‘A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse’. The Song of Songs, Solomon and Literary Gardens in the English Renaissance

The Song of Songs has always been an extremely influential work for the aesthetics and architecture of gardens, particularly during the Renaissance and late Renaissance. In an age that ardently fosters the art of gardening and celebrates England as the New Jerusalem and James I Stuart as the new Solomon, the intrinsic and symbolic meaning of gardens is frequently associated with Hermetic and alchemic culture: it is worth noticing that king Solomon, the alleged author and protagonist of the Song of Songs, is traditionally regarded as one of the fathers of alchemy and mnemotechnics and that Cain, the first gardener, is interpretable as the first alchemist. The very etymology of the term κῆπος (‘garden’) semantically connects gardens to generation, to the origins of humanity and to images of protection, shelter and enclosure and sheds light on the Song of Songs: the garden sang by Solomon – protective, nursing, defensive and alluding to motherhood and generation – is identifiable with female sexuality, with the cult of the Great Mother and with fecundity, evoked by the pomegranate and the vine. This article investigates the links among the Song of Songs, Giordano Bruno, Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, emblematics and the alchemic tradition in order to ascertain how «earth’s freshest softest lap», as Milton would say, is often, albeit obliquely, associated with the alchemists’ furnace, with the womb of the Earth and with the perfect – and androgynous – original state of humanity.