Anne Ashworth reviews Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of her Age by Fiona Maddocks, Faber (London 2001, paperback 2013). 332 pages. £12.99.
In twelfth century Europe, the Church was almost coterminous with civilisation. Popes, archbishops, abbots wielded both religious and worldly power. It was a career path, and not only for men, though women were at best subordinate. One woman did achieve astonishing fame and power. How? Fiona Maddocks traces the story in detail. Hildegard (1098–1179), not officially canonised as Saint Hildegard until 2012, was a phenomenon. Theologian and visionary, musician and artist, herbal doctor and proto-scientist, business woman and (unofficially) abbess, Hildegard had rare ambition and drive. In spite of frequent illness her achievements were prodigious, her stature formidable. With impunity she could write admonishing letters to popes and emperors. Four hundred of her letters still survive, along with five books, music still performed today, and visionary art.
When Hildegard was eight she was given by her wealthy parents to the monastery of Disibodenberg, on the Rhine, along with an older girl, Jutta. Jutta opted to become an anchoress, and after due funeral rites was immured in a cell attached to the abbey, attended by her small companion. End of story for both, then? By no means. Other women joined them, under Jutta's control. Twenty years later, Jutta died and Hildegard took command. Her nuns, all from high class families – Hildegard was a stickler for social rank – brought rich dowries. So there was prolonged opposition when the ambitious Hildegard decided to build her own religious house. Abbot Cuno vetoed it.
Hildegard, already famous, was suddenly taken acutely ill. The abbot backed down: miraculous recovery of Hildegard.
She bought land at Rupertsberg, supervised building, held the reins through years of financial negotiations with sharp, even ruthless business acumen. One of her angry letters from this period is quoted: 'I WHO AM say, you are robbers, sons of Belial.' Maddocks comments dryly, 'The Almighty and his vessel appear to have become one.' Other correspondence when Hildegard was thwarted is described as having 'a tone of panic and petulance.' Even to a pope she could write: 'You, O man, who are too tired to rein in the pomposity of arrogance…' Pots and kettles spring to mind. Yet the great and the good continually wrote asking for her advice and prayers, and were answered.
Hildegard's visions were undoubtedly genuine.
Oliver Sacks and others see them as compatible with severe migraines, though her illnesses cannot now be diagnosed. The strange, haunting paintings they produced – were these by Hildegard's own hand? And the music and its text for singing – was she the composer? Maddocks suggests she might have been 'the presiding genius... the person without whom none of these things would have occurred, in an ancient and proper sense their author'.
Behind her medical treatises, Physica and Causae et Curae we can glimpse the busy work of a general practitioner, for monasteries and their herb gardens were centres of healing. Hildegard must have spent much time diligently recording her (to modern readers) bizarre recipes. Though Hildegard prized holy chastity above all virtues, these writings include much detailed and surprisingly knowledgeable writing on sexual matters. Physica is a sort of encyclopaedia, listing plants, creatures, stones and metals. New Agers have made much of her word viriditas, greenness and growth. Her other books were theological and record her visions.
Hildegard was not a feminist. Indeed she taught that women are inferior beings and should be passive and servile, though she can hardly be said to have practised what she preached. Her letters begin with carefully self-deprecating references to the writer being merely an unlearned woman. How good was her Latin? We cannot be sure, but she surely read books from the monastic library. However, her lifelong secretary, the monk Volmar, had leave to edit her words. As a preacher she presumably spoke in Latin.
Maddocks makes the interesting point that it was only later that 'the shift of learning, whether theological or scientific, from the monasteries to the universities proved a regressive step for women by excluding them from learned discourse.' And preach she did, doing popular tours of the Rhine region for nearly twenty years in her 60s and 70s. Often suffering acute illness and expecting death, in fact she lived to 81, a good age in 1179.
In today's world, what might Hildegard have become? Scientist, artist, musician, head of a business empire, Chancellor of Germany? This fascinating book leaves me wondering.
Anne Ashworth's Not as the Crow Flies: Journal and Selected Poems was published by SOF in 2012.