Sicut apis operosa: honey, bees and chastity in the early medieval world

Honey and bees have been a long-standing metaphor in western civilisation, having a history as a didactic metaphor employed by various writers across the centuries. This paper aims to delineate the changing interpretations of honey and bees in the early medieval period with a focus on how they were attached to chastity. It argues that the metaphor was gradually re-developed and re-interpreted from the early church to the early medieval period, it also pinpoints the evolution to a more specific usage of the metaphor within the contexts of monasticism. It first explores how honey and bees were connected to chastity in the writings of various church fathers, then it surveys how the connection continued in the works of several monastic writers.