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Picturing Hildegard of Bingen’s Sight: Illuminating Her Visions
Abstract
This chapter explores the development and purpose of the illustrations in two manuscripts of Hildegard of Bingen’s works: one designed by Hildegard (the Rupertsberg Scivias), the other designed by a later generation of her monastery’s nuns (the Lucca Liber divinorum operum). An overview of her visionary experiences demonstrates the prophetic mission of their detailed images to communicate theological truths. The author argues that Hildegard designed the Scivias images to aid that communication and provide visual exegesis of her visions, serving as a teaching tool to guide the reader through the manuscript. The next generation of nuns followed Hildegard’s impulse to illustrate her visions with the later Liber divinorum operum manuscript, but its famous cosmological diagram diverges from the text because the designer did not understand its meaning. The chapter closes with an assessment of the very limited influence of Hildegard’s illustrations in the later Middle Ages, with one story from the preaching of Johannes Tauler demonstrating their liability to reinterpretation.
El objetivo de esta investigación es profundizar en la vida y pensamiento de la religiosa Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) a través del análisis de las iluminaciones del universo con forma de ser humano de una de sus obras más destacadas, Liber Divinorum Operum (El libro de las horas divinas). En plena Edad Media y desde los espacios de clausura, Hildegard von Bingen desarrolló una abundante producción teórica creativa en áreas muy diversas, encabezó algunas de las reformas más importantes de su momento, tuvo relación con personajes relevantes de su época y adquirió el poder que a las mujeres les estaba vedado. Las imágenes estudiadas, con sus códigos propios de orden visual (formas, estructuración del espacio, colores), permitieron comprender mejor el contenido de sus visiones. Las conclusiones de este estudio enfatizan, por una parte, el interés de la autora por compartir la complejidad de sus revelaciones utilizando para ello la imagen como vehículo de conocimiento, algo que llamó la atención de sus contemporáneos. Por otro lado, dan cuenta de una profunda cosmogonía propia que desprende conocimientos literarios, filosóficos, teológicos, así como científicos y que se anticipa al pensamiento humanista del Renacimiento colocando al ser humano desnudo como centro del universo.
El objetivo de esta investigación es profundizar en la vida y pensamiento de la religiosa Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) a través del análisis de las iluminaciones del universo con forma de ser humano de una de sus obras más destacadas, Liber Divinorum Operum (El libro de las horas divinas). En plena Edad Media y desde los espacios de clausura, Hildegard von Bingen desarrolló una abundante producción teórica creativa en áreas muy diversas, encabezó algunas de las reformas más importantes de su momento, tuvo relación con personajes relevantes de su época y adquirió el poder que a las mujeres les estaba vedado. Las imágenes estudiadas, con sus códigos propios de orden visual (formas, estructuración del espacio, colores), permitieron comprender mejor el contenido de sus visiones. Las conclusiones de este estudio enfatizan, por una parte, el interés de la autora por compartir la complejidad de sus revelaciones utilizando para ello la imagen como vehículo de conocimiento, algo que llamó la atención de sus contemporáneos. Por otro lado, dan cuenta de una profunda cosmogonía propia que desprende conocimientos literarios, filosóficos, teológicos, así como científicos y que se anticipa al pensamiento humanista del Renacimiento colocando al ser humano desnudo como centro del universo.
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.
As with the first two works in her visionary trilogy, St. Hildegard of Bingen’s masterpiece, the Liber diuinorum operum (written 1165-1173/74), includes as a “Table of Contents” summaries for each of its 316 chapters, originally composed separately from the main text but later distributed throughout, either before each of its three parts or, in one recension, before each chapter. It has been generally, if silently, assumed that Hildegard herself composed these summaries. However, a detailed study of the Capitula reveals significant divergences from the Visionary Doctor in terms of vocabulary and expression, interpretation, and style. Further technical aspects of the compositional process indicate that she was likely not their author. The second half of this study considers who among the circle of men who helped her in her final years might have been responsible for writing these summaries. After examining the roles of the three provosts of her abbey -Volmar of Disibodenberg, Godfrey of Disibodenberg, and Guibert of Gembloux - I turn to the adiutores whom Hildegard specifically mentioned in the “Epilogue” to the Liber diuinorum operum: Ludwig, abbot of St. Eucharius and Matthias in Trier; Godfrey of Kahler, a monk of St. Eucharius among the sapientes whom Ludwig sent to Hildegard’s aid; and Wezelin, her nephew and provost of St. Andreas in Cologne. The final two men - Godfrey of St. Eucharius and Wezelin - prove to be the only two probable candidates. In composing these Capitula, their author helped Hildegard to make her challenging visionary text more accessible by schematizing the work and orienting the reader.
Charles Singer's retrospective diagnosis of Hildegard of Bingen as a migraine sufferer, first made in 1913, has become commonly accepted. This article uses Hildegard as a case study to shift our focus from a polarised debate about the merits or otherwise of retrospective diagnosis, to examine instead what happens when diagnoses take on lives of their own. It argues that simply championing or rejecting retrospective diagnosis is not enough; that we need instead to appreciate how, at the moment of creation, a diagnosis reflects the significance of particular medical signs and theories in historical context and how, when and why such diagnoses can come to do meaningful work when subsequently mobilised as scientific 'fact'. This article first traces the emergence of a new formulation of migraine in the nineteenth century, then shows how this context enabled Singer to retrospectively diagnose Hildegard's migraine and finally examines some of the ways in which this idea has gained popular and academic currency in the second half of the twentieth century. The case of Hildegard's migraine reminds us of the need to historicise scientific evidence just as rigorously as we historicise our other material and it exposes the cumulative methodological problems that can occur when historians use science, and scientists use history on a casual basis.
Only two large collections of Hildegard of Bingen's music are extant, today housed in the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven ( B-LVu, no shelf number ) and in the Hochschul-und Landesbibliothek RheinMain in Wiesbaden ( D-WI1 2 , the so-called ‘Riesencodex’). The Riesencodex, though, was almost lost during World War II. It survived both bombing and plundering in Dresden in February 1945, only to be appropriated by the Soviet Administration in 1947. Using archival records from the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden from the 1940s and 1950s, I detail the efforts of a number of people to retrieve the manuscript after the war and bring it back to Wiesbaden. Franz Götting, the director of the Wiesbaden library, spent several years trying to recover the manuscript through official channels. Its eventual return to Wiesbaden in 1948, however, came about surreptitiously, largely through the efforts of Margarete Kühn at the German Academy in East Berlin and an American woman, Caroline Walsh, in Berlin as a military spouse.
The Visual and the Visionary adds a new dimension to the study of female spirituality, with its nuanced account of the changing roles of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In nine essays embracing the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, above all, the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of the general history of medieval art and spirituality.
Gender Symbolism and Text Image Relationships: Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias
- Madeline H Caviness
Hildegard As Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works
- Madeline H Caviness
- Caviness