Festering Lilies

Abstract Lilies, especially white lilies (Lilium candidum), are complex visual and metaphoric symbols in the Renaissance. For medieval and early modern artists, white lilies signal purity. But lilies also decay rapidly, releasing a strong scent as they die. For poets like Ronsard and Shakespeare, the smell of ‘festering’ lilies provided them with a powerful metaphor about the unseen dangers of desire. The sensuous qualities of white lilies as symbols of both sexual purity and contamination helped to solidify cultural ideals of chastity, beauty, and whiteness as discernible phenomena. Reading the ecological and cultural history of lilies in the Renaissance against metaphors of beauty in Renaissance lyric poetry, especially Shakespeare’s sonnets, I argue that lilies function as eco-material signifiers of race and gender. Chaste and pure or mutable, spotted, and festering, lilies came to signify a powerful figuration of whiteness in the Renaissance, mobilized through metaphors of smell.