A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

286 michael embach
that Winand was the driving force behind the canonization process of
Werner of Oberwesel (also Werner of Bacharach or Werner of Womrath,
1271–1287), whom legend held to be a victim of Jewish ritual murder—
an accusation that led to intense anti-Jewish pogroms along the Middle
Rhine.
A poem about the end times that was composed around 1470 in Darmstadt,
the Darmstädter Gedicht über das Weltende (Darmstadt, Hessische
Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, Cod. 2194), should also be numbered
among the apocalyptic texts inspired by Hildegard. The text, a type of
eschatological poetry about the Last Judgement, programmatically invokes
Hildegard as an authority, but does so without specifying any particular
text or source.
Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), abbot of the Benedictine monastery
at Sponheim, is of particular importance in the history of Hildegard’s
influence.24 He arranged for the copying of the Riesenkodex (London,
British Library, Ms. Add. 15102) and treated Hildegard’s writings in numerous
hagiographic and literary-historical texts of his own. The inclination
that Trithemius pursued in these endeavors is twofold: he desired to represent
Hildegard within the history of the county of Sponheim and simultaneously
emphasize her importance for the Benedictine order in general.
In pursuit of these goals, Trithemius was willing to employ fijictional events:
in his Chronica in signis monasterii Hirsaugiensis and his Chronicon monasterii
Sponheimensis, he depicted a visit by Bernard of Clairvaux to Hildegard’s
monastery on the Rupertsberg and also recorded the dialogue
that supposedly took place between the two religious fijigures. Although
such a meeting never occurred, Trithemius’s depiction achieved a broad,
uplifting reevaluation of Hildegard through his use of the most important
clerical authority of the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux. More valuable
to modern scholars is Trithemius’s extensive listing of Hildegard’s texts,
which he compiled in his work from 1494, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis,
which also includes incipits to some of the texts. Of ultimate importance
is the fact that Trithemius was a witness to the opening of Hildegard’s
grave in 1498 and participated in the elevatio corporis, the translation of
her bones, which was equivalent to an informal canonization. From this
occasion, Trithemius composed a sequence entitled In solemnitate Sanctae
Hildegardis, which is extant in both prose and verse forms, and was
24 Michael Embach, “Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) als Propagator Hildegards von
Bingen,” in Umfeld, pp. 561–98. Embach, Die Schriften Hildegards von Bingen, pp. 458–91.