Among the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, her Expositiones euangeliorum, or gospel homilies, have attracted comparatively little scholarly attention. Kienzle, who, with Carolyn Muessig, co-edited the recent critical edition of that work (in Hildegardis Bingensis Opera minora [Turnhout: Brepols, 2007], 185–333), gives us now the “first comprehensive study” (16). This is a thorough piece of scholarship. Kienzle carefully places the Expositiones in context both of the traditions in which Hildegard stood and of her broader oeuvre.

Hildegard's exegetical method in the Expositiones illustrates, for Kienzle, both the seer's indebtedness to tradition and her originality. The work comprises fifty-eight homilies on twenty-seven lections from the gospels, most of which she probably delivered to her sisters in the chapter house at the Rupertsberg monastery over many years and which apparently elude precise dating, with the exception of four that were presented instead at Disibodenberg around 1170. In form the homilies are “intratextual glosses,” whereby the speaker follows the gospel text seriatim, word by word, but inserts a gloss, usually articulating a spiritual (non-literal) interpretation, into the very syntax of the narrative of the text. The gloss constitutes a narrative in its own right, and so the insertion produces the effect of a tightly contrapuntal “dual narrative” (115). For instance, one of the several homilies on the nativity story in Matthew includes the following sentence (with the biblical text here in italic type, the interpretation in roman): “Then Herod, the Devil, secretly, namely in his craftiness, having called together the kings, the questioners of the creatures, learned diligently from them, seeking the time, clearly the appetite for understanding, of the star, that is, for God's gifts” (Expos. Euang. 12, lines 45–48, quoted p. 116): here Hildegard interweaves the biblical narrative, which concerns Herod's encounter with the magi, with the interpretive narrative, which concerns the devil's keenness to acquire knowledge that may aid him in his nefarious work. Kienzle is at pains to establish that the content of Hildegard's interpretation of such gospel texts is deeply indebted to patristic authors, including Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Origen. Her learning “should not be undervalued because of its monastic context, her gender, or her protestations of unlearnedness” (113). Nonetheless the form of the “intratextual gloss” is quite unique to Hildegard; neither patristic authors nor contemporaries like Bernard of Clairvaux incorporated glosses into biblical narratives in quite this way. The homilies display another distinctive formal trait as well, namely their alternation between “modes” of voice: sometimes Hildegard speaks as narrator, sometimes as discursive commentator, and sometimes as one of the characters in the story, thus suggesting that she may have performed the homilies as a kind of dramatic reading—which anyway must have helped make these dense texts comprehensible to their hearers.

Kienzle also discusses three typically Hildergardian themes that appear in the Expositiones, to situate the work within Hildegard's thought and life. One of these is her concept of salvation history. As elsewhere in her writings, that concept is strongly Augustinian, but unlike the Scivias where she follows Augustine's six-age schema, here she employs a simpler schema of three ages conceived in Trinitarian terms, which according to Kienzle makes the Expositiones conceptually important in its own right. A second theme, that of the “virtues,” echoes Hildegard's drama the Ordo virtutum which pictures the wandering and return of a soul, and the triumph of the virtues, who are personified, over the devil. Kienzle, again evoking the dramatic quality of the Expositiones, points out that not only does Hildegard routinely personify virtues in the course of her exegetical narratives, but that the work “focuses on the journey of the soul” and shows similarity to the Ordo virtutum in “vocabulary, scriptural allusions, and theme” (214). A final theme is heresy: here Kienzle surveys evidence of Hildegard's anti-heretical concerns in her other writings, then demonstrates their presence in the Expositiones, with a particular emphasis on her apparently self-consciously anti-Cathar assertion of the orthodox doctrine of creation. Though Kienzle finds this last theme considerably less dominating than the other two, she sees its presence in a work otherwise focused on subjects more directly related to monastic observance, as evidence that heresy weighed heavily on Hildegard's mind.

Kienzle's fine study succeeds in its major task of demonstrating the place and significance of the Expositiones euangeliorum in multiple contexts. It also raises interesting questions about an important theme in Hildegard studies that is itself not Kienzle's major focus, namely, the nature of Hildegard's claim to the authority to speak and write on the basis of her visionary experience. Remarkably, the Expositiones contain no such claim. Kienzle suggests the reason: that in this case Hildegard was writing for her own community and “felt no need to justify her authority” (6). By contrast, in reporting the three visions that Hildegard elsewhere described to justify herself as an interpreter of scripture—in Scivias, Liber divinorum operum and one of the autobiographical portions of the Vita sanctae Hildegardis, all of which presuppose a broader audience—she was in effect denying that “her own learning was the source for her comprehension of the Scripture” and thus protecting herself from “suspicions of transgressing gender bounds on religious discourse” (12). But in view of the high level of learning that Kienzle finds implicit in Hildegard, and that scholars like Fiona Griffiths have been documenting in other female monasticism of the time, Hildegard's claims to base her interpretation of scripture on visionary authority begin to look like something closer to a mere expedient than we might have thought. To be sure, it was a powerful expedient, authorizing her to “speak new secrets” (301) to the world beyond her monastery. And Kienzle nowhere denies that Hildegard somehow meant what she said when she claimed a distinctive visionary basis to her understanding of scripture. But how she meant it becomes the more difficult to say the more we give her learning its due.