HERRAD, HILDEGARD and the women of Mechelen were not alone in their recourse to a hermeneutics of flourishing gardens for the forging of their communal and literary identities within their respective enclosed environments. The late thirteenth century bore witness to other women in other geographical locations who strove in similar ways to undertake the same recuperative work and who, moreover, also recognised the potential of the hortus conclusus to provide a rich grammar and an expressive lexis for approximating on what they regarded as ultimately inexpressible, that is to say, their deeply personal – and intersubjective – visionary encounters with the divine love of God. In this chapter, I examine the collaborative visionary works of two such writers from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta: Gertrude the Great (d. 1302) and Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298). As I shall argue, in the visionary writings attributed to these women, such hermeneutics regularly collapse into deeply sexualised images as their writers grapple with the garden's ontology of fertility and fecundity in order to uncover a suitable idiom to make their visionary insights into divine love understood. In order to unpack their complexity, I will draw upon a range of contemporary theories regarding female divinity and existential flourishing, as espoused by Grace Jantzen and Luce Irigaray, and demonstrate the centrality of their premises to Gertrude's and Mechthild's conceptualisation of a holy woman's own divinity.

Like Herrad and Hildegard before them, both Gertrude and Mechthild lay down challenges to those traditional understandings of salvational history they inherited from the Church Fathers and other male commentators. In other words, instead of presenting a vision of human salvation solely predicated upon orthodox discourses of fall, punishment and redemption, they consistently draw upon alternative discourses, also theologically endorsed but predicated upon what Grace Jantzen has identified as ‘an imaginary of natality issuing in a symbolic of flourishing’.