Hildegard of Bingen’s first visionary and theological tome, Scivias, is irresistible to those of us who work on Hildegard’s music. As Margot Fassler herself showed us already a decade ago in her article ‘Allegorical Architecture in Scivias’, the work is intimately tied to Hildegard’s musical output.Footnote ¹

Epic in scope, Scivias tells the story of salvation history through three books, beginning with the creator and creation and ending with the Last Judgement and the new heaven and new earth. Each book is divided into individual visions that follow a pattern: a description of what Hildegard saw and heard is followed by explanations and elaborations of each element of the preceding vision, presented in numbered sections (typically referenced as book, vision and subsection when appropriate, e.g. II.iii or II.iii.5). In her final vision, when the destruction of the world is complete and the new heaven and earth have emerged, Hildegard, significantly, hears music, ‘marvellously embodying all meanings I had heard before’ (III.xiii).Footnote ² That she hears music that embodies ‘the meanings’ of all of the visions that came before would be attractive enough to scholars working on Hildegard’s music. But Hildegard takes it further, providing sixteen texts (III.xiii.1–8) sung by ‘the joyous citizens of heaven’ (III.xiii), immediately followed by the Exhortatio virtutum (III.xiii.9), the shorter, text-only version of Hildegard’s sung play, the Ordo virtutum. The first fourteen poetic texts are presented in pairs hierarchically, celebrating first Mary, the nine orders of the heavenly spirits, the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, the confessors, and the virgins, and are followed by two laments. The fourteen poetic texts all appear fully notated as antiphons and responsories in the two large collections of Hildegard’s music (the Dendermonde manuscript and the Riesencodex),Footnote ³ while the two laments appear fully notated within the Ordo virtutum, as transmitted in the Riesencodex.

While this concrete manifestation of Hildegard’s music in the culminating moment of her first visionary work features in Fassler’s study, Fassler focuses more on references to and resonances with the liturgy throughout the entirety of Scivias, drawing associations between Hildegard’s broader liturgical output – beyond what is directly captured within the final vision of Scivias – and her theological understanding of the world: ‘In this book I argue that Scivias is the setting for Hildegard’s initial understandings of the universe, and the place of her chants and her play within it are crucial to the ways in which she thought the universe was formed, continued to exist, and would be remade at the end’ (p. 3). In addition, what is critical to Fassler’s study is deep engagement with the material artefact, the luxuriously illustrated manuscript that was produced during Hildegard’s lifetime, while she was at Rupertsberg (the most important of a number of medieval copies of the work). That engagement, however, as Fassler acknowledges, is complicated by the lost status of the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript. Missing since the Second World War,Footnote ⁴ only black-and-white photographs of the original remain as well as digitised images of a meticulously reproduced handmade copy of the original produced by nuns at the Benediktinerinnenabtei Sankt Hildegard in Eibingen in 1927–33.Footnote ⁵ Fassler had access to both sets of images and shares many of them with her readers in this volume. Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts, comprising an introduction and eight chapters, is richly illustrated with twenty-five black-and-white figures throughout, as well as sixteen colour plates in the centre of the book, thirteen of which come from the early twentieth-century copy of the Rupertsberg Scivias. The text also includes thirty-two music examples and seven tables.

The book is a masterful and profound demonstration of Margot Fassler’s years of deep thinking and intertextual absorption of all of Hildegard’s written output. It is a book that requires close reading, with a copy of Scivias at hand to contextualise given passages and the Hildegard Abbey website open to magnify the Scivias images to better understand the detail discussed in the text.Footnote ⁶ What unfolds over the course of the book could have been more strongly set up in the introduction through an expanded description about the connection between Hildegard’s scientific and theological understanding of the creation of the world and the cosmos, as well as an overview of the structure of Scivias and how it interacts with that understanding.

The grand story narrated through Scivias and underpinning Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts is encapsulated in the epigraph used for Fassler’s introduction and a further elaboration would have helped readers navigate the rest of the book. From Cause et cure, one of two scientific treatises ascribed to Hildegard, it reads: ‘Before the Fall of Adam, the heavens were immovable and did not turn, but after the Fall, they gradually started to move and to spin. On the Last Day they will again come to rest, as it was at the beginning before the Fall’ (p. 1). As the book progresses, Fassler argues that Scivias details this connection between planetary movement and the salvation of humankind through repeated reference to contemporary cosmological theory – in both the written text and the accompanying images – and to liturgical texts, in particular to those associated with the Feast of All Saints.

Fassler’s introduction provides a short overview of the chapters, as well as briefly describing the companion to the book, ‘a unique digitized model of the cosmos and its stages of creation’ (p. 2). She discusses the chronology of Hildegard’s lyrics (pp. 3–8), particularly because she will discuss poetic texts in the book that may have been (or certainly were) written after Scivias was completed. She also discusses the status of the illustrations in the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript and Hildegard’s presumed role as a designer (pp. 8–10), and addresses thorny questions surrounding the authenticity of the scientific treatises ascribed to Hildegard (pp. 10–12).

The first chapter, ‘The Cosmological Background’, is a deep dive into cosmology (‘the study of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the universe’), cosmogeny (‘the study of creation’), and cosmography (‘the mapping of the cosmos’) (p. 13). As Fassler explains, the book is ‘an exercise in archaeoastronomy, for it takes what Hildegard knew about the cosmos and interrelates this with her theological explorations’ (p. 15). She discusses in great detail the transmission of Greek cosmology to the Latin Middle Ages and points out that Hildegard did not accept Aristotle’s idea about eternal motion of the planets, since she articulated that motion began with the Fall and that it ‘would cease at the end of time’ (p. 18). Fassler emphasises as well the connection between the cosmos and the Church year and its liturgical calendar: the Christian calendar in the Middle Ages (and today) relies on the cycle of the sun (the Roman Julian calendar) for its fixed dates and on the cycle of the moon for the celebration of Easter and the Lenten season preceding it. She argues that Hildegard understands the liturgy as ‘an allegorial reflection of cosmic action’ (p. 32).

In Chapter 2, ‘Scivias on the Rupertsberg’, Fassler describes the structure of Scivias and aptly describes its style as a Summa (following Barbara Newman in her introduction to the authoritative English translation of Scivias), which begins with creation and closes with judgement.Footnote ⁷ Newman proposed Hugh of St Victor’s De sacramentis Christianae fidei as a possible model and Fassler further describes Scivias as a response to that work, and as a liturgical commentary (pp. 42, 45). She provides evidence for considering Rupertsberg as a site of manuscript production, through descriptions of monastic buildings in a letter by Guibert of Gembloux, Hildegard’s mentioning of a female scribe in the prefaces to her later Liber vitae meritorum and Liber divinorum operum, and the inclusion of implements of a scriptorium in the vocabulary list of Hildegard’s lingua ignota (p. 47). This chapter also includes codicological discussion, concerning the stages of production, and the implications of the identification of scribal hands in the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript (pp. 52–63).

It is in the third chapter, ‘Cosmology and the Liturgy: Hildegard and the One Enthroned’, that Fassler begins to bring together all the strands laid out so far: the text of Scivias, the images from the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript, the medieval liturgy, Hildegard’s own poetic texts and music and the association between Hildegard’s theology and her understanding of the cosmos. She begins with the author portrait in the Rupertsberg Scivias (pp. 64–8), relating the ‘flames of inspiration’ above Hildegard’s head to the cosmos through what Hildegard described as the ‘cosmic power that warms her gently by its rays’, with the sun as a representation of Christ.

She argues that the liturgy, ‘the forms of monastic prayer’, have not been taken into account enough in considering Hildegard’s theological texts, and that the Feast of All Saints in particular ‘is fundamental to understanding Hildegard and her treatise Scivias’ (p. 72). It is well documented that Hildegard was consecrated on 1 November 1112 – thus All Saints Day was her day of new creation (p. 72). Fassler provides the texts for the Office of All Saints in Appendix 3 (pp. 265–8) as recorded in Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek MS 103, considered to be a contemporary manuscript from a regional monastery (pp. 73–4), and demonstrates the repeated iteration of the hierarchical ranks of saints (pp. 77–80). She relates the office texts, the Rule of St Benedict, and the Gospel reading (the Sermon on the Mount) to the accompanying image for Scivias I.i., ‘The One Enthroned’ (pp. 80–6), which depicts Christ in Majesty but also on top of a mountain. Fassler concludes the chapter with a discussion of one of Hildegard’s chants not included in Scivias, ‘O Ierusalem’, a sequence dedicated to a particular saint, Rupert, the patron saint of Hildegard’s new monastery. As she argues, it is ‘a chant that fuses devotion to the cult of Rupert with the work of the saints in building the structure of the Church, stone by gleaming stone, soul by soul’ (p. 90).

In Chapter 4, ‘Hildegard and the Hexameron’, Fassler considers the relationship between the Trinity and the six days of creation, and examines closely three of the Rupertsberg Scivias images that accompany visions II.ii, II.i and I.ii, reproduced in Figures 4.1–3, respectively. She discusses three of Hildegard’s antiphons, ‘Laus trinitati’, which is not one of the chants featured in Scivias III.xiii, as well as ‘O splendidissima gemma’ (for Mary) and ‘O gloriosissimi’ (for angels), which are included in that final vision. Fassler’s analysis of ‘O gloriosissimi’ is particularly insightful (pp. 116–22). The text addresses creation and the Fall of Satan, relating to the descriptions and depictions of the Fall earlier in the Rupertsberg Scivias. She demonstrates how the music changes drastically with the shift to ‘the wicked work that first arose in your companion, the lost angel’. The chapter ends with a compelling comparison of depictions of the creation and the Fall in the Rupertsberg Scivias with those found in a late twelfth-century illuminated copy of Scivias from Zwiefalten, held today at the University Library at Heidelberg and available for viewing in colour online.Footnote ⁸

The wonderfully illustrated Chapter 5, ‘The Cosmic Egg and the Liturgy’, really makes clear the relationship between the depictions of the cosmos in the Rupertsberg Scivias and a twelfth-century scientific understanding of the universe. (And if you could assign only one chapter from this book to a related graduate seminar, I would recommend this one.) As Fassler states, ‘Hildegard’s map of the cosmos is both highly unusual and rooted in tradition and in her own times’ (p. 128). She shows how the cosmic egg accompanying the Rupertsberg Scivias I.iii combines contemporary depictions of the Twelve Heads of the Winds (pp. 131–5) with rendering of ‘the planets arrayed in their circular orbits around the earth’ (p. 137), along with schematic T-O (terrarum orbis) maps, placing Jerusalem in the centre of the known continents (pp. 137–40). Hildegard’s representation is pictorial rather than diagrammatic, and captures these three contemporary practices without labelling any of the elements as they do. She instead provides an ‘exegesis upon the meanings of this visual expression … to explore the relationships between the Church (as the city of God), Christ, as its head, and the saints, produced as they are by this Church, in the past, the present, and the future’ (p. 141). For the remainder of the chapter, Fassler further ties ‘Hildegard’s map of the cosmos … to her understanding of a cosmic model embodying sacramental action’ (p. 147), in particular to the Eucharist.

The final three chapters of Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts relate in various ways to Book III of Scivias: Chapter 6 covers Book III, visions i–x, while Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the final vision xiii as it relates to the Ordo virtutum (the extended version of vision xiii’s Exhortatio virtutum), as well as the seven antiphon–responsory pairs of texts, and the elucidation of Psalms 148–50. In Chapter 6, ‘The Edifice of Salvation and its Virtues’, Fassler describes Scivias Book III as Hildegard’s ‘attempt to fuse the cosmic reflection of God’s power and intentions … with ongoing earthly action, leading to a prediction of the end of time’ (p. 158). The Edifice is an allegorical architectural structure that houses the virtues in various quadrants, and ‘the turning of the cosmos and the duration of time would cease’ once an ‘unfathomable number of saints’ reaches the top of the Edifice (p. 161). The opening of Book III parallels the opening of Book I by beginning with the Fall to trace the ‘perilous journey of Eve’s children through history’ (p. 158). Fassler connects one of the virtues, Wisdom, who is ‘aiding the Apostles in the Tower of the Church’ (p. 177) in Scivias III.ix to Hildegard’s Trinitarian antiphon ‘O virtus Sapientiae’. The text of the antiphon describes Wisdom’s three wings: ‘one of them soars on high, the second exudes from earth, and the third flutters everywhere’ (p. 178), which are reflected musically by the range and contour of the melodies setting those textual phrases.

In Chapter 7, ‘Fall and Recovery in the Ordo virtutum’, Fassler describes the Ordo virtutum as a feminised, musical response to the Ordo prophetarum (p. 189), in which ‘the virtues become a new set of prophets and apostles, teaching, leading, [and] inspiring’ (p. 190). Fassler argues that the Ordo virtutum ‘is a study of a musical recovery of redemption within an individual soul, a recovery that in [Hildegard’s] view was dramatically tied to the unfolding of the cosmos and the nature of time and eternity’ (p. 189). She considers the enactment of the Ordo virtutum by the nuns at Rupertsberg as being in dialogue with Scivias, a text that they would have known deeply (p. 195). The remainder of the chapter is a close reading and musical analysis of the Ordo virtutum, which moves back and forth between different visions in Scivias, and considers melody and mode as expressive elements of the play.

In the final chapter, ‘Endings and Time Beyond Time’, Fassler designates three kinds of song described in Hildegard’s final Scivias vision as ‘songs of joy offered by the “citizens of heaven”, laments calling people back from the follies of sin, and the exhortations of the virtues encouraging people to break out of the Devil’s snare’ (p. 224). Significantly, the final vision closes with a paraphrase of Psalms 148–50, those that were sung every day at Lauds, leading ‘the reader directly back to the liturgy and to song within community’ (p. 224). The most extended musical discussion in this chapter (pp. 227–33) is devoted to ‘In Principio’, the final chant of the Ordo virtutum (but not of the Exhortatio virtutum). It is a lament sung by Christ on the Cross (p. 227) and ‘provides a summary of Hildegard’s understanding of the nature and purpose of the cosmos: the redemption of humankind’ (p. 233). Fassler discusses the final illustration in the Rupertsberg Scivias, which accompanies the final vision, drawing connections between it and the Feast of All Saints, in particular the eight responsories from the office (p. 243). She identifies the saints by rank (pp. 245–6), linking them then to the fourteen chants in III.xiii that follow the same ranking from Mary, through the angels, the patriarchs and prophets and so on (pp. 246–8).

As Barbara Newman wrote in 1990, Scivias is ‘a prophetic proclamation, a book of allegorical visions, an exegetical study, a theological summa. Finally, it may be considered as a multimedia work in which the arts of illumination, music and drama contribute their several beauties to enhance the text and heighten the visionary message’.Footnote ⁹ Margot Fassler in writing Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts took on the monumental task of considering Scivias in all these ways as well as tracing the connection of this work to all Hildegard’s other output (whether it came before or after), and to twelfth-century liturgy and contemporary thought. The complexity of the terrain makes it a demanding read, which could have been eased somewhat by the use of footnotes rather than endnotes. Given that endnotes were used, it would have been helpful to have more in-text citation to specific passages in Scivias (by book, vision and chapter) as well as to other works of Hildegard. For example, on page 242 following discussion of Scivias I.iii, Fassler quotes Cause et cure without mentioning that work in the text; I only discovered this when I could not find the passage in Scivias and checked the endnote which directed me to Cause et cure instead. These quibbles aside, Fassler’s book is a marvellous engagement with an original thinker and composer, and gives the reader much to contemplate.