The metaphor of nectar-gathering implies fertility and florescence, and opens pathways for medieval writers and readers into a broader moralised landscape of fields, ploughlands and vineyards and associated activities expressing the aims and nature of clerical endeavour: ‘the Lord is to be praised’, writes Gregory IX in 1233, ‘for in this the eleventh hour He has led the Friars Preachers and Minors into His vineyard’ to root out heresy. It is an extended metaphor that embraces realities of medieval economy in northern Europe, as well as scriptural parables such as that of the workers in the Lord’s vineyard, and the parable of the sower.[10] As Elizabeth Freeman has demonstrated, it was possible for the Cistercian writer Hugh of Kirkstall, a daughter house of Fountains Abbey in England, to celebrate the success of Fountains Abbey using this complex metaphor drawn from writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of his Order. Hugh, a near-contemporary of Bartholomew, wrote the following passage sometime between 1205 and 1226. The image is of vines, bees, seeds, harvest and procreation to signal the Cistercian Order’s growth, industry, and success:
Thus Newminster took its origin. This was the first shoot which our vine put forth; this was the first swarm which went out from our hive. The holy seed sprouted in the soil and, being cast as it were in the lap of fertile earth, grew to a great plant, and from a few grains there sprang a plentiful harvest. This newly founded monastery rivalled her mother in fertility. She conceived and brought forth three daughters, Pipewell, Sawley and Roche.[11]
The above quotation shows a writer combining well-understood metaphors of fertility to express the evangelising aims of the Cistercians in Bartholomew’s time, but it also demonstrates an understood precedent that existed for scholars, whether mendicant or monastic, to use imagery of the vine, the beehive, the seed, the gleaner, the cultivation of fertile ground and of female fertility to denote the active work of spreading God’s word, nurturing Christian souls and obtaining the rewards of salvation. Francis of Assisi had in some senses been a follower of Bernard, and Bartholomew testifies early on to the latter’s importance as an authority.[12]