A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

124 justin a. stover
this method. Hildegard, however, weaves her commentary into the biblical
pericope, producing a single, integrated passage with two parallel narratives,
which Beverly Kienzle has described as “intratextual glosses.”69 While
Hildegard’s discourses were composed for a monastic audience within a
monastic milieu, her method closely resembles the catena commentary,
a method of exposition employed in the schools of northern France in
the 12th century by masters such as Bernard of Chartres and William of
Conches for glossing ancient literary and philosophical texts, like Cicero’s
Rhetorica, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plato’s Timaeus, and Boethius’s Consolatio.70
Contemporaries called this sort of gloss continuative producta,
“drawn out in a continuous fashion,” or as Häring explains it, combining
the text commented upon, the commentator’s own words, and the words
of the source material into an integral whole.71 This resemblance suggests
that the investigator of Hildegard’s method of glossing should look to 12thcentury
scholastic rather than monastic practice.
Hildegard was not the fijirst exegete to apply this method of scholarship
to a biblical text. A student of Bernard of Chartres and colleague of
William of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers himself employed precisely this
method of exposition in his commentaries on the psalter, which were substantially
completed before 1117 but did not circulate widely before 1140.72
Theresa Gross-Diaz has demonstrated how Gilbert derived his method of
69 Ibid., p. 115.
70 This style of commentary was also found in Germany, albeit less widely. The Glossa
coloniensis on Macrobius (composed probably in the Rhineland, c.1100) offfers a less developed
example of this sort. Bernard of Chartres’ Glosae super Platonem is, however, extant in
three late 12th-century manuscripts of German provenance. See Peter Dronke, The Spell of
Calcidius: Platonic Concepts and Images in the Medieval West (Florence, 2008), pp. 138–40.
71 This phrase is used by Robert of Auxerre in his Chronicon MGH SS 26.237, and quoted
by Nikolaus Häring, “Commentary and Hermeneutics,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the
Twelfth Century, eds. Robert Benson and Giles Constable with Carol Lanham, Medieval
Academy Reprints for Teaching 26 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 180–81. See below for an
example of this type of commentary.
72 On this commentary, see the monograph by Theresa Gross-Diaz, The Psalms Commentary
of Gilbert of Poitiers: From Lectio Divina to the Lecture Room (Leiden, 1996). It has
never been fully edited. In 1930 Maria Fontana edited the prologue and the commentary
on the fijirst three psalms, in “Il commento ai Salmi di Gilberto della Porrée,” Logos 13 (1930):
283–301. In 1963 Ada Pagliari edited the prologue again, in “Il presunto commento ai Salmi
di S. Lorenzo Giustiniani opera di Gilberto Porretano,” Aevum 36 (1962): 414–29. Several
brief selections are also printed in Gross-Diaz’s monograph. The numerous manuscripts of
the commentary are listed in Nikolaus Häring, “Handschriftliches zu den Werken Gilberts
Bischof von Poitiers,” Revue d’histoire des textes 8 (1978): 133–94, supplemented by Gross-
Diaz, ibid., pp. 160–80.