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55 Chapter 2 Viriditas and Virginitas The image of Hildegard of Bingen’s merry band of virgins, attired in silken garments and embroidered crowns during tony feast day celebrations, has captured the imagination of scholars, filmmakers ,and medieval enthusiasts alike.1 These “blithe noble virgins”donned gold jewelry and allowed their hair to flow freely beneath floor-length veils to receive communion as true brides of Christ, free from the subjugation of an earthly marriage.2 Hildegard’s insistence on such fanfare was the source of tension between her and Tenxwind, the magistra of the reformed Augustinian house at Andernach, who criticized her luxury and her practice of admitting only the daughters of nobility into her community. Hildegard’s love of opulent accessorizing has been considered more recently as a point of contrast with the reformed simplicity and modesty commanded of the virgins of the Speculum virginum. For example, Constant Mews has remarked 1. Pamela Sheingorn, “The Virtues of Hildegard’s Ordo virtutum: or, It Was a Woman’s World,” in The Ordo virtutum of Hildegard of Bingen: Critical Studies, ed. Audrey Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications,1992);Vision:Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen,dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Munich: Celluloid Dreams, 2009). 2. For a criticism of Hildegard’s “strange and irregular practices,”see Letter 52, “Mistress Tengswich to Hildegard,” in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1:127–28; Hildegardis Bingensis epistolarium, ed. Lieven Van Acker, CCCM 91 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991, 1993), 126. 56 HOLY MATTER that “the Speculum virginum offers a vision of the religious life so different from that provided by Hildegard of Bingen that it seems difficult to imagine that she was profoundly influenced by [the Speculum author’s] perspective.”3 Whereas the author of the Speculum warned virgins against the lure of material extravagance, Hildegard actively encouraged vestmental grandeur and took into her care only nuns of aristocratic lineage. But an examination of the instructive texts that Hildegard designed for communal use demonstrates some important similarities with the Speculum. A new interpretation of Hildegard ’s devotion might emerge if we examine not what she saw—that is,her visionary tracts—but the performances she created to be seen. Hildegard’s famed fondness for sartorial luxury was no mere concession to the comforts of a noble upbringing. It made a devotional and theological point about the divine materiality of re-creation, and the role that the consecrated virgin played in it. Defending her sumptuousness, Hildegard’s letter of response to Tenxwind, composed ca. 1148–50, championed viriditas as a speculatory means of identifying God’s presence in the material world. “[The virgin] stands in the unsullied purity of paradise,” she wrote, “lovely and unwithering, and she always remains in the full vitality of the budding rod.”4 Hildegard believed that the earth’s canopy of green grass was proof of God’s creative energy, or viriditas, at work in the material world of creation. In the same way, she taught, within the world of the cloister, the virgins’ long flowing hair was the external manifestation of their virtues, their work through viriditas to render God present to the material world. For Hildegard , viriditas and virginitas were inextricably yoked; the practice of virginity compelled the world’s viridity, making God materially present. Hildegard fashioned a theology of virginity in which her community might command a pivotal role in making God accessible in the world, even claiming for that community a participation in divinization itself. It is possible that Hildegard knew the Speculum virginum and imbibed from it the notion that consecrated virgins retained a special task to continue the world’s re-creation. Along with two or three other women, she lived until 1147 in a stone cell attached to the monastery of Disibodenberg, which was affiliated with the Hirsau reform. The Speculum virginum circulated during Hildegard’s lifetime among the monasteries under the influence of Hirsau. 3. Constant Mews, “Hildegard of Bingen, the Speculum virginum and Religious Reform,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Alexander Reverchon (Mainz: P. Von Zabern), 250. 4. Hildegard, Epistolarium, 52.24–26, p. 128: “ipsa stat in simplicitate et in integritate pulchri paradisi, qui numquam aridus apparebit, sed semper permanet in plena viriditate floris virge”; The Letters, 129. VIRIDITAS AND VIRGINITAS 57 Additionally, a manuscript leaf depicting a tree of Jesse from a twelfthcentury Speculum virginum belonged to the church...

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