HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, 1098-1179
A Visionary Life
Sabina Flanagan
New York: Routledge, 1989
221 pp., $29.95
The Middle Ages continue to fascinate many people in the modern world in spite of a generally uninformed current of thought that assumes something may be dismissed by merely branding it "medieval." In addition to stories set during this period, like The Name of the Rose or Ladyhawke, a subtle current of chivalry and medieval legend has found wide popularity in films as seemingly modern as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and several others. Something in the Western psyche still resonates to the blending of religion, mysticism, politics, knight errantry, courtly love, adventure, and the wonders of nature we associate most closely with the High Middle Ages--even when the interest is clothed in contemporary garb.
In part, the renewed appreciation of things medieval is a reaction against modern industrial societies. Medieval life, whatever else may be said of it, was lived close to nature with only the simplest of human contrivances. It often reflected an organically articulated society, composed of reciprocal rights and duties binding nobles and peasants together, that appeals to our sense of radical loss of community. The formalized relations of men and women also seem to speak to those of us dazed by modern sexual indeterminacy.
In reality, medieval societies meant a good deal of dirt, discomfort, and early death to most of those then alive. On the imaginative side, however, the Middle Ages represent one of the most vigorous and colorful periods of Western history, combining pageantry, art, and honor in a relatively unspoiled setting.
Although the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the High Middle Ages proper, produced the greatest and most familiar medieval figures--Dante and Giotto, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, the Franciscans and the Dominicans--the twelfth century has lately received increased attention as the soil from which the riches grew. Once the Viking, Saracen, and Magyar invasions ceased around the year 1000, Europe began to rebuild civilization after nearly five-hundred years of chaos. Over fifty years ago, the great medievalist Charles Homer Haskins titled a book The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century to underscore the importance of the rise of the universities, the achievements of Romanesque art, the revival of the classics, and the rediscovery of Greek philosophy in that century. The twelfth century has often since been thought of as a period of energetic beginnings and fluidity in contrast to the more formalized and scholastic centuries that followed. It is also the age of reformist ferments in the monasteries, Heloise and Abelard, and the Platonic mystics. Its combination of innocence and experiment holds much appeal for complex and sophisticated modern society.
A remarkable twelfth-century figure
Sabina Flanagan, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, has chosen a remarkable twelfth century figure to study in her Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179: A Visionary Life. In addition to being a mystic and writer of theological treatises, Hildegard studied plants,
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