Companions to Hildegard are hardly in short supply. The 900th anniversary of her birth in 1998 saw the publication of a German conference volume edited by Alfred Haverkamp, a Warburg Institute colloquium led by Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke, an anthology produced by the nuns of St. Hildegard's Abbey, and my own Voice of the Living Light. These were followed by a Brill Companion in 2014, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra Stoudt, and George Ferzoco. Within this crowded field, Jennifer Bain's Cambridge Companion covers some familiar ground, but the quality is uniformly high. Novice Hildegardians will find reliable guidance across the full range of the visionary's endeavors in a volume more affordable than its recent competitor.

The essays are carefully arranged from the broadest to the most specialized, beginning with Michael Embach's biographical sketch and ending with Margot Fassler's study of scribal culture at the Rupertsberg. Bain has divided the anthology into three sections: “Life and Monastic Context” (three essays), “Writings and Reputation” (six essays), and “Music, Manuscripts, Illuminations, and Scribes” (four essays). Each chapter has a brief bibliography for further reading while a more extensive one concludes the volume, including Latin editions, English translations, and key manuscripts, many of which are now digitized.

Embach's chapter, somewhat quirkily translated from the German, ends with a brief account of Hildegard's canonization—first broached in 1228 but concluded only in 2012, when Benedict XVI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church. A point of special interest lies in the examination of Hildegard's writings by the masters of theology in Paris, directed by Bishop William of Auvergne. William Courtenay has dated that event to the winter of 1228–1229, making it one of the earliest instances of such magisterial consultation on record. A promising line of inquiry might seek Hildegard's influence on the masters involved in that review, who allegedly found her words to be “not human but divine.” The saint's French reception has been little studied.

Alison Beach considers the nuns’ daily life and work at Eibingen—a monastery linked with Hildegard since the early thirteenth century, although no contemporary document confirms its foundation by the magistra. Beach concentrates on the Divine Office and the nuns’ manual labor, which included manuscript production, skilled textile work, and perhaps viticulture. Lori Kruckenberg provides an overview of literacy in the lives of medieval German nuns and canonesses, using library holdings, hagiographic texts, and other women's writings to show that Hildegard's wide learning was not uncommon for a religious woman of noble birth.

In Part II, James Ginther's essay on Hildegard's theology focuses on method, stressing the disposition of humility, the ars memoriae, and the importance of a concrete audience, namely the women of her community. Christopher Fletcher analyzes the abbess's letters, one of the largest personal collections to survive from the twelfth century. Manuscripts containing parts of this correspondence outnumber all known copies of her treatises, indicating the importance of letters as a medium for transmitting thought. About 40 percent of Hildegard's correspondents were fellow monastic superiors, although she famously wrote to emperors and popes as well. Peter Loewen addresses the favorite Hildegardian theme of viriditas, “greenness” or flourishing, as expressed in her sermons. Although she picked up the term from Gregory the Great, a quarter of all uses in the Patrologia Latina database are her own. Viriditas marks her conviction that moral, spiritual, and intellectual vitality spring from the same Holy Spirit that is the life force in nature, greening gardens, as well as souls.

Faith Wallis takes up Hildegard's medicine, explaining how her Physica and Causae et curae were edited after her death from a single text that does not survive, the Liber subtilitatum. The late redaction of these writings (and not some perceived incompatibility with her prophetic role) accounts for their absence from the Riesencodex, the “giant book” of her collected works. Wallis also traces the history of Hildegard's reception as a medical writer. More influential was her reception as an apocalyptic prophet, a story told by Magda Hayton in her treatment of the Pentachronon (The Five Ages). That prophetic anthology, compiled by the Cistercian Gebeno of Eberbach around 1220, survives in three redactions that account for by far the greatest part of Hildegard's late medieval and early modern fame. Readers of divergent factions saw her as predicting the arrival of the mendicants, the Great Schism, the Reformation, and the dissolution of the monasteries. The popularity of her authentic prophecies was augmented by a wave of pseudo-Hildegardiana. Finally, Wendy Love Anderson considers Hildegard's reception as a visionary from the late Middle Ages through the present, reviewing the influential positions of Evelyn Underhill (the revival of mysticism), Charles Singer and Oliver Sacks (the “migraine hypothesis”), and Matthew Fox (“creation-centered spirituality”).

Part III contains more technical essays treating Hildegard's chant repertory (Jennifer Bain), her music drama Ordo virtutum in its Benedictine context (Alison Altstatt), illuminated manuscripts of the Scivias and Liber divinorum operum (Nathaniel Campbell), and some paleographic features of Rupertsberg hands (Margot Fassler). Specialists in these fields will find valuable points of departure to study Hildegard's compositional techniques and her use of visual representation. Fassler's chapter encourages further study of the intensive Rupertsberg scribal culture, an index of the effort Hildegard devoted to assuring the long-term survival of her life's work.