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| Imago expandit splendorem suum... Scivias II.3: The Church and Baptism. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 51r. |
Update: The full article on which this presentation was based has now been published in Eikón / Imago 4 (2013:2), pp. 1-68, available electronically here.
A major point of contention within Hildegard studies is the question of her role in the production of the illuminated Scivias manuscript known as the Rupertsberg Codex.[1] Much current German scholarship has tended to preclude Hildegard’s hand by dating the manuscript’s production after her death in 1179, based on stylistic comparisons to firmly dateable contemporary manuscripts or on the many places where the images in the manuscript diverge from or even contradict the text of the visions. Pre-war German scholars, however, who had access to the original manuscript before it was lost, and most modern Anglophone scholars have argued more or less strongly for Hildegard’s influence on the design. Today, I argue for Hildegard’s direction of the images based on their function as a theological discourse refracting the text. I propose that the manuscript was produced in the late 1160’s or early 1170’s, at about the same time Hildegard was writing the Liber Divinorum Operum; and that she designed the images specifically to offer a visual record of the work’s theology.
