Now published: “Picturing Hildegard of Bingen’s Sight” in The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

Nathaniel M. Campbell, “Picturing Hildegard of Bingen’s Sight: Illuminating Her Visions.” Ch. 12 in The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Jennifer Bain. Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 257-279; access online here.

Summary

This chapter explores the development and purpose of the illustrations in two manuscripts of Hildegard of Bingen’s works: one designed by Hildegard (the Rupertsberg Scivias), the other designed by a later generation of her monastery’s nuns (the Lucca Liber divinorum operum). An overview of her visionary experiences demonstrates the prophetic mission of their detailed images to communicate theological truths. I argue that Hildegard designed the Scivias images to aid that communication and provide visual exegesis of her visions, serving as a teaching tool to guide the reader through the manuscript. The next generation of nuns followed Hildegard’s impulse to illustrate her visions with the later Liber divinorum operum manuscript, but its famous cosmological diagram diverges from the text because the designer did not understand its meaning. The chapter closes with an assessment of the very limited influence of Hildegard’s illustrations in the later Middle Ages, with one story from the preaching of Johannes Tauler demonstrating their liability to reinterpretation.

Vos flores rosarum (Symphonia 38)

For the Feast of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, a Responsory for Martyrs
by St. Hildegard of Bingen^[1]

Agony in the Garden.
Drawing from the Abbey of
St. Walburg, Eichstätt, ca. 1500.
(From J. Hamburger,
Nuns as Artists, plate 8)

V. Vos flores rosarum, qui in effusione sanguinis vestri   beati estis in maximis gaudiis, redolentibus et sudantibus in emptione que fluxit de interiori mente consilii manentis ante evum R. in illo, in quo non erat constitutio a capite. V. Sit honor in consortio vestro,   qui estis instrumentum ecclesie et qui in vulneribus vestri sanguinis undatis: R. In illo, in quo non erat constitutio a capite.

V. You blooms of roses, within your blood outpoured you’re blessed in joys supreme— the fragrance and distilled perfume of that redemption that flowed from th’ inmost heart of counsel kept before all time R. in him who was unfounded at the start. V. An honor in your fellowship! The Church’s instrument you are as in your wounds, your waves of blood, you surge and gush: R. in him who was unfounded at the start.

O magna res (Symphonia R 407ra)

For the Octave of the Epiphany, a Verse for the Incarnate Word
and His Virgin Mother by St. Hildegard of Bingen ^[1]

Hand of God. Frontispiece,
Uta Codex, ca. 1025.
Munich, Staatsbibliothek
MS Clm 13601, fol. 1v.

1a. O magna res que in nullo constituto latuit,    ita quod non est facta nec creata ab ullo, sed in se ipsa permanet. lb. O vita que surrexisti in aurora, in qua magnus rex      sapientiam que in antiquo apud virum sapientem fuit misericorditer manifestavit, quia mulier per foramen      antiqui perditoris mortem intravit.

1a. O greatness that no creature formed could hide— not made indeed, created not by anyone, within itself abides. 1b. O life that rose upon the dawn, the dayspring when      the mighty King in mercy made his Wisdom known— of old she dwelt together with the sage— for once a woman entered death through the ancient slayer’s      darkened door.

Article Published: "Visio-Theological Designs in Hildegard of Bingen's Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript"

I am pleased to announce that the full article upon which the paper I presented at the Kalamazoo conference earlier this year was based has now been published in the art history journal Eikón / Imago 4 (2013, Vol. 2, No. 2), pp. 1-68.

"Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript" can be viewed on the journal's website here or on my Academia.edu profile here.

Guest Post at Beyond Borders

I've written this week’s guest post over at the medieval art history blog, Beyond Borders. Titled, “Monstrosity within the Church in Hildegard of Bingen’s Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript,” it explores the hybridized, monumental images of Ecclesia (the Church) in that manuscript, with a specific eye to the ways in which the monstrous and grotesque are central to the images, rather than marginalized, as in many later, Gothic-style manuscripts. The design of the images in the Ruperstberg manuscript transgresses medieval conventions in order to make explicit Hildegard's reformist message against monstrosity within the Church.

Go check it out!

Text vs. Image in the Lucca Illustration of Liber Divinorum Operum I.2: Humanity and the Macrocosmos

Humanity and the Macrocosmos.
Liber Divinorum Operum I.2
(Lucca MS 1942)

With the advent of the summer months, I have set to work again on my new translation of Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber Divinorum Operum. Last week saw me (re)tackling the second vision of the work, in which Hildegard revises her vision of the cosmos in the shape of an egg in Scivias I.3 into an elaborate series of “circles” whirling one inside the other, with a grand human figure standing astride the spinning globe. The vision text is extremely complex and intricate in its details, especially as Hildegard begins to describe the interplay of the four principal winds and their eight collateral winds, each represented by an animal’s head. As one reads through it, one feels compelled to pull out paper and pencil and to sketch it out, simply in order to keep straight above and below, left and right, east and west, north and south. In the course of carefully piecing together each detail, it soon became clear to me that the famed illustration of this vision in the thirteenth-century Lucca manuscript—so often compared to da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”—has several significant flaws:

Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript

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.

The Secrets of Medieval Cathedrals...

…aren’t really all that secret. But if you’re an overzealous editor at NOVA, you might be tempted to invoke “secretly encoded” information in sacred architecture to drum up popular interest. When PBS last week reaired the series’ 2010 opener, “Building the Great Cathedrals”, it was apparent that even their high standards could sometimes be duped by that popular myth that codes, DaVinci or otherwise, are hidden all about those mysterious Middle Ages, just waiting for modern sleuths to expose the hidden past.