Meanings behind myths: the multiple manifestations of the Tree of the Virgin at Matarea

摘要

Matarea - five 'Lombard' miles north of Old Cairo - was one of the most popular stops on what Wade Labarge has called the 'longer, complete circuit' of medieval Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The garden there was purported to have sheltered the Holy Family on its flight from Egypt, but also occupied a strategic location on international thoroughfares and, via its famed balsam grove, offered visitors a glimpse at the source of production of one of the rarest and most valuable spices known in the West. Over the early modern period, the mythical history of Matarea was forced to alter its contents. The Tree of the Virgin there was, for example, variously presented as a sycamore, a fig and a palm. The purpose of this article is to trace the shifts in the metrics of the myth, explain them and their impact on the myth's credibility, at the same time as attempting to gauge the importance of other circumstantial changes such as the dislocations to the balsam trade wreaked by the emergence of New World suppliers.