Disibodenberg,
a nine-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland region of
western Germany, is a majestically dismal ruin, its roofless buildings overrun
by ivy and interspersed with stands of oak, ash, and beech. When I searched out
the site, last May, I was the only visitor. I half expected to come across
Caspar David Friedrich painting at an easel. One sector, consisting of
scattered blocks and fragments of walls, is marked with a sign, in German:
“Area of the Hildegard Convent (12th Cent.).” This, according to one guess, is
where the nun, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen spent about
forty years of her eight-decade life. In her teens, she was enclosed with two
other nuns at the monastery, seemingly destined for a life of anonymous
devotion. Something of the ambience of the place seeps into Hildegard’s hymn to
St. Disibod, the Irish bishop for whom the monastery is named: “You hid
yourself out of sight / drunk with the smell of flowers in the windows of the
saints / reaching towards God.”
Hildegard
did not stay out of sight. In 1146 or 1147, when she was in her late forties,
she wrote a letter to the French cleric Bernard of Clairvaux—a leading figure
in the Cistercian Order, an architect of the Knights Templar, a propagandist of
the Crusades—in which she disclosed that she had been experiencing religious
visions. The letter begins with protestations of humility, seeking recognition
for her newfound calling, but by the end it radiates the fearsome certitude of
a prophet in the pulpit:
“And so
I beseech you, through the serenity of the Father, through his wondrous Word,
through the sweet fluid of remorse, through the spirit of truth, through the
sacred sound to which all creation resounds, through the Word that gave birth
to the world, through the sublimity of the Father whose sweet viriditas
[viridity, verdancy] released the Word in the Virgin’s womb, where it took on
flesh like a honeycomb built out from honey: may this same sound, the power of
the Father, descend on your heart and elevate your soul so that you do not
remain idly numb to this person’s words.”
Bernard
must have been taken aback by this letter from an unknown nun. In his reply, he
cloaks himself in the timeless condescension of the bigwig: “The press of
business forces me to respond more briefly than I would have liked.” Still,
Hildegard’s conviction impresses him: “When the learning and the anointing
(which reveals all things to you) are within, what advice could we possibly
give?” As it turned out, Bernard’s approval was superfluous, for Hildegard also
secured the blessing of Pope Eugene III. For the remainder of her life—she died
in 1179—she held sway as a seer, her teachings heeded by Popes and emperors
alike.
Hildegard’s
letter to Bernard, incantatory in rhythm and poetic in imagery, encapsulates
several of her preoccupations. It emphasizes the interdependence of
spirituality and nature. It trains attention on the body of the Virgin Mary,
not merely as a vessel of divinity but as a holy domain unto itself. Most
strikingly, it casts the Word as “sacred sound.” In Hildegard’s telling,
Paradise was a place of pure, many-voiced music, and it falls to the prophets
to revive the lost angelic concert, through a fusion of word and melody.
Hildegard herself devised such music—a cycle of seventy-seven liturgical songs,
which she called “Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum,” or “Symphony of
the Harmony of Celestial Revelations.” They are pieces of spectacular length
and breadth, dissolving syllables into endless melismatic flights.
Around
1150, Hildegard left Disibodenberg and founded a new abbey in the area of
Bingen, about fifteen miles to the northeast. While Disibodenberg was and
remains a secluded place, Rupertsberg, as the new institution was called, had a
conspicuous perch on the banks of the Rhine. Hildegard later opened a secondary
convent across the river, in Eibingen. Few traces of the original buildings
remain, but high on a hill above Eibingen stands the Hildegard Abbey, a
suitably imposing neo-Romanesque complex that dates from 1904. In the course of
the twentieth century, the abbey’s nuns helped to bring about a surge of
interest in Hildegard, preparing editions of her writings and recording her
music. She had never been forgotten, but modern Catholicism has embraced her as
a symbol of piety and creativity intertwined. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI
announced Hildegard’s canonization and named her a Doctor of the Church—a title
that has been bestowed on only thirty-six other figures.
Hildegard’s
fame has also crossed over into zones of New Age spirituality, environmental
discourse, and feminist thought. In the gift shop at the Hildegard Abbey, you
can find self-help texts along the lines of “Strengthen the Immune System with
Hildegard of Bingen.” Fiction about Hildegard is a genre unto itself: there
have been at least twenty novels in various languages, including two crime
stories. The growth of the phenomenon had much to do with the serene allure of
Hildegard’s music. In 1982, the British group Gothic Voices released a rapt album
titled “A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard
of Bingen,” which became a cult item. The Sequentia ensemble followed with a
nine-CD survey of Hildegard’s output. These and other releases have sold
hundreds of thousands of copies.
Long
overlooked in music history, Hildegard now possesses immense stature. Staff
notation, which enabled the preservation of musical creations, had arisen less
than a century before she was born; most early notations are anonymous in
origin, and the concept of a professional composer would not take hold for
several centuries. Still, musical personalities began to emerge in this period,
and Hildegard was one of the first to exhibit a recognizable voice. The
contradiction that she represents—a woman presiding over the earliest stages of
the male-dominated Western canon—has had a galvanic effect on contemporary
female composers, who see in her the shape of sound to come.
The
turbulence of Hildegard’s century justified some of her more apocalyptic utterances.
The Holy Roman Empire and the papacy were locked in conflict; the Crusades cut
deathly swaths across the Middle East; a rising urban culture challenged the
clerical and monarchical order. Hildegard held fast to the papal line, going so
far as to send admonitory messages to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who assumed
the Italian throne in 1155 and vainly tried to subdue Rome. In one such letter,
Hildegard compares the Emperor to “a little boy or some madman”; in another,
she channels the voice of God and warns that “my sword will pierce you.”
She was
born into a wealthy, estate-owning family, probably in Bermersheim, east of
Disibodenberg. According to one account, she was promised to the Church as a
human tithe, because she was her parents’ tenth child. Disibodenberg had been
established just a few years before Hildegard was consigned there, and Jutta,
the resident nun, at first had only her niece and Hildegard in her charge. The
enclosure ceremony followed the format of a funeral rite: the women were, in
essence, being buried alive, in service to the Lord. They communicated with the
outside world through a single aperture, which, when not in use, was blocked
with stones. Or so claimed a monk who knew Hildegard in her final years; the
task of separating fact from myth in her biography is arduous.
When
Jutta died, in 1136, Hildegard assumed leadership of the Disibodenberg convent,
which eventually grew to include about twenty women. A few years later, she had
her first full-scale visions, which were usually accompanied by spells of
trancelike immobility and racking pain. Recounting these incidents in the third
person, Hildegard says that she “suffers in her inmost being and in the veins
of her flesh”—that she is “distressed in mind and sense and endures great pain
of body.” Various attempts have been made to attribute these spells to illness;
one theory, popularized by Oliver Sacks, holds that she experienced severe
migraines. The music historian Margot Fassler, in her new book, “Cosmos,
Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century,” points out an obvious problem
with such speculation: many people have migraines, but “to have the kinds of
visions Hildegard underwent does not follow as a matter of course.”
Despite
these periods of incapacitation, Hildegard was no self-scouring ascetic, as
Jutta had been. On the contrary, she preferred rather lavish trappings,
especially after she moved her community to Rupertsberg. The literature
contains a letter from a woman named Tengswich, who complains to Hildegard
about “strange and irregular practices” that have been observed at Rupertsberg,
such as the following: “They say that on feast days your virgins stand in the
church with unbound hair when singing the psalms and that as part of their
dress they wear white, silk veils, so long that they touch the floor. Moreover,
it is said that they wear crowns of gold filigree.” Tengswich further comments
that the convent excludes those of “lower birth and less wealth.” Hildegard, in
reply, argues that whereas married women are wintry husks and comport
themselves accordingly, virgins are like blooming flowers, representing the
“unsullied purity of Paradise.”
The most
curious episode in Hildegard’s biography—two approachable accounts are Fiona
Maddocks’s “Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age,” from 2001, and Honey
Meconi’s “Hildegard of Bingen,” from 2018—concerns a reportedly beautiful young
nun named Richardis of Stade, who had followed Hildegard from Disibodenberg to
Rupertsberg. In 1151, Richardis was appointed the abbess of a convent far to
the north, near Bremen, where her brother happened to be the archbishop.
Hildegard launched a furious campaign to stop the transfer, her letters
displaying, as Maddocks writes, a “palpable tone of panic and petulance.” When
these efforts went nowhere—one reply from Pope Eugene simmers with
exasperation—Hildegard appealed to Richardis herself, in nakedly emotional
terms: “Daughter, listen to me, your mother, speaking to you in the spirit. My
grief flies up to Heaven. My sorrow is destroying the great confidence and
consolation that I once had in mankind.”
The
intensity of Hildegard’s attachment to Richardis has led some to wonder whether
the relationship was erotically charged. The possibility cannot be ruled out,
although any project of remaking Hildegard as a Sapphic icon runs up against
her explicit condemnations of homosexual acts. The one clear thing about this
murky business is Hildegard’s colossal stubbornness. Refusing to acknowledge
the role of her own will, she considered the presence of Richardis to be
divinely ordered. When the younger nun died, not long after leaving
Rupertsberg, Hildegard felt grimly vindicated. To Richardis’s brother, she
wrote that God had too deeply favored this paragon of beauty to surrender her
to a “heartless lover—that is, to the world.”
As
imperious as Hildegard was in dealing with exterior threats, she seems not to
have been a particularly severe taskmaster inside the convent. A posthumous
biography titled “The Life of Hildegard” says that she was neither “disturbed
by blame nor seduced by praise”—that she “kept her soul as taut and ready as a
stretched bow with every discipline.” A vivid personality emerges from these
sources: a charismatic woman, at times overbearing, at times vulnerable,
relentlessly adhering to her plan.
Hildegard’s
literary production was vast: three major volumes (“Scivias,” “Book of Life’s
Merits,” and “Book of Divine Works”); a medical treatise (“Causes and Cures”);
a discourse on science and healing (“Physica”); the sacred songs
(“Symphoniae”); a musical morality play (“Order of the Virtues”); and the
letters, of which some three hundred and fifty survive. The books were assembled
in the Rupertsberg scriptorium, where nuns transcribed Hildegard’s prose and
inserted illustrations of her ideas. Two glorious documents of that labor long
remained in the possession of Hildegard’s community: a compilation known as the
Riesencodex, or Giant Codex, and an illuminated version of “Scivias,” whose
creation Hildegard supervised. The former survived and can be viewed online.
The latter went missing in East Germany after the Second World War, but the
nuns of the Hildegard Abbey had earlier made an immaculate replica.
In the
upper left of the first page of “Scivias”—short for “Scito vias Domini,” or
“Know the Ways of the Lord”—we see a depiction of Hildegard in a chapel-like
space, receiving a vision. She is seated with her feet on a stool, writing with
a stylus on a wax tablet. Volmar, a learned monk who served for decades as her
secretary, is observing from an adjoining room. Five tongues of flame descend
and touch her face, looking curiously like the tentacles of a squid. The text
launches into a verbal evocation of the moment: “And behold! In the forty-third
year of my earthly course, as I was gazing with great fear and trembling
attention at a heavenly vision, I saw a great splendor in which resounded a
voice from Heaven, saying to me, ‘O fragile human, ashes of ashes, and filth of
filth! Say and write what you see and hear. But, since you are timid in
speaking, and simple in expounding, and untaught in writing, speak and write
these things not by a human mouth . . . but as you see and hear them on high in
the heavenly places in the wonders of God.’ ” The first of many
proto-surrealist prose poems follows:
“I saw a
great mountain the color of iron and enthroned on it One of such great glory
that it blinded my sight. On each side of him there extended a soft shadow, like
a wing of wondrous breadth and length. Before him at the foot of the mountain
stood an image full of eyes on all sides in which because of those eyes I could
discern no human form. In front of this image stood another, a child wearing a
tunic of subdued color but white shoes upon whose head such glory descended
from the One enthroned upon that mountain that I could not look at its face.”
There is
no writing quite like this in medieval literature. The style recalls that of
the Book of Revelation and the Old Testament prophets, but the combination of
dispassionate specificity and pictorial fantasy looks ahead to the visions of
William Blake. Hildegard’s account of Creation, for example, contains this
description: “Suddenly a dark sphere of air appeared, huge in size, upon which
the shining flame struck many blows, and at each blow a spark flew up.” The
illustrators respond in kind: the images sometimes look more like
twentieth-century outsider art than like conventional iconography of the
period.
Scholars
debate the degree to which Hildegard was responsible for every aspect of her
published legacy—prose, poetry, illustrations, music. Many hands went into the
making of her works; according to her own testimony, Volmar polished her faulty
Latin. The extant texts, especially the letters, were doubtless embroidered
over time. Hildegard herself would presumably have rejected the idea that she
was a creator in the modern sense; everything came from God. Better to think of
the corpus as the product of a guild, with Hildegard at its head. All the same,
there is no mistaking the singular voice that is stamped on each artifact.
Hildegard was, it might be said, the Andy Warhol of a spiritual Factory on the
Rhine.
The
secular fad for Hildegard has encouraged perceptions of her as a religious
renegade, a far-out mystic. She was, in fact, fairly doctrinaire in her
beliefs, despite her penchant for psychedelic imagery. Her writings caused no
scandal like the one unleashed by the twelfth-century theologian Peter Abelard,
who, after espousing principles of universal reason and individual intention,
faced accusations of heresy. Hildegard cherished virginity as the supreme
virtue; Abelard was castrated on account of his secret marriage to his gifted
young student Heloïse.
Nonetheless,
Hildegard’s thinking is rife with idiosyncrasies, particularly concerning the
role of women. Barbara Newman, in her 1987 book, “Sister of Wisdom,” argues
that Hildegard resists the misogyny of Catholic doctrine. For example, her
tendency to pair Eve with the Virgin Mary suggests that the bearer of original
sin also becomes the agent of redemption. Hildegard habitually invokes female
frailty—“I, a poor little figure of a woman” is a recurring formula—yet her
self-deprecation is double-edged, as Newman observes: “Because the power of God
is perfected in weakness, because the humblest shall be the most exalted, human
impotence could become the sign and prelude of divine empowerment.”
When
Hildegard addressed male-female relationships, she performed a subtle
rebalancing. Newman highlights a line in “Scivias” that purports to cite the
words of St. Paul: “Woman was created for the sake of man, and man for the sake
of woman.” In fact, St. Paul says nothing of the sort, explicitly declaring,
“Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man.”
Hildegard’s relatively evenhanded view of gender relations also surfaces in
“Causes and Cures,” which, like many medieval texts of its kind, is startlingly
candid about sex. Male love is characterized as “blazing heat,” as a “storm of
lust”; the love of a woman, by contrast, is “mild and gentle, yet steady.” One
passage seems to give a persuasive and sympathetic depiction of female orgasm:
“When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which
brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during
the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed.”
Hildegard
could, in other words, be bracingly down-to-earth in her advice on worldly
matters. “Physica” is essentially an aggregation of folk wisdom, some of which
remains à la mode. Its promotion of the healing effects of aloe, chamomile, and
spelt is fit for quotation on health-food packaging. Other prescriptions are
less practical for modern readers: “If someone has jaundice, strike a bat
gently, so it does not die. Tie it over his loins, with the back of the bat
turned toward the person’s back. After a little while, take it off, and tie it
over his stomach. Leave it there until it dies.” We are told that eating a
heron heart turns a sad mind happy; that applying the right ear of a lion to a
deaf person’s ear restores hearing; that eels are a fine meal for healthy
people but make ill people “bitter in mind, crafty, and evil.” There is also
advice about the medical usefulness of the body parts of unicorns, dragons, and
basilisks.
In all,
Hildegard comes across as something of a world-maker, the inventor of a richly
appointed fantasy realm. She goes so far as to fashion her own language—the
“Lingua Ignota,” or “Unknown Tongue”—which has a vocabulary of more than a
thousand words. God is “AIGONZ”; the Devil is “diuueliz”; tongue is “ranzgia”;
womb is “veriszoil.” The purpose of the Lingua remains obscure, but Sarah
Higley, in a monograph on the subject, plausibly describes it as an attempt at
“making the things of this world divine again through the alterity of new signs.”
In the antiphon “O orzchis Ecclesia,” Hildegard interpolates invented words
into a Latin text:
“O
immense [orzchis] Church
girded by divine arms
and ornamented in jacinth
Thou art the fragrance [caldemia]
of the wounds of peoples [loifolum]”
The
blurring of meaning into sound has the effect of pulling language into the
nocturnal landscape of music, where, in Hildegard’s view, ultimate truth
resided.
Modern
musical notation stemmed from an assertion of centralized authority. The Holy
Roman Emperors, beginning with Charlemagne, wished to propagate a uniform
version of liturgical chant across their territories, and notation facilitated
that process, eliminating local deviations. Early chants tended not to show
distinctive features, but composers soon introduced artful elaborations, which
drew the scrutiny of doctrinal watchdogs. The Cistercian Order, as part of its
campaign against luxury and pomp, discouraged melodies that indulged in
excessively long melismas or had a range wider than an octave.
If
Hildegard’s songs had circulated in her lifetime, her disdain for such
regulations might have proved controversial. Consider the responsory “O vos
angeli” (“O you angels”), the text of which appears in “Scivias.” Angels,
archangels, cherubim, seraphim, and other higher powers are exalted because
they “see the inward force of the Father, / which breathes from his heart like
a face. / Praise to you, who behold in the fountain / the strongbox of the
ancient heart.” In a transcription in modern notation, the setting departs from
the E above middle C, at the lower end of the soprano range. During a
fifty-one-note melismatic passage on the first syllables, the line gyrates
between the C above middle C and the G below middle C—deep in the contralto
register. The traversal of an octave and a fourth already exceeds Cistercian
boundaries, but the adventures in angelic regions have just begun. At the
mention of the archangels, who “receive the souls of the just,” the music
climbs to a stratospheric D, more than two octaves above middle C. The same
note figures in an eighty-note melisma on the first syllable of the song’s
final word, aspicitis (“behold”).
These
are the earmarks of an ambitious composer who is pushing the limits of the
singable. The range of “O vos angeli”—two octaves plus a fifth—exceeds that of
Wagner’s Isolde or of Strauss’s Salome. One musicologist, Vincent Corrigan, has
suggested that copyists must have made a mistake in notating the clefs, with
the result that the first section is pitched too low. When I consulted with the
Hildegard specialist Jennifer Bain, though, she pointed out that several other
Hildegard chants prowl in the lower range, especially in opening sections.
Possibly, the line was subdivided among members of the convent ensemble, so
that contraltos handled the opening and high sopranos took the climaxes. One
person can, in fact, sing the entire thing, as the Finnish soprano Anneliina
Rif has proved, in a hypnotic recording on the Alba label. Certainly, this
exploration of vocal extremes is an apt metaphor for the celestial sphere.
When
Hildegard’s music first became known, in the later nineteenth century, the
exceptional breadth of “O vos angeli” and several other of her chants excited
comment. In fact, as Bain and other scholars have shown, this feature was not
as unusual as it appeared. Despite the mandates against undue complexity, many
other expansive pieces can be found in eleventh- and twelfth-century
repertories, notably those of Germany. The chants of the eleventh-century theorist
and composer Hermann of Reichenau move across a broad span, and they are also
organized around primary tones of the fifth and the octave. (In the key of C,
this would be F, G, and the C above.) Hildegard, too, liked to hit those
structural nodes: some of her chants begin with a dramatic rising gesture of a
fifth followed by a fourth.
Such
resemblances hardly diminish Hildegard’s originality. Bain, in an essay on the
composer’s style, writes, “Even while working within an established repertorial
style, she also played with the structural forms that she received.” A musical
narrative unfolds by way of calculated repetitions and nuanced variations.
Conspicuous extensions of the line often coincide with crucial statements in
the texts. Bain notes that Hildegard’s chant “O Jerusalem” begins “in a
contained, almost subdued way, with a narrow range and short melodic phrases,”
before scaling the heights: “The climactic pitch G also occurs at a critical
moment in the text when Hildegard makes the connection between heaven, the
saints, and the humans who are singing their praises.”
Here is
the essence of the art of composing: the ability to conceive music in
architectural terms, as a shaping of sound through time. The most stunning
thing about Hildegard’s creations is how they demarcate structure through a
single melodic line. (Bach accomplished the same feat in his pieces for solo
cello and solo violin, but he had the advantage of four strings.) This past
fall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented a multi-composer event titled
“Electric Fields,” during which the soprano Barbara Hannigan gave semi-operatic
renditions of two Hildegard chants—“O vis aeternitatis” and “O virga
mediatrix.” I’d heard Hildegard sung in church spaces, but it was a new thrill
to encounter her in an auditorium built for Beethoven and Mahler. I thought of
the latter’s comment about his Eighth Symphony: “Imagine the entire universe
beginning to ring and resound.” With Hildegard, we hear the cosmos singing in
one voice.
Hildegard
suffered a crushing humiliation in the final year of her life. The Rupertsberg
convent had arranged for the burial of a wealthy patron who had been
excommunicated, for unknown reasons. Officials in Mainz, ignoring the fact that
the man had repented of his sins, decreed that until the body was removed the
nuns would be forbidden to sing Mass. Hildegard, in her reply, unleashed
another masterpiece of righteous rage, acidly asking the prelates of Mainz if
they were “certain that you are drawn to this action out of zeal for God’s
justice, rather than out of indignation, unjust emotions, or a desire for
revenge.” Music is the language of God, she thundered; only the Devil would
seek to forbid it. This time, her intransigence won out, and her nuns were
allowed to resume singing Mass. She died six months later.
In
hindsight, the effort to silence Hildegard feels like a premonition. Within the
walls of a convent, she had found latitude to cultivate her gifts; so had other
brilliant religious women of the late medieval period, such as Roswitha, Herrad
of Landsberg, Hadewijch of Brabant, and Marguerite Porete. But when
universities began to replace monasteries as centers of learning an all-male
regime took hold. The Catholic philosopher Prudence Allen notes that women were
officially excluded from the University of Paris by 1231; Hildegard found no
place in the curriculum. Even as European civilization moved toward the
putative liberation of the Renaissance, it was undergoing a social regression.
Women continued making music in convents and in aristocratic spaces, but for
many centuries none could equal Hildegard’s reach.
Contemporary
female composers have often saluted Hildegard as the one who blazed a difficult
path. A memorable ceremony took place in 1993, at CBGB, the venerable arena of
rock aggression. A quartet of New York composers—Eve Beglarian, Kitty
Brazelton, Elaine Kaplinsky, and Mary Jane Leach—walked through the venue
draped in black, holding candles and singing Hildegard antiphons. Subsequent
generations have paid their respects, albeit in ways that might well have
baffled the honoree. Lingua Ignota, an experimental-pop project launched by the
multidisciplinary artist Kristin Hayter, takes its name from Hildegard’s
“unknown tongue” and channels her spirit through darkly vengeful chants that
unfurl before walls of noise. The Australian American singer-composer Jane
Sheldon, by contrast, cherishes Hildegard’s regard for the divinity of nature.
For an installation in a former timber mill in Tasmania, Sheldon is writing a
composition based on Hildegard’s “O nobilissima viriditas,” which begins with
the lines “O noblest green viridity / you who are rooted in the sun.”
Nothing
in Hildegard’s philosophy is more pertinent to our wounded planet than her
concept of viriditas—greenness, verdancy, fecundity. She almost always
associates the term with the female body, especially with the womb, and it
counterbalances the violence of male sexuality. At the same time, it is the
primary medium of God’s power on earth. Hildegard’s final theological
testament, “Book of Divine Works,” begins with a vision of Caritas, the spirit
of Divine Love, who, clad in a robe as bright as the sun, speaks as nature
incarnate:
“I am
the supreme and fiery force who sets all living sparks alight and breathes
forth no mortal things, but judges them as they are. Circling above the
circumscribing circle with my superior wings, which is to say circling with
wisdom, I have ordered the cosmos rightly. But I am also the fiery life of
divine essence: I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters,
I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. And with the airy wind I quicken
all things to life, as with an invisible life that sustains them all. For the
air lives in viriditas and in the flowers, and the waters flow as if alive, and
the sun lives within its own light, and when the moon has waned it is rekindled
by the light of the sun and thereby lives anew, and the stars shine forth in
their own light as though alive.”
Caritas
is, naturally, a woman, and, like the virgins of Hildegard’s convent, her head
is covered with a band of gold.
Hildegard
of Bingen Composes the Cosmos. By Alex Ross. The New Yorker, January 30, 2023.
girded by divine arms
and ornamented in jacinth
Thou art the fragrance [caldemia]
of the wounds of peoples [loifolum]”
As part of our series exploring lost or lesser-known figures from history who deserve their 15 minutes of fame, Emily Briffett interviews Dr Janina Ramirez about the life of Hildegard of Bingen
“She is everything,” says Ramirez. “She is an intellectual. She is a musician, an artist, a scientist. Just a powerful human being.” Hildegard brought communities of women together, voiced her opinions about important scientific theories and political issues, and was responsible for the building, organising and running of two abbeys in her lifetime. “I cannot think of anyone now who could do any of the range that Hildegard did,” says Ramirez, and for this reason, she deserves to be celebrated.
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