A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

194 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
creativity, likely due to her newfound freedom, the liturgical demands
and organizational challenges of her transplanted community, and her
increasing fame. It was during her almost 30 years at the Rupertsberg that
Hildegard wrote most of her songs for individual saints.
Music written in honor of local saints is one of the most helpful indicators
of the origin and provenance of medieval liturgical manuscripts and
can be of great use to historians. While much of the liturgical calendar
remained constant from place to place (Christmas, Easter, and the other
feasts of the temporal liturgical cycle, for example), each community celebrated
its own cycle of saints’ days, known as the sanctoral cycle or sanctorale.
Some of the stories sung in the liturgy were thus local legends or
universal tales with a local twist, enabling scholars to use the sanctorale
of liturgical manuscripts as a means for reconstructing a community’s selfproclaimed
history and identity. In the case of Hildegard, her songs for
saints offfer a window onto her activities both within and beyond the walls
of her community, as well as her understanding of the monastic life and
the life hereafter. A comprehensive liturgical manuscript from the Rupertsberg,
incorporating Hildegard’s songs into a full liturgical cursus, would be
especially useful in assessing how her songs, and all of her works, relate
to worship in the convent. Since no such manuscript is known to exist,
scholars must search elsewhere for liturgical material (songs, readings,
prayers, etc.) with which to compare and contextualize Hildegard’s works.
For this, they look to her home monastery on the Disibodenberg, and to
Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Zwiefalten, and other centers within her sphere.
This chapter fijirst discusses a liturgical manuscript, Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek,
Ms. 103 (hereafter, Engelberg 103), which scholars have linked
to the Disibodenberg and have begun to use as context in discussing
Hildegard’s music. We provide an overview of the manuscript, an incomplete
breviary; examine its attribution to the Disibodenberg, primarily
through analysis of its sanctorale; propose an alternative but still regional
provenance; and explore its place in Hildegard studies. With Engelberg
103 as a backdrop, we then turn to case studies of Hildegard’s music for
saints. These case studies cast Hildegard as a musical hagiographer—a
creator of character, history, and identity. Like her Scivias songs, some of
Hildegard’s songs for saints survive in a purely textual tradition (her letters,
for instance), in addition to extant collections of her notated songs.
Consideration of their texts and contexts provides insight into her methods
as visionary and composer and her signifijicance to contemporaries.
Here we address Hildegard’s songs for St Disibod; her sequences, with
a focus on O Ecclesia for St Ursula; and, fijinally, her antiphon series for
St Ursula, part of her most complete liturgical offfering.