Hildegard of Bingen: a visionary life (review)

150 Reviews they could perhaps have appeared as footnotes on the page on which they appeared. The lack of a bibliography, although annoying, is perhaps understandable in a publication of this nature. The lack of an index, however, is a little more irritating. Sara Warneke Department of History University of Adelaide Flanagan, Sabina, Hildegard of Bingen: a visionary life, London and New York, Routledge, 1990; paper; pp. xiv, 230; 1 map, 10 plates; R.R.P. AUS$24.95 [distributed in Australia by the Law Book Company]. This is, in many ways, just the sort of book for which English readers, and especially English readers interested in women's history, have been waiting. It is concise, yet scholarly, disciplined, yet committed, clearly written, yet not simplified in the writing to excess. The proof-reading is excellent. If I have certain reservations about the whole, the fact remains that it is a useful introductory contribution to a dauntingly difficult subject. The career of the Abbess Hildegard (1098-1179) spanned a period of great turbulence and complexity, from the crises in the relations between the papacy and the empire among which she lived, to the convulsions within that world of the intellect she sought to enter. Her own life partook fully of this turbulence. A contemporary of many redoubtable women, such as Heloise of la Paraclete and Christina of Markyate, she met with some of those resistances which so troubled their paths but she took her own way. She also wrote far more than they. Hildegard's opera, ranging from herfirstgreat account of her visions, the Scivias (completed in 1151), to the simple saints' lives written in her later years, and proceeding through hymns, sequences, medical texts, and further prophetic and visionary treatises, form one of the most precious deposits of medieval women's writing which has reached us. They are also among the hardest to understand. Hildegard's Latin is not always of the clearest and her works are, as we have them now, for the most part poorly edited. W e lack an adequate working knowledge, therefore, both of the manuscript texts of Hildegard's works and, most importantly, of the sources upon which she drew. It has to be said that as long as this remains the case, all efforts to write assessments of her will be premature. Dr Flanagan lowers the reader gently into the mailstrom, with opening pages upon Hildegard's life and the context of her activities, nicely pieced together from the scattered biographical notices. Successive chapters plunge us into the full corpus of her attributed writings. A final section engages with the abbess's activities upon the wider pastoral scene and, especially, with the ways in which her physical infirmities may have affected her visionary life. The Reviews 151 conclusion that Hildegard's 'neuro-physiological profile', especially her susceptibility to migraine headaches, accounts for her visions is a solution with which many wdl feel tempted to agree. There is a list of Hildegard's works and of some of the works upon her, some notation and an index. M y chief reservations concern assumptions for which the grounds are not obvious, the accuracy of the translations from the Latin, and a conceptual framework which seems, in places, rather pre-fabricated than founded firmly upon the evidence. What, for instance, is the basis for the distinction between 'important manuscripts' and mere manuscripts (pp. 225-6)? What are we to make of remarks such as 'The only other women of the twelfth century whose writings have survived were also German nuns' (p. 13)? H o w are we to take such a statement as 'there istittledoubt that the material [of the Physicae and Causae et curae] bears Hildegard's own stamp' (p. 105) when we are certain neither of the sources of these treatises nor, come to that, of their absolute authenticity? Many of the passages in Hildegard's medical works leap to the eye, in fact as simple extracts from old fashioned and familiar monastic compendia. The Latin Liber vitae meritorum does not mean in English 'Book of life's merits' (p. 8), but 'Memorial book of meritorious actions', a very different matter. 'Recluditur' does not...