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This chapter explores a neglected topic in the history of Christian reception of the Song of Songs — its interpretation for and by women. The reason for this lack of attention is not hard to find. Although women began to make major contributions to theology, especially mystical theology, from the 13th century on, even educated women could not receive the formal training in scriptural interpretation that was under the control of male monks and schoolmen.

This chapter examines Hildegard of Bingen's belief in viriditas as a speculatory means of identifying God's presence in the material world, along with its relation to virginitas and to the concepts of incarnation and salvation. The image of Hildegard'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. 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. Hildegard's fondness for sartorial luxury made a devotional and theological point about the divine materiality of re-creation, as well as the role that the consecrated virgin played in it. This chapter discusses the Speculum virginum, Hildegard's liturgical compositions, and Herrad of Hohenbourg's Hortus deliciarum to show how Hildegard fashioned a theology of virginity based on viriditas and virginitas.

Hildegard of Bingen was deeply engaged with Scripture, and one of the ways to understand her thought is by tracing her treatment of particular figures from the Bible or especially important passages from favored sections of the text. Rachel Fulton, Ann Matter, Barbara Haagh, and others have been particularly attentive to the ways in which the Song of Songs has been used in the medieval offices of Marian feasts to create a life for the Virgin Mary as the woman beloved of God and as a type of the church. Hildegard approaches the relationship between human beings and God through many venues, but she always rooted her experience of human love in the church and in the cloister, the places she knew best. The Song of Songs was available to her as a canonical framework for exploring relationships and expressing them in the terms of human love.

This chapter discusses the rise of the vernaculars and changing role of Latin in medieval Europe. It presents the evidence for nuns and other religious women as poets in Latin. It also examines different varieties of religious life for medieval women, and the implications of these different lifestyles for access to Latin literacy. It discusses women and the exercise of authority in medieval Europe (notably by Norman royal ladies): early arguments for the Latin education of noblewomen. The chapter includes specific sections on surviving anonymous Latin verse in women's voices, rotuli (memorial rolls) as evidence for convent literacy, Baudri of Bourgeuil's circle of educated women, particularly Constantia, women Latinists in northern Europe, especially Hildegard of Bingen, the nuns of Helfta, the love-verses from Regensburg, and Willetrudis's Versus de Susanna: it is argued that this last may have been written at Wilton.

Hildegard (1098-1179), the founder and abbess of a Benedictine nunnery in Bingen, Germany, first came to the attention of modern America in a book about headaches. Oliver Sacks’s 1970 book Migraines included an essay arguing that Hildegard’s mystical visions were “indisputably migrainous”, although with characteristic open-mindedness he has also written that this “does not detract in the least from their psychological or spiritual significance”. Today Hildegard of Bingen is known chiefly for her music. What brought about the change was a pair of 1982 CDs, Gothic Voices’s A Feather on the Breath of God, and Sequentia’s Ordo Virtutum. Both still stand among the best-selling recordings yet made of early music. This chapter presents an interview with Barbara Thornton, who discusses the music of Hildegard, Gregorian chant, color in music, imagery in Hildegard’s music, and feminine elements of Hildegard’s music.

Mary is the pure virgin at her conception and at the birth of Jesus as well as the exalted queen of heaven. But she is also the sorrowful mother. She understands and is with us in our suffering. More fundamentally, she shared fully in her son' suffering, having foreknowledge of his crucifixion from his birth. Feminine symbolism is central to the work of several key medieval mystical writers, including Hildegard of Bingen. This chapter explores the development of Mariology through the medieval world. It looks at five medieval women mystics who laid hold of these female symbols—Wisdom, Mother Church, and bridal soul—to affirm their own spiritual journeys as women empowered to speak, write, teach, and guide other women. It also discusses feminine symbols in Cistercian and beguine love mysticism, as well as the views of fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich.

This chapter begins with a visitation by a great blue heron to the author’s class taught in Swarthmore College’s Crum Woods. Is the Crum Woods holy ground? Some ecotheologians (John B. Cobb Jr., Richard Bauckham) caution against this way of speaking, but this chapter argues that Christianity is a religion of double incarnation: in a twofold movement, God becomes flesh in both humankind (Jesus) and otherkind (Spirit), underscoring that corporeality and divinity are one. The chapter focuses on historical portraits of Jesus’ relationship to particular birds as totem-beings in his teaching ministry; Augustine’s repudiation of Neoplatonism and natalist celebration of the maternal, birdy Holy Spirit in the world; and Hildegard of Bingen’s avian pneumatology in which earth’s “vital greenness” is valorized for its curative powers in a manner similar to Jesus’ mudpie healing of the blind man in John 9. It concludes with a meditation on nature-worship in a Quaker meetinghouse in Monteverde, Costa Rica.

This chapter contextualizes Hildegard of Bingen’s monumental sequence for her monastic community’s patron St. Rupert, O Ierusalem aurea civitas, both within Hildegard’s own output of sequences, and within the sequence repertory at large. Considering her deep sensitivity to the relationship between text and music, including close attention to grammatical structure, word stress, and word and syllable parsing, the essay proposes that Hildegard uses a varied repetition technique, adapting the standard sequence form. Instead of strict repetition, she varies many elements of the melodic surface through expansion or contraction, preserving an audible sense of repetition while responding directly to new text structures. The essay provides a textual and musical analysis of the entire sequence, demonstrating the composer’s large-scale control of musical structure.

This chapter presents Hildegard of Bingen's discussion of melancholy. One of the most talented, eclectic, and interesting personalities of the German Middle Ages, Hildegard lived between 1098 and 1179. She was born the tenth and last child in a noble family at Bingen, which was in the area of Rhenish Hesse, and was as a small girl consecrated to God and entrusted to a woman hermit, Jutta of Spanheim (or Sponheim), who lived at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. As a young woman Hildegard became a nun, and after Jutta's death she was elected to direct the small convent attached to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg. In addition to her religious duties, Hildegard composed music, wrote poetry, invented a language, wrote extensively on religious and spiritual matters and on matters of medical and scientific interest, and kept up an extensive correspondence with influential ecclesiastical and secular leaders. Between 1151 and 1158 she completed two works of scientific interest, Physica (also called A Study of Nature) and Causae et curae, or Of Causes and Cures (a standard abbreviation for what was originally entitled Liber compositae medicinae (Book of Holistic Healing), from which the remarks on melancholy that follow are taken.

The High Middle Ages was a time of great learning in the Latin West between the monasteries and cathedral schools. Anselm of Canterbury showed great intellectual daring in providing a logical proof of God independent of Scripture in an initial move of scholasticism, while Hildegard of Bingen developed works in medicine, music, cosmology, and undertook preaching tours greatly expanding the reach of her learning and leadership, as access to this learning was becoming far more of a public matter. This was something that the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux sought to contain within monasticism, especially against the peripatetic wanderings of Peter Abelard who was continually stirring up public interest in scholasticism in ways that were seen to challenge the authority of the church and overstep his seemingly limited intellectual property rights in producing works that engaged biblical contradictions and drew on pagan philosophers, inspired as he was by Heloise. While it did not end well for Abelard at many points, there was no stopping the new public place of learning.

Hildegard of Bingen was fascinated by the greening power of nature, seeing the mystery of the divine in all growing things. She admired trees in particular. In their magical work of photosynthesis, their ability to heal themselves, and their capacity for communicating with each other, they express nature’s interconnecting web—joining all things as one. The author explores this himself as he climbs and spends the night in the cottonwood tree he calls Grandfather. He also surveys recent research in forestry science, asking about the communicative character of trees as discussed in the work of Suzanne Simard, Peter Wohlleben, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Trees fill the pages of classic spiritual texts. The Christian Bible begins with the Tree of Life and ends with the Tree of Paradise in the New Jerusalem. The Buddha went through 150 incarnations before being born as the historical figure we know; in forty-three of those he was a tree. Ancient Celts regarded a host of trees as sacred, including the oak and hazel.

Jewish and Christian medieval exegetes argued that Barak and Lappidoth were the same man, elevating Lappidoth to the role of “judge” alongside his wife Deborah. In allegorical, anti-Jewish readings, Deborah symbolized the church, and Barak’s weakness symbolized Jewish failure. Some Christians characterized Deborah’s public role as judge, prophet, teacher, and even “preacher,” but canon lawyers and scholastic theologians such as Aquinas said she did not set a precedent for women to serve as priests or judges. Rabbis debated whether Deborah’s location beneath the palm tree meant that she instructed a multitude or only a handful of disciples in Torah. Jewish interpreters disagreed about whether Deborah served as judge, but most agreed that her role was not parallel to a male judge. Though medieval women generally did not model themselves after Deborah, their male supporters used Deborah to explain that God speaks through divinely inspired women such as Hildegard of Bingen.

This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.

This chapter takes up one of the hymns from Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia, in which the speaker(s) and addressee seem to shift interestingly—particularly as the speakers are the chorus of singers and the addressee is God. The hymn makes more and richer sense read in light of Hildegard’s complex cosmological imagery, which includes both the world as mirror of divinity and creation as song. The latter implies both that the created world may be sung into being (suggested in some of Hildegard’s many reflections on the text “In the beginning was the Word”) and that it sings or resonates with, as it reflects, divinity, in a curious and delightful synaesthesia. The sense of voice in this chapter becomes cosmological and world-wide.

The introduction addresses the complex interface between scholastic theologians and altered modes of consciousness, first in general, then in medieval Europe, through three case studies: 1) the correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen with Master Odo; 2) the heresy of the Amalricians, and 3) ecstatic experiences in Thomas Aquinas’ hagiography. It then moves from such encounters to the central topic of the book, the scholarly investigation of such modes of cognizing God, and introduces the community of theologians whose writings will be studied.

Language for melancholic experience is fundamentally different in psychoanalysis and in phenomenology, posing significant difficulties for any interdisciplinary dialogue between these rich discourses. This chapter presents a case study of this incompatibility of discourse by considering the works of Julia Kristeva (psychoanalyst) and Jean-Luc Marion (phenomenologist). The chapter then argues that theology provides the condition of possibility for dialogue between these discourses and invokes the work of the medieval mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, as an example. Positioning theology as a mediator, the chapter considers specific ways that psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and theology are able to dialogue, despite conflicting ideologies and languages.

The post-Augustinian Latin tradition explored in this chapter was written off within Sophiology as something of a dead-end. This chapter aims to show that this judgement was premature and that the wisdom teachings of the Latin West are of enormous richness and significance with eloquent representatives in figures such as Pope Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, John Scotus Eriugena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Latin West also offers and intriguing counterpoint to developments in Greek patristic theology over roughly the same time period. The consistent manner in which divine simplicity was construed from Augustine to Aquinas meant that there is no place for wisdom as divine except in relation to the categories of divine substance (with which it is identical) or person (principally, for exegetical reasons, the person of the Son). Thus the space or gap that opens for Sophiology in the Greek East remains largely closed in the Latin West. It is also the case that the West remained consistently focussed on and rooted in biblical wisdom literature and sapiential theology in a way the East often did not. Thomas Aquinas is presented as a particularly rich source of wisdom reflection and as a shining representative of a tradition that Sophiology was too quick to dismiss.

The concept of artistic inspiration in the realm of music composition has changed notably over the last millennium. Using portraits of composers as evidence, this essay presents, in chronological order, three different views of the causation of artistic inspiration as related to the reception of specific composers: Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). As discussion of these composer portraits reveals, contemporary perceptions of the efficient causation of musical inspiration went from divine inspiration in the medieval era, to rational “invention” in the Baroque era and secular transcendence in the modern era.

This chapter looks at theories of world soul in the medieval period, considering texts from the Islamic world and Latin Christendom. The central theme is the comparison between the cosmos and an individual human, who is conceived as a so-called microcosm. By this logic, since the human has a soul, so must the cosmos. Plato’s Timaeus is shown to be a key source for both cultures, including in Christian authors who detected a reference to the Holy Spirit behind Plato’s notion of World Soul. Figures in focus include al-Razi, the Brethren of Purity, the School of Chartres, Peter Abelard, and Hildegard of Bingen.