A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard of bingen: a history of reception 293
ideal of poverty connects with Hildegard’s conservative conception of the
world as it should be ordered.
In addition, around 1250, while Albert was reworking the commentary
on the Apocalypse by (pseudo-) Alexander Minorita, he inserted long quotations
from Hildegard’s works into Minorita’s text. The tendency, characteristic
of failed reformers, appears once again: perceiving one’s own time
as occurring under the sign of the beginning of the last days. According to
Albert, the influence of the Antichrist was already present. Similar evaluations
of Hildegard as a person also appear in the Chronicon by Robert
of Auxerre, written between 1198 and 1207, and the Speculum historiale,
which chronicled the years up to 1250, authored by Vincent of Beauvais
(c.1184/1194–1264).
The Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (c.1180–1240) quoted Hildegard
in the context of a virulent, anti-Franciscan polemic. His Vita Sancti
Engelberti and his Osterhomilie also contain corresponding quotations.
The Easter Homily, written around 1225, quotes substantial excerpts from
Hildegard’s letter to the clergy of Cologne, whose specifijic history of influence
was examined earlier.
Praepositinus (Gilbert Prevostin) of Cremona (1130/1135–1210), magister
scholarum of the cathedral school in Mainz and later chancellor of the
University of Paris, likewise mentions Hildegard in his treatises. It is notably
signifijicant, however, that Praepositinus’s early scholasticism, informed
as it was by Aristotelianism, can no longer adequately handle Hildegard’s
light metaphors with their pictorially abstract-rational orientation. Friedhelm
Jürgensmeier reads into this instant an expression of the coming
paradigm shift, which will provide the most important reason behind the
deterioration of Hildegard’s importance in the 13th century.30
Matthew Paris (c.1200–1259), the English Benedictine and chronicler at
the Northumbrian abbey of St Albans, also showed an interest in Hildegard
of Bingen in his Chronica maiora. He recognizes symptoms of decline
and the beginning of the end times in the rapid emergence of the mendicants,
calling upon Hildegard in his criticisms. According to Paris, she
had predicted the rise of the mendicant orders many years previously;
however, he expends no ink on her other prophecies. John of Wallingford,
likewise a monk at St Albans for a few years, also employs references to
30 Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, “St. Hildegard ‘Prophetissa Teutonica,’” in Hildegard von
Bingen 1179–1979. Festschrift zum 800. Todestag der Heiligen, ed. Anton Brück, Quellen und
Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte 33 (Mainz, 1979; reprint Mainz,
1998), pp. 273–93.