The significance of viriditas (greenness) in Hildegard of Bingen’s writing is well known, but how original was her thinking, and how important was it to her concept of preaching? This chapter surveys Hildegard’s activity as a preacher before broadly probing the content of her writing for signs of her adaptation of patristic models. Comparing Hildegard’s use of viriditas to the works of Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory shows her following their inspiration, but she is seldom derivative. Rather, her exegesis and homiletics rely on a method akin to the intratextual hermeneutics on view in her Exposition of the Gospels. Like the church fathers, she uses her knowledge about natural science to convey a spiritual understanding of scripture, but her exegetic method is more dramatic and visionary as she explains the unifying forces of greenness. Borrowing salient concepts, words, and phrases from her models, she teaches her reader about the opposition of greenness and dryness as well as the relevance of internal and mental greenness to preaching and to prove that God’s greenness is manifest in her community of nuns.

Outside the Rhineland, Hildegard of Bingen’s twelfth-century contemporaries knew her primarily as a visionary. Even today, when she is studied as a musician, theologian, linguist, and naturalist, interest in her visions is still strong in both academic and popular circles. This chapter places her visions in the context of twelfth-century Christian visionary activity, where they were remarkable but far from unique, and then traces their distinctive use and transformation by successive generations of readers up to the present day. Even as many of Hildegard’s works fell into disuse, her best-known visions and her reliable reputation as a trustworthy visionary – sometimes attached to visions written by others – remained popular. The visionary Hildegard reappeared again and again: in fourteenth-century debates over prophetic authority, in sixteenth-century broadsides on church reform, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century appeals to medievalism, New Age spirituality, feminism, and ecotheology. Whether Hildegard’s enthusiasts viewed her as a critic or a champion of the institutional church, they were always certain that her visions had something valuable to offer their present moment.

The Ordo virtutum (the Order of the Virtues) is a sung Latin drama that Hildegard of Bingen completed c. 1152 for her newly founded community at Rupertsberg. The drama has invited a multitude of modern responses due to the originality of its language and imagery and the many possible comparisons to her own visionary and theological writing. Yet this work is firmly grounded in the theology and liturgy of the twelfth-century Benedictine convent. This chapter examines how Hildegard draws on the Benedictine rule, the rite of the Consecration of Virgins from twelfth-century Mainz, and the processional and dramatic rituals of the medieval convent to create an embodied drama of the soul’s salvation that is specific to the female monastic experience. Hildegard further emplots the struggle for the soul’s salvation in a narrative which borrows elements from the Descensus Christi ad Infernos, a fourth-century addition to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and the liturgical commemorations of its central event: Christ’s descent into, or harrowing, of hell. These texts and liturgies provide important context for understanding the dramatic situation and poetic language of the Ordo virtutum.

This chapter explores the development and purpose of the illustrations in two manuscripts of Hildegard of Bingen’s works: one designed by Hildegard (the Rupertsberg Scivias), the other designed by a later generation of her monastery’s nuns (the Lucca Liber divinorum operum). An overview of her visionary experiences demonstrates the prophetic mission of their detailed images to communicate theological truths. The author argues that Hildegard designed the Scivias images to aid that communication and provide visual exegesis of her visions, serving as a teaching tool to guide the reader through the manuscript. The next generation of nuns followed Hildegard’s impulse to illustrate her visions with the later Liber divinorum operum manuscript, but its famous cosmological diagram diverges from the text because the designer did not understand its meaning. The chapter closes with an assessment of the very limited influence of Hildegard’s illustrations in the later Middle Ages, with one story from the preaching of Johannes Tauler demonstrating their liability to reinterpretation.

This chapter argues that composing and singing plainchant for the medieval liturgy was enhanced by the creative practice of intertextuality, the citation and referencing of other textual and musical sources. For Hildegard of Bingen, one of the few medieval composers whose plainchants are firmly attributable, this was no exception. This chapter contextualizes the use of her musical compositions in medieval liturgical practice and establishes their interconnectedness with her own works and those of others. The author compares manuscript layout, presentation, and ordering of her plainchants with standard presentations of music in medieval liturgical manuscripts and discusses their liturgical function. Hildegard’s writings about music are considered, in terms of crossover of musical texts and themes within her output as well as her intertextual use of other sources, including biblical passages and Boethius’ De Institutione Musica. Finally, this chapter examines Hildegard’s practice of musical intertextuality through quotation and referencing in her compositions of her own plainchants as well as melodic material from chants commonly used in Office feasts.

This introduction provides an overview of the collection of thirteen chapters on the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). The editor compares the content and style of this volume with two earlier multiauthored collections of essays on Hildegard of Bingen (Voice of the Living Light and Brill’s A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen) and enumerates the range of publications, both in print and online, which necessitates an updated study. The volume is organized into three main sections: Hildegard’s life and monastic context, considering the education of women religious in medieval Germany; her writings and reputation, focusing on her visionary and theological output (Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum), her extensive correspondence, her sermonizing, her scientific and medical texts, and the reception of her works in subsequent centuries; and finally her music, manuscripts, illuminations and scribes, engaging with the materiality of the transmission of Hildegard’s output. The author closes by discussing potential new areas of Hildegard research, brought to light in various chapters throughout the volume.

This chapter imagines an ordinary day in the life of a female monastic community in twelfth-century Germany. The chapter, like the monastic day, is organized around the celebration of the monastic liturgy of the hours. Between the liturgical hours in the oratory, the nuns attend to their daily business in the cloister, chapter house, lavatory, refectory, and workshops. The flow and activities of this monastic day are based primarily on the Rule of St. Benedict, the customary of Hirsau, and Hildegard of Bingen’s own commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, as well as on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence that reflects medieval monastic lifeways.

This chapter demonstrates several ways in which scribes and the scriptorium were central to life in Hildegard of Bingen’s community, perhaps even before the women departed from the Disibodenberg. Under the probable supervision of Hildegard’s provost the monk Volmar, nuns in Hildegard’s scriptorium were responsible for the copying, and hence the preservation of Hildegard’s writings, from the letter collections of the earlier attested periods of scribal activity to the feverish activity of the final decade or so of Hildegard’s life, to the compilation and preparation of the Riesencodex, Wiesbaden, Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMein, MS 2, which forms a kind of critical edition of her writings. Many scribal hands were involved in the work, suggesting that copying was an important part of monastic discipline on the Rupertsberg. This essay introduces the major features of the house style and some of the problems of studying scribal practices, focusing on the habits of one scribe who worked on two copies of Scivias. A complete list of the manuscripts of Hildegard’s trilogy surviving in Rupertsberg copies is provided as well.

Although Hildegard of Bingen described herself multiple times in her writings as indocta (unlearned), medieval accounts and modern scholarship reveal discrepancies and conflicting information regarding this claim. What, then, was the extent of her education? Instead of answering this question directly by interrogating the intent, meaning, or reliability of her statements and those of her contemporaries, a broader picture of educational standards, resources, and contexts for the intellectual formation of women religious in medieval Germany is investigated. Invoking the full breadth of meaning of ‘women religious’ to include nuns, canonesses, consecrated widows, beguines, and anchorites unveils a wide-ranging scope of educational activity. Contemporary sources, including monastic and canonical rules, hagiographic literature of female vitae, and concrete evidence of libraries and scribal activity in female communities elucidate details of materials, learning conditions, pedagogy, and intellectual engagement and creativity. This chapter thus contextualizes the medieval German environment of female literacy and learning with which Hildegard would have been familiar.

This chapter, translated from German by Florian Hild, examines the principal sources for Hildegard’s biography and discusses conflicting evidence and gaps in information that pose difficulties for the modern researcher. The author presents Hildegard’s life chronologically, including her family history, birth, and early years enclosed at Disibodenberg with Jutta of Sponheim; her visions, writings, and other early activities; her founding of the convent at Rupertsberg; her travels, preaching, healing, and miracles; and her final years and death. Additionally, the reception of her written works both toward the end of her life and after her death are considered, including the approval of her three books of visions – Scivias, Liber divinorum operum, and Liber vitae meritorum – by thirteenth-century academic theologians of Paris. Finally, this chapter describes the rise of her status as ‘popular saint’ juxtaposed with the challenges/setbacks in early canonization attempts, culminating with her elevation to sainthood and Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza portrays the social order as arising out of a state of nature in which people aren’t constrained by laws, in which we may do whatever we can do, and in which our natural egoism makes life insecure and wretched. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza thinks right is coextensive with power even in civil society, not only in the state of nature. Spinoza’s best argument for this arguably relies on two assumptions: if there were a natural law constraining our behavior, it would have to be based on a divine command; but God cannot be a lawgiver; prescriptive laws assume that the commanded can disobey; and no one can disobey an omnipotent being. Although Spinoza takes right to be based on power, he denies that sovereigns have a right to rule just as they please. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes, he is conscious of the fragility of political power. Even if the sovereign’s right is theoretically absolute, individuals are roughly equal in power; so any sovereign must depend on having at his command a group of people who will obey his enforcement commands without being coerced. Like Machiavelli, he prefers forms of government in which this de facto constraint is institutionalized.