A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard, the schools, and their critics 125
commentary from contemporary scholarship on the liberal arts.73 Examine,
for example, Hildegard’s gloss on Matthew 2:13 with Gilbert’s gloss on
part of Psalm 1:1, “Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel
of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners.” Hildegard writes:
An angel of the Lord, that is the admonition of the Holy Spirit, appeared
by admonishing in sleep, that is, secretly, to Joseph, namely to man, saying:
Arise in understanding and take the child, namely knowledge, and his
mother, namely the matter of good works, and fly, that is descend, into Egypt,
namely into this afffliction, that you right your transgressions, and be there
until I shall tell thee, namely until God shows his grace to you.74
Gilbert writes in comparison:
Who hath not walked, that is, he has not left the Lord into the region of the
desert, in which the lost sheep wandered. He hath not walked with unjust
thought, that is he did not sin by will per se, which is praiseworthy; he did
not sin, I repeat, although placed in the counsel of many sinners, that is,
although many suggest it would be more praiseworthy. It continues: and on
the path of sinners, that is, by perverse action which leads to death, he hath
not stood, that is, he has not sinned in deed.75
While Gilbert in the gloss does not utilize parallel narratives like Hildegard,
he does share with her an integrated, “intratextual” method of commentary,
in which the movement back and forth between lemma and
gloss proceeds rapidly, sometimes abruptly with no lexical cue, sometimes
signaled by words like scilicet or phrases like id est. In fact, although
73 Gross-Diaz, The Psalms Commentary, pp. 41–42: “Donatus, Priscian, Boethius, Macrobius—all
the stars in the liberal arts constellation are to be found in company with
their expositions in the exact same format utilized in Gilbert’s commentary . . . Gilbert was
without doubt accustomed to similar presentations of the commented classics, it is not
at all surprising that he hit upon the idea of using the cum textu format for a schoolroom
commentary on the Psalms.”
74 Expo. Euang., 11, p. 217: “Angelus Domini, id est admonitio Spiritus Sancti, apparuit
admonendo in somnis, id est secreto, Ioseph, scilicet homini, dicens: Surge in intellectu et
accipe puerum, scilicet scientiam, et matrem eius, uidelicet materiam bonorum operum,
et fuge, id est descende, in Egyptum, scilicet in hanc affflictionem, ut peccata tua corrigas, et
esto ibi usque dum dicam tibi, uidelicet dum Deus gratiam suam tibi ostendat.” The translation
of the biblical phrases is taken from the Douay-Rheims translation.
75 Gilbert of Poitiers, Glose super psalterium 126–132 (ed. Fontana, “Il commento di
Gilberto della Porrée,” p. 287), “Qui non abiit, id est non recessit a domino in regionem
deserti, in quo ovis perdita erravit. Non abiit iniqua cogitatione, id est non peccavit voluntate
per se, quod est laudabile, non, inquam, quamvis positus in consilio et multorum
peccatorum, id est quamvis multi hoc suggererent quod laudabilius est. Sequitur et in via
peccatorum, id est prava operatione quae ducit ad mortem, non stetit, id est non peccavit
opere.” I have regularized word divisions and corrected incorrect identifijications of lemmata
in Fontana’s text.