Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) would have been an extraordinary person in any age. But for a woman of the twelfth century her achievements were so exceptional that posterity has found it hard to take her measure. Barbara Newman, a premier Hildegard authority, brings major scholars together to present an accurate portrait of the Benedictine nun and her many contributions to twelfth-century religious, cultural, and intellectual life. Written by specialists in fields ranging from medieval theology to medicine to music, these essays offer an understanding of how one woman could transform so many of the traditions of the world in which she lived.
Hildegard of Bingen was the only woman of her age accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine as well as the first woman permitted by the pope to write theological books. She was the author of the first known morality play; an artist of unusual talents; the most prolific chant composer of her era; and the first woman to write extensively on natural science and medicine, including sexuality as seen from a female perspective. She was the only woman of her time to preach openly to mixed audiences of clergy and laity, and the first saint whose biography includes a first-person memoir.
Adding to the significance of this volume is the fact that Hildegard's oeuvre reflects the entire sweep of twelfth-century culture and society. Scholars and lay readers alike will find this collection a rich introduction to a remarkable figure and to her tumultuous world. With the commemoration of the 900th anniversary of Hildegard's birth in September 1998, the publication of Voice of the Living Light is especially welcome. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) would have been an extraordinary person in any age. But for a woman of the twelfth century her achievements were so exceptional that posterity has found it hard to take her measure. Barbara Newman, a premier Hildegard authority, brings major scholars together to present an accurate portrait of the Benedictine nun and her many contributions to twelfth-century religious, cultural, and intellectual life. Written by specialists in fields ranging from medieval theology to medicine to music, these essays offer an understanding of how one woman could transform so many of the traditions of the world in which she lived.
Hildegard of Bingen was the only woman of her age accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine as well as the first woman permitted by the pope to write theological books. She was the author of the first known morality play; an artist of unusual talents; the most prolific chant composer of her era; and the first woman to write extensively on natural science and medicine, including sexuality as seen from a female perspective. She was the only woman of her time to preach openly to mixed audiences of clergy and laity, and the first saint whose biography includes a first-person memoir.
Adding to the significance of this volume is the fact that Hildegard's oeuvre reflects the entire sweep of twelfth-century culture and society. Scholars and lay readers alike will find this collection a rich introduction to a remarkable figure and to her tumultuous world. With the commemoration of the 900th anniversary of Hildegard's birth in September 1998, the publication of Voice of the Living Light is especially welcome.

Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World

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By Barbara Newman, editor

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Barbara Newman, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520208269

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One
"Sibyl of the Rhine"
Hildegard's Life and Times
Barbara Newman

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), mistress of St. Rupert's Monastery and "Sibyl of the Rhine," would have been extraordinary in any age.1 But for a woman of the twelfth century, hedged by the constraints of a misogynist world, her achievements baffle thought, marking her as a figure so exceptional that posterity has found it hard to take her measure. For centuries she was ignored or forgotten, like so many accomplished women of the past. A skeptical historian in the nineteenth century tried to explain her away by casting doubt on the authenticity of her books, imagining a male ghostwriter behind her mask.2 A fideist countered by reading her prophetic claims in a naively literal way, making God the ghostwriter who dictated every word she set down and Hildegard but a passive and uncomprehending tool.3 Even now, despite enormous advances in scholarship on medieval women, she is still portrayed at times as an anomaly. Some books give the impression that she dropped into her world like a meteorite from a late-twentieth-century sky, proclaiming enlightened postmodern views on gender, ecology, ecumenism, and holistic health to an uncomprehending age.4

The purpose of this book is to set Hildegard in context, but this project will in no way diminish her exceptionality. Among the countless "firsts" and "onlies" to her credit, Hildegard was the only woman of her age to be accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine; the first woman who received express permission from a pope to write theological books; the only medieval woman who preached openly, before mixed audiences of clergy and laity, with the full approval of church authorities;5 the author of the first known morality play6 and the only twelfth-century playwright who is not anonymous; the only composer of her era (not to mention the only medieval woman) known both by name and by a large corpus of surviving music; the first scientific writer to discuss sexuality and gynecology from a female perspective;7 and the first saint whose official biography includes a first-person memoir.8

Yet exceptionality is only half the picture, for to study Hildegard's complete oeuvre is also to study the entire sweep of twelfth-century culture and society. Her prophetic career and her vast correspondence contribute to but also need to be illumined by a knowledge of all the burning religious and political issues of her day: the conflict between empire and papacy, the territorial ambitions of Frederick Barbarossa, the ravages of schism and civil war, the careerism of contemporary prelates, the rising threat of the Cathar heresy, the Second Crusade, the invigorating developments and crises in monastic reform, the nascent evangelical poverty movement, the competition for lucrative endowments and relics, the struggle over clerical celibacy. To understand Hildegard's massive visionary trilogy, readers need to be aware of twelfth-century developments in sacramental theology, the emerging doctrine of purgatory, Christian-Jewish relations, biblical exegesis, and cosmology, to name only a few of the topics she covers. Her medical and scientific writings present a body of encyclopedic lore about animals, birds, fishes, herbs, trees, gemstones, metals, nutrition, sexuality, disease, and therapeutics. To hear or perform her music and drama is to enter the rich and, for most of us, exotic world of Benedictine liturgy. Beyond their remarkable beauty, Hildegard's chants can offer insight into matters ranging from the self-image of consecrated women to the nature of devotion directed toward Mary and the saints. Her illuminated manuscripts, unique in twelfth-century iconography, raise a host of questions about the work of women as artists, producers, and patrons of deluxe books. Even her vita, or saintly biography, sheds light on the politics of canonization and new trends in women's spirituality.

Given the scope of Hildegard's accomplishments, an introduction to all the dimensions of her life and creativity lies beyond the competence of any individual scholar. Hence this book is a collaborative effort by specialists in many fields, ranging from medieval theology to medicine to music. Attentive readers will note that in some areas Hildegard's teaching proves to be socially and religiously conservative, while in others she stood at the vanguard of twelfth-century thought or developed wholly original ideas. Only contextual study can distinguish what is typical or atypical, idiosyncratic or commonplace, in such a large and bewilderingly diverse oeuvre. It should be stated at the outset, however, that although Hildegard was in many ways "transgressive," breaking her society's gender taboos with impunity, she was in no sense heretical.9 To be sure, she named and fiercely challenged the abuses of power that she saw around her, writing to archbishops and kings with a truly

prophetic, sometimes shocking candor. And she made enemies, among them the abbot who resented her bid for monastic independence, the unnamed detractors who felt sure she was deceived by demons, the reform-minded canoness who penned a withering critique of her elitism, and the prelates who slapped an interdict on her monastery when she was eighty years old and ailing. Yet her career as a whole testifies to the farthest limits of acceptable behavior in the twelfth century, including the degree and ferocity of criticism that powerful churchmen might be willing to tolerate. What Hildegard "got away with" must be finally explained not only by her energy and ability but also by her contemporaries' genuine belief that she was inspired by God, no matter how uncomfortable she made them feel. But had she voiced any genuine heresy, that is, doctrinal error in matters pertaining to the faith, there is no question that she would have been promptly silenced, her books condemned, and her unusual activities brought to a swift and if need be violent end.10 Doctrinal orthodoxy, in short, was not only a matter of deep-seated conviction for the seer but also a necessary condition for her survival.

Our principal source for her biography is the Vita Sanctae Hildegardis (Life of St. Hildegard ), a book whose title reveals its purpose: to secure her veneration as a saint and, if possible, her canonization by the church.11 Like other hagiographic texts, therefore, it does not pretend to offer an "objective," even-handed treatment of its subject. The Vita pursues its religious goal by ascribing as many events as possible to supernatural rather than natural causes, discerning the hand of God in all of Hildegard's motivations and actions, and emphasizing her official validation as a prophet, which is attested not only by miracles but also by an ascending chain of authorities: her teacher, her abbot, the archbishop of Mainz, a synod of bishops at Trier, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and finally Pope Eugene III. Once these churchmen had certified Hildegard's visionary gift as authentic and God-given, the path was cleared for two major undertakings: the completion and publication of her first book, called Scivias (an abridgment of Scito vias Domini , or know the ways of the Lord), and the founding of her new monastery on the desolate site of the Rupertsberg, or St. Rupert's Mount. Given the importance of these initiatives, the Vita focuses intensely on the period between Hildegard's "prophetic call," which she experienced in 1141 at the age of forty-three, and the secession of the Rupertsberg from its motherhouse, the male monastery of St. Disibod, in 1155. The life has much less to say about Hildegard's early years and her final decades.

A monk named Godfrey of St. Disibod, who served as provost at the Rupertsberg late in Hildegard's life (1174–1176), began to compose her Vita even before she died, anticipating that the community would want to promote her as a saint. Unfortunately Godfrey predeceased Hildegard, leaving his work unfinished. Several years after Hildegard's death in 1179, her friends commissioned another monk, Theoderic of Echternach, to finish the task. But Theoderic was apparently chosen more for his literary reputation than his personal interest in the saint; he seems to have had no direct acquaintance with Hildegard and little knowledge of her works.12 So instead of resuming the narrative where Godfrey had left off, Theoderic made an extraordinary choice: he decided to fill book 2 of the Vita with memoirs that Hildegard herself had dictated to help her earlier biographer, interspersing his own awed if sometimes uncomprehending comments. Thus the Vita permits us to compare three diverse perspectives on Hildegard's life: her own, the perceptions of a monk who worked for her, and the imagination of a more distant admirer who, having only secondhand knowledge, tried to fit her life into the stereotyped pattern of female sanctity fashionable in his own age. Fortunately, however, the Vita is not our only source for Hildegard's life. We can supplement and, if necessary, correct it with the information provided by another fragmentary vita,13 Hildegard's letters,14 the autobiographical prefaces of her books, a series of charters and other official documents pertaining to her monasteries,15 and (with greater caution) an account of miracles prepared for her canonization.16

All of these sources have been known since the nineteenth century. In 1992, however, surprising light was shed on Hildegard's early life by the discovery of another vita: that of her teacher, Jutta of Sponheim, who was herself considered a saint.17 It is fitting, then, to begin the account of Hildegard's life with a look at these two women's intertwined destinies.18 Born in 1098, Hildegard was the daughter of a Rhenish nobleman, Hildebert of Bermersheim, and his wife, Mechthild. Little is known of this couple except that they were wealthy and prolific: Hildegard was the youngest of ten children.19 Jutta, six years older than Hildegard, was born in 1092 to Count Stephen of Sponheim and his Bavarian wife, Sophia. Although the Sponheim family was more exalted than that of Bermersheim, the two clans were affiliated and may have been distantly related. So when the teenaged Jutta made a precocious decision to enter the religious life, Hildegard's parents strengthened this advantageous alliance by offering their youngest child—their "tithe to God," as one biographer put it—to be her companion.

Europe at the turn of the twelfth century was aglow with a revival of the eremitic life, a cherished ascetic ideal dating back to the desert fathers and mothers of the early Christian era. In growing numbers men and women alike were forsaking not only marriage but even the security of established monasteries to live an austere, solitary life as free-roaming hermits (the preferred option for men) or as enclosed recluses (the lifestyle recommended for women).20 Young girls in particular might go to extraordinary lengths to adopt such a life, resisting parental demands with all the determination of martyrs. When the twelve-year-old Jutta became ill, she vowed to become a nun if she survived and thereafter refused all her suitors viriliter ("like a man"), much to her family's disgust. Her biographer says Jutta "endured great perils" to preserve her chastity, and although he does not elaborate, we might recall the trials of her English contemporary, Christina of Markyate. Forced into an arranged marriage, Christina steadfastly refused to sleep with her husband, although he and her parents tried everything from sorcery to attempted rape. At last she fled the family home, disguised as a man, and took refuge in a hermit's cell, where she remained in hiding for years, even though the enclosure was too small for her to stand in and she could only go out to answer nature's call under cover of night.21

Jutta seems to have been equally fierce and independent. From about 1106 she embarked on an unvowed religious life in the house of Lady Uda, a widow of Göllheim, possibly with the eight-year-old Hildegard already in tow.22 After Uda died Jutta expressed a desire to go on pilgrimage, further indicating her spirit of adventure. But her brother Meinhard, later count of Sponheim, thwarted that plan and persuaded her, at age twenty, to settle at the monastery of St. Disibod. Thus on All Saints' Day, November 1, 1112, the young noblewoman was formally enclosed as a recluse and took her monastic vows, together with Hildegard (then fourteen) and one or two other girls who also bore the name of Jutta.23 Since their ordinary prelate, Archbishop Adalbert I of Mainz, was at that time a political prisoner of the emperor Henry V, the girls' vows were received by Otto, bishop of Bamberg.24

Some accounts of Hildegard give the impression that when she and Jutta joined the community at St. Disibod it was already a well-established house. But this was not the case. Although the Disibodenberg was indeed an ancient religious site, allegedly founded by a wandering Irish hermit in the seventh century, the monastery had passed through many vicissitudes and stood vacant for several years during the political

exile of Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz (reigned 1089–1109). He returned in 1106 and refounded the community two years later, restoring the dilapidated site and staffing it with monks who may have been affiliated with the reformed Benedictine congregation of Hirsau.25 When Jutta and Hildegard arrived, then, the existing monastery was quite new and still under construction. Thus the young Hildegard grew up surrounded by the noise and bustle of masons and carpenters, an experience reflected in the ubiquitous architectural metaphors of her Scivias .26 We know little about the space occupied by the women; it is unclear, for example, whether they had their own chapel for singing the Divine Office or participated along with the men.27 What is clear, however, is that the well-born and distinguished Jutta (unlike Hildegard) enjoyed an excellent relationship with the monks, who lost no time in promoting her sainthood when she died (22 December 1136).

Jutta's Vita describes her as an ascetic par excellence, using conventional terms borrowed from the life of the sixth-century St. Radegund of Poitiers.28 We are told that Jutta devoted herself to prayer, fasting, vigils, nakedness, and cold; she tortured her body with a hairshirt and an iron chain, which she removed only on great festivals; and she refused meat for eight years in defiance of her abbot, who urged moderation. At least once a day she recited the entire Psalter, which in wintertime she often said barefoot. As magistra , mistress or teacher, of the girls under her tutelage, Jutta would certainly have taught Hildegard to chant the Psalter and thus to read Latin at an elementary level. It is interesting that Hildegard, in a laconic and somewhat backhanded reference to her foster mother, says that she herself had "scarcely any knowledge of letters, as an uneducated woman had taught" her.29 Jutta's biographer, in contrast, praises her capable intellect and tenacious memory, describes her as a ready teacher who refused to play favorites, and casually alludes to her literacy when he remarks that she received many letters from devotees seeking her prayers. In addition, the Life of Lady Jutta repeatedly presents the recluse as a teacher and her companions as discipulae , or students, at one point referring to the women's hermitage as a schola , or school.30 Although these references to learning need not be exaggerated, they should incline us to take Hildegard's lifelong protestations of ignorance with more than a grain of salt.

When the adult Hildegard described herself as indocta ("uneducated"),31 she was in one sense telling the truth. Unlike boys of her vocation and status, she did not have the opportunity to attend a cathe-

dral school or to follow itinerant masters as a wandering scholar.32 Nor had she studied at a convent with a splendid library, as did her contemporary Heloise, who received an outstanding classical education at Argenteuil,33 or Abbess Herrad of Hohenbourg, who was to compile an encyclopedia of patristic learning from the rich store of books at her disposal.34 Since Hildegard never had occasion to study the trivium, or literary arts, her command of Latin grammar would always remain shaky, and she developed a style that could be awkward and idiosyncratic rather than urbane and polished.35 But if her early education paled by comparison with others', Hildegard was to amass prodigious learning by the end of her life.36 By midcentury, too, St. Disibod had acquired a substantial library of its own, though its destruction during the Reformation era makes it difficult to know for certain what books Hildegard might have read there. The main purpose of her apparent self-deprecation, however, was not to belittle herself or comment on the faults of her early training but to emphasize that the source of her revelations was divine, not human. Without this indispensable claim to prophecy, her career as a writer and preacher would have been unthinkable.37

Other indications in Jutta's life suggest a degree of continuity between the two holy women. We learn that Jutta herself was endowed with prophetic powers: when an abbot died, God showed her who his successor would be. Like Hildegard, too, she earned a reputation as a healer and made St. Disibod into a mecca for pilgrims, who are said to have revered her "as a heavenly oracle."38 It appears, then, that Hildegard learned considerably more than the Psalter from Jutta. She also saw firsthand what an unusually gifted and energetic nun might make of her vocation. Yet the delicate girl's temperament was very different from the recluse's. A savage ascetic, Jutta died at forty-four, worn out by her austerities, while Hildegard, though of fragile health, prized the classic Benedictine virtue of moderation and lived to be eighty-one. In addition, her visionary bent was all her own. From Hildegard's Vita we learn that as a tiny child she beheld "a light so dazzling that [her] soul trembled," but she had no words to speak of it.39 Another source recounts a story of childhood clairvoyance: seeing a pregnant cow, the girl accurately predicted the color and markings of her calf.40 As both women's biographies confirm, Hildegard continued to have visions under Jutta's tutelage, culminating in a hair-raising account of the soul's journey after death. Then thirty-eight, she watched as her teacher's spirit in the hands of angels passed close by the flames of purgatory and

endured false accusations from the devil before being received by St. John the Evangelist and led into paradise.41 This, Hildegard's earliest recorded vision, anticipates certain passages from her Scivias and especially her book on purgatory, the Liber vite meritorum (Book of Life's Merits ).

Jutta at the time of her death had ten disciples, of whom Hildegard was said to be the "first and most intimate . . . flourishing in a holy way of life, the acme of all virtues."42 Not surprisingly, she was soon elected magistra in her teacher's stead. As the Life of Jutta states, "After her passing [Hildegard] took over the administration of her school."43 It is odd, though, that the seer's own memoirs say nothing of her election to leadership but skip ahead to the "great pressure of pains" she experienced in her early forties, when God first commanded her to "cry out and write" what she saw in her visions.44 This moment, rather than Jutta's death or her election as mistress, represented the first major crisis in Hildegard's life. As the now famous story runs, she initially confided only in the monk Volmar, who had been her teacher and would become her lifelong friend, secretary, and confidant. In all likelihood he was her confessor as well. Despite Volmar's support, however, Hildegard felt so daunted by the prospect of writing and the concomitant fear of ridicule that she became severely ill. This would become a recurrent pattern both in her own life and in the narratives of countless female visionaries in the later Middle Ages. A vision or divine command to write so terrifies the woman that it brings on a sickness, at once punitive and motivating, which will in turn become a catalyst for action: the would-be prophetess cannot be cured until she obeys the heavenly voice.45 In Hildegard's case, Volmar's encouragement and the cautious support of Kuno, abbot of St. Disibod, enabled her eventually to surmount her fears and embark on the task. The famous author-portraits of Hildegard present an idealized picture of her at work in her scriptorium. Her face uplifted toward heaven, she receives streams of fire from on high, signifying divine inspiration, as she writes with her own hand on wax tablets—or perhaps, as the art historian Madeline Caviness suggests, sketches the visionary forms unfolding before her eyes. Separated by a partition, Volmar makes a fair copy of her text on parchment, and one of Hildegard's nuns—perhaps her favorite, Richardis of Stade—stands by to assist her (see figure 16).46

It is quite possible to read the Scivias simply as a work of Christian theology, including material on ethics, biblical commentary, sacred history, and cosmology as well as thorough discussions of the Trinity and

redemption through Christ. To understand the power and distinctiveness of this book, however, we must look more closely at its genesis in what Hildegard called her visio ("vision," in the singular, rather than "visions"). In many so-called visionary writings from the Middle Ages, visual description plays only a minor role, while the bulk of the text is given over to conversations between the seer and a heavenly figure like Christ, Mary, or an angel.47 But Hildegard was a visionary in the strictest sense. Not in ecstasy or trance or dream but wide awake, she retained the full use of her senses and yet "saw things" in living color—mountains, cosmic eggs, spheres of shimmering light, colossal figures, towering walls and pillars—sometimes in static tableaux and sometimes in dynamic motion. Late in her life a distant admirer asked Hildegard to explain how she received her revelations, and she enlightened him in a now famous letter.48

"I have always seen this vision in my soul," she wrote, and in it "my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away." The light that illumined her, she added, was "not spatial, but far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun . . . And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam within it." Hildegard insisted that this "shadow of the Living Light" was never absent from her field of vision, and when she received revelations within it, the words that came to her were "not like words uttered by the mouth of man, but like a shimmering flame, or a cloud floating in a clear sky." Moreover, on rare occasions she saw within this "shadow" or "reflection" another light, "the Living Light" itself, by which she seems to have meant a direct experience of God. "I cannot describe when and how I see it, but while I see it all sorrow and anguish leave me, so that then I feel like a simple girl instead of an old woman."

What are we to make of this account? Certainly it is not conventional. Twelfth-century authors were familiar with several theories of visionary experience, including those of St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Hildegard's contemporary Richard of St.-Victor. These theorists distinguished among several kinds of vision—such as imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual—and established hierarchies among them, always representing pure, imageless contemplation as higher than the more "corporeal" types of vision.49 But none of their descriptions closely match Hildegard's, and her insistence that she remained awake and lucid during her visions is virtually unique. Her correspondent, the

monk Guibert of Gembloux, had asked whether the visions appeared to her in ecstasy or in dreams, as these were the only possibilities he could imagine; but she replied, in effect, "none of the above." Nor can modern theories fully account for her experience. David Baumgardt, a scholar of mysticism, noticed the synaesthetic quality of Hildegard's visions and described her inspiration as a kind of "intellectual downpour," comparable to that experienced by her countryman and kindred spirit Jakob Boehme (1575–1624).50 At the height of the psychedelic era, Kent Kraft compared the seer's visions with reports of mescalin hallucinations, using the theories of Timothy Leary to account for what he took to be parallel psychosomatic processes.51 But this hypothesis has won few adherents.

Since the early twentieth century a growing number of scholars have ascribed Hildegard's visions, or at least the physical aspect of them, to migraine. Charles Singer, a historian of science, long ago pointed out that the classical migraine aura can produce disturbances of the visual field ("scintillating scotomata") much like what Hildegard experienced in her visions of shimmering lights, falling stars, and "fortification figures," perceived by her as the crenellated walls and turrets common in Romanesque architecture.52 Moreover, in describing her chronic illnesses, she mentions symptoms like temporary blindness and an oppressive, paralyzing sense of heaviness, which would be consistent with severe migraine attacks. Yet by no means all of her visions fit the model of migraine auras, nor would such a diagnosis account for the constant presence of the "shadow of the Living Light." Whether or not Hildegard had migraine—and it seems plausible that she did—that condition no more "explains" her prophetic vocation than Dostoevsky's epilepsy explains his literary genius (even if he wrote brilliantly about the disorder in The Idiot ). We may come closest to Hildegard's experience if we understand her discrete "visions" as incidental to her overarching "vision," and in that respect, she recalls William Blake.53 The eighteenth-century maverick had in common with Hildegard a powerful and distinctive sense of the divine, coupled with a prophetic outrage against evil (especially the evil in religious institutions). In addition, both had a penchant for constructing dense and difficult mythopoeic systems, and both conveyed their vision in a more accessible way through lyrics as well as brilliantly painted images that could not possibly be mistaken for the work of any other.

With the loyal assistance of Volmar, Hildegard continued to labor at her Scivias until 1146 or 1147. At that time the fiery St. Bernard, Cis-

tercian abbot of Clairvaux, undertook a preaching tour to promote the Second Crusade against Islam, and his travels eventually brought him to the Rhineland.54 There his preaching was received with adulation as throngs gathered to witness miraculous cures. Among his many admirers was Hildegard, who not only endorsed the crusading effort but wistfully contrasted her own timidity ("wretched and more than wretched in the name of woman") with the abbot's bold courage ("like an eagle gazing straight into the sun"). In the first of several hundred letters ascribed to her, she confided to Bernard the whole story of her visions, seeking his consolation and advice. The abbot responded briefly but to the point, urging Hildegard to "rejoice in the grace of God" she had received, though with all humility, and to pray for his sinful self.55 About a year later "the grace of God" brought Bernard along with his former disciple, Pope Eugene III, to the Rhineland city of Trier for a synod of bishops (November 1147–February 1148). It was this meeting that would set the apostolic seal of approval on Hildegard's visions. In the intervening years the ambitious Henry, archbishop of Mainz, had learned of her revelations from Abbot Kuno, and—perhaps sensing a means to enhance the prestige of his diocese—saw fit to raise the matter with the assembled prelates.

Pope Eugene, guided by Bernard of Clairvaux, advanced the reforming agenda of the late-eleventh-century popes by doing all he could to centralize and consolidate papal authority. In particular, he responded to the perceived threat of heresy by undertaking to investigate and pass judgment on potentially controversial books of theology.56 Informed of Hildegard's revelations, therefore, he appointed a papal commission to visit her at the Disibodenberg and secure a manuscript of the still unfinished Scivias . Having attained the book, as the seer herself says, the pope "had it read before many and himself read from it," whereupon he sent her a letter "commanding" her to continue recording her visions. Godfrey expands on this account: "The pope commanded the blessed Hildegard's writings to be brought to him . . . and, taking them up with his own hands, he himself read publicly in lieu of a reciter before the archbishop, the cardinals, and all the clergy who were present . . . and stirred the minds and voices of all to rejoicing and praise of the Creator." Bernard too is said to have spoken out in the seer's favor.57 No doubt the prelates were motivated in part by the staunch orthodoxy of the Scivias , in which Hildegard stresses precisely those doctrines, such as the divine origin of marriage, the sanctity of the Eucharist, and the dignity of the priesthood, that the Cathars most vehemently denied.

About sixty years later Cardinal Jacques de Vitry would similarly promote the cult of another holy woman, Marie of Oignies, because he saw her and the movement she represented as a bastion of orthodox fervor against the growing allure of heresy.58

For Hildegard's nuns at St. Disibod, the papal validation came as a mixed blessing. Word of the pope's decree traveled fast, making Hildegard a celebrity and spreading her fame throughout Europe. In the twelve years since Jutta's death the community had grown to include eighteen or twenty women, who had brought with them rich dowries and donations, and the number of pilgrims had multiplied. For Kuno and the monks the now celebrated visionary nun represented both a material and a spiritual asset, perhaps even rivaling the cult of the sainted Jutta. But for Hildegard herself, dependence on the men's community was beginning to rankle. The nuns' living conditions were increasingly crowded, while their wealth remained firmly under the abbot's control. Perhaps the visionary felt a need for spiritual as well as financial independence in order to grow into the fullness of her talents. In any case, sometime in 1148 she received a new revelation declaring that she and her "girls" must move to their own house, which she was called to establish on Mount St. Rupert. But this unexpected vision was hardly received with joy. Many of the nuns, their families, and their patrons objected to the hardship and poverty such a move would entail, while Kuno was livid at the prospect of the nuns' secession. In this spiritual emergency Hildegard took once again to her bed, this time with a paralyzing illness. According to her memoirs, she was unable to rise or work until the resistance to God's call had been overcome, while according to Godfrey the outcome was settled by a miracle. Kuno, says the Vita , physically tried to lift the ailing seer from her bed but, finding her "like a stony rock," acknowledged that she was suffering no human illness but a divine chastisement, and he grudgingly released her to depart.59

In the meantime, Hildegard had been busily negotiating to buy the Rupertsberg land, which she secured with the help of Henry of Mainz and her most important patron, the marchioness Richardis of Stade. This noblewoman, the scion of an exalted Saxon family, was a cousin of Jutta of Sponheim and mother of Hildegard's favorite nun, likewise named Richardis.60 Only a few years after the move, however, Hildegard would pay the cost of such lofty patronage. For a time all had gone uncommonly well for her. Title to the land was gained, detractors were gradually won over, and in 1550 she and her nuns left St. Disibod

for their new home, making an epic journey that she would later compare to the exodus of Israel from Egypt. By 1151 the Scivias was at last complete, its decade-long composition delayed by the tumultuous move. But in the same year an unexpected blow fell as if from heaven. Archbishop Hartwig of Bremen, son of the marchioness and brother of Hildegard's protégée Richardis, invited his sister to accept the vacant post of abbess at the aristocratic nunnery of Bassum, far to the north. Humanly, spiritually, and politically, Hildegard felt crushed by the "defection" of her favorite. In a frantic letter-writing campaign that would extend all the way to Pope Eugene, she tried in vain to quash the election, charging with some plausibility that it was motivated by family politics rather than the will of God and even hinting darkly at simony.61 Perhaps she also begrudged the younger but more highborn woman the title of "abbess," a dignity Hildegard herself coveted but could not attain, given the newness of her foundation.62

To Richardis herself, however, Hildegard wrote in an exceptionally candid and intimate mode, voicing all the passion of a bereft lover. "Woe is me, your mother, woe is me, daughter—why have you abandoned me like an orphan? I loved the nobility of your conduct, your wisdom and chastity, your soul and the whole of your life, so much that many said: What are you doing?" Her overpowering love for Richardis contrasts tellingly with the proper but much cooler sentiment she expressed in her commendation of Jutta. In thus revealing the depths of her soul, Hildegard shows for once the human face behind the "trumpet of the Living Light."63 At the same time she affords an early glimpse into the kind of chaste but troubled, intensely erotic bond between nuns that later spiritual directors would call "particular friendship"—and sternly forbid.64 In the event, the Richardis affair had a tragic dénouement. Hildegard's pleading persuaded the young abbess to return to Bingen, if only for a visit, but she was carried off by a sudden fever in 1152 before she could do so. The bereft Hildegard consoled herself with the thought that God, the true lover of virgins, had taken Richardis for himself before her beauty could be corrupted by the world. Not long afterward Hildegard paid her daughter a last memorable tribute in her play, the Ordo virtutum (play of virtues), where the character Chastity proclaims: "O Virginity, you stand in the royal bridal chamber. How tenderly you burn in the King's embraces when the sun shines through you, so that your noble flower shall never wilt!"65

The death of Richardis was the first of several losses Hildegard experienced around this time. In 1153 both Pope Eugene and St. Bernard

died, as did her patron Henry of Mainz, after being deposed for embezzling—despite her last-ditch attempts to intercede for clemency on his behalf.66 Closer to home Hildegard was embroiled in a long struggle with the monks of St. Disibod over possession of the endowments, primarily land holdings, which had been donated on profession of her nuns. Visiting the Disibodenberg in 1155, she threatened a dying Kuno in God's name, announcing that if the monks continued to withhold the women's property they were "the worst of robbers," and if they recalled Volmar to his abbey—evidently another point of contention—they would be "sons of Belial."67 Hildegard later reported this embassy to her daughters as a great success, but it should be noted that she did not get quite everything she wanted. Her declaration of independence required not only prophetic denunciations but also a substantial payment in cash,68 and throughout her lifetime she remained officially subject to the abbot of St. Disibod. Not until the thirteenth century did the decline of that community enable her successors to claim the title of abbess.

In the meantime Hildegard had much work to do to establish the Rupertsberg on a firm monastic footing. On the practical side there was constant construction to supervise; on the spiritual, the nuns' liturgical life required care and nurture. Hildegard may have composed her Ordo virtutum , a drama of the pilgrim soul's progress from the buoyancy of a youthful conversion, through temptation and sin, to a sadder but wiser maturity and a final triumph over Satan, as a festival play for the profession of novices, of whom she had many.69 By the end of her life her monastery housed up to fifty nuns. But since their patron was St. Rupert, an obscure ninth-century nobleman rather than some great apostle, Hildegard first needed to revive his long-forgotten cult, for a monastery required strong patrons both on earth and in heaven. She attended to this need by writing a hagiographic life of Rupert70 as well as a stunning musical sequence and a series of antiphons for his feast day. These liturgical pieces were only a few of more than seventy that she eventually gathered in her song cycle under the title Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. 71

While the arrangement of liturgical music in cycles was not altogether new, as a generic device it was gaining renewed popularity in Hildegard's lifetime. Abelard had assembled such a cycle for the use of Heloise's nuns at the Paraclete, and the canon Adam of St.-Victor composed another.72 In a departure from common practice, however, Hildegard did not follow the procedure of contrafactura , setting new words

to existing melodies or composing tunes that could be sung with a variety of lyrics. Instead, all of her pieces combine words and melody to form inseparable wholes. They are exceptional in other ways as well. For instance, to consider only their formal properties, Hildegard wrote her lyrics in Latin "free verse" rather than in classical quantitative meters or the newly fashionable rhymed stanzas, and her melodies are considerably more rhapsodic and wide-ranging than traditional Gregorian chant.73 She always maintained that her musical gift, like her visions and her understanding of Scripture, came to her "without any human instruction": she recorded the songs and taught them to her nuns just as she had heard them sung by celestial voices.

Aside from praying the Divine Office, reading and copying books, and providing for their material needs, the Rupertsberg nuns would have maintained a hospice for their many guests and pilgrims, perhaps including an infirmary for the sick. Most ordinary health care in the twelfth century was provided by men's and women's monasteries, along with village healers and herbalists. Although some men acquired professional training at medical schools, like the famous one at Salerno, the treatment provided by such physicians was accessible only to the rich. Monasteries, however, not only offered hospitality to all but held out hope of both natural and supernatural healing. Pilgrims who came to venerate the tombs and relics of saints, praying for miraculous cures, might at the same time benefit from nursing care and treatment offered by the religious.74 Monks and nuns dispensed remedies based on a core of medical knowledge handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, augmented by centuries of practice but limited by the local availability of herbs. As mistress of the Rupertsberg, Hildegard took an ardent interest in healing. No doubt she was prompted by the suffering of pilgrims, as well as by her own chronic ill health, to investigate the wholesome and toxic properties of plants, animals, gemstones, foods and beverages, and other aspects of her environment. But while her scientific and medical writings are extensive, they differ from her other books in that they have probably not come down to us in the form she intended.75

Hildegard notes in the preface to her Liber vite meritorum (1158), where she lists her previous books, that she had recently completed one with the intriguing title of Subtilitates diversarum naturarum creaturarum (Subtleties of the Different Natures of Creatures ). The Vita mentions a work with a similar title. Typically Hildegardian is this concentration on the intricacies and providential uses of God's creation. Yet what the surviving manuscripts transmit is not this book but two others,

one called Physica or Liber simplicis medicinae (Book of Simple Medicine ), the other entitled Liber compositae medicinae (Book of Compound Medicine ) or Causae et curae (Causes and Cures ).76 One controversial explanation is that copyists, sometime in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, may have lifted materials from Hildegard's original book and arranged them in separate compilations corresponding to established genres of medical writing.77 "Simples" were remedies employing a single ingredient, such as an herb, mineral, or animal part, whereas "compound medicine" dealt in recipes concocted from numerous ingredients, many of them exotic or hard to procure. The Book of Simple Medicine describes the physical properties of an enormous number of items, ranging from rye bread and beer to elephants to rubies, in nine encyclopedic sections. Not all of this material is intended for practical use; much of it attests to learning gleaned from books, personal observation, and, above all, Hildegard's all-encompassing fascination with the cosmos as the work of God.78 In Causes and Cures , however, therapeutic needs come to the fore. Here the material is organized not by ingredients but by diseases, arranged according to the parts of the body they afflict. The book is nonetheless something of a hodgepodge, interspersing the medical portions with remarkable but disorganized material on human sexuality, the fall of Adam and Eve, male and female personality types,79 musings on the weather and the planets, and even lunar horoscopes. The thirteenth-century compiler or copyist of Causes and Cures was more concerned with the usefulness of his text than with its "authenticity," and it is possible (though not certain) that he inserted material from a variety of authors. Conversely, excerpts from Hildegard's known medical writings have begun to surface in a few other medieval compilations.80 Much textual scholarship remains to be done, therefore, before this aspect of her work is fully understood.

Hildegard's writing in the mid-1150s can be seen as a vast, multifaceted work of celebration. In the Symphonia she celebrated the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the saints; in the Play of Virtues , the spiritual triumph of virginity; in the Life of St. Rupert , her patron saint and, by extension, her own community; in the Subtleties , the wonders of the natural world. She also found time for a more mysterious project, her so-called Lingua ignota (Unknown Language )—a glossary of about a thousand imaginary nouns, complete with their own "secret alphabet" (litterae ignotae ). No one knows precisely what Hildegard meant to do with this language. It may have been an attempt to reproduce the pure, virginal tongue spoken by Adam and Eve in paradise, thus a kind of sa-

cred game, a quirky and playful way to heighten the camaraderie of her nuns.81 For twelfth-century monks the exchange of letters of friendship, composed in the urbane and elegant Latin of the schools, served a similar purpose,82 but Hildegard had quite literally to forge her own language. By 1158–1159, however, she had moved into a darker and more urgent phase of her career: the confrontation with personal and systemic evil.

As abbess in all but name, Hildegard bore full responsibility for the spiritual growth and discipline of her daughters. But we must not imagine the Rupertsberg under her direction as an idyll of harmonious sisterhood. To be sure, twelfth-century monastic writers sometimes called the cloister a "paradise of delights," but they also called it a prison, a military training camp, and a purgatory.83 Women might enter nunneries for several reasons other than sheer devotion, among them parental vows, the companionship of their female kin, lack of a dowry sufficient to marry well, desire to escape marriage altogether, a thirst for learning, a disability, a secure retirement home in old age.84 But once there, they were sworn in principle to constant warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Temptations lay in wait around every corner, and even in the cloister salvation was not automatic but had to be earned by heroic struggle. In her Scivias Hildegard had given pride of place to the Virtues, a troupe of allegorical virgins whom she envisioned in radiant beauty and resplendent apparel, first deploying them along the pillars and ramparts of what she called the "Edifice of Salvation," later bringing them onstage to be enfleshed by her women in the Ordo virtutum . But Chastity, Charity, Humility, and the rest were not mere personifications for Hildegard, though similar characters appear in countless medieval allegories. She perceived them rather as living emanations of the Divine, powerful energies streaming down from God to animate human moral striving. The Virtues are both a choir of celestial beings and an army massed against Satan.85

In the second volume of her trilogy, the Book of Life's Merits (written 1158–1163), Hildegard directed her vision to the devil's side and gave form and voice to the Vices.86 In medieval literary tradition, all virtues and vices were conventionally female, chiefly because the abstract Latin nouns that designate them are feminine in gender. Hildegard departed from this convention so as to avoid demeaning representations of women, instead portraying her Vices as grotesque, parodic creatures, part human and part animal, to make sin as ugly as possible. Yet the brilliance of the work lies in their seductive speeches, since the

business of the Vices is to make sin attractive. In a sequence of debates where the alluring, self-excusing, or whining Vices are rebutted by the sober, undeceived Virtues of the Scivias , Hildegard dramatizes her conviction that self-knowledge, or what Genesis calls "the knowledge of good and evil," is the root of moral discernment and right action.87 The overall tone of this book is austere, even somber, reflecting Hildegard's experience and realism as a spiritual director, and it is quintessentially monastic. Even its construction in brief, self-contained snippets suggests that Hildegard meant it to be used for reading in chapter or as an edifying text to accompany the otherwise silent meals of monks or nuns in their refectory. Evidence from the 1170s indicates that it was in fact used this way by the monks in two Belgian monasteries, Gembloux and Villers, where the mistress of Rupertsberg was highly esteemed.88

Beyond its dramatized ethical instruction, the Book of Life's Merits has another dimension. Along with the centralization of papal power, twelfth-century clerical reformers concerned themselves increasingly with the pastoral care and thoroughgoing conversion of the laity. One aspect of this reform was a continuing struggle to take marriage out of the hands of parents and establish it firmly as part of the church's sacramental system, with all matrimonial disputes and impediments to come under the jurisdiction of canon law. Another closely related development was the rapid expansion of the penitential system, culminating in the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) that every Christian must confess his or her sins privately to a priest and receive Communion at least once a year. The pastoral genre of confessors' manuals supplied priests with detailed guides on how to interrogate penitents about the nature and severity of their sins, after which they were to assign an appropriate penance for each.89 The Book of Life's Merits has much in common with such manuals, for Hildegard recommends the proper remedies of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and more stringent penances (like the wearing of hairshirts) to atone for every sin she describes. If a sinner should die repentant but without completing the necessary penance on earth, he or she would have to pay a debt to God in purgatory before attaining the purity of soul required to enter heaven.90 In the Book of Life's Merits Hildegard was among the first authors to give a detailed account not only of the specific torments of purgatory (envisioned as a lake of fire or a stinking, oozing marsh) but also of their theological rationale.91 Her promotion of all aspects of the penitential system—careful and thorough instruction about sins, auricular confession, penance, and purgatory—shows once again that

she was no rebel but a staunch ally of the Gregorian reform movement.

Zealous clerics often defined their aim as "reform of the church in head and members," a total purification of Christ's body from the pope down to the meanest peasant. More visible than the gradual reform of the members was the intense controversy that swirled around the head. Hildegard, no stranger to politics, noted darkly on a few occasions that she had been born "in an effeminate age" under the reign of "a certain tyrant," by whom she meant the German king (or Holy Roman Emperor) Henry IV.92 Henry had been locked at the time in a relentless struggle with Pope Urban II over investiture, the right to appoint (and thus dominate) the powerful prince-bishops of the empire. This controversy and the warfare it generated were ostensibly ended by the Concordat of Worms in 1122, an agreement whereby bishops would be canonically elected and invested by the pope with ring and staff (symbols of their spiritual office), while emperors retained the right to intervene in disputed elections and to invest bishops with their "regalia" (symbols of their secular, feudal role as barons of the realm). The compromise was inherently unstable, however, since the prelates' political allegiance to the empire remained in conflict with their ecclesiastical obedience as long as emperors and popes continued to struggle for dominance.93 Strong emperors tried to control the papacy itself by naming "antipopes" of their own choosing to that office, while "legitimate" popes retaliated by excommunicating emperors and appointing "antikings." One of the longest and bitterest of these schisms broke out in 1159, when Frederick Barbarossa challenged Pope Alexander III by supporting the election as antipope first of Victor IV, then of two successors on his death.94

Soon after Frederick's coronation in 1152 he had summoned Hildegard to an audience at his palace of Ingelheim, not far from the Rupertsberg, where he apparently asked her to prophesy the fortunes of his reign.95 Its beginning looked promising indeed, as Frederick successfully mustered his royal authority to quell private warfare in Germany, but his imperial ambitions in Italy soon stirred up even greater strife, and he proved himself determined to regain control of the German episcopacy. From Hildegard's papalist viewpoint, the subservience of the emperor's bishops was as bad as the Roman schism itself. While the mighty prelates of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier engaged in political intrigues, supported Frederick's Italian wars, and amassed land and riches for their personal aggrandizement, the church as Hildegard saw

it suffered persecution from within. Christ's beleaguered bride appeared to her in grave distress, like a virgin threatened with rape: her face spattered with dust, her silken robe in tatters, her shoes mired with grime.96 The apocalyptic symbol carried an all too obvious meaning. In defiance of the reformers' agenda, priests deprived of their right to marry were taking concubines instead; ecclesiastical offices were freely bought and sold (the sin of simony); greedy prince-bishops neglected the task of preaching; and the most fervent laity, disgusted with clerical corruption, threw off the dust of the Catholic church and flocked to join the impressively chaste, ascetic Cathars. These religious dissidents were dualists who rejected the material world and the body as creations of an evil god, whom they renounced by abstaining from procreation, following a strict vegetarian diet, and, ideally, ending their lives in a sacramental act of self-starvation.97

It is in this context that we must understand both Hildegard's correspondence and her extraordinary preaching. Like her protégée and fellow prophet Elisabeth of Schönau, Hildegard urged vigorous pastoral action against the Cathars and denounced them in visions and sermons, not long before several were burned alive at Cologne in August 1163.98 Recognizing that the dissident movement profited from the chaos of the Catholic church, she blamed the rapid spread of heresy chiefly on negligent prelates. Thus she broke with, even threatened, Barbarossa for persisting in his schismatic policies, and in a flood of letters she tirelessly harangued the bishops themselves, exhorting them to fairness and vigilance in pastoral care, warning them against schism and heresy, reminding them of their duty to obey God rather than man, and calling them sternly to judgment. Although her visionary and allegorical language is often obscure, the dominant message comes through clearly enough. Hildegard's public sermons, especially the ones she preached at Trier (Pentecost 1160) and Cologne (1163), represent the apex of her prophetic politics.99 Using the mysterious, highly charged imagery of the apocalypse, and speaking at times in the awesome first person for God, she summoned up remembrance of all his mighty deeds—the wonders of creation, the lessons of sacred history, the shedding of Christ's blood—only to highlight the enormity of the clerics' betrayal. Like the final portions of the Scivias and of her last book, the Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works ), these sermons prophesy disaster, including anticlerical riots and secular confiscation of the church's wealth, if prelates failed to repent while they still had time. Of all her multifarious writings, it was Hildegard's apocalyptic prophecies that

made the keenest impression on her age and held the longest gaze of posterity.100

Perhaps most astonishing of all is the response of the very prelates she attacked so vehemently. Not only did they fail to invoke St. Paul's authority against her, as one might have expected ("I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent")101 but they actually invited her to preach and then wrote to her afterward, begging for transcripts of her sermons. Although the texts come down to us in Latin, we do not know what language Hildegard actually used. If she did preach in the learned tongue it may have helped to ensure her safety, since the use of Latin would have aimed her critique straight at its clerical targets without stirring up the dangerous hornets' nest of lay anticlericalism. The monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing around 1225, records that Hildegard preached her solemn anti-Cathar sermon to the priests of Cologne in Latin. Yet she may well have preached in German when she addressed mixed audiences of clergy and laity.102 The evidence is inconclusive because sermons delivered in the vernacular were frequently taken down in shorthand, to be polished after the event and set down for posterity in Latin.

But the majority of Hildegard's sermons and letters were directed to a different audience—her fellow monastic superiors. While the twelfth century is often regarded as a golden age of monasticism, it was an age rife with conflict on that front as well. New monastic orders, especially the Cistercians under the magnetic leadership of Bernard of Clairvaux, challenged the more solidly entrenched Benedictines by their emphasis on poverty, fasting, manual labor, and stricter observance of the Benedictine Rule. Other reformers experimented with new forms of collaboration between religious women and men, to the scandal of purists like Bernard, who felt certain the reformers were playing into the devil's hands because it was easier to raise the dead than to be always with a woman and not have intercourse.103 Wandering hermits and itinerant preachers took up the siren call of the "apostolic life," aiming at a literal imitation of Jesus and his earliest disciples—an ideal that would culminate with the founding of the Franciscan and Dominican orders in the early thirteenth century.104 In contrast to these movements, Hildegard's foundation preserved the aristocratic character of the traditional "black monks," or Benedictines, an order that had long been enmeshed in the feudal alliances and family strategies of the German nobility. Her unabashed sense of class superiority can be shocking to more democratic sensibilities, and it even shocked some of her contemporaries.

When a fellow magistra , Tenxwind of Andernach, questioned the luxurious attire of Hildegard's nuns and challenged her practice of accepting only noble, wealthy girls into her community, reminding her that Jesus chose humble fishermen, Hildegard was not in the least apologetic. God loved all his children regardless of rank, she replied, but people of different social classes could not possibly live together without rancor and envy, any more than sheep, goats, and cattle could be herded into a single barn.105

This exchange, though understandably famous, is not typical of Hildegard's monastic epistles. More often, she advanced the cause of moderate reform and played the role of peacemaker in squabbling communities. This portion of her correspondence opens a revealing window onto the inner life of twelfth-century monasticism, less idealized than the picture conveyed by the glowing treatises of St. Bernard and his confreres on the love of God. In some houses, we learn, ambitious members schemed to be elected superior, while in others, harried abbesses and weak abbots yearned to lay down the burdens of office, dreaming of a quiet hermitage or an invigorating pilgrimage to Rome. In one community discipline might be lax and worship slipshod, with individuals doing just as they pleased, while in another the superior imposed a regimen so harsh that the community revolted. Writing to her fellow monastic leaders, Hildegard urged discretion on some, renewed zeal on others, using biblical exegesis, analogies from nature, and home-grown parables to drive home her points. Many of these letters either preceded or followed personal visits, during which Hildegard probably preached in the chapterhouse or chapel as well as meeting individually with the leaders. By using local monastic archives to determine the regnal years of abbots and abbesses, it is possible to date most of the exchanges roughly and thus to construct a chronology of Hildegard's preaching tours. Beginning in 1158 at the age of sixty, she made four such excursions, the first three mainly by boat along Germany's great rivers—the Main, the Moselle, and the Rhine—and the fourth, a more arduous overland journey in Swabia, when she was well into her seventies.106 Her health, never robust, deteriorated further with age but could not daunt her formidable spirit.

By the mid-1160s the Rupertsberg nuns had grown so numerous that Hildegard was able to found a daughterhouse at Eibingen across the Rhine. This second foundation is poorly documented, but on the basis of Hildegard's exchange with Tenxwind, some have speculated that its purpose was to house nuns of less exalted social rank. If so,

democracy has had the last laugh, for the original Rupertsberg was destroyed by the Swedes in 1632 during the Thirty Years' War, but the monastery at Eibingen, today the Abbey of St. Hildegard, still stands. Although it was dissolved in 1814 with the sweeping secularization of the Napoleonic era, nuns returned to the site in 1907, and for most of the twentieth century the abbey has been a flourishing women's community as well as a center of scholarly research on Hildegard.107

One other incident of the 1160s casts an oblique light on the seer's fame. A young lady named Sigewize, native of Cologne, had been suffering for years from a hapless malady: she was possessed, or as Hildegard put it, "overshadowed" by a demon.108 Like others with the same affliction, she was escorted from town to town by her kinsfolk, visiting the shrine of one saint after another in the hope of a miraculous cure. During an exorcism one day, Sigewize's demon taunted that he could only be cast out by an old woman named "Scrumpilgard," so the priest—it happened to be the abbot of Brauweiler—lost no time in addressing the sibyl of the Rhine. Hildegard, no doubt hoping to avoid a dangerous face-to-face meeting with the demoniac, responded by sending the abbot a theatrical ceremony of exorcism, with the roles of seven biblical characters to be played by seven priests, each pronouncing a different conjuration over the devil.109 The Brauweiler monks duly performed the rite, but as the demon would not be vanquished so easily, there was nothing for it but to pack Sigewize off to the Rupertsberg, where the nuns welcomed her with mingled compassion and terror. There she remained throughout the season of Lent, 1169, as Hildegard organized a concerted campaign on her behalf, persuading monks, nuns, and layfolk alike to pray, fast, and give alms. In the meantime (for the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose), Sigewize regaled the populace by preaching, her sermons perhaps meant as parodies of Hildegard's own.110 Finally, at the Easter Vigil when the priest solemnly consecrated the baptismal font, the devil "horribly departed through the woman's shameful parts, along with excrement." The grateful Sigewize, healed and in her right mind, would spend the rest of her short life as a novice at the Rupertsberg.

As for Hildegard, even the combined pressures of travel, ill health, and administration could not keep her long from intellectual work. The decade between 1163 and 1173 witnessed the composition of her last great volume, the Book of Divine Works , a masterful study of the harmonies between macrocosm and microcosm.111 In this vision, the seer wrote in her memoirs, "I saw the height and depth and breadth of the

firmament, and how the sun, moon, and stars are arranged in it." But she also saw how all of these are correlated with the proportions and functions of the human body, as well as with the subtle workings of God within the soul. The doctrine of "man the microcosm" animated humanistic thinking from antiquity through the Renaissance and is probably best known today from the famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci showing a nude, perfectly proportioned man with arms outstretched in the center of a circle. Several of the dazzling illuminations in Hildegard's Book of Divine Works are similar, except that just as the human being straddles the cosmos, the universe in its turn is embraced by an enormous, overarching figure of Divinity.112 This is not God the Father but a flaming winged figure who identifies herself as Caritas —Charity or Love—and proclaims:

I am the supreme and fiery force that kindled every living spark, and I breathed forth no deadly thing . . . And I am the fiery life of the essence of God: I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars . . . I also am Reason. Mine is the blast of the resounding Word through which all creation came to be, and I quickened all things with my breath so that not one of them is mortal in its kind; for I am Life.113

In structure the Book of Divine Works continues the pattern established in the Scivias and the Book of Life's Merits , their common form marking the three works, though disparate in subject, as a unified trilogy. Hildegard begins each major section by introducing a new vision, using a direct experiential formula redolent of the biblical prophets: "And I saw." She then presents the visionary scene in vivid, painterly detail, complete with colors and proportions. If figures such as Virtues or Vices appear, their symbolic attire is described and they make speeches disclosing their essence. After completing the visual portion of her text, which may be far from self-explanatory, the seer marks a transition into the much longer didactic and allegorical portion with words such as, "I heard a voice from heaven saying to me." This "voice," seldom further identified, goes on to gloss each detail of the vision, including the speeches of the dramatis personae; it repeats the earlier descriptions verbatim but adds lengthy explanations. Thus the initial "vision" text plays the same role as a biblical text in a commentary: it is a peg on which the author hangs all the instruction she wants to give. While the visionary report is thus invested with a high degree of authority, Hildegard also feels free to add new material not adumbrated in the original description. Her "heavenly voice" sometimes appears to

be the voice of God speaking in the first person (using expressions like "My Son Jesus Christ," for example), but such "prophetic" moments occur only sporadically in the text, where the third-person voice otherwise dominates. Not only is this form itself reminiscent of biblical exegesis but the visionary gloss is frequently interrupted by short exegetical sections, as Hildegard reaches for a scriptural verse to reinforce or amplify her point.114

Finally, each vision is brought to a close with a formulaic admonition to the reader. In book 3 of the Scivias we read: "Let the one who has ears sharp to hear inner meanings ardently love My reflection and pant after My words, and inscribe them in his soul and conscience." In the Book of Life's Merits the recurrent formula runs: "These things uttered about the souls of the penitent . . . are faithful; and let the faithful attend to them and gather them in the memory of good knowledge." The Book of Divine Works famously ends with a still more solemn warning: "Let no one be so bold as to add anything to the words of this book or delete anything from it, lest he himself be deleted from the book of life and all the beatitude under the sun. . . . Whoever presumes to do otherwise sins against the Holy Spirit, and will be forgiven neither here nor in the age to come."115 This impressive threat (compare Revelation 22.18–19) may indeed have militated against the excerpting of Hildegard's works in florilegia, with the exception of one anthology of her apocalyptic prophecies compiled in 1220.116 Aside from this extremely popular text, entitled The Mirror of Future Times , the seer's three theological volumes were seldom abridged and rarely copied, partly no doubt because of their daunting length. They survive in a comparatively small number of medieval manuscripts: ten for the Scivias (two of them lost in modern times), five for the Book of Life's Merits , and only four for the Book of Divine Works .

As Hildegard was preparing to make her final revisions of Divine Works in 1173 (and despite her claim to verbal inspiration, she revised meticulously),117 the work came to a sudden and distressing standstill with the death of Volmar, her lifelong secretary and "only beloved son." Volmar's loss was a blow to the prophet in several ways. Aside from her personal grief, Hildegard had trouble persuading Helengar, then abbot of St. Disibod, to release the monk her nuns had elected to succeed Volmar as their provost, and once again she was compelled to appeal to the pope. While all women's monasteries required the regular assistance of at least one priest to say Mass and hear confessions, the needs at the Rupertsberg were far greater. The ailing Hildegard, now

seventy-five, with a community numbering fifty nuns plus assorted servants and laborers, badly needed administrative as well as secretarial help. This time her appeal succeeded and for a brief time the nuns were granted the services of Godfrey, who also began to compose Hildegard's Vita . Further assistance was supplied by two kinsmen, her brother Hugh (who had been cantor of Mainz cathedral) and her nephew Wezelin (provost of St. Andreas at Cologne). But Godfrey died in 1176 and Hugh a year later, leaving the seer bereft once again. Fortunately, by this time she had become acquainted through letters with Guibert, the French-speaking monk of Gembloux, in what is now Belgium. We encountered Guibert earlier as a passionate inquirer into Hildegard's visionary experience. Responding to her urgent invitation, he traveled to the Rupertsberg in 1177 and formed a close friendship with the aged seer, remaining there as secretary until 1180, several months after her death. It is to Guibert's zeal that we owe Hildegard's celebrated letter "on the manner of her visions" as well as his unfinished biography of her, several prolix epistles on her reputation and conditions at the Rupertsberg late in her life,118 and the project of preserving all her writings (except her medical works) in a single enormous volume, the so-called Riesenkodex , or "giant book" of Wiesbaden.119

Even in her seventies, however, the former recluse turned woman of affairs was not allowed to spend her declining years in peace and quiet. Doubtless she was overjoyed to receive news of the long-desired end of the Roman schism, when Barbarossa finally gave up his futile attempts to control the papacy and made peace with Alexander III in the Treaty of Venice (1177). But her own fame, as she had discovered many times, was still a mixed blessing. Hildegard and Guibert had some mutual friends among the Cistercian monks of Villers, near Gembloux. Like many others, these monks thought of "the sibyl of the Rhine" as an oracle who could enable them to transcend the uncertainties of human thought with direct messages from God. Accordingly, they presented her through Guibert with a list of thirty-eight theological and exegetical questions and proceeded to pester her without mercy for replies. The lengthy correspondence between Villers and the Rupertsberg on this subject makes for both comic and pathetic reading: the monks take an alternately bullying and obsequious tone, while Hildegard pleads illness but promises to do the best she can, and Guibert as go-between is torn between the desperation of his mistress and the demands of his imperious friends. Ironically, the seer did complete at least perfunctory replies

to all thirty-eight questions before she died, but they were evidently "lost in the mail" so that the monks, for all their importuning, received no satisfaction.120 The whole incident goes to show how tempting it was to manipulate a prophet's gifts: power-hungry schemers as well as the merely curious, like the Villers monks, all had designs on "the voice of the Living Light." Admittedly, Hildegard's own sometimes heavy-handed use of her prophetic persona could encourage this tendency.

The brouhaha over the Villers questions was but a minor nuisance compared to Hildegard's last great trial. When she founded the Rupertsberg nearly three decades before, she had been delighted that wealthy families coveted the privilege of burying their dead in her churchyard, making appropriate gifts to show their gratitude for the sisters' prayers. Such donations constituted a major source of revenue for all monastics. But one such burial caused Hildegard untold trouble. In 1178 a certain nobleman, whose identity is lost to us, was interred at the Rupertsberg. He had during his lifetime been excommunicated for some grave sin, also unknown, though reliable witnesses eventually proved the noble had been reconciled before his death and had received absolution along with the last rites of the church. But the canons of Mainz, in whose diocese the Rupertsberg lay, were apparently unaware that the anathema had been lifted. It is also possible that they cherished some implacable grievance either against Hildegard herself or against the dead man and his family. In any case, the canons demanded that she have the corpse exhumed as unworthy of burial in sacred ground, and speaking in the bishop's name, they threatened the Rupertsberg with an interdict if she did not comply. But since Hildegard was convinced that yielding to this request would mean inexcusable desecration of the body, she stood her ground, effacing all traces of the grave to prevent others from disturbing it and so incurring the prelates' sanction.121

An interdict, the heaviest penalty the church could impose, was a collective excommunication: as long as it lasted, the nuns could neither receive Communion nor sing the Divine Office, which they had to mutter sotto voce .122 Hildegard, torn between her commitment to the deceased and her obedience to the church, obeyed the interdict while protesting it by every means at her disposal. It is significant that she objected to the silencing of chant even more vehemently than she did to loss of the sacrament. In fact, one of her most powerful (though in the event unsuccessful) pleas for release amounted to nothing less than a theology of music, an art that she described to the prelates of Mainz as

a reminiscence of Eden and a foretaste of heaven. Before Adam's fall, she wrote, his holy voice had rung with "the sound of every harmony and the sweetness of the whole art of music. And if he had remained in the condition in which he was formed, human frailty could never endure the power and the resonance of that voice." Angels too exult in constant song, whereas Satan—the spirit of discord—"lured humankind away from the celestial harmony" and cannot bear the sound of music. So in silencing her nuns, Hildegard implied, the prelates were doing the devil's work and depriving God of his just praise, for which they would in turn be deprived of his company in heaven.123 But the canons, unmoved by her threats and her eloquence alike, persevered until Hildegard's friend, Archbishop Philip of Cologne, intervened to produce witnesses who convincingly swore to the dead man's absolution. Thus the interdict was finally lifted, after still further setbacks, in March 1179. On September 17 of the same year, Hildegard herself "made a blessed passing to the celestial Bridegroom" while, as the Vita poetically adds, two rainbows crossed in the twilit sky, setting the whole of St. Rupert's Mount aglow with celestial fireworks.124

More than forty years earlier, when Jutta died, Hildegard and Abbot Kuno together had commissioned her Vita . In those days an authorized biography of some revered founder, along with a well-kept tomb and a community to record the miracles performed there, were sufficient to make a local saint. But in the intervening decades the papacy had centralized its control in yet another way by formalizing and bureaucratizing the process of canonization. To be sure, even in the later Middle Ages, papal canonization was a relative rarity, and the majority of "new saints" were simply venerated locally by people who lacked the clout, expertise, and money required to promote a cause in Rome.125 Yet Hildegard's friends and daughters decided to make a formal bid for canonization, with every hope of success. After all, she had been a staunch supporter of Pope Alexander III, who still reigned at the time of her death; she numbered bishops and influential nobles among her friends; and she was undeniably famed for her prophetic gifts, her healing powers, and her unwavering defense of orthodoxy. Among the many steps her supporters took toward the goal were preparation of Hildegard's Vita , production of deluxe illuminated manuscripts of her Scivias and Book of Divine Works , encouragement of pilgrimage to her shrine, documentation of all the miracles ascribed to her in life and after death, composition of a hymn and liturgical lessons for her feast day, and embroidery of an altarcloth depicting her with the nimbus of a saint.126

Then as now, however, the cause unfolded at a most leisurely pace. Confident in the possession of eternity, Rome seldom hurries. By the time that Pope Gregory IX officially opened the canonization proceedings in 1227, almost half a century had passed since Hildegard's death and most of the witnesses who had known her were also dead. Despite the pope's personal support of her cause and the encouragement of his successor, no official decree of sainthood was ever forthcoming. There is no need to posit any dark political motive for this failure. Pope Gregory's stated reason was mere bureaucratic incompetence: as the commissioners' report lacked sufficient detail and precision in recording Hildegard's miracles, it was not possible to authenticate them, and by the mid-thirteenth century the cures had ceased. More significantly, though, only 50 percent of all canonization processes in the thirteenth century—or for that matter, the entire medieval period—issued in official sainthood. The success rate for women and for monastics was even lower, standing at 46 percent for each category; and between 1198 and 1461 not a single Benedictine nun was raised to the altar.127 Clearly the politics of sainthood had shifted away from the old, established orders toward the Dominicans and Franciscans and, among women, toward the lay penitents who were closely connected with these orders. Under the circumstances, what is remarkable about Hildegard's cause is not that it failed but that it came so close.

Despite the absence of any papal decree, her cult continued unperturbed.128 At least six thirteenth-century chronicles from Germany, France, and England refer to her as "St. Hildegard," and by 1324 the Rupertsberg nuns were able to procure from the Avignon papacy a decree of indulgence for pilgrims to her shrine. Several paintings and sculptures from the fifteenth century continue the tradition of representing her as a saint. In the sixteenth century her name was included in the widely used Roman martyrology of Baronius, guaranteeing her continued veneration. Finally, in 1940, the Vatican saintmakers (now called the Sacred Congregation) officially approved the celebration of her feast day in all German dioceses. As of this writing, there has still been no formal canonization, yet some have gone so far as to propose that Hildegard be named a "doctor of the Church" in recognition of her theological achievements—a distinction so far granted to only three women, Saints Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and recently Thérèse of Lisieux. There we may safely let the matter rest, for our business henceforth concerns not Hildegard's sainthood but the many dimensions of her life, work, and writing in the context of her times.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World by Barbara Newman, editor Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Newman, editor. Excerpted by permission.
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