What’s a Florilegium?

Short answer: A collection of excerpts, a place where I’ll share snippets of poetry, beautiful passages from recent reads, poignant quotations, moving scripture, etc. 

Long answer: I’ve always been impressed by authors who always include the perfect quotations as epigraphs in their books, or people who simply spill over with literary references, lines, verses etc. Of course, they say that being well-read naturally develops this quality. But I’ve been inspired over the last year by those who not only read, but who also fastidiously annotate and commonplace their reading material. This practice of common-placing is nothing new, and while it dates back to Lord knows when, it came to special and unique prominence in early monastic culture. 

As Jean LeClercq notes in his lectures compiled in “The Love of Learning and the Desire for God,” the florilegia “grew out of spiritual reading. The monk would copy out texts he had enjoyed so as to savor them at leisure and use them anew as subjects for private meditation.” In a time before it was normal for folks to have their own personal libraries, the florilegia were a way to hold on to and disseminate bits of wisdom and truth. Florilegium translates literally to a “gathering of flowers,” and I just adore the image of poetry + prose + scripture creating a wild bouquet. “In medieval metaphor,” LeClercq explains, “the perfume [the florilegia] exude and the honey that can be extracted from them vary according to the flower-bed where these writings were culled and collected.” And so I think about how personal these collections are, and how people can tell a great deal about each other by the writings they’ve grasped and shared and held close. 

This is the section of the blog that pushed me to start a blog in the first place. While I am reluctant to share my own writings, I love any excuse to, as the metaphor continues, share the flowers I have gathered from the gardens and thickets I have trekked.