Nature writing has been parodied for what Richard Kerridge identifies as ‘purple prose’. Given the remarkable resurgence of the popularity of nature writing in the first decades of this century, this chapter considers how nature writers now can develop a prose style that avoids the excesses traditionally associated with the genre and that will face up to and not shrink from the threats to nature, including ‘global warming and the huge loss of wildlife populations’, that demand perspectival shifts between the local and the global, the personal and the planetary.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

Comic prose has much in common with other genres and styles; timing and balance, for example, are integral to its effects. Jonathan Greenberg and David Galef offer an examination of many different techniques in comic writing that build upon and depart from familiar strategies, many of them relying on upending expectations. The chapter enumerates various techniques, including reversal, elaboration, soundplay, excess (and restraint) and parody.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

Conceptualizing Hildegard of Bingen as a theologian has been impeded by a pervading focus on her visionary status. The author provides a fruitful reassessment of Hildegard’s theology by contextualizing her writings along three coordinates: the authoritative texts she cites, the institutional environment in which theological discussion takes place, and the audience to whom the theology is directed. Her responsibility as magistra of her community led her to construct her trilogy of visions – Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum – not just as visionary writings for the broader church but as a structured theological system to aid her nuns pedagogically. Analysis of her writings reveals a systematic methodology of theological instruction, including her use of classical rhetoric; additionally, her concerns for her nuns’ spiritual welfare are reflected in a customized presentation of theological topics. Ultimately, understanding Hildegard’s theology as a direct response to her immediate community reframes it and highlights its similarities to twelfth-century methods of theological instruction.

This chapter introduces readers to the most popular work through which Hildegard of Bingen was known throughout Europe in the centuries after her death, the Pentachronon (also known as the Speculum futurorum temporum siue Pentachronon sancte Hildegardis). The Pentachronon is an anthology of excerpts from Hildegard’s authentic writings that was created by Gebeno of Eberbach in the early thirteenth century and it enjoyed a pan-European circulation through the seventeenth century. This sophisticated anthology includes Hildegard’s apocalyptic prophecies of present and future history from the Scivias, the Book of Divine Works, and her letters, as well as excerpts from her correspondence in which she offered spiritual direction and counsel through her prophetic gift. An overview of the main apocalyptic narrative of the anthology is provided and particular attention is paid to the way in which Hildegard as a prophet and her apocalyptic teachings were presented for premodern readers in the three main versions of the anthology.

Hildegard of Bingen’s reputation for expertise in medicine was established not during her lifetime but after her death, with the compilation of Physica and Cause et cure by her secretaries and nuns at Rupertsberg. These works arranged and supplemented materials collected and composed by Hildegard. While described by early witnesses as works on medicine, they are not entirely typical of twelfth-century medical writing. Physica is an encyclopedia of the natural world, and Cause et cure an extended meditation on the consequences and remedies for the fall of the human race. Yet both works reveal Hildegard’s familiarity with current scientific and medical theory, as well as principles of secular healing practice. As her medieval readers affirmed, her visionary message was fully compatible with, and amplified in significance by, medical teachings based on Greco-Roman sources. This chapter explores this convergence of spiritual meaning and medical erudition in both works and examines the reception of Hildegard as a ‘medical writer’ in the later Middle Ages and early modern periods, and the ways in which this identity has been used by humanistic and alternative medical movements.

This chapter explains the significance of Hildegard of Bingen’s letter collection for her public career and for understanding why she wrote letters, why editors collected them, and why readers desired to receive them. It places the letters into the larger context of letter-writing in the twelfth century; like her contemporaries, Hildegard saw letters as the most effective way to publicize her work, but the prophetic style in which she wrote them made them unique and particularly desirable for correspondents. The chapter describes how editors and collaborators gathered her letters into a formal, edited collection that would serve as a record of the widespread and beneficial impact of her prophecy and examines the relationship between Hildegard and her correspondents. The incoming letters reveal that people from all walks of life looked to Hildegard as a source of life-changing spiritual power, while Hildegard’s responses show her wielding that power in a responsible and orthodox manner. The chapter argues that Hildegard’s letter collection offers a unique perspective on the seer, one that brings us closer to the experience of her prophetic career than any other part of her corpus.