A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

the medical, the magical, and the miraculous 255
holistic medicine.28 The useful introduction in Part I of Sue Spencer Cannon’s
study, “The Medicine of Hildegard of Bingen: Her Twelfth- Century
Theories and Their Twentieth-Century Appeal as a Form of Alternative
Medicine,”29 is supplemented in Part II by a detailed examination of
the pathology of the humors in general, followed by specifijics regarding
Hildegard’s understanding of it; the work concludes with a discussion of
alternative and New Age medicine, as well as the Hildegard-Medizin of
Gottfried Hertzka.30 Drawing on decades of research, the medical historian
Heinrich Schipperges relates the magistra’s medical views to her
worldview in Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos.31
In Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern
Medicine,32 Victoria Sweet adopts an anthropological approach,
grounding the Physica and the Cause et cure fijirmly in the natural world.
Sweet provides extensive commentary on the elements and the humors,
but her focus is on Hildegard as medical practitioner and the Cause et
cure as a resource for both practical and theoretical purposes, based upon
the Benedictine’s own experiences. The sources for and reception of the
Physica and the Cause et cure also have received extensive scrutiny and
28 Preceding the works noted here are numerous articles and a few monographs, primarily
in German, that contributed to the awakening of interest in Hildegard’s medicine. In
addition to the sources referenced elsewhere in this essay, the following deserve mention:
Hermann Fischer, Die heilige Hildegard von Bingen. Die erste deutsche Naturforscherin und
Ärztin. Ihr Leben und Werk, Münchener Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur der Naturwissenschaften
und Medizin 7/8 (Munich, 1927); Gerhard Baader, “Naturwissenschaft und
Medizin im 12. Jahrhundert und Hildegard von Bingen,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte
31 (1979): 33–54; Irmgard Müller, “Krankheit und Heilmittel im Werk Hildegards
von Bingen,” in Hildegard von Bingen 1179–1979. Festschrift zum 800. Todestag der Heiligen,
pp. 311–49; and Joan Cadden, “It Takes All Kinds: Sexuality and Gender Diffferences in Hildegard
of Bingen’s Book of Compound Medicine,” Traditio 40 (1984): 149–74.
29 Unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Los Angeles, 1993).
30 A medical doctor, Gottfried Hertzka (d. 1997), defended the view that Hildegard’s
medical works were the result of visionary experiences in So heilt Gott. Die Medizin der
hl. Hildegard von Bingen als neues Naturheilverfahren (1970; Stein am Rhein, 2006). He
also advocated the use of Hildegard’s remedies to treat illnesses today; see Handbuch der
Hildegard-Medizin (Stein am Rhein, 1987).
31 Trans. John A. Broadwin (Princeton, 1997). Several other works on this topic by
Schipperges should be noted as well: “Menschenkunde und Heilkunst bei Hildegard von
Bingen,” in Hildegard von Bingen, 1179–1979: Festschrift zum 800. Todestag der Heiligen,
pp. 295–310; “Heil und Heilkunst: Hildegards Entwurf einer ganzheitlichen Lebensordnung,”
in Hildegard von Bingen. Prophetin durch die Zeiten, pp. 458–65; and The World of
Hildegard of Bingen: Her Life, Times, and Visions, trans. John Cumming (Collegeville, Minn.,
1998), pp. 93–122.
32 New York, 2006.