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  • Hildegard of Bingen by Honey Meconi
  • Michelle Urberg
Hildegard of Bingen. By Honey Meconi. (Women Composers.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. [xiii, 157 p. ISBN 9780252033155 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780252083679 (paperback), $21.95; ISBN 9780252050725 (e-book), price varies.] Figures, list of works, notes, bibliography, discography, index.

I remember my introduction to Saint Hildegard (1098–1197) during an undergraduate class with Roy Hammerling at Concordia College. In addition to Hildegard of Bingen, class included readings on a number of other important female figures in the history of Western Christianity, including Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden, whose monastic order and music later became the focus of my dissertation. I distinctly remember that Hildegard was depicted as larger than life in her vita by the monks Gottfried and Theoderic (The Life of the Holy Hildegard, trans. James McGrath [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995]), and her own writings described vibrant visionary experiences in detail, notable to me because music or instruments (trumpets especially) appeared in many places (Secrets of God: Writings of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Sabina Flanagan [Boston: Shambhala, 1996]). Finally, Barbara Newman's influential volume on Hildegard, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen [End Page 440] and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), helped organize my impression of Hildegard's writings. Nevertheless, I wish this book had been available back then as a scholarly complement to the primary and secondary sources we read in that class. Hildegard of Bingen by Honey Meconi—part biography, part history of Hildegard's musical output, and part introduction to liturgical practice in medieval monasteries—appears in the Women Composers series, which aims to publish books that are readable and a convenient reference. Indeed, Hildegard of Bingen is readable for students and those meeting Hildegard for the first time, serves as a convenient reference for experienced scholars or performers, and effectively establishes Hildegard as the notable composer of her milieu.

Meconi's biography of Hildegard is compact, comprising ten short chapters in 150 pages. The first six chapters chronicle Hildegard's life, with a careful look at how music was ever present for Hildegard during her life and in her writings. Chapter 7 examines how Hildegard's life and music were transcribed, printed, and disseminated following her death. Chapters 8 through 10 take a close look at the extant manuscripts that contain her music as well as the scope of her musical output. A list of Hildegard's works, endnotes, a short reference bibliography of works about Hildegard, and a brief list of key recordings of Hildegard's music follow the main chapters. While the bibliography, notes, and discography are not complete, they do admirably to introduce or to reintroduce Hildegard to readers.

One of the great strengths of this volume is how it juxtaposes manuscript evidence that helps scholars build a biography and musical history of Hildegard's life with the historiographical circumstances that made it possible to write Hildegard's history. I genuinely enjoyed reading Meconi's music-infused biography of Hildegard in the first six chapters; chapter 7 then narrates a few key choices that made it possible for this Hildegard biography and others to take form. Meconi attributes much of the twentieth-century interest in Hildegard to the refounding of the monastery at Rupertsberg and the transcriptions of her Scivias (the allegorical visions and apocalyptic prophecies) and the Ordo Virtutum (the allegorical morality play) by the nuns of the Abtei St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany (pp. 79, 81). Furthermore, chapter 7 shows that the sequence of decisions made by printers, scholars, musicians, and monastics to keep Hildegard's visions and compositions circulating occurred gradually over centuries, and these decisions helped documents survive (pp. 77, 79). Soon after her death, for example, biographers and William of Auxerre championed her cause (p. 76). The printed word was instrumental in rejuvenating interest in Hildegard later in the sixteenth century when several printings of her mystical text the Scivias, her medical treatise Physica, and her letters appeared. These constituted the primary published works of Hildegard until the nineteenth century (p. 78), with the appearance of the first modern editions by Charles Daremberg and F. A. Reuss (S. Hildegardis Abbatissae...

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