewn it the strees "on joyous occassions such as marriages"

"...all weddings could not be confined to June...resort had to be made to
dried, artificial and metal flowers, as well of course to foliage, _le chapelet
vert_.

"by the sixteenth centrury, the chaplets have disappeared...cloth head
coverings of peacock and ostrich feathers...however floral crowns are used...at
weddings where orange blossom replaced the rose"

He  quotes a poem from 1584 "Lavander is for lovers true..., rosemarie is for
remebrance..., sage is for sustenance, Fenel is for flaterers...(there's 8
more)

"the bride and groom gave rosemary to friends at weddings, "

I think its an important book, and I'd recommend it in context, not as my
isolated quotes:  there's a lot of good points about the way modern and Period
views of flowers differ.

Clearly the rose was the single most popular flower of the Middle Ages.

Agnes
kkeeler1 at unl.edu

============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.