4 - ‘Mervoillous fu li engineres que croix fist de fust, non de pierre’: Materiality and Vernacular Theology in the Wood of the Cross Legend

Summary

TREES PLAYED AN important role in the communication of knowledge in medieval thought. Whether it be the stylised diagrammatic trees used to organise scientific thought, genealogical trees that structure kinship relations as a trunk with branches, or the many trees in religious imagery, the shape, form, and behaviours of a tree are universally recognisable and endlessly reiterable. The Christian Bible, of course, holds a special place for trees as the instrument of both Adam's sin and Christ's death, which endows them with a cosmic significance at the heart of salvation history. The Wood of the Cross legends, which imagine that it was the Tree of Paradise that became the material for Christ's cross, participated in the communication of biblical knowledge in both theological and popular contexts, offering a concrete representation of the connection between sin and redemption. For the majority of lay people, access to the text of the Bible was heavily mediated by translations, sermons, and adaptations, which made linguistic and cultural interventions in order to adapt the content for a general audience who lacked clerical or monastic training. In this article, I examine the way in which thirteenth-century Wood of the Cross stories were instrumentalised to convey theological information to lay audiences in an accessible mode, focusing on a Latin version called the Legenda (c.1220) and its French adaptations, particularly the Bible Anonyme.

Jacobus de Voragine describes the Wood of the Cross in the Legenda Aurea as lignis vilibus (‘cheap wood’) that transiuit in pretiositatem (‘passed into preciousness’) through its role in the Passion. As Shannon Gayk and Robyn Malo argue, this elevates the tree over and above its basic materiality, allowing it to transcend ‘its arboreal properties’. While the Wood of the Cross is evidently marked as sacred and exceptional because of this role, it is paradoxically the very materiality of the tree's arboreal properties that is essential to its transcendence in the texts I examine. The tree in the Legenda and its French versions is not the thinking, feeling subject of The Dream of the Rood, who speaks to the audience and experiences Christ's pain, nor is it the speaking cross that, according to legend, expressed its wish to be placed in Røldal church in Norway.