Vioice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World ed. by Barbara Newman (review)

610BOOK reviews their geographical distribution and helped to identify some of the more obscure places from which they wrote. Finally, a comparison of the first and second volumes reveals a sad deterioration in the production values of Oxford University Press (NewYork). Not only is the paper of the present volume noticeably coarser,but in several places the text threatens to disappear off the bottom of the page. Despite this, the book costs a good deal more than the first volume. It is to be hoped that this trend may be reversed for the two further projected volumes of this most important work. Sabina Flanagan University ofMelbourne, Australia Vioice ofthe Living Light: Hildegard ofBingen and her World. Edited by Barbara Newman. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998. Pp. Lx, 278. $48.00 clothbound; $1995 paperback.) As Barbara Newman outlines in her introduction to Voice ofthe Living Light, the aim of this collection is to "set Hildegard in context" without diminishing her exceptionality. The contributors to this volume are respected scholars in their fields, who each examine a facet of Hildegard's life and activity—from abbess and reformer to medical writer and composer. They explore the breadth and scope of her diverse interests and personal creativity against the social, religious , intellectual, and political backdrop of twelfth-century culture and society . This approach locates Hildegard within the traditions she inherited, while at the same time demonstrating how she stretched these boundaries to accommodate her unique perspective. The result is a richly documented and perceptively written collection that not only offers insight into the life of this woman, but into the lives of medieval religious women generally. The influence of Hildegard's monastic background in shaping her outlook as abbess, religious thinker, and reformer is apparent in the essays addressing these aspects of the visionary's life. Constant Mews explores the relationship between her experience as a recluse and her cosmology, tracing the development of her religious thought through her visionary trilogy. John Van Engen examines Hildegard's gradual transition from recluse to abbess of her foundation at Rupertsberg, outlining the various administrative and pastoral roles she performed as "mother and teacher" and leader of her community.Joan Ferrante extends this discussion through an analysis of the visionary's extensive correspondence , which wumines the pastoral role Hildegard adopted for a wider monastic community. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton analyzes Hildegard's reforming aims and strident polemic in the context of contemporary intellectual trends and political events. She highlights the visionary's often radical approach, emphasizing how Hildegard drew on the traditions of apocalyptic prophecy to create and sustain her stance as prophet and reformer. BOOK REVIEWS611 The essays addressing Hildegard as artist, medical writer, composer, and poet provide sound scholarship into areas of her activity that have long been the mainstay of contemporary popularizing of Hildegard as a "new age" figure. Florence Eliza Glaze provides an important overview and analysis of Hildegard's medical writings, situating them within monastic practice and the intellectual trends of the twelfth century. Madeline Caviness discusses how the inherently visual quality of Hildegard's thought is represented through the relationship between text and image in the Scivias illuminations. Margot Fassler and Barbara Newman provide complementary studies on Hildegard as composer and poet. They emphasize the unity of words and music in her compositions, demonstrating how these compositions contributed to her wider educational and didactic program for the Rupertsberg community. A particular strength of this collection is the way in which seemingly disparate areas of Hildegard's intellectual and spiritual creativity are explored within the overarching framework of her vision of God's divinity incarnate in the created world. Each essay offers a critical and original perspective on Hildegard 's social, cultural, and religious context, and as a whole the interrelationships and resonances between the different facets of her extensive oeuvre emerge. Thus aspects of her activity previously viewed as marginal to her visionary writing, or marginalized by the scholarly overemphasis on the textual aspects of her work, are explored as different expressions of the cosmology articulated so effectively in her visionary trilogy. This collection is a valuable addition to the field of Hildegard studies that will also have broad appeal...