Liz Herbert McAvoyߣs essay on women visionaries highlights the importance of community in relation to womenߣs literary culture, in particular textual community. McAvoy adopts Karen Baradߣs terminology of dynamic intra-actions to describe the lives and writings of visionaries in the European high and later Middle Ages, taking as her starting point the complex and manifold spiritual female entanglements across space and time that are described in The Book of Margery Kempe. McAvoy traces such intra-actions back through Mechthild of Hackeborn and the nuns of Helfta in the thirteenth century to Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh, and forwards to the later fourteenth century and Julian of Norwich. McAvoy also identifies the influence of Mechthild on A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century by an anchoress of Winchester, and on the writings of Birgitta of Sweden, with which Kempe was familiar. McAvoy concludes that these interwoven spiritual connections between women are mirrored in knotted patterns of manuscript patronage and ownership.

This essay addresses women and medicine in the Middle Ages, especially works concerning the female body and reproduction. Positive representations of the female body are found in the mystical writings of, for example, the thirteenth-century nuns of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn, and, in contrast to later gynaecological works, which were often deeply misogynistic, Hildegard of Bingenߣs medical texts ascribe a redemptive quality to womenߣs reproductive processes. Most medical treatises, however, were not written for women, and even women involved in health care, including midwives, had little access to them. The Trotula, a compendium on womenߣs medicine taking its name from the twelfth-century woman physician Trota, was widely disseminated and translated as a whole and in parts, but although early Latin versions were addressed to women, later versions were owned largely by men. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of female readership and audiences, and the translation of medical treatises about women into the vernacular increased womenߣs access to this important form of textual knowledge.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

The large territory of Northern and Central Europe covered in the Middle Ages by the Holy Roman Empire is considered in Chapter 9. We consider the music of mystics and visionaries, including St Hildegard of Bingen and the Dutch-speaking Hadewijch. Religious reform movements in northern areas and in Bohemia, including Modern Devotion and Utraquism, had important consequences for liturgical singing, and we observe the survival in these areas of polyphonic traditions apparently dating back to the centuries considered in Chapter 2. In the courtly environment, the Minnesingers took up the traditions of the troubadours, cultivating a distinctive approach to song in Middle High German and Middle Dutch. This chapter concludes with a manuscript of song whose name is well known but whose contents are difficult to classify: the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana juxtaposes Latin and vernacular, notated and un-notated, and the religious and secular, to a remarkable degree.

This new chapter considers the achievements of remarkable writer, composer and visionary Hildegard of Bingen. After an outline of her life and her writings, her views on creation, humankind as microcosm, fall and redemption receive particular attention.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter characterises visionary experiences of heaven, hell, and purgatory received by medieval religious women.The twelfth-century Benedictines Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau offer detailed representations of a celestial city but fewer specifics regarding the netherworld.Hildegard’s perception of the cosmos informs her view of heaven, whereas for Elisabeth it symbolises a longed-for end to life’s journey.Among the Cistercian women residing at Helfta in the thirteenth century, the graphic descriptions of otherworldly realms described by Mechthild of Magdeburg in The Flowing Light of the Godhead are most remarkable.For her contemporaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, the joyous union with Christ on earth is emphasised equally with the union in heaven.The striking scenes depicting the judgement of sinners in purgatory found in the revelations of the fourteenth-century saint Birgitta of Sweden serve as an admonition to her more secular audience.

This chapter begins with an account of the depiction of Muhammad the prophet as the Antichrist at the time of the Crusades and its beginnings in Muslim Spain. It then segues to a discussion of the development of the figures of Al-Dajjal, the Muslim Antichist, and Armilus, the Jewish Antichrist. There follows a snapshot of ‘lives of the Antichrist’ in the year 1200 from Roger de Hoveden’s Annals, the one derived from Adso, the other from Joachim of Fiore. These two 'lives of the Antichrist' provided the conceptual space for debates over the next 600 years about who the Antichrist might be and whether he would come from inside or from outside of the church. It also continues the discussion of how the debate about the Antichrist now became focused around disputes over authority within and outside of the church. It analyses the Antichrist accounts of Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hildegard of Bingen. It concludes by establishing Joachim of Fiore’s ‘Antichrist’ as a crucial development in the history of the Antichrist by suggesting the idea of a papal Antichrist.