Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg’s Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript’s author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff, and Michael Curschmann, published by the Warburg Institute in 1979 in two large-format folio volumes intended to replicate the lavish decoration of the original manuscript, if not its original scale. Given the mammoth effort involved in simply reconstructing the manuscript’s contents, it is not surprising that earlier generations of scholars made only limited attempts to analyze intentions behind the manuscript’s production, its function, its audience, and its intellectual context. Even its authorship has been attributed to Herrad only with significant reservations, in part because female spirituality of the twelfth century has been defined almost exclusively in terms of the...