1. Elizabeth’s biography reads exactly like that of Hildegard, with whom she corresponded. Like Hildegard, Elizabeth suffered poor health as a child, was subject to ecstatic visions, and was ordered by her abbot to record them. She hesitated to do so for much the same reasons as Hildegard but was convinced to proceed. The monk Egbert aided her in this enterprise, and her works appeared in three books, the first of which, Liber viarum dei, seems to be modeled on Hildegard’s Scivias. With so much in common between these two lives, one begins to suspect that this sort of biography is also a literary trope or rhetorical posture, rather than simple history.
2. See Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, trans. Myra Heer-spink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
3. In seventeenth-century England, the terms referred to the kings, lords, and commons—related, but not identical, to the description above.
4. This is specified in the Rule of Saint Benedict, Chs. 54 and 59.
5. Rule of Saint Benedict, Ch. 41.
6. See Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179. A Visionary Life, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), and Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
7. See Maddocks, The Woman of Her Age, 63-65, for a summary, and Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 193-213, for an even more complete account.
8. See Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen. The complete series of letters appears in chronological order in Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, trans., The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994-2004), vol. 3, letters 11-19, the numbers used here.
9. It is perhaps significant that this passage does not occur in the abbreviated version of the Ordo virtutum in Scivias, Vision 13, lines 245-454.
10. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, trans., Hildegard: Scivias (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 67.
11. See http://www. newadvent. org/cathen, s. n. Hildegard.
12. See New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), s. n. Hildegard.
13. Barbara Newman, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the “Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum,” 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
14. For the complete letters, see Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen.
15. See Barbara Newman’s translations in Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the ‘Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 180, 182, 186-88.
16. See Http://www. healingchants. com/hct. omirum. html.
17. See, for instance, Http://www. womenspirit-twincities. org/.
18. Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace,” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no. 1 (Spring 2004), Http://www. echo. ucla. edu/Volume6-Issue1/bain/bain4.html (accessed June 22, 2011).
19. Jany Fournier-Rosset, From Hildegard’s Kitchen: Foods of Health, Foods of Joy, trans. Victoria Hebert and Denis Sabourin (Liguori, MI: Liguori Publications, 2010).
20. “Queer Saints and Martyrs (and Others): Hildegard of Bingen,” http://queering-The-church. blogspot. com/2010/09/hildegard-of-bingen. html (accessed June 22, 2011).
21. Hildegard. An Omnibus/CTVC BBC Production. Worcester, PA: Distributed by Gateway Films/Vision Video, 1994.
22. Information and blurb about various aspects of the film are available at http:// Www. zeitgeistfilms. com/vision/, together with a short biography (not, however, error-free) and a timeline of Hildegard’s life. There is also an associated CD of music from the film.
23. Daniel DiCenso, “Hildegard on Trial: A Note Regarding the Narrow Reception of a Medieval Abbess-Composer,” Marginalia 5 (2007), Http://www. marginalia. Co. uk/journal/07trial/dicenso. php.
World History
