Mystical Rose

Factual Questions
1

I read that the Virgin Mary was known as the Mystical Rose in medieval times.

Can anyone tell me what the Mystical Rose is?

2

I think it might originally come from the Song of Songs/ Song of Solomon (everything in the Old Testament gets tie up to the life of Christ in the middle ages-- they were thorough about it)-- she was called the Rose without Thorns and things of that sort, and a series of ave maria prayers, I believe in the 1400s was kind of codified as a “rose garland” of prayers, mnemonically (now known as a rosary).

3

The Rosa Mystica is at the culmination of Dante’s Paradiso — his vision of the ultimate harmony and unity of Heaven, in which all the saints and the blessed are arrayed in circles. In the final canto of the Paradiso, immediately after his vision of the Rose, he concludes with a hymn to the Blessed Virgin. So perhaps there is some association there. Mary herself occupies one of the petals of the Rose on the topmost tier.

Canto XXX, Lines 109-120:

  • E come clivo in acqua di suo imo
    si specchia, quasi per vedersi addorno,
    quando è nel verde e ne’ fioretti opimo,

sì, soprastando al lume intorno intorno,
vidi specchiarsi in più di mille soglie
quanto di noi là sù fatto ha ritorno.

E se l’infimo grado in sé raccoglie
sì grande lume, quanta è la larghezza
di questa rosa ne l’estreme foglie!

La vista mia ne l’ampio e ne l’altezza
non si smarriva, ma tutto prendeva
il quanto e 'l quale di quella allegrezza.*

And as a slope shines in the looking glass
of a lake below it, as if to see itself
in its time of brightest flower and greenest grass,

so, tier on tier, mounting within that light,
there glowed, reflected in more than a thousand circles,
all those who had won return to Heaven’s height.

And if so vast a nimbus can be bound
within its lowest tier, what then must be
the measure of this rose at its topmost round?

Nor were my eyes confounded by that sea
and altitude of space, but took in all,
both number and quality, of that ecstasy.

Canto XXIII, Lines 7-9, connects the Rose directly with the Virgin:

  • Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore,
    per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace
    così è germinato questo fiore.*

The Love that was rekindled in Thy womb
sends for the warmth of the eternal peace
within whose ray this flower has come to bloom.

(Translation by John Ciardi)