Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) has long been revered for her extraordinary versatility, culminating with her canonisation as both a saint and a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Documentation of her multifarious activities during her lifetime and enduring influences well beyond has attracted widespread attention and has secured Hildegard’s prominence in medieval studies. This recent interdisciplinary collection complements previous edited volumes (published in 1998 and 2014) by providing an updated and accessible introduction to current resources for the study of Hildegard’s life, works and reputation in conjunction with related communities, ideas and materials prevalent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Hildegard’s life and monastic context is the unifying theme of Part I, with three essays focusing on sources that document Hildegard’s biography and facilitate understanding of the lived experiences and education of religious women of her time and place. In an overview of the principal sources documenting Hildegard’s life, archivist Michael Embach exposes interpretative challenges and suggests how to weigh varying perspectives. Embach observes how missing and contradictory evidence – some by Hildegard herself – has generated controversy over her birthdate and birthplace, her age at enclosure, and the date of her death. The rarity of female canonisation attests to Hildegard’s posthumous popularity, which Embach explains is also evident in earlier informal actions, such as the granting of indulgences and elevation of her remains from her grave at Rupertsberg. In the reconstruction of a single day (30 September) in the lives of Hildegard’s contemporaries at the female monastery of Eibingen across the Rhine from Rupertsberg, historian Alison Beach consults textual sources – the Rule of St Benedict along with Hildegard’s commentary, customaries from the influential monastery of Hirsau, and documents from contemporaneous women’s communities – alongside bioarchaeological evidence to portray the centrality of the liturgy of the hours to the experience of monastic life. Beach combines liturgical and devotional practices with manual activities, the physical layout of a typical nunnery, food consumption and sanitation techniques in her descriptions of each office hour, interspersed with relevant references to Hildegard’s writings. To contextualise Hildegard’s education and intellectual achievements, musicologist Lori Kruckenberg examines contemporaneous standards and expectations for female literacy and learning in a variety of medieval German religious communities, documented in monastic rules and conciliar decrees, hagiographical literature and present-day case studies of relevant artefacts. Such varied evidence reinforces the importance of education among religious women across the German lands, suggesting that the breadth of Hildegard’s knowledge was more common than Hildegard herself admitted. Although many of her contemporaries were equally learned writers and composers, Hildegard still stands apart for the size and diversity of her output.

Hildegard’s writings and reputation are contextualised in Part II, with six essays examining her theology, letters, sermons, medical expertise, prophecies and visions in relation to sources of influence, intended audiences and reception. Noting the prevailing emphasis on Hildegard’s spirituality, church historian James Ginther argues instead for Hildegard’s role as a theologian in his study of the pedagogical emphasis of her three theological works: Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum and the Liber divinorum operum. By underscoring Hildegard’s educational oversight as magistra of Rupertsberg, Ginther argues that these works – sharing resonances with Benedictine values (humility) and practices (meditation) as well as recurring mnemonic devices – were conceived primarily as a theological curriculum for the nuns under Hildegard’s immediate care who became vital for the success of her programme of moral reform. The desire to engage a more diverse public via a prophetic voice is one of two principal motivations for Hildegard’s voluminous epistolary output studied by historian Christopher Fletcher. When compared with contemporaneous practices of letter-writing, Hildegard’s vivid use of prophetic language to describe visions in her letters is unique. Fletcher suggests that emphasis on Hildegard’s use of her prophetic abilities in the service of her divinely inspired knowledge was equally important to the campaign to promote Hildegard for sainthood, begun prior to her death, through the careful curation of her correspondence into collections that also sought to align her goals of reform with those of the papacy. Some of Hildegard’s letters echo recurring themes – notably viriditas (greenness) and its association with preachers – in her preaching activities and sermons examined by musicologist Peter Loewen. Tracing the influence of the Church Fathers, particularly Gregory the Great, Loewen demonstrates how Hildegard adapted language from these models in her own exegetic exhortations to the nuns and monks in her vicinity as well as in her pastoral outreach to correspondents seeking her advice and even to defend questionable practices at Rupertsberg – the nuns’ unbound hair, through which greenness could flourish – against external critics.

The remaining three essays in Part II give greater emphasis to the later reception of Hildegard’s works at Rupertsberg and beyond. Focusing on Hildegard’s posthumous renown for her medical expertise, historian Faith Wallis analyses the compilation of two medical writings, Cause et cure and Physica, from a now lost parent text, and the consequences of the rediscovery of these compilations in the nineteenth century. The present-day business of ‘Hildegard-Medizin’, which has inspired websites such as ‘Healthy Hildegard’, attests to ongoing perceptions of Hildegard’s medical knowledge that are at once derived from the Rupertsberg compilations and at odds with their original intent. Wallis argues that, in keeping with twelfth-century perceptions of Hildegard as a healer in the spiritual – not medical – sense, the Rupertsberg editors recognised the medical aspects of these writings as integral to Hildegard’s spirituality and ultimately sought to emphasise the breadth of her teaching. Another posthumous anthology, the Pentachronon compiled in the thirteenth century by the Cistercian monk Gelano of Eberbach, enabled ongoing engagement with Hildegard’s prophecies well into the seventeenth century, as studied by Magda Hayton, a scholar of religion. Hildegard’s lasting reputation as a prophet whose predictions were perceived to be relevant to later eras drew at once upon the fame of her prophetic calls for reform and the extent to which her contemporaries solicited her spiritual guidance. Hayton shows how the Pentachronon emphasises both aspects of Hildegard’s prophetic reputation by combining excerpts from her visions and letters prophesying history (notably the five ages) with letters offering spiritual counsel, thereby opposing false prophecies and teaching effective practices for clerical reform. Noting Hildegard’s self-comparison not to the prophets of the Old Testament but to the visionary apostles of the New Testament, the scholar of religion Wendy Love Anderson contextualises Hildegard’s visionary persona and visions in the twelfth century, which she sees as a ‘watershed for visionary activity’, and her enduring influence in later visionary history. Anderson observes that Hildegard stands out from the self-authorising visionaries of her time not because of her gender but rather because of her relative independence from a male authoriser. Hildegard was already upheld as a model visionary by her contemporaries, and Anderson explains how and why her visions have enjoyed exceptional popularity among an increasingly diverse public up to the present.

Hildegard’s music, manuscripts, illuminations and scribes are the focus of Part III, with four essays examining the ritual and material contexts of her creative activities. Applying the modern concept of intertextuality, musicologist Jennifer Bain shows how Hildegard’s substantial musical output relates to contemporaneous liturgical music and intersects with her writings. Bain nuances the ongoing perception of Hildegard’s musical originality by pinpointing idiosyncrasies that are specific to the circulation of her music outside of standard liturgical books and to her flexible approach to music and poetry in particular liturgical genres (hymns, sequences and the ambiguous symphoniae). Bain identifies intertextuality at once in previously unstudied examples of Hildegard’s melodic reuse of her own music and in textual citations of her chants in her visions (notably Scivias), letters and hagiographical writings, demonstrating the centrality of music to her spiritual initiatives. The female experience of Benedictine monasticism informs musicologist Alison Altstatt’s discussion of Hildegard’s sung drama, the Ordo virtutum. Noting the prominence of the virtues in the Rule of St Benedict, the rite of the consecration of virgins codified in twelfth-century Mainz, and the weekly processional chant Benedic domine, Altstatt explains how these influences combine with a widely known account of the Harrowing of Hell – the Descensus Christi ad Infernos – to shape Hildegard’s original emphasis on the salvific powers of the virtues and the embodiment of the soul. The present popularity of Hildegard’s music is matched by that of her illustrations, which can be understood to have been originally conceived not to depict or promote visionary experiences but rather for a didactic purpose, as argued by historian Nathaniel Campbell. Hildegard’s didactic mission is evident both in the larger content of her visions which, as Campbell stresses, differ from the ecstatic experiences characteristic of female mystics to focus instead on the instruction of divine truths, and in her design of the illustrations in the Rupertsberg copy of Scivias that draw upon traditional Christian iconography to facilitate comprehension of the text’s unconventional imagery – a practice that intensified after Hildegard’s death with the illustrated edition of the Liber divinorum operum. Scribal practices at Rupertsberg attesting to Hildegard’s efforts to disseminate and preserve her output are the focus of the concluding essay by musicologist Margot Fassler, based on the Zweifalten letter collection (copied from the 1150s to c.1170), the production of Hildegard’s three major theological treatises (in the 1160s and 1170s), and distinctive features of one of the principal Rupertsberg scribes. Fassler argues for the development of the Rupertsberg scribal style from prior practices at Disibodenberg, interpreting the high number of scribal hands in extant manuscripts as evidence of the frequency of scribal work by Hildegard’s nuns, and suggesting that copying Hildegard’s works may have encouraged theological comprehension. Analysis of passages attributed to a single scribe (visible in the manuscript images accompanied by an edition of the Latin text and its translation in the appendix) at once highlights characteristics specific to the Rupertsberg scriptorium and motivates Fassler’s call for more detailed scrutiny of individual hands and the importance of the scriptorium to communal life.

Overall, this collection effectively showcases the diversity of current research on Hildegard and her various collaborators and provides engaging points of entry into her world and worldview. In keeping with the goal to stimulate further study by students and scholars new to the field, each essay includes a short bibliography listing editions plus English translations as well as relevant scholarship, and the last three essays also reference other media (recordings and online manuscript images). The volume concludes with a select bibliography of editions and English translations of Hildegard’s works (organised by genre), biographies, additional resources (such as online databases, records of Hildegard’s canonisation, previous essay collections), and a list of the principal manuscripts preserving Hildegard’s output, many of which are accessible online. A detailed index allows readers to track concepts, people, places and works across the collection. These reference and research tools are enhanced by the transparency with which each contributor outlines their research methods and, when relevant, conflicting or incomplete evidence. Hildegard thus emerges as a complex yet increasingly accessible figure who continues to shed new light on multiple facets of medieval life.