Abstract
In this chapter, Lauren Cole and Hannah Victoria track the evolution of how the twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen wrote about women by contextualizing Hildegard’s lexical choices regarding Mary and Eve as models of holy femininity across several major texts. Focusing on how personal experiences of movement, including her physical move to the religious community at Rupertsberg in 1150 and the loss of her beloved companion Richardis in 1152, impacted her readings of the female body. Cole and Victoria argue that this period demonstrates a reorientation in Hildegard’s thinking about embodied femininity. They conclude that her later texts, such as her Symphoniae and Causae et curae demonstrate a turn from negative depictions of women to a positive—even desiring—attention to the female body.
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Notes
- 1.
Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
- 2.
See: Judith M. Bennett, “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 1–2 (2000): 1–24; “The L-Word in Women’s History,” in History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 108–127; “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge,” in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. N. Giffney, M. M. Sauer, D. Watt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 131–143.
- 3.
Noreen Giffney, Michelle. M. Sauer, Diane. Watt, eds., The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 4.
See: Lucy Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance (Boydell & Brewer, 2020); Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Giffney, Sauer, Watt, eds., Lesbian Premodern; Anna Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 5.
A term which she later defends in: Bennett, “Remembering.”
- 6.
Bennett, “Remembering,” 138.
- 7.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2006), 19.
- 8.
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 648.
- 9.
See Dyan Elliott, “Gender and the Christian Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199582174.001.0001 for the juxtaposition of Eve and Mary.
- 10.
Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 169–72.
- 11.
Hildegard, Scivias, 525.
- 12.
Ibid., 525–9.
- 13.
Ibid., 77.
- 14.
Relatively little is known about Richardis, and none of her letters to Hildegard survive. Her importance is entirely dependent upon and mediated by Hildegard’s own bias.
- 15.
Bassum is about 480 km north of Bingen am Rhein.
- 16.
Hildegard von Bingen, “Epistola CCCXXIII,” in Epistolarium, Pars tertia (CCLI–CCCXC), ed. L. van Acker (Brepols, 1991), 81–82.
- 17.
This is not unlikely, as Richardis’ family was quite wealthy and politically influential.
- 18.
H.V. translation: “These different attacks seem to indicate that Hildegard believed herself to be, correctly or not, the victim of a coalition between Richardis, her family, the abbot of Kuno, and the archbishop of Mayence. Rarely, in any case, does the saint display such ardor in opposing the inevitable.”
Rebecca Lenoir in Hildegard von Bingen, Lettres (1146–1179), trans. R. Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2007), 221.
- 19.
Hildegard von Bingen, “Epistola XVIII,” in Epistolarium, Pars prima (I-XC), ed. L. van Acker (Brepols, 1991), 53.
- 20.
Hildegard, “Epistola IV,” Epistolarium, 10.
- 21.
H.V. translation: “I loved your noble manners, and your wisdom and your chastity, and your soul and all your being, such that many others said to me: What are you doing?”
Hildegard, “Epistola LXIV,” Epistolarium, 111–112.
- 22.
H.V. translation: “She [Richardis] was like a flower in beauty and splendour, a symphony of this century. While she yet remained in her body, I heard it said of her in a true vision: “O virginity! you stand in the chamber of the king!” For that seedling communes with the most holy order by means of [her] virginity, whence the daughters of Zion rejoice. But still the ancient serpent desires her to withdraw from that blessed honour through the high richness of [her] human origin.”
Hildegard, “Epistola XIIIr,” Epistolarium, 30–31.
- 23.
As James Baldwin puts it so concisely in The Language of Sex: “From the monastic movement [in the 12th to early 13th centuries] originated the oldest and perhaps most pervasive of all medieval social classifications that divided human society into three groups according to sexual practice: conjugates (married), continentes (continent), and virgines (virgins)” (1994, 85–6).
- 24.
Tables in Appendix.
- 25.
It is important here to note that Hildegard never uses uxor as a possible synonym for mulier when referring to a woman (usually Eve) in such contexts; she is never explicitly “wife.”
- 26.
See: Baldwin, Language of Sex; Peter Brown, Le renoncement à la chair. Virginité, célibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif, trans. P.-E. Dauzat & Ch. Jacob (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press Inc, 1993).
- 27.
Importantly, Newman points out: “Hildegard’s usage of the terms materia and forma should not be interpreted in an Aristotelian sense, which would be alien to her metaphysics” (Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 63).
- 28.
A duality prevalent in high medieval religious imaginary and literature. See Table 4.
- 29.
H.V. translation: “Therefore, because woman constructed death, / The shining virgin demolished it. / And so the highest blessing is/ In the womanly body / Before all creatures,/ Because God was made man /In the sweetest and blessed virgin.”
Hildegard von Bingen, “Quia ergo femina,” in Symphonia: Gedichte und Gesänge (Lateinisch und Deutsch), ed. W. Berschin & H. Schipperges (Lampert Schneider, 1995), 46.
- 30.
Much to the scandal of others, for example, Ep. LII in which the Abbess Tenxwind objects heavily to the vain and rich devotional performances which took place at Rupertsberg.
- 31.
Hildegard would purportedly walk around the cloisters singing O virga ac diadema when she was ill (See: Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2006)).
- 32.
A dichotomy which, as Newman explains, comes from the second century. The theologian Irenaeus of Smyrna considered the Virgin Mary “an advocate for the virgin Eve” in the Christian context, and thought that “through a virgin, mankind came under bondage of death; so also through a virgin the bonds were loosed, and virginal disobedience was balanced by a Virgin’s disobedience” (cited in Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 167). Newman explains further that because St. Augustine (fifth century) linked Original Sin to concupiscence, “obedience” and “disobedience” were understood in terms of “chastity” and “lust,” which eventually led to an ideological transformation from a dichotomy of “two virgins” (Irenaeus) to one of a “sinful mulier” (a (hetero)sexually active woman) and a “blessed virgin” placing Eve (as mulier) firmly in the domain of unmediated (hetero)sexual activity.
- 33.
Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2–16.
- 34.
Given the context in which we read Eve—that is, in the story of the Fall where the Corruptor (the first temptation) appears in the form of a serpent, an explicitly phallic creating, and corrupts Eve through sin (original sin: being, as we have seen, associated with lust)—we ought to read her sexual appetite as being entirely oriented towards the male.
- 35.
See Genesis 3:19: “In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es.”
Translation (King James): “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.”
- 36.
Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 158.
- 37.
Hildegard, “O tu illustrata,” in Symphoniae, 42.
- 38.
“Unde venter tuus [Mariae] floruit/ de introitu spiritus dei,/ qui in te sufflavit/ et in te exsuxit,/ quod Eva abstulit/ in abscisione puritatis/ per contractam contagionem/ de suggestione diaboli.” (H.V. translation: Whence blossomed your womb/ From the entrance of the spirit of god, / Who breathed in you /And absorbed in you, / That which Eve brought forth /By means of the mutilation of purity / Through the contraction of the contagion /From the devil’s temptation.) Ibid.
- 39.
Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 158.
- 40.
H.V. translation: “Oh how great is the miracle, / That into the subdued form of woman / The king invaded.” Hildegard, “O quam magnum miraculum” in Symphoniae, 52.
- 41.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex” (New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), 7.
- 42.
Jérôme Baschet, Corps et âmes. Une histoire de la personne au Moyen Âge (Aubier: Flammarion, 1994); Erwin Panofsky, “Introduction,” in Abbot Suger: On the Abbey, Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures, trans. Erwin Panofsky (Princeton University Press, 1979).
- 43.
Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 158.
- 44.
H.V. translation: “God’s medium of communication with humans.” Susanne Fritsch-Staar, “Uterus virgineus thronus est eburneus. Zur Ästhetisierung, Dämonisierung und Metaphorisierung des Uterus in mhd. Lyrik,” in Manlîchu Wîp, Wîplîch Man: Konstruktion der Kategorien ‘Körper’ und ‘Geschlecht’ in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. I. Bennewitz & H. Tervooren (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999), 201.
- 45.
See Sabina Flanagan, “Hildegard and the Humors: Medieval Theories of Illness and Personality,” Graven Images: Journal of Culture, Law, and the Sacred, 3 (1996): 14–23 for an outline of Hildegard’s humoral theories.
- 46.
Hildegard von Bingen, Causes and Cures: The Complete English Translation of Hildegardis Causae Et Curae Libri Vi, trans. Priscilla Throop (Charlotte: MedievalMS, 2008), 30.
- 47.
Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard Von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing, trans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester: Healing Arts Press, 1998), 118.
- 48.
Honey Meconi, Hildegard of Bingen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 15; Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, ed. M. Klaes, CCCM 126 (Turnhout: Brepols. 1993), 2.6, 31, quoted in Franz J. Felten, “What Do We Know About the Life of Jutta and Hildegard at Disibodenberg and Rupertsberg?” in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, George Ferzoco and Debra Stoudt (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 37.
- 49.
Felix Heinzer, “Unequal Twins: Visionary Attitude and Monastic Culture in Elisabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen” in A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, George Ferzoco and Debra Stoudt (Leiden: Brill, 2014),106.
- 50.
Felten, “What Do We Know About the Life of Jutta and Hildegard at Disibodenberg and Rupertsberg?”, 22.
- 51.
Meconi, Hildegard of Bingen, 17.
- 52.
Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, 47.
- 53.
For an overview of the conditions and life at Rupertsberg, see Felten, “What Do We Know About the Life of Jutta and Hildegard at Disibodenberg and Rupertsberg?”, (2014), Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989), ch.1, Meconi, Hildegard of Bingen, ch.2, and Barbara Newman, “Sibyl of the Rhine: Hildegard’s Life and Times” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1–29.
- 54.
Translated by and quoted in Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 5.
- 55.
Margot Fassler, “Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 2 (2014): 318.
- 56.
See Hildegard von Bingen, Beate Hildegardis Cause et Cure, ed. Laurence Moulinier (Berlin: Akademie, 2003), 102 and 104–5 for Eve and mulier, femina found throughout.
- 57.
Hildegard, Cause et Cure, 144.
- 58.
Hildegard consistently refers to Richardis as her filia: “in carissima filia nostra Richarde” (lines 15-16), “Si filia nostra quieta manisset” (lines 25–26), “ut dimittas ad me carissimam filiam meam” (line 31) in Hildegard von Bingen, “Epistola XII,” Epistolarium, 29(our emphases). She does so additionally in lines 18 and 29 of “Epistola XIIIr,” in which letter she also calls Richardis her mater: “Sic factum est in filia mea Richardi, quam et filiam et matrem meam nomino” (line 7, our emphasis); repeated in “Epistola LXIV”: “Heu me, mater, heu me, filia, quare me dereliquisti sicut orphanam?” (lines 14–15, our emphasis). In the latter, Hildegard also refers to herself as Richardis’ mother: “Esto memor misere matris tue Hildegardis” (line 23, our emphasis).
- 59.
Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 5.
- 60.
Hildegard, Cause et Cure, 86.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Hildegard, Scivias, p. 77.
- 63.
Little was recorded about Hildegard and her nuns’ practice of medicine, as it was not considered important. See Victoria Sweet, “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73, no. 3 (1999): 395–397 for a discussion of practical experience as a source for Causae et curae.
- 64.
Hildegard, Cause et Cure, 86.
- 65.
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 93.
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Cole, L., Victoria, H. (2023). Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy. In: Price, B.A., Bonsall, J.E., Khoury, M. (eds) Medieval Mobilities. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12647-5_4
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