The Meaning of Green in Medieval Life

And the (rather expensive) medieval remedy for eye strain.

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.

(Green, O that I love you green.
Green wind. Branches, green.
The sailing ship upon the sea
and the horse on the mountain.)

—Federico García Lorca (d. 1936), from “Romance sonámbulo”

The medieval romance Sir Orfeo, which we discussed last week, contains a line that could be easily overlooked but is nonetheless rather strange, at least for modern readers:

The butres cam out of the diche
Of reed gold y-arched riche.

(The buttress [of a Faerieland castle] came out of the ditch
Made of red gold splendidly arched.)

The poet describes gold as “red.” For us, gold is gold-colored, or rich yellow. I’ve never heard any modern person describe gold as red. And yet, this color was commonly associated with gold in medieval English. Part of the explanation for this has to do with the red appearance of pure gold that’s been heated—“red gold” was a poetic expression for “pure gold.” But medieval texts still give the impression that the color of gold was included in the “red” category, and analysis of early usage of the word “red” indicates that it encompassed not only the color of blood, cherries, and rubies but also shades of purple, pink, and orange.

Captivating use of color in the Stammheim Missal, produced c. 1170 and now held by the Getty Museum: “An inhabited initial C opens the text of the priest’s prayers for the Mass on Christmas day. The hybrid nude figure at the left holding a rod may refer to the yoke of sin, which oppresses humanity, symbolized by the nude man in the upper right. Similarly, the clusters of green grapes may here refer to the wine served at the Last Supper.”

This brings up an interesting question, then: to what extent is a human being’s perception of color influenced by culture and language? In modern society, color is presented as an objective physical reality that can be reduced to numerical relationships—we learn in school that a rainbow is made up of seven hues that you can memorize as Roy G. Biv; a quick Google search will tell you each color’s wavelength range; and we’re accustomed to screens that imitate real colors by combining precise quantities of red, green, and blue light. This is all very correct and efficient, I’m sure, but it’s also yet another way to ensure that modern life is as disenchanted, mechanistic, and blandly homogenous as possible. Color, as the Symbolist painter Paul Gauguin (d. 1903) said, is “a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.” We’ll try to recover a bit of that mystery by exploring the nature of color in the ancient and medieval world.

King David sees Bathsheba bathing, from a late-fifteenth-century Book of Hours (ahem, I cropped out her very naked and slightly-too-arousing body). Green was an especially beautiful color for Christians of the Middle Ages, and the quintessential site of greenness in the medieval imagination was the orchard. It appears that this painting served as an introduction to the manuscript’s section for the Penitential Psalms—that’s the (always interesting, sometimes disconcerting) medieval spirit for you: a risqué, erotic image is included in a prayer book but used as a lead-in to the prayers you will need if you fall into the sort of sin depicted in the image.

Michel Pastoureau, a professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne, has written several books on the cultural history of colors. For him, “it is the society that ‘makes’ color”: a community of people, rather than a collection of laboratory instruments, gives color “its definitions and meaning” and “constructs its codes and values.” In his book on the history of the color green, he gives a striking example of how much a human being’s experience of color can vary from one cultural environment to another. He first mentions a fact that will come as no surprise to readers of Via Mediaevalis: “notions of pleasure, harmony, and beauty in the Middle Ages were not what they are in the twenty-first century, very far from it.” He continues:

To the medieval sensibility, for example, juxtaposing yellow and green produced the most violent contrast imaginable, whereas for us those two colors, as neighbors in the spectrum, are close to one another, and our eye is used to passing imperceptibly from yellow to green or from green to yellow without experiencing an impression of discontinuity…. Conversely, contrasts like red/green or red/yellow, which are relatively strong for us, were not so to the twelfth- or thirteenth-century eye. Those colors were neighbors in the chromatic scales of artists and scholars.