Beatrice Trînca:
Text Gardens: Mediological Perspectives on the Late Medieval Book of Nature

In her presentation, Beatrice Trînca will first introduce the genre of garden allegories within its cultural and literary-historical context before taking a closer look at Stephan Fridolin’s (d.1498) manuscript “Spiritual May”. The text engages in a nuanced exploration of the concept of the Book of Nature, its mediality, and beauty as a condition for its legibility as formulated by Augustine (d.430). The forget-me-not, peony, borage, and dandelion take center stage as examples. Precise descriptions of plants, which are also lavishly adorned with the adjective ‘beautiful’, provide Fridolin with an opportunity for extensive deciphering in line with Augustinian thought, ultimately aiming to bring about a rejection of the material world.  

Beatrice Trînca is a scholar of Medieval German Literature as well as of the Study of Religion, with a research focus on aesthetics and cultural studies. From 2012 to 2020 she was Assistant Professor for “Religion and Literature in Medieval European Culture and Its Reception, With a Focus on Gender Studies” at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2017, she received her ‘Habilitation’ in medieval German language and literature at the Universität Hamburg. The title of her second book is Amor conspirator. Zur Ästhetik des Verborgenen in der höfischen Literatur (published in 2019 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Currently, she carries out her research within the Heisenberg Project “Productive Barriers to Communication in the Literature of the High and Late Middle Ages” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.