Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine (review)

Victoria Sweet has ventured into a dense field of medieval scholarship in her book about Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Aided by renewed interest in women's history, Hildegard's life and writings have become a scholarly industry of sorts in recent years. Victoria Sweet, with credentials as a historian of medicine and a practicing physician, believes that despite this spate of scholarly studies, Hildegard has not been well served in regard to her medical writings. "[C]ompared to the energy, research and creativity that has gone into most facets of Hildegard's work, research into her medicine—into its background, its significance for interpreting the rest of her work, and its utility for the history of medicine—has been meager" (38-39). Sweet seeks to remedy this and explains Hildegard as both a practitioner of medicine and a pigmentarius (akin to a pharmacist today and skilled in recipes for cures). Above all, Sweet finds that Hildegard understood plants and gardens, from which flowed both her treatments and her understanding of physiology and health.

Chapter one deals with Hildegard's life from her entry into a Benedictine monastery as a child. As the tenth child of an aristocratic family, she became a tithe from among her siblings and was dedicated to the religious life. Her education, move from Disibodenberg to Rupertsberg near Bingen, friendships, religious writings, and her illnesses are discussed. Sweet concurs that migraines may have had much to do with her visions and speculates about other possible illnesses noted in Hildegard's writings, none of which kept Hildegard from a highly productive life as a thinker and a religious leader with influence far beyond the confines of her monastery. In her long lifetime, Hildegard became a recognized authority on theology, mysticism, music, and medicine as well as an assured voice on the politics of church and state. Hildegard as polymath is the attraction she exerts over her admirers down to the present day; in particular, Sweet is interested in the connections among Hildegard's stated opinions in diverse fields of knowledge.

Sweet presents her thesis in chapter two, "Gardener of the Body." She believes that Hildegard's experience as a gardener proves her to be the author of "Causes and Cures," a disputed treatise, which Laurence Moulinier among others, has recently assigned to later authorship. (Hildegardis Bingensis Cause et Cure, Berlin, Rarissima mediaevalia, 2003, 1). Hildegard's more scholarly "Physica" is not a disputed manuscript and Sweet's analysis rests on comparisons of these two treatises. Sweet also challenges two eminent Hildegard scholars, Peter Dronke and Barbara Newman, on the reading of a poem arguing that these scholars do not appreciate that a medical syndrome lay behind the term "suffocatio," namely the suffocation of the womb, usually diagnosed by the absence of menses (48).

Sweet discusses the four elements (wind, land, rain, and sun) and then the four bodily humors, finding "Causes and Cures" the richest source of information. Following the argument that Hildegard's thought is best understood by her practice of medicine and her practical knowledge of gardening, Sweet concludes that Hildegard was able to reassemble ancient medical learning, her own "private understanding. . . from her own experience of plants in the garden and bodies in the infirmary" (132). Sweet's final analysis of viriditas or greening as it appears in the corpus of Hildegard's writings is illustrated by tables demonstrating frequency of usage per page of text (132). The brief conclusion is illustrated with diagrams and ends with "We Never Stopped Being Medieval" (165). A large scholarly apparatus follows composing about half the volume; Sweet claims all translations are hers and when reference is made to a manuscript, the transcription is also hers unless otherwise noted.

The thesis argued here, that Hildegard's practice of medicine and gardening experience informed her thought in vital ways, rests largely on Hildegard's authorship of "Causes and Cures...