Abstract
Before I discuss the private and fictional projects of succeeding centuries, I will briefly describe Hildegard’s spiritual and historical environment and the mystical notions of language to which she may have been exposed.
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Notes
See Caroline Walker Bynum’s chapter entitled “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 82–109.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2005), pp. 24, 25.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 326.4, in The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo: Ml: Cistercian Publications, 1998), p. 402.
Hildegard of Bingen, Hilãegarãis Bingensis Epistolarium, ed. Lleven Van Acker, CCCM vol. 91 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), pp. 125–127.
On the issue of Hildegard’s social politics, see Constance J. Mews, “Hildegard, the Speculum Virginuin and Religious Reform in the Twelfth Century,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld. ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabem, 2000), pp. 237—267.
Stephen PoUington, heechcraft: Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing (Frithgarth, Norfolk: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2000), p. 190.
Jim Reeds inquires about the relatively unknown intent of Trithemius’ book, “Is [the Steganographia] primarily an exposition of cryptographic techniques disguised as angel magic, or is it primarily a magic work disguised as cryptography?” in “Solved: The Ciphers in Book 111 of Trithemius’s Steganographia,” Cryptologia 22 (1998): 292 [291—319].
Dante, “Inferno,” vol. 1, in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. trans. Robert M. Durling (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 112, 484. While Durling cannot decipher Raphael’s utterance, Peter Dronke insists that it is creditable Arabic, a language known to Dante along with Hebrew (Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], p. 41).
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient to Modem.” Exemplaria 3.2 (1991): 278 [267–298].
“Le Miracle de Théophile,” in Ouvres complète de Ruteheuf vol. 11, éd. Edmond Farai and Julia Bastin (Paris: Picard, 1960), p. 185.
Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993), pp. 95–108.
Ewert H. Cousins, “Bonaventure’s Mysticism of Language,” in Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 236 [236–257].
See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 12, 19—20.
Ibid., p. 139.
See Jacques Derrida’s essay “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayahle: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 3—70. Derrida argues that his materialist notion of différance differs from the realist notions of the negative theologians who in denying the ability to speak of God still believe in the existence of God outside human experience.
See especially Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1980).
Hildegard, Scivias, ed. Adelgundis Führkõtter and Angela Carlevaris, CCCM vol. 43 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), pp. 3–4.
Ibid., p. 3: “dice et scribe quae uides et audis … ea sic edisserendo profer-ens, quemadmodum et auditor, uerba praceptoris sui percipiens, ea secundum tenorem locutionis illius, ipso uolente, ostendente et praecipente propalat.”
“Actes de Philippe,” trans. Bertrand Bouvier and François Bovon, in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, ed. François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 1184. Their French translation is based on three manuscripts: the Athens Manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale 346), the Vatican Manuscript (Greek 824) and the Manuscript of Mount Athos (Xenophontos 32).
Ibid., p. 1212.
M(ontague) R(hodes) James, ed. and trans.. The Apocryphal New Testament, Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses With Other narratives and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924, 1989), p. 448. The parenthetical remarks by James are the summaries of text he has omitted. Furthermore, he gives little information about the manuscripts he bases his translation upon.
G.R.S. Mead, “Summary of the Contents of the So-Called Pistis Sophia Treatise,” in ed. G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (New York: University Books, 1960), pp. 461–462.
Monika Klaes, ed., III.xvi. Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, CCCM, vol. 126 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), pp. 53–54.
Brian P. Copenhaver, trans.. Hermética: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Transation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xlvii.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, completed 1510, trans. James Freake, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book 111, x, “Of Divine Emanations, which the Hebrews Call Numerations” (London: Gregory Moule, 1651); ed. annot. Donald Tyson (St. Paul, MN: LlyweUyn Publications, 2004), pp. 468, 533.
Folio 75v. See Marianna Schrader and Adelgundis Fürhkõtter, Die Echtheit des Schriftums der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen: Quellenkritische Untersuchungen (Cologne: Bohlau-Verlag, 1956), p. 53.
Jonathan P. Green, “A New Gloss on Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota.” Viator 36 (2005): 234 [217–234].
George Phuip Krapp and EUiott Van Kirk Dobbie, ed.. The Exeter Book (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936, 1961), p. 204: U. 8b-lla.
Derek J. Price, ed. facsimile version of The Equatorie of the planetis, Peterhouse ms. 75.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1955), fol. 30v et passim.
See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) p. 4. More like “technical books than magic books,” they were produced under “the assumption that nature was a repository of occult forces that might be manipulated not by the magus’s cunning, but merely by the use of correct techniques.” One of the strangest uses of a cipher in a “Book of Secrets” can be seen in the putatively medieval Voynich Manuscript, dated anywhere from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The entire book is written in what looks like a substitution cipher, but it has never been decrypted, nor has its “language” been identified. See my comments in chapter four, note fifteen.
Mandeville’s Travels: Translated from the French of Jean d’Outremeuse, ed. Paul Hamelius, vol. 11, (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 22. 1 am grateful to Thomas Halm for directing me to these alphabets.
See Michael Embach’s discussion of Trithemius’ interest in HUdegard’s invented alphabet in Die Schriften Hildegards von Bingen: Studien zu ihrer Uher-lieferung und Rezeption im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. 255—256; but especially his chapter in the same book “Johannes Trithemius (1462—1516) als Propagator Hildegards von Bingen,” pp. 459–491.
Enoch was considered a prophet of such stature that he was bodily assumed into God’s heaven, according to Genesis 5:21—24 and Ecclesiasticus 44:16. The “First Book of Enoch” is presumably quoted injude, verses 14—15, and in the Pistis Sophia (Mead, Pistis Sophia Treatise, p, 487). For the lost Ethiopian version, supposedly discovered in the eighteenth century, see Donald Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language as Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1994), p. 14. Deborah E. Harkness writes about these matters in her book John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 147, 166–167.
Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, III, xxix, xxx. pp. 438—439, in Tyson, p. 563. I give the original pages from EEBO, since Tyson prints these diagrams out of order.
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© 2007 Sarah L. Higley
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Higley, S.L. (2007). Medieval Language Philosophy. In: Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610057_4
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