A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

250 debra l. stoudt
Translations of texts, particularly Greek and Arabic works of philosophy
and science, profoundly advanced medical knowledge during Hildegard’s
lifetime. Although scholasticism, grounded as it is in empiricism, became
a dominant method over the course of the 12th century within the world
of the universities and intellectuals,4 the unnatural or supernatural realms
still held sway in medieval society. In her discussion about the contents
of the Cause et cure in Sister of Wisdom, Barbara Newman asserts that
for H ildegard “[t]here are no clear lines of demarcation between medical,
magical, and miraculous ways of healing.”5 This statement raises provocative
questions about the nature of healing not only in the magistra’s
natural sciences writings but also in the rest of her oeuvre, which contains
frequent allusions to sickness and health—both of the body and the
spirit. This essay introduces these three traditions and describes the two
scientifijic-medical works alluded to above; it then examines how Hildegard
characterizes the medical, the magical, and the miraculous, and how
she interweaves them in her theological and scientifijic writings.
The inherent connection between religion and medicine in Western
Europe was especially apparent during the era of monastic medicine, from
the 7th to the mid 11th century. Religious communities served as repositories
for medical knowledge, and religious men and women functioned
as practitioners of the healing arts for those inside and outside their communities.
Such arts included remedies derived from plants found in the
herbal or infijirmary garden, special diet, surgical procedures, the application
of amulets, and the uttering of formulaic words, often with religious
overtones—cures representative of the natural and unnatural realms.6
With the introduction of scholastic ideas, however, monastic medicine
4 For a discussion of Hildegard’s relationship to the scholastic world of the 12th century,
see Justin A. Stover’s essay in this volume, pp. 109–35.
5 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, rev. ed.
(Berkeley, 1997), p. 149. Laurence Moulinier examines the relationship of magic, medicine,
and the cura animarum in Hildegard’s medical-scientifijic works in “Magie, médecine et
maux de l’ȃme dans l’oeuvre scientifijique de Hildegard,” in Angesicht, pp. 545–59. Peregrine
Horden provides a useful discussion of medicine, magic, and religion in the broader context
of the medieval healing arts, “Sickness and Healing,” The Cambridge History of Christianity.
Volume 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100, eds. Thomas F.X. Noble, Julia
M.H. Smith, and Roberta A. Baranowski (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 416–32.
6 A useful introduction to the topic of medieval medicine is Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval
and Early Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990).
Various sections of the text edited by Faith Wallis, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto,
2010), are also relevant.