"Imago expandit splendorem suum". Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript

Abstract

A significant point of contention within studies of the twelfth-century visionary saint and Doctor of the Church, Hildegard of Bingen, is the question of her role in the production of the illuminated Scivias manuscript known as the Rupertsberg Codex. While current German scholarship has tended to preclude Hildegard’s hand, pre-war German scholars, who had access to the original manuscript before it was lost, and most modern Anglophone scholars have argued more or less strongly for Hildegard’s influence on the design. This paper argues for Hildegard’s direction of the images based on their function as a theological discourse refracting the text. The images are not ancillary to or derivative of the work; they are integral to it. A key area of the manuscript design that reveals these authorial interventions is the color scheme. The use of certain colors, such as green and red, that have particular meanings in Hildegard’s symbolic vocabulary—even when at odds with the colors described in the recorded vision text—reveals the theological place of each image within Hildegard’s perception of salvation history. Furthermore, the extensive use of silver, gold, and blue in the manuscript can be understood both through Hildegard’s likely use of actual jewelry that contained enamel work and those metals, and through the theological meanings with which Hildegard imbues the metallic pigments. Such visual markers invested with theological significance thus argue for Hildegard’s design of the manuscript and aid the viewer- reader in interpreting the complex visual allegories at work in Hildegard’s often enigmatic visions. Finally, they reveal the dynamic ways in which Hildegard used the images to emphasize her theological insights into the feminine divine and its connection especially to her and her community as virgin members of a virgin Church.

Full text

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
1
Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Imago expandit splendorem suum: Los diseños visio-teológicos de
Hildegarda de Bingen en el manuscrito Rupertsberg de Scivias
Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL
Union College, Barbourville, Kentucky, United States of America
ncampbell@unionky.edu; nathaniel.campbell@gmail.com
Recibido: 01/10/2013
Aceptado: 22/11/2013
Abstract: A significant point of contention within studies of the twelfth-century visionary saint and
Doctor of the Church, Hildegard of Bingen, is the question of her role in the production of the illuminated
Scivias manuscript known as the Rupertsberg Codex. While current German scholarship has tended to
preclude Hildegard’s hand, pre-war German scholars, who had access to the original manuscript before it
was lost, and most modern Anglophone scholars have argued more or less strongly for Hildegard’s
influence on the design. This paper argues for Hildegard’s direction of the images based on their function
as a theological discourse refracting the text. The images are not ancillary to or derivative of the work;
they are integral to it. A key area of the manuscript design that reveals these authorial interventions is the
color scheme. The use of certain colors, such as green and red, that have particular meanings in
Hildegard’s symbolic vocabulary—even when at odds with the colors described in the recorded vision
text—reveals the theological place of each image within Hildegard’s perception of salvation history.
Furthermore, the extensive use of silver, gold, and blue in the manuscript can be understood both through
Hildegard’s likely use of actual jewelry that contained enamel work and those metals, and through the
theological meanings with which Hildegard imbues the metallic pigments. Such visual markers invested
with theological significance thus argue for Hildegard’s design of the manuscript and aid the viewer-
reader in interpreting the complex visual allegories at work in Hildegard’s often enigmatic visions.
Finally, they reveal the dynamic ways in which Hildegard used the images to emphasize her theological
insights into the feminine divine and its connection especially to her and her community as virgin
members of a virgin Church.
Keywords: Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Rupertsberg Manuscript, Text/Image Relationships, Gender,
Visual Theology
Resumen: Un punto importante de discusión dentro de los estudios de la santa visionaria del siglo XII y
Doctor de la Iglesia, Hildegarda de Bingen, es la cuestión de su rol en la producción del manuscrito
iluminado Scivias, conocido como el Codex Rupertsberg. Mientras la erudición alemana actual ha tendido
a excluir la mano de Hildegard, los estudiosos alemanes de antes de la guerra, que tuvieron acceso al
manuscrito original antes de que se perdiese, y la mayoría de los estudiosos anglófonos modernos han
argumentado con mayor o menor brío en favor de la influencia de Hildegard en el diseño. El presente
artículo razona en defensa de la dirección de Hildegarda sobre las imágenes, basándose en su función de
discurso teológico que refleja su texto. Las imágenes no son subsidiarias de o derivadas de la obra
literaria, sino que son parte integral de ella. Un aspecto clave del diseño del manuscrito que revela esas
intervenciones de la autora es el esquema de los colores. El uso de ciertos colores, como el verde y el
rojo, que tienen un significado especial en el vocabulario simbólico de Hildegarda –aun cuando en
desacuerdo con los colores descritos en la visión registrada en el texto— revela el lugar teológico de cada

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
2
imagen dentro de la percepción de Hildegarda sobre la historia de la salvación. Además, el amplio uso de
la plata, el oro y el azul en el manuscrito se puede entender tanto a través del probable uso de Hildegarda
de auténticas joyas que contenían trabajos en esmalte y esos metales, como también a través de los
significados teológicos que Hildegarda confiere a los pigmentos metálicos. Dichos signos visuales
investidos de significado teológico abogan así en favor de Hildegarda como la diseñadora del manuscrito,
y ayudan al espectador-lector a interpretar las complejas alegorías visuales presentes en las visiones a
menudo enigmáticas de Hildegarda. Por último, revelan las dinámicas maneras mediante las que
Hildegarda utiliza las imágenes para enfatizar sus intuiciones teológicas sobre lo divino femenino y su
relación especialmente con ella misma y su comunidad como miembros vírgenes de una Iglesia virgen.
Palabras clave: Hildegarda de Bingen, Scivias, Manuscrito Rupertsberg, Text/Image Relationships,
Sexo, Visual Theology
Summary: 1. Introduction. 2. The Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript: Status Quaestionis. 2.1. Scivias:
Composition and Themes of the Work. 2.2. Dating the Manuscript. 2.3. The Relationship between Vision,
Text, and Image. 3. The Function of the Images as Theological Discourse. 4. Color and Theological
Meaning in the Rupertsberg Scivias. 4.1. Red and Green. 4.2. Blue, Gold, and Silver. Fontes and
Bibliography.
1. Introduction
On travels through the Rhineland in 1814 and 1815 to explore the area’s rich history
of art and antiquities, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe viewed the growing collection of the
state library in Wiesbaden, which included many monastic books that it had acquired at
the time of secularization. He noted one in particular, an old manuscript containing the
visions of a local saint, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), calling it “merkwürdig.”
1
Although that term probably meant little more than “noteworthy” to the great poet, its
stronger connotations of oddity and strangeness likely describe the reaction that most
readers and viewers have had on first encountering Hessische Landesbibliothek,
Handschrift 1: the so-called Rupertsberg Codex of Hildegard’s first visionary work,
Scivias.
2
One of only two manuscripts of this work to contain illustrations, this late
The seeds of this project were sown in seminars with Profs. Boyd Taylor Coolman, Stephen Brown, and
Pamela Berger at Boston College in 2006-2007; they were watered during study with Prof. Christel
Meier-Staubach at the Westfälische-Wilhems Universität, Münster under a Fulbright Fellowship in 2007-
2008; and they sprouted and blossomed under the guidance of Profs. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Danielle
Joyner at the University of Notre Dame in 2009-2010. Portions were presented in Session 94, “Hildegard
von Bingen: Bridges to Infinity,” sponsored by the International Society for Hildegard von Bingen
Studies, at the 48th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 9-12, 2013, at Western Michigan
University (Kalamazoo, Michigan). My thanks also to Prof. Jose Maria Salvador González of the
Universidad Complutense de Madrid for his help in publishing this study.
1
Johann Wolfgang von GOETHE, “Kunst und Altertum am Rhein und Main,” in Goethes Werke in zehn
Bänden, vol. 10 (Artemis Verlag, 1958), p. 231: “Hier ist in gedachter Rucksicht schon viel geschehen,
und mehrere aus Klöstern gewonnene Bücher in guter Ordnung aufgestellt. Ein altes Manuskript, die
Visionen der heiligen Hildegard enthaltend, ist merkwürdig.”
2
See Marianna SCHRADER and Adelgundis FÜHRKÖTTER, Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der heiligen
Hildegard von Bingen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1956), pp. 43-4; and the “Einführung” to the critical edition of

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
3
twelfth-century book is the only one whose image cycle is not only complete but
illuminated: each of the work’s twenty-six visions is prefaced by one or more miniatures
whose iconographical details are often enigmatic and even confusing.
3
Some of the most
remarkable full-page miniatures strain to contain immense female figures within the
plane of the page, the sparkle of vast fields of silver and gold leaf shimmering before the
viewer’s eyes (Fig. 12). The visual impact of the book’s deluxe design frequently stops
academic and non-academic viewers alike in their tracks, enamored, enticed, and
enthralled by its seemingly unique visionary quality.
4
It is not difficult to see why it is
frequently assumed that its images are the visual equivalent of Hildegard’s often
mysterious visions, whose descriptions begin each section of Scivias, only then followed
by exegetical interpretation offered to Hildegard by the voice she hears from her
visionary experience of the Living Light. Rarely are the images fully comprehensible
without deep engagement and reference to the text.
A significant point of contention in contemporary Hildegard studies, however, is the
question of her role in the production of this illuminated Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript.
There is no direct documentary evidence attesting to its production, which has left
scholars in the uncomfortable position of wide-ranging conjecture. The consensus in
Scivias, ed. Adelgundis FÜHRKÖTTER and Angela CARLEVARIS, CCCM 43 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1972), pp. xxxii-xxxv.
3
The other manuscript of the work to contain illustrations is Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, cod.
Salem X, 16. This Salem Codex, which was once thought possibly to be a copy of the text sent to the
Cistercians of Salem during Hildegard’s lifetime, contains ten illustrations, none of which bear much
resemblance to those in the Rupertsberg manuscript, and at least two of which were based on images
found in other manuscripts in the Salem monastery’s library. While early scholarship tended to date it to
the later twelfth-century, more recent appraisals have pushed its execution as late as the early thirteenth-
century. Although its illustrations do not originate with Hildegard, they do provide crucial comparative
material for the Rupertsberg manuscript’s use of and innovation from standard twelfth-century
iconographical forms. See “Einführung” to Scivias, ed. FÜHRKÖTTER and CARLEVARIS, CCCM 43,
pp. xxxix-xlii; Clemencia Hand KESSLER, “A Problematic Illumination of the Heidelberg ‘Liber
Scivias’,” Marsyas v. 8 (1957), pp. 7-21; Christel MEIER, “Calcare caput draconis. Prophetische
Bildkonfiguration in Visionstext und Illustration: zur Vision »Scivias« II, 7,“ in Hildegard von Bingen.
Prophetin durch die Zeiten, ed. Äbtissin Edeltraud FORSTER (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1997), pp.
340-58; and Madeline CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships: Hildegard of
Bingen's Scivias,” in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette BEER
(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp. 71-111, at 73-4 and 92.
4
See Lieselotte SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen im „Liber Scivias“ der Hildegard von Bingen: die
Wucht der Vision und die Ordnung der Bilder (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1998), pp. 12-13. She notes that
previous treatments of the images have often assumed either a simple and subsidiary correspondence to
the text or taken them as an opportunity for “unhistorical and widely subjective interpretations” (ibid., p.
vii: “entweder bloß ergänzendes Medium der Schrift ... oder zum Anlaß genommen worden für
unhistorische, weitgehend subjektive Betrachtungen“). This latter category likely refers to such
phenomena as the popular but deeply misleading work of Matthew FOX, Illuminations of Hildegard of
Bingen (Santa Fe, N.M.: Bear & Co., 1985); for an analysis of the difficulties in Fox’s treatment of
Hildegard, see Barbara NEWMAN, “Romancing the Past: A Critical Look at Matthew Fox and the
Medieval Creation Mystics,” Touchstone v. 5 (1992), pp. 5 - 10.

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
4
Anglo-American scholarship dates the manuscript to some point within the last two
decades of Hildegard’s life and attributes to her some kind of role in the production of the
images, even if it is not widely believed that she herself executed them.
5
One of the
principal American scholars on this question, Madeline Caviness, has used a wide range
of techniques, including her own experience with migraine pathology, to come to this
conclusion.
6
Significant recent German scholarship, however, has dated the manuscript’s
production after Hildegard’s death in 1179, based on stylistic comparisons to firmly
dateable contemporary manuscripts or on the many places where the images in the
manuscript diverge from or even contradict the text of the visions, thus minimizing, if not
completely negating, her role in their design.
7
This study will argue that Hildegard did, in
fact, direct the iconography and composition of the images in the manuscript in the last
decade of her life, but not merely as illustrative counterparts to the textual record of her
visionary experiences. Rather, the Visionary Doctor used them as a separate visual and
theological discourse, equal to and interacting with the textual record of her visions. The
images are not ancillary to the text: they are dynamically integral to the work as a whole.
2. The Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript: Status Quaestionis
This manuscript (Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, HS 1) was composed of
235 folios in 27 quires, 32.1 cm. tall by 23.1 cm wide, with a writing area of 24.3 cm by
17.5 cm, divided into two columns of 31 or 32 lines each.
8
After the Protestificatio on
both sides of fol. 1, each of the work’s twenty-six visions followed the same format:
chapter headings, followed by one or more miniatures, and then the text of each vision
and its allegorical interpretation. It was an illuminated manuscript of the highest level: a
painted palette across the whole range of hues, together with copious amounts of gold
and silver. There were a total of thirty-five miniatures—five full-page, single panel;
eleven full-page or nearly full page, with multiple panels; fifteen half-page (often
columnar); and four quarter-page—offered here in a summary catalogue:
9
5
See Kathryn KERBY-FULTON, “Hildegard of Bingen”, in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian
Tradition, c. 1100-c.1500, ed. Alastair MINNIS and Rosalynn VOADEN (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp.
343-69, esp. pp. 361-4.
6
Madeline CAVINESS, “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’,” in Voice of the Living Light:
Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara NEWMAN (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), pp. 110-24; eadem, “Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” in Hildegard of
Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles BURNETT and Peter DRONKE (London:
Warburg Institute, 1998), pp. 29-62.
7
See especially the work of Christel MEIER and Lieselotte SAURMA-JELTSCH, discussed below.
8
“Einführung” to Scivias, ed. FÜHRKÖTTER and CARLEVARIS, CCCM 43, p. xxxiii.
9
The numbering of the miniatures follows that in SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen. The titles given
for each miniature have been adapted from her descriptions and from those given in Hildegard of Bingen:
Scivias, trans. Mother Columba HART and Jane BISHOP (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
5
1. Fol. 1r: Author portrait accompanying the Protestificatio (Fig. 1)
2. Fol. 2r: I.1, The Glorious Splendor of the God enthroned upon the Iron
Mountain, with Timor Dei and Pauper(a) Spiritu at its base
3. Fol. 4r: I.2, The Fall (Fig. 6)
4. Fol. 14r: I.3, The Cosmos in the Form of an Egg
5. Fol. 22r: I.4, The Embodiment of the Soul and its Earthly Life
6. Fol. 24v: I.4, The Virgin Soul Attacked by Demonic Temptations (following ch.
4 in the commentary) (Fig. 7)
7. Fol. 25r: I.4, Death, the Flight of the Soul, and Judgment
8. Fol. 35r: I.5, Synagogue (Fig. 13)
9. Fol. 38r: I.6, The Ranks of Angels
10. Fol. 41v: II.1, Creation, Fall, and Redemption (Fig. 3)
11. Fol. 47r: II.2, The Trinity (Fig. 5)
12. Fol. 51r: II.3, Ecclesia, the Mother of the Faithful in Baptism (Fig. 11)
13. Fol. 60r: II.4, Ecclesia and the Tower of the Spirit in Confirmation
14. Fol. 66r: II.5, Ecclesia’s Mystical Body: Her Orders (Fig. 12)
15. Fol. 86r: II.6, Crucifixion, Endowment of Ecclesia, and Eucharist (Fig. 10)
16. Fol. 86v: II.6, Eucharist and its Reception
17. Fol. 115v: II.7, The Devil Bound (Fig. 8)
18. Fol. 116r: II.7, The Tempter’s Hell-mouth opposes Humankind (Fig. 9)
19. Fol. 122v: III.1, The One upon the Throne
20. Fol. 123r: III.1, The Fallen Stars (Angels) (Fig. 2)
21. Fol. 130v: III.2, The Edifice of Salvation
22. Fol. 138v: III.3, The Tower of the Anticipation of God’s Will
23. Fol. 139r: III.3, The Five Virtues of Heavenly Love, Discipline, Modesty,
Mercy, and Victory
24. Fol. 145v: III.4, The Pillar of the Word of God
25. Fol. 146r: III.4, The Virtue of Knowledge of God
26. Fol. 153r: III.5, The Zeal of God
27. Fol. 161v: III.6, The Triple Stone Wall of the Old Law, Spiritual Authority,
and Secular Authority
28. Fol. 172r: III.7, The Pillar of the Trinity
29. Fol. 178r: III.8, The Pillar of the Savior’s Humanity, with the Seven Virtues of
Humility, Charity, Fear, Obedience, Faith, Hope, and Chastity, and with the
Grace of God
30. Fol. 192r: III.9, The Tower of the Church and the Virtues of Wisdom, Justice,
Fortitude, and the triplet of Sanctity, the Root of Goodness, and Self-Sacrifice
31. Fol. 292v: III.10, The Son of Man and the Five Virtues of Constancy, Celestial
Desire, Compunction of Heart, Contempt of the World, and Concord
32. Fol. 214v: III.11, The Five Ages to Come and the Antichrist
33. Fol. 225r: III.12, The Last Judgment
34. Fol. 225v: III.12, The New Heaven and the New Earth

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
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35. Fol. 229r: III.13, The Symphony of the Choirs of Heaven (Fig. 4)
A complicating factor for modern studies of this manuscript is the loss of the original
since its evacuation to Dresden for safe-keeping in 1945. Fortunately, a full, hand-painted
facsimile was made by the nuns of the modern Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen,
working from the original manuscript in the 1920’s; there also survive black-and-white
photographs made at the same time.
10
Although there are slight stylistic discrepancies
between the facsimile and original, as seen in the photographs, the facsimile is
nevertheless so exacting in its reproduction that it suffices for a study of this kind.
11
Furthermore, two of the earliest studies of the manuscript, by Louis Baillet (1911) and
Hiltgart Keller (1933), were made from the original manuscript and contain detailed and
precise descriptive catalogues of its images.
12
Comparisons of their observations to the
facsimile confirm its accuracy and usefulness as a proxy for study of the lost original.
2.1. Scivias: Composition and Themes of the Work
Scivias (“Know the Ways”) was the first of Hildegard’s three large, visionary works,
upon which she labored a full decade from 1141 to 1151. It was followed in 1158-1163
by Liber Vitae Meritorum (“Book of the Rewards of Life”), and by her final and most
definitive visionary theological work, Liber Divinorum Operum (“Book of Divine
Works”), begun in 1163 or 1164 and completed between 1172 and 1174, when the
Visionary Doctor was well into her seventies. All of Hildegard’s extraordinary
theological, musical, and artistic work thus belonged to the second half of her life. Each
of these three visionary works followed the same compositional format: Hildegard would
first describe what it was that she saw in each visionary experience (et vidi…, a pattern
inherited from the visionaries of Scripture like Ezekiel, Daniel, and John), and then she
would record in words dictated to her by the voice of the Light in which she experienced
the vision the allegorical meaning of each of its details, following the structural model of
standard scriptural exegesis.
The urge to begin writing, however, was a difficult one. We know from several
autobiographical passages that her experiences of “the Living Light” and its shadow had
10
See “Einführung” to Scivias, ed. FÜHRKÖTTER and CARLEVARIS, CCCM 43, pp. xxxv-xxxvii.
11
See CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships: Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias,”
pp. 75-76; Lieselotte SAURMA-JELTSCH, “Die Rupertsberger »Scivias«-Handschrift: Überlegungen zu
ihrer Entstehung,” in Hildegard von Bingen. Prophetin durch die Zeiten, ed. Äbtissin Edeltraud
FORSTER (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1997), pp. 340-58, at p. 340; and eadem, Die Miniaturen, p. 4.
12
Louis BAILLET, “Les miniatures du »Scivias« de Sainte Hildegarde,” Monuments et mémoires publiés
par l'Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres v. 19 (1911), pp. 49-149; and Hiltgart L. KELLER,
Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien in Handschriften aus dem Kreise der Hiltgart von Bingen (Stuttgart:
Surkamp, 1933). Throughout this study, my own observations of the images in the facsimile have been
carefully checked against these descriptions of the originals.

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
7
been with her since childhood, often with confusing and even frightening results. But “in
the forty-third year of [her] earthly course,” as she tells us in the Protestificatio
(“Declaration”) that prefaces Scivias, the brilliant splendor of her visionary experience
burst in upon her with an urgent vocation: “Speak therefore of these wonders, and, being
so taught, write them and speak.”
13
She continues:
When I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened
and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole
brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning
but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch. And
immediately I knew the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures, namely
the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and
the New Testaments (…). But I, though I saw and heard these things,
refused to write for a long time through doubt and a bad opinion and the
diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of
humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of
sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, and by the witness of a
certain noble maiden of good conduct [the nun Richardis of Stade] and of
that man whom I had secretly sought and found [the monk Volmar of
Disibodenberg, her first secretary], I set my hand to writing. (…) And I
spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any
other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received
them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying
to me, “Cry out therefore, and write thus!”
The result of this divine commission was a collection of twenty-six visions, arranged
into three parts. The first, containing six visions, deals with the order of creation and is
built around the relationships in creation between microcosm and macrocosm. Its opening
vision confirms Hildegard’s divine commission to “cry out and speak of the origin of
pure salvation” and “burst forth into a fountain of abundance and overflow with mystical
knowledge,” all in a prophetic mission to the Church’s wayward ministers, “who, though
they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them,
because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice” (Scivias I.1,
Vision). This is followed by an account of creation and the Fall (I.2), an elaborate image
of the macrocosmic universe as an egg (I.3), a description of the microcosmic
relationship of soul to body (I.4), God’s first manifestation to his people in the form of
Synagogue (I.5), and the ranks of angels (I.6). The second part, of seven visions, is
13
All quotations from Scivias will be taken from the translation of HART and BISHOP, with citations
offered in-text in the format Part.Vision.Chapter. Occasionally, the translation has been modified to better
match particular nuances in the Latin, especially as concerns color-related imagery, as found in the
critical edition of FÜHRKÖTTER and CARLEVARIS. For reasons of bulk, I have chosen not to include
the original Latin for most quotes from Scivias in the footnotes.

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
Eikón / Imago 4 (2013 / 2) ISSN-e 2254-8718
8
focused on the order of redemption, and deals with the Church and her sacraments. Its
opening vision recapitulates the story of creation and fall, but brings the story to its
fruitful restoration in the work of the Redeemer. After a vision that attempts to grapple
with the Trinity in its relationship to creation and the world (II.2), the remaining visions
describe Ecclesia in her relationship to Christ (as Bride) and to the faithful (as Mother),
culminating in a monstrous vision of the Devil enchained and the temptations with which
he entices humankind. Across these thirteen visions, Hildegard articulates the process
from Creation through recreative Redemption, perfected once in the Incarnation and
sacrifice of the Son on the Cross and perpetuated in history by the work of the Church.
The thirteen visions of the third part deal with the order of sanctification, presented in
the image of the “edifice of salvation” and often comprising an extensive commentary on
the personified virtues. These architecturally-structured visions allow Hildegard to
reinterpret the recreative dynamic from the eschatological perspective. It concludes with
a vision of the symphony of the heavenly court, and early versions of some of her
musical compositions and her musical morality play, Ordo Virtutum. This study will
mainly confine itself to the Rupertsberg images accompanying the first two parts of the
work, as the image cycle that was produced for the extended description of the Edifice of
Salvation that forms the bulk of the third part (Scivias III.2-10) operates under its own
unified and particular pictorial logic that sets it slightly apart from the other miniatures.
14
Despite its unique structure as a record of visionary revelation, Scivias shares an
affinity with other twelfth-century attempts to articulate a systematic Christian theology.
Barbara Newman, for example, has compared it in breadth and scale to Hugh of St.
Victor’s De sacramentis christianae fidei, produced in the 1130’s, and like Hildegard,
Hugh is thought to have used visual images in his work (e.g. his treatise on the Ark of
Noah).
15
While Hugh divided his work De sacramentis into two parts—the first dealing
with the Creator and the dispensation of the Law and the second with the Redeemer and
the dispensation of Grace—Hildegard’s tripartite structure recalls also Rupert of Deutz’
14
BAILLET even went so far as to suggest that, of the various painters who worked on the miniatures,
one group was responsible for miniatures 1-20 (through the first vision of Part III), and another for the
remaining fifteen miniatures that comprise most of Part III (“Les miniatures du »Scivias« de Sainte
Hildegarde,” pp. 124-31). Although all scholars since then have eschewed so strong a break between the
parts, recognizing instead the overall unity of the design amidst discernable differences in execution
(owing to multiple painters), the miniatures accompanying the Edifice of Salvation (21-31) do possess
their own distinct unity—see SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, pp. 19 and 22-3. As she notes, four
of the manuscript’s five undivided, full-page miniatures occur in Parts I and II (Fol. 14r, I.3; fol. 38r, I.6;
fol. 47r, II.2; and fol. 66r, II.5); the fifth (fol. 192r, III.9), although sharing its universalizing theme with
the images of Ecclesia in Part II, utilizes a different format from the other full-page miniatures and shares
the multifocal approach found in the other depictions of the many virtues whose allegorical presence
dominates the Edifice of Salvation in Part III.
15
Barbara NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkely: Univ. of
California Press, 1987, 2
nd
ed., 1997), p. 16; see also NEWMAN’s “Introduction” to the HART and
BISHOP translation of Scivias, pp. 23-4. On Hugh’s use of visual images in The Mystical Ark, see Conrad
RUDOLPH, “First, I Find the Center Point”: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark
(Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2004).

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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De Trinitate et operibus eius, an exegetical work of the second decade of the twelfth
century; and the Trinitarian schema developed in the last decades of the century by
Joachim of Fiore.
16
Joachim also shared a fondness for visual exegesis, and one could be
tempted to find his division of salvation history into three ages according to the three
persons of the Trinity paralleled in Hildegard’s delineation of the order of creation under
the Father, the time of the Church under the Son, and the order of the virtues as a work of
the Spirit.
17
Where Joachim’s emphasis tends to lie on the double role of the Spirit in
salvation history, however, Hildegard’s focus falls squarely on the Incarnation as that
history’s central event.
18
Particularly important in this regard is a theological concept in
which Hildegard shared an interest with certain other western, twelfth-century thinkers
like Rupert of Deutz and Honorius Augustodunensis: the absolute predestination of the
Incarnate Christ according to the “eternal counsel” of Ps. 32:11, to which Hildegard made
explicit reference at the opening of Scivias III.1, in the only place in the entire work in
which she herself speaks in reply to “the One Who sat on the throne,” albeit “from the
inner knowledge of that vision”:
Grant me to make known the divine counsel which was ordained in the
ancient counsel, insofar as I can and should: how You willed Your Son to
become incarnate and become a human being within Time; which you
willed before all creation in Your rectitude and the fire of the Dove, the
Holy Spirit, so that Your Son might rise from a Virgin in the splendid
16
For Rupert’s still too-little studied work, see John VAN ENGEN, Rupert of Deutz (Los Angeles: Univ.
of California Press, 1983), esp. pp. 81-94; the massive work spans four volumes and more than 2000
pages in the critical edition by Hrabanus HAACKE, CCCM 21-24 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971-1972).
Rupert’s only work to receive illustrations in the manuscript transmission is, however, a separate
commentary on the Apocalypse; see Michael CURSCHMANN, “Imagined Exegesis: Text and Picture in
the Exegetical Works of Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and Gerhoch of Reichersberg,”
Traditio v. 44 (1988), pp. 145-69, esp. 148-153. For a comparison of Hildegard’s Trinitarian images to
Joachim’s, see Bernard McGINN, “Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art
and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. HAMBURGER and Anne-Marie BOUCHÉ
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 186-207.
17
Christel MEIER has argued for such a Trinitarian interpretation of the three parts of Scivias in
“Hildegard von Bingen,” in Die deutsche Literature des Mittealters: Verfasserlexicon, v. 3, ed. K. RUH
et al. (Berlin, 1981ff.), pp. 1263-4. Of the extensive literature on Joachim, see especially Bernard
McGINN, Apocalyptic Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 97-148; Richard K.
EMMERSON and Ronald B. HERZMAN, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1992), pp. 5-35; and Marjorie REEVES, The Influence
of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages. A Study in Joachimism (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University
Press, 1993). Joachim also followed the urge to illustrate his patterns of history in his Liber Figurarum,
for which see Marjorie REEVES and Beatrice HIRSCH-REICH, The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
18
See E. Randolph DANIEL, “The Double Procession of the Holy Spirit in Joachim of Fiore’s
Understanding of History,” Speculum v. 55 (1980), pp. 469-483.

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beauty of the sun and be clothed with true humanity, a human form
assumed for the sake of humankind.
As Newman has shown, much of Hildegard’s theology centers on the various
manifestations of that divine counsel within time, and especially the feminine mediators
of that counsel, the Virgin Mother Mary and the Virgin Mother Church.
19
Curiously, the
former appears in embodied form in the visions of Scivias only once, as the Queen of
Heaven in the work’s final piece (III.13), enthroned in the uppermost medallion as the
choirs of heaven sing their celestial symphony. Far more prominent, especially in four of
the visions in Part II, is the grand female figure of Ecclesia, to whose extraordinary
appearance we will return at the end of this study. For Hildegard, the Incarnate Redeemer
born of a virgin, and the Church, his virgin Bride born, baptized, and betrothed in his
blood, are the keys to the perfection of creation, even while the synthetic cooperation of
all three persons of the Trinity is necessary in the act. Hildegard’s notion of a perfection
of the physical as well as spiritual order of creation is the hallmark of her unique,
sacramental perspective.
2.2. Dating the Manuscript
All studies of the Rupertsberg manuscript agree that it cannot have been either the
first fair copy of the work, or even an early copy, given paleographical and stylistic
evidence. The earliest full study of the manuscript, by Louis Baillet in 1911, established
the range of 1150-1180 for its production, based on the terminus a quo of the work’s
completion ca. 1150, and paleographical evidence and stylistic comparisons, especially of
the costuming and armor that appears in certain miniatures of Part III.
20
Following the
comparative evidence available to them at the time, Baillet’s co-author, Puniet, narrowed
that window to 1160-1180 and suggested that the manuscript was produced in one of the
professional scriptoria in Trier, likely that of the monastery of St. Matthias / St.
Eucharius, with whose abbots Hildegard had a warm relationship.
21
Indeed, it is likely
that the monks of that scriptorium were kept busy in the latter half of the twelfth century
fulfilling some of the many eager requests that she appears to have gotten for copies of
her writings.
22
Furthermore, Baillet’s foundational study established that the scribes and
19
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 42-64 and 156-249.
20
Louis BAILLET, “Les miniatures du »Scivias« de Sainte Hildegarde,” Monuments et mémoires publiés
par l'Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres v. 19 (1911), pp. 49-149, at 139-43.
21
Ibid., pp. 133-9. Hildegard exchanged nearly a dozen letters with the community’s abbots and monks
over the years (Letters 209-220), as well as several letters with other communities in Trier (Letters 221-
222). She also preached one of her powerful sermons on the Feast of Pentecost, 1160, to the cathedral
clergy of the city, castigating them for their corruption and prophesying a remarkable future of renewal
and holiness (Letter 223r).
22
See Angela CARLEVARIS, Das Werk Hildegards von Bingen im Spiegel des Skriptoriums von Trier
St. Eucharius (Trier: Paulinus, 1999). For the fulsome praise that Hildegard received from correspondants

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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the painters (there were likely three of the former, along with two rubricators, and as
many as seven of the latter) must have worked closely with one another, as the hand that
wrote the inscriptions on several images is the same as one of the scribes of the main text.
Finally, the rough layout of the images was clearly planned before the writing of the text,
as the layout of the final chapter headings for each vision into one column or into two is
determined by the size and shape of each miniature that follows them.
23
In addition to Baillet’s, there were two other major studies of the manuscript and its
images completed before its disappearance in 1945. Hiltgart Keller’s dissertation work,
begun in 1928 and completed in 1933, is of particular importance for the precise and
copious descriptions she gives of each miniature.
24
Unfortunately, its publication in
Stuttgart in 1933 was in typescript with hand-drawn figures, and it has remained too little
read and too little cited by most scholars since that time.
25
Keller, too, recognized the
tight connections between manuscripts produced in the scriptoria at Trier and certain
features of the Rupertsberg manuscript, especially in the paleography and the slightly
old-fashioned style of the decorated initials.
26
Yet, the time she spent pouring over the
manuscript left her convinced that its unique images could only have been conceived
under the direct influence of Hildegard’s powerful personality. Based on a report of
Guibert of Gembloux from 1177 that indicated that the nuns of her abbey were involved
in the production of books, Keller was the first to suggest that the illustrations may have
been produced, not in Trier, but in Hildegard’s own scriptorium on the Rupertsberg, the
independent abbey that she established in 1150 after a two-year battle to free herself and
the community of women around her from their ancillary confines at the men’s house of
Disibodenberg.
27
Ultimately, she concluded that the text itself may have been copied in
the Abbey of St. Matthias / St. Eucharius in Trier, but that the paintings must have
originated under Hildegard’s supervision at the Rupertsberg. But when?
who eagerly devoured her writings, see e.g. Letter 200, from the Abbot Gero of Salem, ca. 1165-1173;
similarly, Guibert thanks the nuns of the Rupertsberg for sending his community a copy of Liber Vitae
Meritorum in ca. 1176 (Letter 108a).
23
BAILLET, “Les miniatures du »Scivias« de Sainte Hildegarde,” p. 132.
24
Hiltgart KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien in Handschriften aus dem Kreise der Hiltgart von
Bingen (Stuttgart: Surkamp, 1933).
25
I have worked from a photocopy I made of the copy held by the Seminar für Lateinische Philologie des
Mittelalters und der Neuzeit at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität, Münster, which was itself a
photocopy made by Christel Meier from one of the few original copies held in the Stadtsbibliothek Trier.
26
Ibid., pp. 132-6.
27
Ibid., pp. 127-8. Guibert wrote of the nuns: “In claustro decenter cum silentio sedentes, lectioni et
discendo cantui suo student; et…privatis diebus, per officinas competentes, vel scribendis libris, vel
texendis stolis, vel aliis operibus manuum intendunt.” (In Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis, ed. J.-B. PITRA
[Monte Cassino: Typis Sacri Montis Casinensis, 1882], p. 406.) As we will see below, there may, in fact,
be an important connection between the nuns textile and book production. On the move from the
Disibodenberg to the Rupertsberg, see John VAN ENGEN, “Abbess: ‘Mother and Teacher’,” in Voice of
the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara NEWMAN (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1998), pp. 30-51, at 37-41.

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Fig. 1: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 1r: Author portrait
accompanying the Protestificatio. From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
Keller narrowed the window of production to the last few years of Hildegard’s life,
after the death of her long-time and beloved secretary, Volmar, in 1173, and coinciding
with the arrival of her long-time admirer, Guibert, to take up the position of secretary in
1177, a position he held until 1180, a few months after her death. She believed that
Hildegard used the opening image of the manuscript (fol. 1r: Fig. 1), an author portrait to
accompany the Protestificatio, as a personal memorial to Volmar.
28
Rather than the
standard scribe imagery employed, for example, in the Salem Scivias Codex or the Lucca
manuscript of the Liber Divinorum Operum, in this image, Volmar leans intimately in
through the window that separates him from the sanctified space in which Hildegard sits,
bathed by the warming tongues of divine fire.
29
Keller further proposed several pieces of
evidence that would indicate that particular features of illustrating Scivias were on
Hildegard’s mind in the early 1170’s. For example, in the second vision of the Liber
Divinorum Operum (completed between 1172 and 1174, around the time of Volmar’s
death), Hildegard describes a vision of the cosmos as, “a wheel, wonderful to see (…)
28
KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien, pp. 24-25.
29
There is only one manuscript of Hildegard’s final work, Liber Divinorum Operum, to contain
illustrations: the early thirteenth-century Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, MS 1942. Madeline CAVINESS has
suggested its illustrations may, however, also be based on sketches and designs that Hildegard made
before her death: “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’,” pp. 121-3.

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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[that] was nearly like that instrument that I had seen twenty-eight years before, signified
in the shape of an egg, as shown in the third vision of the book Scivias.” The later
interpretation of this specific point of comparison assures us that both images are
appropriate, but for different reasons.
30
This refers, of course, to the image of the cosmos
in the shape of an egg in Scivias I.3 (image on fol. 14r).
31
As we will see below,
Hildegard makes another reference to an image from Scivias—of the Trinity (II.2, Fig.
5)—in a famous letter she wrote to Guibert in 1175, a short time before he joined her.
32
Keller’s late dating of the manuscript received additional support in Albert Derolez’s
1998 overview of the manuscript transmission of Hildegard’s works. He bases his initial
arguments not on the images but on the peculiar structure of the Rupertsberg
manuscript’s text. By placing the chapter lists before each individual vision rather than
grouped together before each of the three main parts, it “differs from the arrangement of
all other early manuscripts of this text, made on the Rupertsberg and elsewhere.” He
further notes that the main scribe of the Rupertsberg Scivias shares affinities with one of
the correctors of the Ghent manuscript of the Liber Divinorum Operum, which dates from
the early 1170’s. Indeed, he seems to suggest that the Liber Divinorum Operum’s
theological scheme may have had a direct influence on the conception of the Rupertsberg
manuscript’s images, especially in the places where they differ from the text. He thus
posits a date for the manuscript of between 1175 and 1180.
33
The other principal study of the manuscript executed before its loss was that of Josef
Schomer, published in 1937. This study is most valuable for articulating his theory of the
illustrations as a “künstlerische Neuschöpfung”—artistically innovative in ways that are
very unusual for medieval art, precisely because Hildegard built entirely new images
around traditional theological concepts.
34
In dating the manuscript’s production, however,
he mainly followed Baillet’s conclusions: between 1150 and 1180, in the scriptoria of
Trier, most likely St. Matthias / St. Eucharius. Although he did consider Guibert’s
30
HILDEGARDIS BINGENSIS, Liber Divinorum Operum, ed. Albert DEROLEZ and Peter DRONKE,
CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996): I.2 (Vision) and I.2.3: “[R]ota mirifice visionis apparuit (…) huius
fere similitudinis ut instrumentum illud, quod ante viginti octo annos velut in figura ovi significative
videram, quomodo in tercia visione libri Scivias ostenditur.”
31
KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien, p. 27. Keller also suggested that working on the miniature
for Scivias I.1, in which the iron-grey mountain upon which God is enthroned is full of windows from
which little faces peek out, influenced her choice to invoke the image of “the windows of the celestial
Jerusalem” in a letter to Abbot Dieter of Maulbronn. However, the revised dating of this letter in the
modern edition places its composition in the early 1150’s, just after the original completion of Scivias,
rather than Keller’s date of 1170/1 (Letter 171, in Epistolarium II, pp. 389-90; trans. Letters of Hildegard
of Bingen, vol. 2, p. 130).
32
Letter 103r, in Epistolarium II, p. 253; trans. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, vol. 2, p. 24.
33
Albert DEROLEZ, “The Manuscript Transmission of Hildegard of Bingen’s Writings: The State of the
Problem,” in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles BURNETT and
Peter DRONKE (London: Warburg Institute, 1998), pp. 17-28, at p. 24.
34
Josef SCHOMER, Die Illustrationen zu den Visionen der hl. Hildegard als künstlerische Neuschöpfung
(Das Verhältnis der Illustrationen zueinander und zum Texte) (Bonn: Stodieck, 1937).

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description of the nuns engaged in the copying of books, he believed that if they were
also involved in illustrating them at the level found in the Rupertsberg manuscript,
Guibert would have said so explicitly.
35
Definitive evidence that the manuscript was produced at the Rupertsberg, however,
was recognized by two nuns of the modern Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Marianna
Schrader and Adelgundis Führkötter, in their magisterial 1956 study, Die Echtheit des
Schrifttums der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen.
36
In addition to finally clearing away the
doubts that had long clouded Hildegard’s definitive authorship of the various works
ascribed to her, they recognized that the principal scribe of the Rupertsberg manuscript
was the same as the principal scribe of the abbey’s ledger book and necrology, where that
scribe’s contributions to the former run through 1195.
37
Furthermore, they argued that a
correction that appears in the text of the Protestificatio to add the specific detail that
Hildegard was forty-two years and seven months (septemque mensium) old at the time of
the divine command to write, could only have come from Hildegard herself.
38
Nevertheless, they maintained Baillet’s suggested dating of 1160-1180. When Führkötter
collaborated with Angela Carlevaris to critically edit Scivias for the Corpus
Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis (published in 1978), their introduction offered an
estimated date of 1165, but acknowledged the range suggested by Baillet. They also
confirmed the assumption that the correction of Hildegard’s age must indicate her
supervision of the manuscript.
39
Furthermore, they followed Schomer’s analysis to
conclude that Hildegard was “the spiritual creator of the design of the manuscript’s
images.”
40
Nevertheless, they maintained Baillet’s conclusion that the miniatures were
likely painted by monks of St. Matthias / St. Eucharius in Trier—perhaps following the
observations of Josepha Knipps, the artist at the Abbey of St. Hildegard responsible for
painting the images in the facsimile upon which we now rely, who believed categorically
that the miniatures must have been painted by men rather than women. They concluded
their discussion of the miniatures with a note of caution, however, concerning the
thereunto unchallenged assumption of Hildegard’s supervisory role in the manuscript’s
design, based on the recent work of Christel Meier.
41
35
Ibid., pp. 7-13.
36
Marianna SCHRADER and Adelgundis FÜHRKÖTTER Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der heiligen
Hildegard von Bingen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1956).
37
Ibid., pp. 44 and 30. They also identified a third scribe from the Scivias manuscript (Hand C), to whom
they attribute the inscription on the miniature on fol. 86v as well as parts of the necrology.
38
Ibid., p. 46.
39
“Einführung” to Scivias, ed. FÜHRKÖTTER and CARLEVARIS, CCCM 43, pp. xix and xxxii-xxxiii.
40
Ibid., p. xxxv: “Somit ist Hildegard nicht nur die Verfasserin der Texte der Scivias, sondern auch die
geistige Urheberin bei der Gestaltung der Miniaturen dieser Handschrift.”
41
Ibid., p. xxxiv-xxxvi. Unfortunately, the major work on the relationship between text and image in all
of the illustrated manuscripts of Hildegard’s works to which Führkötter and Carlevaris refer in n. 72 as
forthcoming from Meier (Text und Werk im überlieferten Werk Hildegards von Bingen), to which Meier

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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Meier’s pioneering work in exploring the visual vocabularies of a variety of
(especially neoplatonic) medieval authors has included several key contributions to the
study of Hildegard’s work.
42
Although she has never undertaken to establish different
criteria for dating the Rupertsberg manuscript, she has approached it with a newly critical
eye, refusing to assume a priori that the images must have been designed by Hildegard
herself—an assumption she has found suspect, based on its implications of Romantic and
modern notions of the solitary artistic genius, an approach foreign to medieval
sensibilities.
43
Furthermore, Meier has held firmly that the numerous places where the
images in the Rupertsberg manuscript diverge from or even contradict the vision text are
an indication that “they are not simply to be imagined as overseen by Hildegard.”
44
Her
most important contribution has been to explore the ways in which the images operate
within (and against) the established iconographical traditions of medieval Christian art,
thus helping to spring them from the art historical isolation (as Saurma-Jeltsch would
later term it) into which they had been placed by assumptions of their unique creativity.
In setting the images into conversation with traditional visual vocabularies and
discourses—and particularly in using the images in the Salem Codex of the work as
comparanda to understand how different artists would use those vocabularies in different
ways to interpret the text—Meier opened up the possibility of understanding the images
as attempts at critical interpretation of Hildegard’s vision texts. Indeed, the different paths
taken by the Rupertsberg and Salem artists are possible precisely because Hildegard’s
work offers multiple possibilities of intertextuality and intervisuality.
Meier’s challenge to critically examine the images in those wider contexts has been
taken up in the last two decades by Lieselotte Saurma-Jeltsch, whose 1998 study of the
manuscript’s miniatures provides the fullest attempt to date at just such a critical,
contextual examination.
45
By reevaluating all of the evidence put forth for dating the
Rupertsberg manuscript, Saurma-Jeltsch has concluded that it was most likely produced
in the decade after Hildegard’s death in 1179, likely as part of the other projects
undertaken at that point—the compilation of her opera omnia in the Riesenkodex, and the
composition of her saintly Vita and the testimonies included in the Acta Canonizationis
later forwarded to Rome—to ensure the recognition and remembrance of Hildegard’s
herself made reference in her chapter on the same subject (“Zum Verhältnis von Text und Illustration im
überlieferten Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” pp. 159-69, at p. 159, n. 1, in the 1979 Festschrift Hildegard
von Bingen, 1179-1979. Festschrift zum 800. Todestag der Heiligen, ed. Anton Ph. BRÜCK [Mainz:
Selbstverlag der Gesellschaft für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte]), never seems to have appeared.
42
See esp. Christel MEIER, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen.”
Frühmittelalterliche Studien v. 6 (1972), pp. 245-355.
43
MEIER, “Zum Verhältnis von Text und Illustration,” pp. 159-61.
44
MEIER, “Calcare caput draconis,” p. 385: “[A]uch der illustrierte Rupertsberger Kodex, in dessen
Miniaturen sich trotz seiner genauen Wiedergabe der Visionstexte gleichwohl zahlreiche Abweichungen
von diesen finden, ist, was die Entstehung der Bilder angeht, nicht einfach als von Hildegard überwacht
vorzustellen.”
45
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen.

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prophetic sanctity.
46
The paleographical evidence of the Rupertsberg ledger, upon which
Führkötter and Schrader relied to secure the Scivias manuscript’s production at
Hildegard’s abbey, establishes an absolute terminus ante quem at 1195—but, Saurma-
Jeltsch argues, there is no reason on that basis alone to place the manuscript’s production
before Hildegard’s death in 1179. Furthermore, she argues, the correction to Hildegard’s
age in the Protestificatio is ambivalent—after all, if the visionary had overseen the
manuscript’s production, it is hard to see why the error would have been committed in the
first place.
47
Saurma-Jeltsch also questions whether the ever self-deprecating Hildegard
would have allowed the author portrait that opens the manuscript to be designed to
emphasize so boldly her unique claims to inspired authority.
48
The most consequential of Saurma-Jeltsch’s reconsiderations, however, is stylistic.
The sheer range of iconographical vocabularies to which the images owe a debt, as well
as the exacting workmanship, indicate the manuscript must have been produced in a
professional workshop with access to a wide variety of exemplars. Furthermore, when
compared to several securely-dateable manuscripts from the 1160’s through the 1190’s,
the stylistic features and vocabulary of forms argue for a later period of production, likely
the 1180’s. Particularly noteworthy is the absence of the trough-like drapery found in the
so-called Hildegard Gebetbuch, which was produced nearby, perhaps in Trier, in the
1170’s.
49
Instead, Saurma-Jeltsch notes a particular evolution in the drapery that points to
connections in the 1180’s with manuscripts produced at Andernach or Maria Laach, or
perhaps even Cologne.
50
While other scholars (most notably Madeline Caviness) have
emphasized various archaizing and conservative features, often to argue for an earlier
date, Saurma-Jeltsch confidently demonstrates that other evolutions in style can only
point to the last two decades of the twelfth century.
51
In contrast to the cautious approaches taken by Meier and Saurma-Jeltsch, Caviness
has argued strongly in the last two decades in favor of Hildegard’s authorship of the
images. Indeed, she has criticized many twentieth-century studies for allowing “a good
46
SAURMA-JELTSCH, “Die Rupertsberger »Scivias«-Handschrift,” pp. 353-4; eadem, Die Miniaturen,
p. 24.
47
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Dia Miniaturen, pp. 4-5.
48
Ibid., pp. 15-18.
49
On this manuscript, see the work of Elisabeth KLEMM, “Der Bilderzyklus im Hildegard-Gebetbuch,”
in the Commentary Vol. to Hildegard-Gebetbuch. Faksimileausgabe des Codex-Latinus Monacensis 935
der Bayrischen Staatsbibliothek (Wiesbaden, 1987), pp. 71-356.
50
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, pp. 6-11.
51
KELLER noted old-fashioned features in the initials, though her analysis also points to stronger
connections with Cologne than with Trier (Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien, pp. 131-6). For CAVINESS’
observations, see “Artist,” pp. 116-7; she posits the Sacramentary of Maria Laach (ca. 1160) as a stylistic
parallel, especially for the drapery. SAURMA-JELTSCH disputes this suggestion, arguing that while the
stiff drapery in the Sacramentary is simplistic, united to bodily form, and two-dimensional, the
Rupertsberg Scivias represents a later development of that style, with more movement and freedom from
the bodily form even while retaining the bold lines (Die Miniaturen, p. 10).

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deal of vagueness and confusion” to obscure the question by referring to the images as
“inspired” by Hildegard, but by refusing to actually name her as their master designer.
52
Such equanimity smacks, for Caviness, of earlier interpretative moves that sought to
minimize Hildegard’s intellectual contributions. To the lengthy list of Hildegard’s
“logocentric” accomplishments that modernity has finally recognized, Caviness strives
definitively to add “making pictures” and to declare her perhaps the only true “great
master” of the Middle Ages.
53
Though never claiming for her the actual role of painter, Caviness posits that
Hildegard was directly responsible for all other stages of the images’ design. She
interprets the repeated divine command of Scribe! in the Protestificatio as “a single verb
to connote her setting down, or drafting, or sketching, the words and pictures.” Taking
the author portrait that accompanies the Protestificatio (Fig. 1) as direct evidence of
Hildegard’s compositional process, she believes that Hildegard would have sketched the
outlines of her visionary images on the wax tablet in her own hands, while “more or less
simultaneously” dictating the text to Volmar, who can be seen copying down the
dictation on loose parchment leaves.
54
The dimensions of the wax tablet would then
account, for example, for the large number of illustrations that are contained in tall but
rather narrow frames, and the borders of the frames would correspond to the thin wooden
frame in which the wax had been poured.
55
These initial sketches therefore originated
with the genesis of the work itself in the 1140’s, and then later served as the basis for the
designs of the images in the manuscript. Thus, Caviness resists the temptation of later
scholars to push the date of the manuscript’s production as late as possible, arguing that
the date of 1165 proposed by Führkötter and Carlevaris is sufficient, or even possibly a
little late.
56
To support this theory, Caviness turns to a suggestion first made by the early-
twentieth century historian of science, Charles Singer, and later popularized by one of the
twentieth century’s greatest neuroscientists, Oliver Sachs: that Hildegard’s visionary
experiences can be understood through the pathology of a particular type of migraine
aura called “scintillating scotoma”.
57
Because Caviness herself suffers from this same
52
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp. 77-9.
53
Madeline CAVINESS, “Hildegard of Bingen: German Author, Illustrator, and Musical Composer,
1098-1179,” in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
1997), pp. 685-7.
54
CAVINESS, “Artist,” p. 115; see also eadem, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp.
87-91. KELLER also suggested that, in the context of Guibert of Gembloux’s description of the nuns’
activities on the Rupertsberg, scribere could mean all aspects of book production (Mittelrheinische
Buchmalereien, p. 127).
55
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp. 90-1; eadem, “Hildegard as
Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” p. 32.
56
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” p. 73; eadem, “Artist,” pp. 116-7.
57
See Charles Joseph SINGER, From Magic to Science, Essays on the Scientific Twilight (London: E.
Benn, 1928), pp. 199-239; idem, Studies in the History and Method of Science (London: W. Dawson &

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Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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physical malady, she is in a good position to notice the ways in which the illustrations
evoke the experience. Indeed, Caviness’ own migraine auras have been triggered by
viewing the shimmering effects of the images, which first inspired Singer to investigate
whether Hildegard might have experienced the flashes of light and jagged-edged,
contrastive architectural shapes that appear in the visual field of patients recorded in the
pathology of scintillating scotoma. The widespread use of silver and gold in the
manuscript, together with a preference for setting off particular shapes on a highly
contrastive palette of blacks, greys, and purples, highlighted with white stippling in the
outlines, contributes to an extraordinarily dynamic visual movement in different parts of
the images. A particularly impressive example of this is the image of the falling stars
accompanying Scivias III.1 (fol. 123r, Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 123r: III.1, The Fallen Stars (Angels).
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
Caviness suggests that these dynamic stars, which are very different from other
illustrations of the fallen angels as stars in contemporary Apocalypse illustrations, are
Sons, 1955), pp. 1-55; and Oliver W. SACKS, Migraine: Understanding a Common Disorder (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), pp. 55-8 and 106-9.

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similar to “the phosphenes or scintillating scotoma (…) of migraine auras.”
58
While she is
careful not to reduce Hildegard’s intellectual accomplishments to a physiological cause,
Caviness does believe that the migraine auras likely offered a point of departure for the
visionary’s theological imagination.
59
2.3. The Relationship between Vision, Text, and Image
As a result of her daring suggestion of the simultaneous origins of the visual and
textual records of Hildegard’s visionary experiences, Caviness has charted a middle
course between the main approaches that have dominated the interpretation of the
relationship between the images in the Rupertsberg manuscript, Hildegard’s visionary
experiences, and the text. On the one hand, she presumes that the images originate with
Hildegard herself. On the other hand, she rejects the notion that the images are based on
and thus posterior to the textual record, which she claims is the naïve consequence of “the
logocentricity of our discursive practices”, which often prevent us from recognizing
places where “visual thinking” takes priority.
60
By springing the images from the
confines of the vision text, she embraces the notion that, insofar as they are different from
it, they can anticipate the allegorical interpretations provided in the exegetical text, adapt
existing iconographical codes into new meanings, and “add information that is not in the
text (or that is a corrective to it).”
61
This allows Caviness to interpret ruptures between
text and image as components of a creative dynamic in which Hildegard has mediated her
experience into two different discourses, each following its own internal logic and
vocabulary. In this sense, she follows some of the critically interpretative modes opened
up by the work of Meier and Saurma-Jeltsch, while simultaneously maintaining that
Hildegard designed the images as a personal record of her visions. The most important of
Caviness’ suggestions, in this regard, is the way in which the images emphasize the
power and divinity of the feminine, often in ways that are far more “subversive” than the
texts they parallel.
62
58
CAVINESS, “Artist,” pp. 113-4. See also eadem, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,”
pp. 84-6; and eadem, “Hildegard as Designer,” pp. 33-4.
59
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” p. 87.
60
CAVINESS, “Artist,” p. 111. For a different perspective that analyzes the privileged importance of the
visual over the auditory in constructing medieval mystical authority, see Anita OBERMEIER and
Rebecca KENNISON, “The Privileging of Visio over Vox in the Mystical Experiences of Hildegard of
Bingen and Joan of Arc,” Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997), pp. 137–167.
61
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” p. 73; eadem, “Artist,” pp. 115-20.
62
This argument runs throughout all of CAVINESS’ contributions: “Gender Symbolism and Text Image
Relationships,” “Hildegard of Bingen: German Author, Illustrator, and Musical Composer, 1098-1179,”
“Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” and “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at
Once’.”

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The older approach, against whose “logocentrism” Caviness reacts, assumed that the
images illustrate the vision text directly, thus necessitating what Schomer called a
“Neuschöpfung”:
This term designates the fact that motifs that were already known in
medieval iconography were cast into different forms by Hildegard, and thus
had to be illustrated by the painter in a different way. (…) Hildegard
employed symbolic forms and images for her visionary renderings that,
though solidly anchored in Scripture and tradition, nevertheless were
completely unprecedented. Only the fundamental idea that lies at the root of
the image is retained: the form of its rendering is new.
63
Schomer recognized that Hildegard’s visions presented a particular difficulty to the
medieval painter, because so much of their visual content had no traditional precedent.
He believed that the painter of the Rupertsberg manuscript thus strived to reproduce the
images described in the vision texts as closely as possible, and only reached for stock
images from the iconographical tradition when exact details were lacking.
64
Thus, he
suggests that in places where the images omit details found in the text, it is because it
would have been too complex and difficult to illustrate them—for example, details that
change in the course of a vision, or areas of the vision field that are described in detail too
magnified to fit in the miniature. At the same time, there are several places where the
illustrations seem to go further than the text, in the direction of newly invented forms,
rather than conforming to standard iconographies.
65
Schomer finds it hard to believe that
a painter would have taken it upon himself to make such changes in a project that
otherwise seems to follow the text so meticulously. Thus, he suggests the possibility “that
Hildegard herself stood behind the illustration of her work and that in those places where
it seemed, for whatever reason, enigmatic, allowed the literal text to be disregarded.”
66
In
this way, the visionary’s peculiar spirit lies behind the extraordinary images. He
concluded: “We are faced by the astounding fact that, despite medieval art’s strong
reliance on tradition and despite their unwavering adherence to received teachings as
63
SCHOMER, Die Illustrationen zu den Visionen der hl. Hildegard als künstlerische Neuschöpfung, p.
58: “Das Wort Neuschöpfung ist einmal so zu verstehen, daß Gegenstände, die in der mittelalterlichen
Ikonographie bekannt waren, von Hildegard anders geformt und infolgedessen vom Maler auch anders
dargestellt worden sind. (...) Hildegard dagegen hat für ihre Darstellungen, die in Schrift und Lehrgut fest
verankert waren, symbolische Formen und Bilder gefunden, die dem Mittelalter gänzlich unbekannt
waren. Nur die den Darstellungen zugrunde liegende Idee ist erhalten geblieben, die Form der Darstellung
ist neu.”
64
Ibid., pp. 26-7.
65
Ibid., pp. 30-33.
66
Ibid., p. 61: “Ich möchte aus diesen Gründen für wahrscheinlich halten, daß Hildegard selbst hinter der
Illustration ihres Werkes steht und daß sie dort, wo es ihr aus irgendeinem Grunde ratsam schien, den
Text außer acht gelassen hat.”

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elaborated in the theological schools, Hildegard’s literary products were able to produce
an iconography that departed from tradition and upon which the medieval tradition
exerted only a minor and fleeting influence.”
67
Although it had appeared four years before his own work, Schomer does not appear to
have consulted Keller’s meticulously detailed study, which for every miniature provides
cross-references to a wealth of iconographical and stylistic comparanda (in multiple
media, including enamel work), matched again only by Saurma-Jeltsch’s comprehensive
effort at the end of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Keller also came away with the
consistent impression when making such comparisons that the images in Hildegard’s
manuscript are unique counterparts to Hildegard’s unique visionary style. Thus, she could
conclude, for example, that the subtleties of the image of Synagogue (fol. 35r, I.5; Fig.
13) are so “powerfully expressive of suffering”—in contrast to more traditional
iconography—and “so belie the notion of an illustration mechanically reproducing the
text, that one could even say that it is, as it were, a visual correction executed under the
eyes of Hildegard herself.”
68
However, this move to privilege the images’ design, to set them apart as something
unique, has come under significant criticism. The studies of Meier and Saurma-Jeltsch
have warned against the danger inherent in privileging the images, strange as they may at
first seem, as the unique product of the romanticized artistic and visionary genius.
69
Twentieth-century scholarship moved early on to spring Hildegard’s written work from
the contextual isolation into which its own efforts to establish and maintain its visionary
and prophetic authority had placed it.
70
Yet, the images remained for a long time stranded
67
Ibid., pp. 58-9: “So stehen wir also hier vor der erstaunlichen Tatsache, daß trotz der stärken
Traditionsgebundenheit der mittelalterlichen Kunst und trotz ihres unbeirrbaren Festhaltens an
überkommenen
und in den theologischen Schulen sich weiterentwickelnden Lehren Hildegards literarische Produkte
imstande gewesen sind, eine von der Überlieferung abweichende Ikonographie zu erzeugen, auf die die
mittelalterliche einen verschwindend geringen Einfluß ausgeübt hat.”
68
KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalerein, p. 44: “Dennoch ist bei der Synagoge ein überzeugend
schmerzlicher Ausdruck erreicht. (...) Der Eindruck gerade dieser [blaß-violetten] Farbe ist so stark und
spricht so sehr gegen eine mechanisch wiederholende Illsutration nach dem Text, daß man sagen möchte,
sie ist sozusagen visuell korrigiert und eben unter den Augen der Hiltgart selbst entstanden. ”
69
See, e.g., MEIER, “Zum Verhältnis von Text und Illustration,” pp. 159-160; and SAURMA-JELTSCH,
“Die Rupertsberger »Scivias«-Handschrift,” p. 341.
70
The most important early work in this movement was Hans LIEBESCHÜTZ, Das allegorische
Weltbild der Heiligen Hildegard von Bingen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1930);
important milestones thereafter can be found in the work of Peter DRONKE, esp. “Problemata
Hildegardiana,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, v. 16 (1981), pp. 97-131; and several important essay
collections: Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles BURNETT and Peter
DRONKE (London: The Warburg Institute, 1998); Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and
Her World, ed. Barbara NEWMAN (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998); and Hildegard von
Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred HAVERKAMP (Mainz: Trierer Historische
Forschungen, 2000).

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by their seemingly artistic isolation. The motivation to treat them almost as talismans of
Hildegard’s visionary connection to the divine has been strongest in the popular
reception, where the images are often called “mandalas” and treated as if their
composition were trans- or even ahistorical.
71
In breaking down the iconographical barriers that approaches like Schomer’s built around
the manuscript’s images, Meier and Saurma-Jeltsch have opened up new ways of
interpreting the functions of the images in the manuscript by looking at the various visual
vocabularies on which they draw. For example, in studying the image that accompanies
Scivias II.1 (fol. 41v, Fig. 3), Meier begins, not with the text, but with the image alone, to
see what it is trying to communicate.
72
The allure of the image is immediately striking: it
draws the viewer in, inviting us to try to understand it. But using traditional
iconographical, allegorical, and exegetical tropes, Meier can, in fact, understand most of
the image’s content—despite Schomer’s insistence that the images are radically
innovative, they actually utilize a variety of preexisting vocabularies. The medallion that
appears in the middle of the image contains a familiar set of six smaller scenes, easily
identifiable as the six days of creation described in Genesis. As soon as the viewer
recognizes this trope, other pieces of the image fall into place. The concentric circles of
blue and gold that echo above the hexaemeral medallion take the same position that, in
comparable compositions, would be held by the Creator overseeing his creation. The
theological mind might then connect the use of silver and gold to the light of the world
that the Prologue to John’s Gospel identifies as the Word through which the world was
created. A bit more digging in the commentary tradition—including one of most
important works for medieval exegesis, Gregory the Great’s Moralia—helps the viewer
to recognize the various stars that appear in the dark brown and black spaces filling the
middle of the image as the patriarchs and prophets, their lesser lights foretelling the
“dayspring from on high”, the coming of Christ, to the dark night of fallen humanity.
This connection then lays plain the meaning of the golden figure below, his hand
outstretched in the traditional gesture of Christ the Savior. Only one significant detail of
the image—the man sniffing a flower in the upper right—remains impenetrable to such
analysis, at which point one must turn to the text for answers. The text, in turn, confirms
some of the insights that visual analysis alone provided, but appears to contradict others:
for example, the vision text describes, not the six days of creation that appear in the
middle of the image, but the blazing fire of the divinity hammering upon the dark sphere
of the atmosphere like a blacksmith, striking sparks from it “until that atmosphere was
perfected and so Heaven and earth stood fully formed and resplendent” (Scivias II.1,
Vision). Meier interprets these differences as “equivalents” that replace vision elements
71
See n. 4 above. Although this popular use of the Rupertsberg manuscript’s images has often lapsed into
abuse, their dazzling visionary quality has also sparked a number of artistic tributes to the Visionary
Doctor. For a particularly striking example, see the work of Michael O’Neill McGRATH, described in
“Faith Circles,” America Magazine, October 22, 2012, accessed online on September 1, 2013:
http://americamagazine.org/issue/5155/art/faith-circles
72
MEIER, “Zum Verhältnis von Text und Illustration,” pp. 161-5.

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that would be too difficult to visualize in book painting with elements that impart a
similar meaning drawn from traditional sources known to the painter. The images are
complex and unusual, to be sure—but they are not nearly as innovatively impenetrable to
iconographical and allegorical analysis as Schomer concluded.
Fig. 3: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 41v: II.1, Creation, Fall, and Redemption.
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
For Meier, the importance of pursuing such visual analysis lies in “studying on a
broad basis the types of transformation from word into image, [to] further gain general
insights into the translation from textual syntax to visual syntax, from linguistic structure
to image structure, from one semantic system to another.”
73
Ultimately, she concludes
that the images in the Rupertsberg manuscript function as both a celebration of the
work’s inspired authority and as a means of offering the reader (“dem Leser”) a way to
73
Ibid., pp. 167-8: “Im Vergleich der Illustrationen mit dem Text und untereinander, soweit sie parallel
verlaufen oder gleiche Gegenstände darstellen, können auf breiterer Grundlage die Arten der
Transformation von Wort ins Bild studiert werden bis hin zu generellen Einsichten in die Umwandlung
von Textsyntax in Bildsyntax, von Sprachstruktur in Bildstruktur, von einem semantischen System also in
ein anderes—unter den Bedingungen einer betstimmten Epoche.”

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make the work’s difficult visionary descriptions a bit easier to understand by employing a
visual vocabulary they may already be familiar with. Yet, she remains skeptical of their
independent discursive value. For Meier, the images are always based on the text.
Furthermore, in schematizing the ways in which images can translate allegorical texts in
which there is both a signifier (res significans) and a signified (significatum), she limits
the function of the Rupertsberg images to illustrating the signifiers alone, i.e. the visual
details of each vision text, but not its allegorical interpretations.
74
Ultimately, this is why
the images must, in some cases, diverge from the text and, further, why Meier does not
consider Hildegard’s hand in their design. Her analysis of Hildegard’s allegorical mode
suggests that often, details of the vision texts themselves are confusing to the point of
incoherence, when taken literally, because the coherence of their meaning depends, not
on their relationship to one another, but to their allegorical significations.
75
By assuming
that the visual composition can only operate univocally, Meier concludes that it must
remain at least partially foreign to an equivocal textual composition, making a complete
complementarity between text and image both impossible and futile.
76
Saurma-Jeltsch, while following Meier’s lead in exploring the various iconographical
and formal traditions that were adapted, referenced, or alluded to in the creation of the
images, seems to allow for a freer movement between literal and allegorical, concrete and
universal, in their interpretative function. A particularly important feature of the language
of Hildegard’s work, both written and visual, is its polyvalent intertextuality and
intervisuality—its ability to bring multiple different layers of previous images and ideas
to mind. Drawing on Heinrich Schipperges’ identification of the relationship between the
key concepts of vita, verbum, and opus in Hildegard’s thought and their dynamic
movement from conceptual to concrete and back, as well as Meier’s application of this to
Hildegard’s color vocabulary, Saurma-Jeltsch suggests that the illustrations also operate
along that dynamic continuum between conceptual and concrete as they work to illustrate
the vision text.
77
That interpretative process means that, even in the most literally
illustrated visions, the miniatures contribute to the meaning of the text through their
74
Ibid., pp. 165-7.
75
Christel MEIER, “Zwei Modelle von Allegorie im 12. Jahrhunder: Das allegorische Verfahren
Hildegars von Bingen und Alans von Lille,” in Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie, ed. Walter HAUG
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), pp. 70-89, at p. 78.
76
MEIER’s schema for the ways in which images can interpret allegorical texts is threefold: Either (1) the
image represents the signifier alone; (2) the image represents the signified alone; or (3) the image
represents both together, but only through multiple types of representation. (“Zum Verhältnis von Text
und Illustration,” p. 166.) She does not consider the possibility that a visual component could represent
both meanings simultaneously. See further Sec. III, “Color and Theological Meaning in the Rupertsberg
Scivias,” below.
77
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, p. 15, referencing Heinrich SCHIPPERGES, ed. and trans.,
Hildegard von Bingen: Welt und Mensch. Das Buch »De operatione Dei«. Aus dem Genter Kodex
(Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1965), pp. 335ff.; and MEIER, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards
von Bingen,” p. 230.

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visual form. As she concludes, “The illustrations ought not to be understood as
equivalents to the vision, but rather as the first representative of their interpretation. In no
way can they claim to be perceived or understood on their own; rather, they also point
back to the text itself. Without the text, the images, like the vision itself, remain
incomprehensible.”
78
3. The Function of the Images as Theological Discourse
Two fundamental problems confront the interpretative study of Hildegard’s visionary
work, whether written or visual: first, the nature of her visionary experiences, the
theological truths revealed through them, and the ways in which these are represented
textually and visually; and second, the effort that went into constructing and maintaining
the unique authority of her visionary charism.
79
An essential element in understanding
Hildegard’s writings is her experience of the visions that, she says, she laid down word-
for-word in Scivias and her other books. She described the “mode of her seeing” in her
famous letter to Guibert of Gembloux in 1175, in a passage that became instantly so
important that it was later gathered into the autobiographical sections of her Vita (I.8):
Since my infancy, however, when I was not yet strong in my bones and
nerves and veins, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even till now,
when I am more than seventy years old. And as God wills, in this vision my
spirit mounts upwards, into the height of the firmament and into changing
air, and dilates itself among different nations, even though they are in far-
off regions and places remote from me. And because I see these things in
such a manner, for this reason I also behold them in changing forms of
clouds and other created things. But I hear them not with my physical ears,
nor with my heart’s thoughts, nor do I perceive them by bringing any of my
five senses to bear—but only in my soul, my physical eyes open, so that I
78
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, p. 23: “Die Darstellungen dürften also nicht zu verstehen sein
als ein Äquivalent zur Schau, sondern eher als gleichsam erste Stellungnahme zu deren Interpretation. In
keiner Weise erheben sie den Anspruch, atonom rezipiert zu werden, sondern sie wollen im Gegenteil auf
den Text selbst zurückverweisen. Ohne ihn bleiben sie, wie die Schau selbst, dem Verständnis entzogen.”
79
On the first issue, see especially Peter DRONKE, Women Writers of the Middle Ages. A Critical Study
of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),
pp. 145-7; Kathryn KERBY-FULTON, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 56-64; and Bernard McGINN, “Hildegard of Bingen as Visionary
and Exegete,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred HAVERKAMP (Mainz:
Trierer Historische Forschungen, 2000), pp. 321-50. On the second issue, see DRONKE, Women Writers,
pp. 147-56; Barbara NEWMAN, “Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation,” Church History v. 54
(1985), pp. 163-75; eadem, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 31-34; John VAN ENGEN, “Letters and the Public
Persona of Hildegard,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred HAVERKAMP
(Mainz: Trierer Historische Forschungen, 2000), pp. 375-418; and KERBY-FULTON, “Hildegard of
Bingen”, pp. 346-62.

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never suffer their failing in loss of consciousness [exstasis]; no, I see these
things wakefully, day and night. (…)
The brightness [lumen] that I see is not spatial, yet is far, far more lucent
than a cloud that envelops the sun. I cannot contemplate height or length or
breadth in it; and I call it “the shadow of the Living Light” [umbra viventis
lucis]. And as sun, moon and stars appear [mirrored] in water, so
Scriptures, discourses, virtues, and some works of men take form for me
and are reflected, radiant in this brightness.
Whatever I have seen or learnt in this vision, I retain the memory of it
for a long time, in such a way that, because I have at some time seen and
heard it, I can remember it; and I see, hear, and know simultaneously, and
learn what I know as if in a moment. But what I do not see I do not know,
for I am not learned. And the things I write [scribo] are those I see and hear
through the vision, nor do I set down [pono] words other than those that I
hear; I utter them in unpolished Latin, just as I hear them through the
vision, for in it I am not taught to write as philosophers write. And the
words I see and hear through the vision are not like words that come from
human lips, but like a sparkling flame and a cloud moved in pure air.
Moreover, I cannot know the form of this brightness [lumen] in any way,
just as I cannot gaze completely at the sphere of the sun.
And in that same brightness [lumen] I sometimes, not often, see another
light, which I call “the Living Light” [lux vivens]; when and how I see it, I
cannot express; and for the time I do see it, all sadness and anguish is taken
from me, so that then I have the air of an innocent young girl and not of a
little old woman.
80
Understanding Hildegard’s mode of seeing is essential to making sense of her
presentation of theology. As much as the words she records to explain her visions are
those she hears in her “soul alone” from the voice of God, the visions themselves and the
visual experience of them are the guiding principles of the explication and form the
essential skeleton on which Hildegard builds her powerful theology. Yet, her description
of a Living Light and its shadow, in which she sees and hears not with the exterior senses
but with some type of inner eye and ear, is incredibly difficult to categorize. Despite her
protestations that these are not experiences of the outer senses, she uses the visual
(sensual) vocabulary of light and its different behaviors to describe them: light that lifts
her up into the sky, where she and it are carried about by the refractions of air and clouds
that both glow and shadow; light that illuminates via reflections in water; the light of
sparkling flame, whose warmth (as she says in the Protestificatio of Scivias) caresses her
80
Letter 103r, in Epistolarium II, pp. 261-2; translation adapted from that in Peter DRONKE, Women
Writers, p. 168.

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mind.
81
Furthermore, as Peter Dronke has noted, Hildegard’s use of the term visio often
slides between “three related things: her peculiar faculty or capacity of vision; her
experience of this faculty; and the content of her experience.”
82
Medieval vision theory, which had its basis in distinctions drawn up by St. Augustine
in his commentary, De Genesi ad litteram (Book 12), differentiated between three basic
types: corporeal vision, which sees outward, physical appearances; spiritual vision, which
was inner seeing and imagination; and intellectual vision, which was a direct perception
of divine truth.
83
Hildegard’s visionary experiences themselves can be identified with
the second category of spiritual vision, which presumes that inner vision is still visual and
concrete; only at the further stage of intellectual vision does knowledge become
abstracted beyond that of physical representation. But as Bernard McGinn has noted,
Hildegard’s visions stretched these categories to the breaking point: her inner spiritual
vision used concrete visual images to reveal divine truths that, for traditionally-schooled
theologians, ought to be perceptible only after one’s mind has left the limitations of the
imagined entirely behind.
84
Often, the content of Hildegard’s visionary experiences was,
theoretically speaking, that of intellectual, not visual, contemplation. Though that last,
imageless type of contemplation had always been prized as the highest level of religious
experience, theologians especially of the later Middle Ages became highly suspicious of
“lower” visionary experiences, often because they relied too heavily on the seer’s own
visual imagination, rather than properly being gifts from God alone.
85
Indeed, this very
problem confronted the celebrated mystical Dominican preacher Johannes Tauler when,
more than a century after Hildegard’s death, he came face-to-face with the image
accompanying Scivias I.1 in the Rupertsberg manuscript (fol. 2r), of the One enthroned
upon the mountain streaming his blinding light down upon Hildegard, the pauper spiritu
(poor in spirit). In 1339, a copy of this image was to be found in the refectory of the nuns
of St. Gertrude in Cologne, and Tauler preached to them an extraordinary sermon about
it, in which he grapples deeply to come to terms with the ways in which Hildegard’s
81
In Liber Divinorum Operum III.3, Hildegard uses the images of shadow and mirror (in the surface of
water) to explore the dynamic between God’s eternal foreknowledge of all creation and then its
manifestation. See NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 51-5.
82
DRONKE, Women Writers, p. 146.
83
AUGUSTINUS, De Genesi ad Litteram, (PL 34, cols. 458-80); trans. J. H. TAYLOR, St. Augustine:
The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Books 7-12 (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 178-222. On
Augustine’s theory, see Margaret MILES, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint
Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions,” The Journal of Religion, v. 63 (1983), pp. 125-42; for an
overview of the relationship between medieval vision theory and art, see Cynthia HAHN, “Vision,” in A
Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad RUDOLPH
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 44-64.
84
McGINN, “Theologians as Trinitarian Iconographers,” p. 187; see also idem, “Hildegard of Bingen as
Visionary and Exegete,” pp. 321-50.
85
See Barbara NEWMAN, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in
Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum v. 80 (2005), pp. 1-43.

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visionary and prophetic insights could be paradoxically aligned with his own mystical
teachings, which stressed the imagelessness (“Bildlosigkeit”) of a true experience of
divine knowledge.
86
As with most of her attempts to describe the Living Light, in the letter to Guibert,
Hildegard fumbles though several metaphors and half-formed images, trying to express in
her “unpolished Latin” the practically ineffable experience. Yet, it is this sometimes
anxious search for words that makes Hildegard’s symbolic and poetic language so
vibrant. The humility formula of confessing her unlearned, “unpolished” Latin skills is
only partially a formula, for Hildegard’s Latin really was a bit roughshod. It was not the
elegant Latin learned by the schoolmen or the other, more celebrated Latin poets of her
time, like Hildebert of Lavardin, Adam of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, or Bernard
Silvestris.
87
Rather, it was the almost auto-didactic language she acquired in her teens and
twenties under the tutelage of Jutta and perhaps a few of the monks at the
Disibodenberg—enough to sing and pray the liturgy and to read Scripture and the other
writings available in the monastery library (which, judging from attempts to trace her
allusions, must have been fairly extensive), but not much more.
88
The consequence, however, is that Hildegard’s visionary and poetic language offers a
raw and unadorned power, its images deeply resonant precisely because they remain
unaffected. Without the learned tools of vocabulary and style available to a school
master, she must make her rudiments carry staggering depths of meaning. The images in
the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript reveal a similarly elastic approach: though
appropriating a wide array of traditional iconography, Hildegard’s designs reform and
reinvent visual vocabularies to dynamically express theological truths that stretch from
the universal, divine exemplar to the concretized image and back again. Newman has
described how this theologically poetic process dances through its series of images: “no
sooner does one of these yield its weight in concepts than the concepts dissolve into new
images, enhancing or correcting the first. The final product is less a doctrine than an
iconography, albeit rich with doctrinal meaning.”
89
86
Jeffrey F. HAMBURGER, “The ‘Various Writings of Humanity’: Johannes Tauler on Hildegard of
Bingen’s Liber Scivias,” in Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn STARKEY and
Horst WENZEL (New York, 2005), pp. 161-205. On the use of visual art objects to stimulate visionary
meditation, especially by women, in the later Middle Ages, see also idem, The Visual and the Visionary:
Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
87
Cf. Peter DRONKE, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000-1500
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 178-9; and NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 22-5.
88
For both the rich heritage of Hildegard’s allusions and the inherent problems in cataloguing them, see
LIEBESCHÜTZ, Das allegorische Weltbild der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen; and Peter Dronke, “The
Allegorical World-Picture of Hildegard of Bingen: Revaluations and New Problems,” pp. 1-16 in
Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles BURNETT and Peter DRONKE
(London: Warburg Institute, 1998), pp. 1-16.
89
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, p. 93.

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This symbolic mode of thinking, though inherited from the Church Fathers, was
particularly strong in certain primarily monastic circles in the twelfth century, and
Hildegard can be considered one of its greatest exponents. First termed “symbolist” by
the early twentieth-century German idealist Alois Dempf, in parallel to expressive modes
of early twentieth-century German art and poetry, it was picked up after the war in Horst
Dieter Rauh’s magisterial study of twelfth-century symbolist approaches to the Antichrist
and the theology of history.
90
In the current generation of Hildegard scholars, Kerby-
Fulton has been at the forefront of using this dynamic approach to understand
Hildegard’s visual and visionary approach to what Michael Curschmann has termed,
“imagined exegesis.”
91
This “leisurely, richly digressive, meditative approach” to the
Scriptures dug deep into the symbolic contours of its revelation of history to uncover and
connect correspondences or “concordances” across the Old Testament and into the New
Testament, which can then be understood prophetically to reveal within Scripture the life
of the Church beyond it.
92
This method of symbolism is in many ways the fullest
expression of the monastic theology, steeped in the rhythms of a scriptural and liturgical
life, described by Jean Leclercq and which Dempf set in opposition to scholasticism.
93
The hallmark of this mode of thinking is the way that it can pass effortlessly from one
symbolic allusion to the next, connecting word after word, image after image, symbol
after symbol, in sometimes surprising ways, constructing a vast web or network along
which the symbolist mind could dynamically dash and slide as it contemplated everything
in the light of the divine plan for salvation history. For Hildegard, this mode of thinking
was analogous to her “Platonizing cosmology”—the flow of emanation and return, the
cycle at the center of which is the Incarnation.
94
In this way, her visionary experiences
90
Alois DEMPF, Sacrum Imperium. Geschichts- und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der
politischen Renaissance (Munich & Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1929), pp. 229-68, and for Hildegard, esp. pp.
261-8; H. D. RAUH, Das Bild des Antichrist im Mittelalter; von Tyconius zum deutschen Symbolismus
(Münster: Aschendorff, 1973), esp. pp. 474-527 on Hildegard.
91
See especially KERBY-FULTON, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman, pp. 26-75; eadem,
“Prophet and Reformer: ‘Smoke in the Vineyard’,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and
Her World, pp. 70-90; eadem, “Hildegard of Bingen,” pp. 359-64; and CURSCHMANN, “Imagined
Exegesis: Text and Picture in the Exegetical Works of Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and
Gerhoch of Reichersberg,” pp. 145-69.
92
KERBY-FULTON, “Prophet and Reformer,” pp. 76-7; see also RAUH, Das Bild des Antichrist, pp.
165-78.
93
Jean LECLERCQ, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1961); and DEMPF, Sacrum Imperium, pp. 230-1. For a more extensive
study of the contrasts between Hildegard’s theological style and that of early scholasticism, see Constant
MEWS, “Religious Thinker: ‘A Frail Human Being’ on Fiery Life,” in Voice of the Living Light:
Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara NEWMAN (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998),
pp. 52-69.
94
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 44-5: “We might characterize the same movement metaphysically as
the cycle of emanation and return, or existentially as that of revelation and response. Hildegard herself

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could, in fact, connect the highest levels of contemplative knowledge (of divinity itself)
with the lowest levels of concrete images and artifacts.
95
As Mary Carruthers has tirelessly worked to demonstrate, the construction of such
imagined networks within the mind was a central component of the medieval practice of
training the memory. Furthermore, the structures of ancient and medieval rhetorical
practice were pervasive, not only in the written and spoken arts, but in visual media, as
well.
96
Like a well-prepared speech or sermon, images could have their own ductus, “the
way by which a work leads someone through itself” on its narratival and experiential
journey, and those journeys could possess complex and sophisticated contours.
97
Modern
scholarship has often found those works of medieval art to be most interesting that appear
to transgress normative boundaries in constructing those journeys, and in so doing posit
enigmas and conundra—works whose rhetorical movements employ antithesis and
variety to entice the viewer to want to linger, to look deeper and longer, or perhaps even
to wander restlessly from one aspect of the work to another, never quite sure where to
allow the gaze to alight.
98
As Anne-Marie Bouché has said of other theologically and
visually complex twelfth-century artistic compositions, “[t]hey are not purveyors of
finished statements of dogma, but devices for stimulating intellectual and spiritual
experience.” The use of visual enigma and paradox makes them particularly suited, not
for playfulness as an entertaining divergence, but for the “serious” play by which the
mind explores and grapples with the paradoxes and enigmas that form “the most natural,
and the most accurate, language in which to express the unfathomable truth of God.”
99
perceived it, in her last vision [Liber Divinorum Operum III.5], as the endless circulation of the energy of
love.”
95
On this symbolic mode of allegory in Hildegard’s works, see Peter DRONKE, “Arbor Caritatis,” in
Medieval Studies for J A. W Bennett, ed. P.L. HEYWORTH (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 207-
53, esp. p. 232.
96
See esp. Mary CARRUTHERS, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); eadem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the
Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
97
Mary CARRUTHERS, “The Concept of Ductus, or, Journeying through a Work of Art,” in Rhetoric
Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. M. CARRUTHERS
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), p. 190. On the rhetorical experience of imagined beauty, see
also eadem, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
98
See e.g. Michael CAMILLE, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992). Despite his emphases on the transgressive, the medieval aesthetic
appreciation for antithesis and variety, whether of the monstrous sort or of tamer breeds, operated not
only at the margins but also at the center of aesthetic and rhetorical practice, for which see
CARRUTHERS, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, pp. 61-78, 135-64, and 187-93.
99
Anne-Marie BOUCHÉ, “Anomaly and Enigma in Romanesque Art”, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and
Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. HAMBURGER and Anne-Marie BOUCHÉ
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 306-35, at 329-30. On the ways in which playful
creativity can be regarded as a “serious” rather than merely comic activity, see CARRUTHERS, The
Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, pp. 16-44. The use of images as gateways to meditative,

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The visual puzzles of Hildegard’s own images utilize just that language—and the virtue
of the symbolic is that it elastically connects the two sides of the paradox, the infinite and
finite, the universal and particular, in a single moment.
It is one thing to note that Hildegard’s visio-theological imagination worked
dynamically within such a symbolist mode. It is another to note that she did so publically.
As a woman, she was constantly aware that she had precious little institutional authority
to pronounce on theological matters of her own accord—and in rare moments, Hildegard
even admitted to the doubts that many had about her visionary charism, especially early
on.
100
This is not to say that women could not have a theological voice in medieval
Christianity—as the evidence clearly indicates that they did, especially as scholarship has
moved in the last few decades to recognize it. But it means that her position was always
much more precarious and often required some force greater than herself to validate it.
Thus, as Newman writes, “[t]he more vulnerable she knew herself to be, the more
emphatically she needed to proclaim that it was not she but the Holy Spirit who
spoke.”
101
This emphatic insistence revealed itself in several ways: repeated claims of
frailty and unlearnedness; a dogged insistence that everything she wrote came, not “from
the invention of her own heart or of any other person, but” from God alone (Scivias,
Protestificatio); and the inclusion of warnings not to change a single word of her divine
writings, as at the close of the Liber Divinorum Operum:
The Book of Life, which is the writings of the Word of God, through
which all creation appeared and which breathed forth the life of everything,
as was preordained according to the will of the eternal Father—that Book
of Life is, as it pleased, the source [edidit] of this writing [sc. Liber
Divinorum Operum], which was brought forth miraculously not by any
teaching of human knowledge, but through a simple, unlearned female
form.
Thus, let no person be so bold as to add anything to the words of this
writing to increase it, or take anything away from it to lessen it, lest they be
erased from the Book of Life and from every blessing that is beneath the
sun, unless it is done in copying out corrections [propter excribationem] of
letters or diction that were revealed simply through the inspiration of the
visionary, and mystical experience is now well-recognized, especially for the later Middle Ages—see
Jeffrey F. HAMBURGER, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval
Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998). However, as Babara NEWMAN has noted, the use of visual
aids to meditation also provoked conflict with the theory of religious experience: “What Did It Mean to
Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum v. 80
(2005), pp. 1-43.
100
E.g. in the second autobiographical passage in Hildegard’s Vita (II.5), she writes: “Then the ancient
deceiver put me to the proof with many mockeries. (…) For indeed many wondered about the revelation,
whether it was from God, or from some withering influence of the spirits of the air who lead many
astray.” (In Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources, p. 164.)
101
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, p. 35.

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Holy Spirit. Any who should presume to do otherwise sins against the Holy
Spirit, which shall not be forgiven either here or in that world to come [cf.
Matt. 12:31-32; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10].
102
In the face of such drastic assurances of Hildegard’s passive reception of divinely
inspired text and certain punishment if anything were to be added or subtracted, scholars
such as Meier and Saurma-Jeltsch have found it difficult to think that Hildegard could
then have gone and designed images for the Scivias manuscript that appear to add to or
depart from its text in a variety of ways. Furthermore, Saurma-Jeltsch has taken the
humility formulas seriously, concluding that the exaltation of Hildegard’s authority in the
author portrait of the manuscript does not fit with the visionary’s humble character. The
latent assumption behind all of their work, therefore, is the primacy of the text.
To assume that the text must be the basis for the images and that divergences thus
might violate the divine inspiration of the work, however, is to privilege the textual
description of what was first a visual and auditory experience, even if the vision and
hearing were those of the inner rather than outer senses. Furthermore, we know that in the
last decade of her life, Hildegard and her secretaries worked to actively manage the
reception of her authority and public reputation.
103
Specifically, her Vita, an account of
her saintly life, was already being drawn up before her death, and its second book is
uniquely composed of extensive extracts in her own words.
104
Crucially, there is a slight
discrepancy between the Vita’s first record of the beginning of Hildegard’s religious
life—claiming that she was enclosed with Jutta at the Disibodenberg at the age of eight—
and Hildegard’s own claim in a later autobiographical passage that she was only “offered
to God for a spiritual way of life” in her “eighth year” (Vita S. Hildegardis, II.2).
105
As
102
Liber Divinorum Operum III.5.38: “Sed liber vite, qui scriptura verbi Dei est, per quod omnis creatura
apparuit et quod omnium vitam secundum voluntatem eterni patris, velut in se preordinaverat, exspiravit,
hanc scripturam per nullam doctrinam humane scientie, sed per simplicem et indoctam femineam formam
ut sibi placuit mirabiliter edidit. Unde nullus hominum tam audax sit, ut verbis huius scripture aliquid
augendo apponat vel minuendo auferat, ne de libro vite et de omni beatitudine que sub sole est deleatur;
nisi propter excribationem litterarum aut dictionum, que per inspirationem Spiritus Sancti simpliciter
prolata sunt, fiat. Qui autem aliter presumpserit, in Spritum Sanctum peccat. Unde nec hic neque in futuro
seculo illi remittetur.”
103
KERBY-FULTON, “Hildegard of Bingen”, pp. 346-62.
104
Barbara NEWMAN, “Three-Part Invention: The Vita S. Hildegardis and Mystical Hagiography,” in
Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles BURNETT and Peter DRONKE
(London: The Warburg Institute, 1998), pp. 189-210. For a full translation of all the biographical sources
related to Hildegard, see Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources, trans. Anna SILVAS
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1999).
105
Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources, pp. 139 and 158. The Latin of the two passages reads:
“Cumque iam ferre esset octo annorum consepelienda Christo….recluditur in monte sancti Disibodi cum
pia Deoque dicata femina Iuttha” (I.1); “In octavo autem anno meo in spiritualem conversationem Deo
oblata sum” (II.2). From Vita Sanctae Hildegardis. Leben der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen, ed. and
trans. Monika KLAES (Freiburg et al.: Herder, 1998), pp. 86 and 124.

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can be established by other records, Hildegard’s own claim is the more accurate, as she
was not fully enclosed with Jutta at the Disibodenberg until 1112, at the age of fourteen
or fifteen.
106
Indeed, Kerby-Fulton has argued that the difference is crucial evidence that
Hildegard actively tried to minimize the fact that she had been formally enclosed in 1112,
as her later movement to a new foundation (the Rupertsberg) and preaching tours would
be a violation of the technical terms of an enclosure.
107
There is other evidence for Hildegard actively managing and editing her writings,
despite repeatedly claiming that she was never more than a mere vessel for God’s
actions—public pronouncements that would seem to forbid her such an active role. For
example, the copies of her letters transmitted through the Rupertsberg’s Riesenkodex—
the definitive manuscript collection of Hildegard’s opera omnia—appear to have been
carefully and surreptitiously edited to “enhance” the authority of her correspondence and
minimize criticism, with a variety of both additions and deletions that do not appear in
earlier recensions of the letters.
108
Furthermore, the early Dendermonde manuscript of her
music contains several compositions that were left out of the Riesenkodex, likely because
Hildegard herself had taken those pieces out of circulation, as it were.
109
Indeed, as both
Derolez and Embach have suggested, even though portions of the Riesenkodex may not
have been physically produced until after Hildegard’s death, its structure and contents
almost certainly originated with Hildegard herself in the last years of her life.
110
Thus, it
is not beyond the bounds of consideration to think that Hildegard might have conceived
in the 1170’s to design the images in the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript in ways that
might, in fact, diverge from the text that was laid down more than two decades earlier.
These divergences would then be complementary, not contradictory.
If we view such points of departure between text and image as authorial statements,
we can pursue a mode of interpretation similar to that of Saurma-Jeltsch, but with the
added benefit of making Hildegard’s “the first representative” of her own work’s
interpretation.
111
By directing the iconography and composition of the images, Hildegard
106
See VAN ENGEN, “Abbess: ‘Mother and Teacher’,” pp. 32-3.
107
KERBY-FULTON, “Hildegard of Bingen”, pp. 347-8 and 352-3.
108
Lieven VAN ACKER, “Der Briefwechsel der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen: Vorbermerkungen zu
einer kritischen Edition,” Revue Bénédictine, v. 98 (1988), pp. 141-68; VAN ENGEN, “Letters and the
Public Persona of Hildegard,” pp. 375-418.
109
See Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. Barbara NEWMAN (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,
1988, 2
nd
ed. 1998), pp. 51-60.
110
DEROLEZ, “The Manuscript Transmission of Hildegard of Bingen’s Writings,” pp. 22-3; and Michael
EMBACH, Die Schriften Hildegards von Bingen: Studien zu ihrer Überlieferung und Rezeption im
Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), p. 36.
111
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, p. 23. See also Monika LEISCH-KIESL, “Irritation des
Göttlichen: Zur Frage des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild am Beispiel des Wiesbadener »Scivias«
Hildegards von Bingen,” in Theologie zwischen Zeiten und Kontinenten. Für Elisabeth Gössmann, ed.
Theodor SCHNEIDER and Helen SCHNÜGEL-STRAUMANN (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1993),
pp. 84-97, esp. pp. 89-90 and 97.

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used them as a separate visual and theological discourse, equal to and interacting with the
textual record of her visions. The images are not ancillary to or merely derivative of the
textual work; they are integral to it. Furthermore, these visual markers invested with
theological significance aid the viewer-reader in interpreting the complex visual
allegories at work in Hildegard’s often enigmatic visions by revealing additional
information about the context of each image within the overall narrative of salvation
history. By placing them at the opening of each successive vision, Hildegard offers the
viewer-reader an initial schematic for orienting the theological implications of what they
were about to read.
One of the ways that the images perform this orientating function is by drawing on
traditional iconographical forms that may, in fact, diverge from the textual description of
the image. We have already seen above in Meier’s analysis of the Creation and
Redemption vision that opens Part II (fol. 41v, Fig. 3), for example, that the illustration
appropriates the standard iconography of the hexaemeron in place of the vision text’s
more unusual image of God the blacksmith striking sparks from the globe of the
atmosphere to fashion it into its final form. Such useful divergences problematize
Caviness’ claim that the illustrations are based on a visual record of the visionary
experience laid down simultaneously with the dictation of the original text. Her
suggestion that the divine command to write (scribere) was also a command (at least
originally) to draw cannot account for those divergences. Furthermore, her invocation of
migraine pathology to explain certain stylistic effects fails to address the claim that the
experiences were those of the inner rather than outer eyes and ears. Although it is
possible that a physiological experience such as migraine auras might elide the difference
between inner and outer experience, there is a further difficulty with the tendency to
pathologize medieval religious experiences under the rubrics of modern medicine. As
Maud Burnett McInerney has suggested, Singer’s initial proposal of Hildegard’s migraine
phenomena can be seen to reflect a male desire to pathologize and thus temper and
mollify women’s mystical experiences that are perceived as uncomfortable or even
threatening.
112
Although Caviness herself has championed Hildegard’s images of the
feminine divine precisely because of their seeming threat to the patriarchal order, the urge
to impose modern assumptions upon medieval women that may undercut their own
claims to authority should not be indulged lightly.
Furthermore, Kerby-Fulton has recently suggested a striking alternative explanation
for some of the visual effects that Caviness ascribed to scintillating scotoma: the
influence of contemporary enamel work from Limoges and the Rhineland.
113
This
independently revives a suggestion made by Keller’s study of the original manuscript
before it was lost. In addition to noting striking parallels between such enamel work and
the frames and borders of the images (discussed in more detail below), Keller argued that
112
Maud Burnett McINERNEY, “Introduction: Hildegard of Bingen, Prophet and Polymath”, in
Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. McINERNEY (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp.
xvii-xxvii, at p. xxiii.
113
KERBY-FULTON, “Hildegard of Bingen,” pp. 362-3.

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“the character of the images consists throughout of strongly contoured and outlined
figures that rise out of great expanses of gold and silver backgrounds (…). The converse
also holds: golden figures upon blue backgrounds, just as they appear in contemporary
enamel work.”
114
One image in particular exhibits a striking similarity to early- to mid-
twelfth-century enamels: the illustration of the choirs of the celestial symphony in the
final vision of Scivias (III.13, fol. 229r, Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 229r: III.13, The Symphony of the Choirs of Heaven.
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
As Keller notes, it departs both in color and form from all other images of the
manuscript; both she and Saurma-Jeltsch have argued that, because the figures in this
image consist only of a single layer of paint laid down in a wash, with only summary
guides to the folds in the clothing and the faces left the color of the blank parchment, it
114
KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalereien, p. 137: “Der Bildcharakter besteht eben doch im ganzen
aus stark konturierten, abgegrenzten Figuren, die sich von den großen Flächen der goldenen und silbernen
Hintergründe abheben, die nirgends geteilt oder gemustert sind. Auch die Umkehrung: goldene Figuren
auf blauem Hintergrund, wie sie in dieser Zeit in den Emaillearbeiten auftreten, kommt vor.”

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appears “unfinished” when compared to the more complex painting layers found in most
of the other images.
115
Nevertheless, its alternating fields of blue, gold, and silver in the
background, together with the grouping of each choir, as well as Mary, the Virgin Queen
of Heaven at the top, into medallions, is reminiscent of several chasses produced at
Limoges.
116
It is also possible to identify a likely area in which Hildegard would have had contact
with mid-twelfth-century pieces of enamel work: the jewelry for which she was
(in)famous in the clothing of her nuns on great feast days. In a remarkable exchange of
letters the visionary made with Tengswich, the superior of a congregation of reformed
canonesses at Andernach, around 1150, the latter offers bitingly pointed criticism of the
material and social elitism on display in Hildegard’s community:
117
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, into which are inserted crosses on
both sides and the back, with a figure of the Lamb on the front, and that
they adorn their fingers with golden rings.
118
When her admirer, the monk Guibert of Gembloux, wrote to inquire of Hildegard
about her experiences in 1175, her famous response, portions of which have already been
quoted above, included an answer to his questions about these very same crowns. She
links them directly to the appearance of the order of virgins arrayed around the central
virginal maiden held within the breast of Ecclesia in the vision text of Scivias II.5 (Fig.
12):
115
Ibid., p. 124; SAURMA-JELTSCH, “Die Rupertsberger »Scivias«-Handschrift,” p. 345.
116
Compare several pieces from the catalogue, Enamels of Limoges, 1100-1350, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York (Harry N. Abrams, 1996), e.g. Entry 9, Chasse of Bellac, ca. 1120-40 (pp. 87-9); and
Entry 10, Chasse of Champagnat, ca. 1150 (pp. 90-2). KELLER he further suggested the elaborate
metalwork of shrines produced in workshops of the Meuse valley, such as that of St. Mangold of Huy, ca.
1173 (Die Mittelrheinische Buchmalerei, p. 126) as comparanda for the medallions.
117
On the exchange, see DRONKE, Women Writers, pp. 165-9; Alfred HAVERKAMP, “Tenxwind von
Andernach und Hildegard von Bingen: Zwei »Weltanschauungen« in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in
Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Feschrift für Josef Fleckenstein, ed. Lutz FENSKE
et al. (Jan Thorbecke Verlag: Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 515-548; and NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp.
221-3.
118
Letter 53, in Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium I, ed. L. VAN ACKER, CCCM 91 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1991), p. 126. The translation is from The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, vol. 1, trans. Joseph L.
BAIRD and Radd K. EHRMAN (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 127. This text represents the
earliest recension of the text; the letter appears in a significantly edited form in the later collection of the
Riesenkodex, amongst whose changes is the replacement of the crosses with “images of angels”
(angelicas imagines). This likely reflects both a change in actual practice and the different description of
the crowns given by Hildegard in her famous letter of 1175 to Guibert of Gembloux, as quoted below.

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And around that maiden I saw standing a great crowd of people, brighter
than the sun, all wonderfully adorned with gold and gems. Some of these
had their heads veiled in white, adorned with a gold circlet; and above
them, as if sculpted on the veils, was the likeness of the glorious and
ineffable Trinity as it was represented to me earlier, and on their foreheads
the Lamb of God, and on their necks a human figure, and on the right ear
cherubim, and on the left ear the other kinds of angels; and from the
likeness of the glorious and supernal Trinity golden rays extended to these
other images.
As she elaborates in her later letter to Guibert, to explain and defend her choice to
have her nuns wear white instead of black on high feast days:
I saw that all the ranks [ordines] of the Church have bright emblems in
accord with the heavenly brightness, yet virginity has no bright emblem—
nothing but a black veil and an image of the cross. So I saw that this would
be the emblem of virginity: that a virgin’s head would be covered with a
white veil, because of the radiant-white robe that human beings had in
paradise and lost. On her head would be a circlet [rota] with three colours
conjoined into one—an image of the Trinity—and four roundels attached:
the one on the forehead showing the lamb of God, that on the right a
cherub, that on the left an angel, and on the back a human being—all these
inclining towards the [figure of the] Trinity. This emblem, granted to me,
will proclaim blessings to God, because he had clothed the first man in
radiant brightness.
119
If, as Hildegard seems to imply, the crowns she described in the Scivias vision served
as the model for the crowns she had her nuns wear, it seems highly probable that these
descriptions reflect at least in part their physical composition. Furthermore, the multiple
colors of the circlet (rota tribus coloribus in unum coniunctis) must mean that the
headwear is not simply of metal, but contains fields of color, i.e. enamel work. Finally,
the association of each of three colors with a person of the Trinity indicates that
Hildegard has in mind a particular color scheme connected to the appearance of the
Trinity, “as it was represented to [her] earlier” in Scivias II.2 (Vision):
Then I saw a bright, calm light (serenissima lux), and in this light a
human figure the color of sapphire, which was all blazing with a gentle,
red-glowing fire (suavissimus rutilans ignis). And that bright, calm light
bathed the whole of the red-glowing fire, and the red-glowing fire bathed
119
Letter 103r, in Epistolarium II, p. 253; trans. Peter DRONKE, Women Writers, p. 169.

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the bright, calm light; and the bright, calm light and the red-glowing fire
poured over the whole human figure, so that the three were one light in one
power of potential.
Fig. 5: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 47r: II.2, The Trinity.
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
The explication tells us that the “bright, calm light” is the Father, the “human figure
the color of sapphire” is the Son, and “the gentle, red-glowing fire” is the Holy Spirit.
The miniature in the Rupertsberg manuscript (fol. 47r, Fig. 5) develops a specific color
scheme for this Trinity: the bright light of the Father is portrayed in an inner circle of
gold overlaid with concentric lines of red or brown lacquer; the sapphire Son appears as a
blue figure in the center, its hands raised in the orans position; and the gentle, red-
glowing fire of the Holy Spirit is an outer circle of silver, overlaid with concentric lines
of yellow, and breaking through the boundaries of the gold circle to create a thin outline
around the blue human figure.
120
Although silver is not as frequently used in twelfth-
120
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, p. 93 interprets the gold with red lacquer stripes as the Spirit,
based on the description of the Spirit’s fire as rutilans, and the silver as the serenissima lux of the Father.

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Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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century enamel work, gold often forms the standard base metal upon which the fields of
enamel were applied; and among the most prominent colors of enamel were various
shades of blue. Furthermore, the vision text gives no necessary reason to interpret the
serenissima lux and suavissimus rutilans ignis as circles. If, however, the circles echo the
forms of a coronet, then Hildegard’s use of two metals and one of the most widely-used
colors of enamel to illustrate the Trinity offers the tantalizing possibility that the
illustration itself reflects in part the physical composition of her nuns’ crowns.
4. Color and Theological Meaning in the Rupertsberg Scivias
Thus, a key area of the manuscript design that reveals Hildegard’s active role in
designing the theological content of the images is the color scheme. Because color is an
attribute of visual art that is not lexically confined by the forms into which it is placed, it
can be multivocal and polyvalent, conveying multiple meanings at once. In representing
both the concrete signifier within the visual image and the more universalized allegorical
and theological significations thereof simultaneously, color possesses the unique
discursive power of the symbol.
121
The use of certain colors that have particular meanings
in Hildegard’s symbolic vocabulary—even when at odds with the colors described in the
recorded vision text—reveals the theological place of each image within Hildegard’s
perception of salvation history.
122
Often, the colors in the image match those described in
the vision text; it is those elements that either are not defined in the vision or in fact
However, the appearance of the gold and blue circles together with the silver finger reaching down into
Creation in the image for the previous vision, Scivias II.1 (fol. 41v, Fig. 4) argues strongly in favor of the
reverse. As will become clear below, the gleaming light properties of the Holy Spirit’s suavissimus
rutilans ignis took visual precedence over its redness, thus determining its depiction in silver rather than
in red and gold.
121
For such modes of allegory that embrace the symbolic, rather than cleaving from it, see DRONKE,
“Arbor Caritatis,” pp. 207-53. I am proposing, as it were, that the use of color transcends MEIER’s
tripartite schema of the ways in which medieval art could illustrate allegorical and metaphorical meaning
(see n. 76 above), which is limited by its presumption that only visual form can bear meaning. MEIER’s
own foundational study of Hildegard’s use of color (“Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von
Bingen”) recognized this fact from the outset, arguing that the complexity of Hildegard’s schema of color
significations (“Farbenbedeutungen”) “is grounded in a theological way of thinking that lies between the
descriptive and the abstract” (p. 247). This polyfocal perspective holds the entirety of both each visionary
experience and all salvation history in view even as it focuses on particular details, always maintaining
the vital connection between part and whole. Yet, MEIER’s study limited itself to textual references to
color and hesitated to apply her important recognition of color’s discursive power to the illustrations in
the Rupertsberg manuscript (pp. 250-1, n. 15).
122
Wedelin KNOCH has recently pursued a similar line of investigation in regards to the catechetical and
theological functions of color, with specific reference to the author portrait (fol. 1r) and the images
accompanying Scivias I.1 (fol. 2r) and III.8 (The Pillar of the Trinity on fol. 172r): “Visionäre Farbigkeit:
Anmerkungen zum Liber Scivias der Äbtissin Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179),” in Farbe im
Mittelalter: Materialität—Medialität—Semantik, ed. Ingrid BENNEWITZ and Andrea SCHINDLER
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), Band 2, pp. 791-802.

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contradict it that can add the additional level of complexity. This study examines two
specific color schemes in the manuscript and their use as theological discourse: first, the
contrasting use of red and green; and second, the use of blue, gold, and silver as markers
of divine activity.
Fig. 6: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 4r: I.2, The Fall.
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
4.1. Red and Green
In designing the images in this manuscript, Hildegard invests green with the vital and
fertile depth of meaning that viriditas has in her theology; by contrast, red frequently
connotes the aridity born of sin and fallenness. This contrastive interplay appears already
in the image accompanying the second vision of Part I—Creation and the Fall (fol. 4r,
Fig. 6). The upper register of Heaven is separated from the lower register of earth by a
red-and-white graduated band. Such bands and frames, in which a solid color at the edges
is graduated to white at the middle, are used throughout the manuscript to separate panels

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and registers within images; and they can be found in various places in different shades
of red, blue, light purple, rose-pink, or green.
123
Sometimes, the frames also contain more
elaborate patterns of waves, palmettes, zig-zags, and other floral and geometric designs.
Keller has suggested that the style of these frames is the most readily recognizable formal
reminiscence of twelfth-century enamel work.
124
The various wave, palmette, and cloud
forms often echo designs found in frames and borders of mid- to late-twelfth-century
book covers and chasses, though the most predominant colors in these enamels are shades
of blue set in gold.
125
Finally, it is important to recognize that the frames and borders
constitute the only consistent formal aspect of the illustrations that are entirely their own,
i.e. they have no correspondence to details of the vision text. Thus, they can be viewed
entirely as an independent interpretative framework, using their symbolic color
vocabulary to set contexts—mood lighting, if you will—and draw connections between
the theological content of each vision.
Red is a multivalent color in Hildegard’s symbolic vocabulary, as Meier’s study
demonstrated.
126
Its use in Hildegard’s textual works can be broken down, however, into
three broad ranges, two of which will be discussed here.
127
First is the red of fire (igneus
and rutilans), which Hildegard associates quite traditionally with the Holy Spirit at
Pentecost and the fire of God’s zealous judgment, but which she also uses for images of
Caritas, or Divine Love. Second is the red of blood (sanguineus and sanguinolentus, but
also often the more general terms for red such as rubeus, rubor, and rubicundus), whose
positive connotations Hildegard associates, via the blood of Christ’s passion (whose royal
character is often denoted by red’s cousin, purple [purpureus]), with the blood of
martyrdom and thus also the discipline of the ascetic life. Its negative usage, meanwhile,
denotes “the savagery of the Persecutor and of the world, of the entire demonic realm that
causes innocent blood to be shed and is itself stained by that blood.”
128
Furthermore,
123
Various shades of yellow also appear, but not as frequently, e.g. in the inner half of the waves in the
outer frames of the image of the embodiment of the soul on fol. 22r (I.4), or the ochre highlighting the
palmettes in the upper and lower frames of the image of Ecclesia on fol. 66r (Fig. 12) and of the Son of
Man on fol. 303v (Scivias III.10). (See KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmaleri, pp. 38 and 60; and
SAURMA-JELTSCH, Die Miniaturen, p. 108.)
124
See, e.g., KELLER, Mittelrheinische Buchmalerei, pp. 25, 29, and 137.
125
For several particularly good examples, see the catalogue Enamels of Limoges, 1100-1350, esp. entries
15. Effigy of Geoffrey Plantagenet, ca. 1151 (pp. 98-101); and 16. Chasse of Saint Stephen, ca. 1160-70
(pp. 106-8); and the two book-cover plaques (of Christ in Majesty and the Crucifixion), ca. 1180-1190, on
pp. 130-1.
126
MEIER, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” pp. 270-7.
127
For the third use of red, in reference to the light of dawn, see the discussion of the manuscript’s use of
gold below.
128
MEIER, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” p. 273: “Das Rot des Blutes
steht (...) in malam partem für die Grausamkeit der Verfolger, der Welt, des gesamten teuflischen
Bereichs, der unschuldiges Blut fließen macht, sich selbst mit Blut befleckt. ”

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when the blood of humans alone is considered, it usually carries the negative
connotations of the pollution of the blood inherited from Adam’s fall.
The use of red in the frames and borders of the miniatures generally follows these two
themes of fire and blood. We will focus here on those places where its connotations are
generally negative, via the connotation of spilt and polluted blood. It appears in many of
the frames and borders of the visions of Part I, in those specific visions of Part II that deal
with the original creation and with the Devil, and in the border and frame of the image of
the Fallen Stars from the opening vision of Part III (fol. 123r, Fig. 2). The vivid
vermillion red is most noticeable in the illustration of Part I’s fifth vision, of Synagogue
(fol. 35r, Fig. 13), where the heavy red border echoes Synagogue’s large, blood-red
(sanguineam) feet, which Hildegard tells us are stained with blood, “for at the end of her
time she killed the Prophet of Prophets” (Scivias I.5.4). Red mixed with brown colors the
bodies of the demon spirits in the small, quarter-folio second miniature to accompany the
fourth vision of Part I (fol. 24v, Fig. 7), in which the demons attack with arrows of
temptations the soul of a woman who is looking up to the hand of God.
Fig. 7: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 24v: I.4, The Virgin Soul
Attacked by Demonic Temptations. From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
Likewise, red appears prominently in the images of the monstrous Devil enchained
beneath the feet of the faithful, and his hellish mouth spewing forth flaming streams of

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temptation against them in Vision 7 of Part II (fols. 115v and 116r, Figs. 8 and 9).
129
Although Hildegard’s text describes the beast as having five differently-colored sections
(green, white, red, yellow, and black—Scivias II.7), the monster on fol. 115v appears in
the image in black and muddy brown, caught within the vividly bright red chain and
spewing forth from his body flaming streams of the same color against the faithful
above.
130
This bright red is echoed in the unusually thick inner and outer linings of the
frames. On the facing page, in the upper register flames in the same brownish red that
colored the demons’ bodies on fol. 24v again spew forth, engulfing entirely many of the
groups of people whom the vision describes as wanting to get to Heaven, their hands
desperately outstretched to the small celestial cloud burst in the upper right corner. A
brighter red, meanwhile, colors the upper and lower bands of the frame, in two shades
washing to white in the middle.
Fig. 8: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 115v: II.7, The Devil Bound. From the Abbey of St.
Hildegard.
Fig. 9: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 116r: II.7, The Tempter’s Hell-mouth opposes Humankind.
From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
129
On this vision, with analysis of its illustration in both the Rupertsberg and Salem manuscripts, see
MEIER, Calcare caput draconis,” pp. 340-58.
130
This divergence between text and image offers further evidence to support dating the design of the
manuscript to the 1170’s, as Hildegard sees a similar monster trod beneath the feet of the divine Caritas in
the opening vision of the Liber Divinorum Operum (I.1, Vision), where the five colors of the Scivias’
monster are replaced by the single “venomous black”: “Quoddam autem monstrum horribilis forme
venenosi nigrique coloris et serpentem quondam pedibus suis conculcabat.”

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Finally, in the scene below, which depicts what the vision calls “a kind of market-
place displaying human wealth and worldly delights,” several of the figures appear in
red-colored clothing, including two with red leggings—details never specified in the
vision text. Thus, red is associated in the manuscript with the evil of the Devil, the
temptations he and his minions shoot forth against humankind—temptations that hit the
mark as we journey through the market of worldly goods—and with the blood that he and
all evildoers have on their hands. The red in the middle band of the first creation vision
(I.2, fol. 4r, Fig. 6), then, represents both the disobedience for which Lucifer was cast out
of Heaven and the break between Heaven and Earth incurred in the Fall, an abyss that can
only be bridged by the Redeemer in the cycle of Part II.
131
Yet, that first vision of creation and fall is not without the hope of life amidst the
pains of death. The image departs from the text in a significant way in its depiction of
Eve’s “white cloud” (candida nubes), for its white swirls have been highlighted with
green, echoing both the green palmettes in the upper frame (from which it is, however,
separated by the red band in the middle), and the imaginatively drawn flora of the garden
below.
132
The concept of viriditas (“greenness”) is a central motif in Hildegard’s
thought.
133
Drawn from nature, its fundamental meaning of the freshness and vitality of a
newly-blossomed leaf informs much of Hildegard’s holistic thinking. In her theological
works, it describes the essential life-force, both corporeal and spiritual, that animates not
only humanity but all the world. She even draws its vitality into the internal living
dynamic of the Trinity itself. In the explicatory chapters of the vision of the Trinity in
Scivias II.2, she offers three additional analogies for the Trinity, in addition to the images
of light, sapphire human, and fire of the vision itself (quoted above). The first of these is
particularly striking: a stone’s damp viridity (umida viriditas) to signify the Father; its
solidity to the touch (palpabilis comprehensio) to signify the Son; and its red-sparking
fire (rutilans ignis) again to signify the Spirit (Scivias II.2.5). Moreover, in describing the
relationship of the Trinity to the Incarnation of the Word in the previous vision,
131
KELLER suggested that the red band separating the two registers in this image represented the
“deceitful, vein-shaped form” (quasi venam visum deceptabilem habentem) touched by “the loathsome
cloud” (taeterrima nebula) that emerged from the pit of Hell (Mittelrheinische Buchmalerei, p. 30).
However, the “vein-shaped form” is clearly meant to represent the serpent in the garden, and has been
shaped out of the last tongue of dark cloud on the right into the head of the snake, spewing its venomous
deceit upon the green cloud representing Eve, emerging from the side of Adam. The ambiguous form of
this dark brown and black cloud has led to many different interpretations, ranging from “a wing or a
drooping tulip blossom” (NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, p. 100; CAVINESS also interprets it as a wing,
in “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,”, p. 113), to KERBY-FULTON’s recent and
persuasive analysis of it as the garden’s infamous tree, with “claw-like branches” that recall
“contemporary images of the Apocalypse’s seven-headed dragon” (“Hildegard of Bingen,” p. 360).
132
Scivias I.2.28 describes Paradise as “the place of delight [locus amoenitatis], which blooms with the
freshness [in viriditate] of flowers and grass and the charms of spices, full of fine odors and dowered with
the joy of blessed souls, giving invigorating moisture to the dry ground.”
133
See esp. Gabriele LAUTENSCHLÄGER, “›Viriditas‹”, in Hildegard von Bingen. Prophetin durch die
Zeiten, ed. Äbtissin Edeltraud FORSTER (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1997), pp. 224-37.

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Hildegard tells us that it happened “through the Holy Spirit’s sweet viriditas” (Scivias
II.1.3); and amid the panoply of images that appear in the sequence that Hildegard
composed to the Holy Spirit (O ignis Spiritus Paracliti), verse 4b declares the Holy Spirit
the dispenser of viriditas:
From you the clouds flow forth, the wind takes flight,
the stones their moisture hold,
the waters rivers spring,
and earth viridity bedews.
134
Although Hildegard’s text never ascribes viriditas to the cloud that is Eve, the matrix
and mother of the human race (envisioned as the golden stars that appear within the
cloud, echoing the stars of the angels in the upper register—the stars that fell and whose
place, according to tradition, humans are destined to fill), the color has been intentionally
added to the image, giving it “the aspect of a tender green leaf” to indicate the fresh life
that will flow from her womb.
135
In contrast to the widespread use of red in the borders lining the frames of several
visions in Part I and the opening vision of Part II, which deals again with creation and the
fall, green becomes a favored color in the inner and outer linings of Part II, Vision 2 (The
Trinity, fol. 47r, Fig. 5) and Vision 5 (The Orders of Ecclesia’s Mystical Body, fol. 66r
Fig. 12), as well as in the right and left portions of the unlined frame of Part II, Vision 3
(Ecclesia, the Mother of the Faithful in Baptism, fol. 51r, Fig. 11). Hildegard has used the
colors of these frames to establish contexts for their content—in this case, by casting
images dealing with the original order of creation and its fallenness into the aridity of sin
within red, while marking out images of the new order of creation, established by the
Incarnation and infused with the working of the Holy Spirit through the fertile
motherhood of Virgin Mother Church, with green. That viriditas as a creative and living
force makes perhaps its most potent appearance in the image accompanying Part II,
Vision 6: the Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross and in the Eucharist (fol. 86r, Fig. 10).
Here, the green infuses both the upper and lower frame of the image, as well as the band
separating the two registers. Just as the red band separating the upper and lower registers
in the image of Creation and the Fall in Part I indicated the entrance of death and sin into
the world, so here its presence reminds us that the drama of the Crucifixion and Eucharist
is not about death but about Life. The dead body of Christ is, in fact, a sign that Death has
been overcome and that Christ and the sacrifice of his body and blood are, in fact, a
quickening power to renew Creation. Indeed, we see that the Cross breaks through the
entire band in the middle of the image; whereas the heavens and the earth were separated
134
Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, ed. NEWMAN, p. 150: “De te nubes fluunt, ether volat, / lapides
humorem habent, / aque rivulos educunt, / et terra viriditatem sudat.”
135
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, p. 102; see also Rebecca L. GARBER, “Where is the Body? Images of
Eve and Mary in the Scivias,” in Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. Maud Burnett McINERNEY
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 103-32, esp. pp. 106-18.

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by sin in the original creation, the Cross unites the heavens and the earthly office of the
Church in its daily renewal of the sacrifice of the Mass in the lower register. This Cross,
however, has a peculiar feature which is neither specified in the text nor drawn from
traditional crucifixion iconography: it is executed in silver.
Fig. 10: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 86r: II.6, Crucifixion,
Endowment of Ecclesia, and Eucharist. From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
4.2. Blue, Gold, and Silver
It is no great surprise to find blue and gold in extensive use in this manuscript, as they
were standard in medieval book art—though they also take on a particular meaning
within Hildegard’s visio-theological vocabulary. It is the extensive use of silver,
however, that is remarkable, and for a simple reason. Open a medieval manuscript and its
gold leaf will shine as brightly today as it did when it was first laid down many centuries
ago. But the same often cannot be said for silver because of its tendency to tarnish.
Indeed, as Keller reported, the black-and-white photographs of the original manuscript
are sometimes useless in discerning details of certain pages that made heavy use of silver,
because the oxidation has rendered the silver almost black.
136
136
See KELLER’s discussion of the image of Ecclesia on fol. 66r (Part II, Vision 5): Mittelrheinische
Buchmalereien, pp. 59-60; and CAVINESS’ discussion of the same, with plates comparing the

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We have seen already a possible motivation, however, for the costly, labor-intensive,
and highly unusual decision to use so much silver: together with gold and blue, it forms
the colors of the Trinity in both the image for Part II, Vision 2 (fol. 47r, Fig. 5) and
possibly in the symbolic coronets worn by Hildegard’s nuns on high feast days. This
color scheme of gold, blue, and silver also informs depictions of the Trinity in other
images of the manuscript, adapting the circular forms of II.2 in the visions before and
after it (II.1, fol. 41v, Fig. 3; and II.3, fol. 51r, Fig. 11), and in other places sprung from
their circles, as for example in the background of the image of the celestial symphony,
discussed above (Scivias III.13, fol. 229r, Fig. 4), silently expressing the triune God’s
omnipresence in “the lucent sky” (lucidissimum aerem). In trying to understand their
appearance in the opening vision of Part II with reference first to their iconographical
function, Meier noted that one typical use of silver and gold in a manuscript is to
represent light, thus drawing on the image of the Word from the opening of John’s
Gospel, the “true Light” (lux vera) of the world by whom that world was created (John
1:9-10).
137
Yet, as Constant Mews has noted, Hildegard subtly altered that passage in the
words with which the voice from heaven spoke to her at the outset of Scivias
(Protestificatio): “I am the Living Light, Who illuminates the darkness” (Ego lux vivens
et obscura illuminans).
138
This change in focus, however, is crucial in understanding
Hildegard’s entire approach: because Hildegard’s visionary experiences of the Living
Light were dynamic, not static, she does not imagine the divinity as fixed and remote, an
inalterable and unapproachable truth. Rather, she focuses on the dynamic vitality of the
divinity—its virtus, its active, moving power—bursting forth in living light that gives
verdant life.
139
If we turn again to that illustration of the first vision of Part II (fol. 41v, Fig. 3), which
recapitulates the Creation and Fall from Part I, Vision 2, by broadening it to include the
coming of the Redeemer, we can see how this dynamic movement stretches down into
the creation of humankind:
(…) a blazing fire [lucidissimum ignem], incomprehensible,
inextinguishable, wholly living and wholly Life, [totum viventem, totumque
vitam exsistentem], with a flame in it the color of the sky, which burned
ardently with a gentle breath [leni flatu ardenter flagrabat] (…). Then the
photograph to the facsimile, in “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp. 75-6 and figs. 7-
9.
137
MEIER, “Zum Verhältnis von Text und Illustration im überlieferten Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” p.
163.
138
Constant MEWS, “Religious Thinker: ‘A Frail Human Being’ on Fiery Life,” p. 55.
139
Barbara NEWMAN has recently noted a similar quality in the unique Trinitarian iconography used in
the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Rothschild Canticles, which she describes as “a playful,
intimate approach to the triune God, marked by spontaneity rather than solemnity, dynamism rather than
hieratic stasis, wit rather than awe.” In “Contemplating the Trinity: Text, Image, and the Origins of the
Rothschild Canticles,” Gesta v. 52, no. 2 (2013), pp. 133-59, at p. 135.

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same flame was in that fire and extended itself with that burning ardor [illo
ardore] to a little clod of mud which lay at the bottom of the atmosphere,
and warmed it so that it was made flesh and blood, and blew upon it until it
rose up a living human. (Scivias, II.1, Vision)
In the explication of the vision, we are told that the “blazing fire symbolizes the
Omnipotent and Living God,” and the “flame the color of the sky” is the Son, for “before
any creatures were made, the Infinite Word was indivisibly in the Father; Which in
course of time was to become incarnate in the ardor of charity, miraculously and without
the stain or weight of sin, by the Holy Spirit’s sweet, green freshness [viriditatem] in the
dawn of blessed virginity” (Scivias II.1.1 and 3). The gold and blue circles of the Father’s
bright, blazing fire and the Son’s sky-blue flame appear at the top of the image, but the
field of the miniature, as well as the finger-like form extending from the Father and Son,
are in silver.
140
The vision text itself seems to identify this “same flame in that fire”
extending down into creation as that of the Word (Son), and besides the mention of the
Spirit’s viridity, the explicatory text never identifies a vision element to correspond to the
third person of the Trinity. The use of the silver, however, offers a visual clarification that
it is in fact the Spirit, the “burning ardor” and “gentle breath”, whose finger-like flame
stretches to the bottom of the circle of creation to touch a human head rising from a
gelatinous pile of red clay: the creation of Adam.
The thrust of that creative finger of silver, then, brings us back (or forwards, as it
were) to the Crucifixion on fol. 86r (Fig. 10), and the silver Cross bursting through the
image’s own limits of narratival space, to bring “a great calmness of light” (magna
serenitas lucis—Scivias II.6, Vision) from Heaven down to bathe the altar and to lift its
sacrificial gifts of bread and wine into Heaven, where they are transformed into the Body
and Blood of Christ. The upper register of the image is filled with the symbolic colors of
the Trinity: the gold background of three of the four quadrants, together with the hand of
God reaching down from heaven in the upper right; the blue of the fourth quadrant; and
the silver Cross. It is in this fiery flash, the embrace by the triune God in Heaven of the
elements of bread and wine offered in the sacrifice of the Mass, that we discover
Hildegard’s program of the Eucharist as a new and perfected creation: as the silver flame
and finger of the Holy Spirit reached down out of the Trinity to quicken Adam from the
mud, so the silver Cross breaks through time and space to quicken Christ, the new Adam,
from the Eucharistic elements of bread of wine. Furthermore, to the left of the Cross and
upon a background of the Son’s sapphire blue, the gleaming, golden figure of Ecclesia,
the Church, is both baptized in the blood streaming from his side and betrothed to him,
140
Clemencia Hand KESSLER identified the silver in this image as the Holy Spirit, its use in the
background connecting the persons of the Trinity inseparably, although she erred in identifying the gold
circles as representing Christ Logos: “A Problematic Illumination of the Heidelberg ‘Liber Scivias’,” p.
14.

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she the bride and he the bridegroom.
141
This background is continued in the lower
register, in which Ecclesia herself stands before the altar, offering up the sacrifice of the
Mass.
142
Fig. 11: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 51r: II.3, Ecclesia, the Mother
of the Faithful in Baptism. From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
That blue background, marked with diamond clusters of white dots, brings us to
Ecclesia’s first appearance in the manuscript, in the third vision of Part II (fol. 51r, Fig.
11): the Church, the Bride of Christ and Mother of the faithful through baptism:
141
The banderole held in the hand of God in the upper right reads, “May she, O Son, be your Bride for the
restoration of My people; may she be a mother to them, regenerating souls through the salvation of the
Spirit and water.” (Text from Scivias II.6, Vision.)
142
Anne W. ASTELL has noted that this image, as well as its companion on the verso side of the folio
showing the priest offering the Mass and its various recipients, has “its own memorial logic, reflective of
the mind’s associative patterns and means of recall”, which echo Hildegard’s program of the Eucharist as
a restorative and regenerative memorial not only of Christ’s sacrifice but of “Mary’s gift to God as well,
her virginity yielding its fruit in a spotless victim, human and divine, and a pure sacramental bread.” See
“‘Memoriam Fecit’: The Eucharist, Memory, Reform, and Regeneration in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias
and Nicholas of Cusa’s Sermons,” in Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church
Renewal, ed. Christopher M. BELLITTO and David Zachariah FLANAGIN (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 2012), pp. 190-213, esp. pp. 201 and 207.

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After this I saw the image of a woman as large as a great city, with a
wonderful crown on her head and arms from which a splendor hung like
sleeves, shining from Heaven to earth. Her womb was pierced like a net
with many openings, with a huge multitude of people running in and out.
She had no legs or feet, but stood balanced on her womb in front of the
altar that stands before the eyes of God. (…) I could not make out her attire,
except that she was arrayed in great splendor and gleamed with a lucid
serenity [tota lucidissima serenitate fulgens multo splendore circumdata
fuerat], and on her breast shone a red glow like the dawn [velut aurora
rubeo fulgore rutilante]. (…) And that image spreads out its splendor like a
garment, saying, “I must conceive and give birth!” [Et eadem imago
expandit splendorem suum velut vestimentum dicens, “Me oportet
concipere et parere!”]
(…)
And behold, that bright, calm light with a human figure in it, blazing
with a red-glowing fire, which I had seen in my previous vision, again
appeared to me, and stripped the black skin off each of [Ecclesia’s children]
and threw it way; and it clothed them in a pure white garment
[candidissima veste] and opened to them the bright, calm light. (Scivias
II.3, Vision)
The illustration that accompanies this has been separated into four panels by frames of
graduated green.
143
In the upper left, we see Ecclesia in gold, surrounded by the children
whom the banderole she holds declares she will conceive and birth (quoting from the
vision text)—her own virginal fecundity signaled visually for us by the verdant green
frame. The sideways-set stone stairs and ladder draw from both the architectural image
that begins the vision and details in a later vision of Ecclesia’s Mystical Body and her
orders (II.5, fol. 66r, Fig. 12), from whose illustration they are then omitted.
144
In the
upper right, we see Ecclesia before the altar, upon which stands a standard image of
Christ, his right hand raised in blessing, his left hand holding the Book of Life. Directly
below, we meet Ecclesia’s netted womb, through which pass each of her children, their
black skin torn away as they come out of her mouth, replaced by the gleaming garment of
the catechumen—and the agent of this baptismal rebirth in the corner, the Trinity’s
concentric circles of blue, gold, and silver. On the lower left, finally, the same Christ
from above reappears, holding a banderole that quotes from the words of admonition he
speaks after baptizing the children of the Church.
143
The illustration also includes details that have been omitted from the quoted vision text.
144
On images of Ecclesia’s eternal exemplar, the heavenly city of Jerusalem, from which spring
Hildegard’s frequent architectural metaphors for her, see NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 198-204.

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Christ’s role as Ecclesia’s Bridegroom is fulfilled in the background of his blue that
accompanies her, a wedding tapestry to celebrate their union. The images of Ecclesia,
moreover, appear consistently throughout the manuscript in gold—but the precious metal
now represents not so much the serenissima lux of the Father as another figure of light,
the splendor and glowing red of the dawn (aurora). This is the third concept under which
Meier categorized Hildegard’s use of the color red—but just as with the silver of the
Holy Spirit, in the manuscript’s images, its properties of light take precedence over its
redness.
145
The dawn light is, in Hildegard’s visionary vocabulary, the preeminent marker
of Christ’s Incarnation, the turning point in salvation history. Thus, in the illustration of
Scivias II.1 (fol. 41v, Fig. 3), the hemisphere of blue and gold that appears at the bottom
of the image both echoes the circles of Father and Son above and heralds the dawn light
of the incarnate Redeemer, who is thus depicted, not in sapphire blue but in gleaming
gold. Furthermore, the Incarnation served as the ideal model for Hildegard’s notions of
virginitas, the order of the Church in which she and her nuns were specially called to
imitate the Savior. The connections between Christ, his Virgin Mother, and the Virgin
Ecclesia are the hallmark of Hildegard’s particular interpretation of the absolute
predestination of the Word, which is also why Hildegard tends to emphasize the entire
Incarnation, and not just the crucifixion, as the triumphant key to salvation history. As
Meier explains: “The dawn, gleaming in purity, red like blood, but also the beginning of a
new day (that is, the end of the old darkness and covenant…), can also include the red of
the Holy Spirit and its working in the Incarnation; the gloria that begins with the
Incarnation after it has overcome the ancient disgrace; and the red of the burning love for
virginitas and, through its renunciation of the world, for heaven itself.”
146
In the collection of Hildegard’s liturgical musical compositions, which she herself
called the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, the “Symphony of the Harmony
of Celestial Revelations,” an early version of which is found in the last vision of Scivias
(III.13), Hildegard devoted more works to the Virgin Mary (sixteen) than to any other
subject.
147
Strangely, however, Mary appears in physical form in the visions of Scivias
only once—in that last vision of the celestial symphony. Symbolically, however, she
appeared in that golden dawn of Scivias II.1 (fol. 41v, Fig. 3), for she was the virginal
145
MEIER, “Die Bedeutung der Farben im Werk Hildegards von Bingen,” pp. 274-7. The gold leaf does,
however, frequently appear in the manuscript with various shades or patterns applied over it in a red
lacquer finish.
146
Ibid., p. 275: “Das Morgenrot, strahlend in Reinheit, rot wie Blut, zugleich aber Anburch des neuen
Tages, das heißt Ende der alten Finsternis und Verheißung (...), vermochte auch noch die Röte des
heiligen Geistes und sein Wirken an der Inkarnation, schließlich den mit ihr beginnenden Zustande der
gloria (...) nach Überwindung der alten Schande, die Röte der brennenden Liebe zur virginitas und zum
Himmlischen (bei Absage and die Welt) einzuschließen.”
147
See HILDEGARD of BINGEN, Symphonia, ed. NEWMAN; NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 161-6;
and Beverly LOMER, Hildegard of Bingen: Music, Rhetoric and the Sacred Feminine (Saarland: VDM
Verl. Müller, 2009).

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matrix through which the Redeemer’s incarnate light burst forth into the world.
148
If we
choose to conflate that blue and gold hemisphere with the Virgin as herald of the
Incarnation, we enter into what Caviness has suggested is the most extraordinary of the
Rupertsberg Scivias images’ functions: the declaration of the feminine divine.
149
As
Newman notes, Mary is both the fulfillment of “the sapiential visions” of the eternal
counsel, and “the new Eve (…), the exemplar of a new creation.” Thus she unites
Hildegard’s treatment of the feminine divine and mortal women, who receive their new
exemplar of virginity in her.
150
As Mary stands at the pinnacle and turning point of salvation history to mediate the
divinity of her Son to the world, Ecclesia takes her place as God’s face and agent within
creation as “it follows its painful but triumphant course through history to a
consummation at the end of time.”
151
It is for this reason that the single most imposing
figure throughout all the images of the Rupertsberg manuscript is Ecclesia, who, for
example, takes Mary’s place as described in the Gospels beneath the beam of the Cross
(fol. 86r, Fig. 10). Caviness, however, goes too far in calling these “Goddesses” that
“were more subversive than the text and were, therefore, at risk in an investigation.”
152
Hildegard did not conceive of the feminine divine as “Goddesses,” nor did she ever use
the term dea (“goddess”). Rather, she believed in the one God (in unum Deum) who
manifested himself in creation through his Word, preeminently in that Word’s
Incarnation, but also continuously in the feminine manifestations of that Word’s eternal
predestination, including both the Virgin Mary and Ecclesia, but also in Hildegard’s
visionary vocabulary such feminine personifications as Caritas (Love), Sapientia
(Wisdom), Humilitas (Humility), or Pax (Peace).
153
Like these, Ecclesia is not a goddess
but an emanation of God, the representative of the divine within the world. Her divinity is
not her own—it is hers as the Bride of Christ, participating in his divinity while sharing
his humanity. The divine feminine, for Hildegard, is the place where God stoops to
148
Several scholars have also suggested that the white flower of obedience offered to Adam out of the
gold and blue circles of Father and Son—a flower he refuses to pluck, thus inverting the traditional image
of picking and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—invokes the traditional white
lily of the Virgin Mary’s own act of obedience at the Annunciation: see NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, p.
168; and GARBER, “Where is the Body? Images of Eve and Mary in the Scivias,” p. 110.
149
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp. 79-94.
150
NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 158-9.
151
Ibid., p. 196.
152
CAVINESS, “Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships,” pp. 92-4. One major problem with
her argument is its assumption that the images in the manuscript were never copied again, despite
evidence to the contrary, e.g. in the fourteenth-century refectory of the nuns of St. Gertrude in Cologne
(see HAMBURGER, “The ‘Various Writings of Humanity’: Johannes Tauler on Hildegard of Bingen’s
Liber Scivias,” pp. 161-205).
153
See Liber Divinorum Operum, III.3 for a particular vision of these female manifestations of divinity;
and discussion in NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 51-5.

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human weakness and human weakness can reach out to touch the face of God.
154
Furthermore, it is in Ecclesia’s paradoxically powerful office as Virgin Mother of the
faithful that Hildegard recognizes the power of her own office within the Church.
155
Fig. 12: Rupertsberg Scivias, Facsimile, Fol. 66r: II.5, Ecclesia’s
Mystical Body: Her Orders. From the Abbey of St. Hildegard.
Thus, the most powerful yet enigmatic image in the entire Rupertsberg manuscript is
that of Ecclesia on fol. 66r (Fig. 12), accompanying a vision that describes the three
orders that make up her membership: virgin monastics, clerics, and laypeople (Scivias
II.5). We have met this image before—it is upon the breast of this figure of Ecclesia that
Hildegard sees her own, highest order of the Church, her virgins, resplendent in veils of
white and crowned with the very coronets upon which she modeled those used in her own
abbey. Several of the women appear wearing veils executed in silver, bound by crowns
that have only been sketched in.
156
Here are the other elements of that vision that appear
154
See NEWMAN, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 42-70.
155
See Barbara NEWMAN, “Divine Power Made Perfect in Weakness: St. Hildegard on the Frail Sex,” in
Medieval Religious Women: Peaceweavers, v. 2, ed. Lillian Thomas SHANK and John A. NICHOLS
(Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1987), pp. 103-21.
156
The details of the crowns were likely too small to be executed in the illustration.

Nathaniel M. CAMPBELL, Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript
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54
in the illustration—many have remarked, however, that it “departs more than usual from
the text”:
157
After this I saw that a splendor white as snow and translucent as crystal
had shone around the image of that woman from the top of her head to her
throat. And from