A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

106 felix heinzer
as a result of hagiographical strategies, but rather as a residual feature of
Elisabeth’s own experience that survived any restyling by her brother, and
might thus account for a rather sound air of authenticity.
The fundamental diffferences between the two visionary cultures, which
we are able to observe in Elisabeth and Hildegard, must thus be placed
in relation to their biographical context. Until her death in 1163, Elisabeth
remained fijirmly embedded in the restricting conditions of her double
monastery situation, while Hildegard, after her departure from Disibodenberg,
enjoys the privilege of considerable autonomy, ruling as abbess of
her new foundation in Rupertsberg. This process of charismatically legitimated
emancipation from her established monastic background might
also have led to the self-assured non-conformism of musical and textual
language in her so-called liturgical creations, which clearly and deliberately
diverge from canonical tradition.
It is exactly this non-conformist aspect that seems to make Hildegard’s
writings—as an offfspring of what we might call an emancipated career—
appear more spectacular than Elisabeth’s, at least from a modern point
of view, and this has led to an uncontested dominance of Hildegard in
modern scholarly and popular interest. This appears all the more interesting
when one considers the medieval resonance of their respective works:
nearly 150 extant manuscripts attest to the broad and international spread
of Elisabeth’s work, which, for example, reached England beginning
around 1170, and at the beginning of the 13th century was known even in
Iceland.74 This scope of dissemination was unknown to Hildegard’s writings
during the same period.
A further distinction between the two appears in the type of vision that
we dealt with in the fijirst part of the article. During the women’s lifetimes
and shortly thereafter, there occurred a thematic shift from the earlier tradition’s
“otherworld” journeys through Purgatory and Paradise—still present,
for example, in the topologically structured visions of the Irish knight
Tundal or Tnugdal, written in 1148, and even in the late 12th-century case
of the anonymous monk of Eynsham75—to what Peter Dinzelbacher
has called “die Begegnung mit dem Minne- und Passions-Christus” (“the
74 Kurt Köster, “Elisabeth von Schönau. Werk und Wirkung im Spiegel der mittelalterlichen
handschriftlichen Überlieferung,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 3
(1951), 243–315, and Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau. Visionary, pp. 48–49.
75 Thomas Ehlen et al., eds., Visio Edmundi monachi de Eynsham. Interdisziplinäre Studien
zur mittelalterlichen Visionsliteratur. ScriptOralia: Reihe A: Altertumswissenschaftliche
Reihe 25 (Tübingen, 1998); Robert Easting, ed., The Revelation of the Monk of Eynsham
(Oxford, 2002).