A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

322 george ferzoco
but it also shows that through the music of Hildegard—a music that supposedly
would die with her—the language could live on. In the early texts
of Hildegard and her followers and devotees, this linking of her music and
her language is signifijicant, as both were seen as divine gifts that together
reached the world through Hildegard. The secret writing had less good
fortune, as it appears to have been used only very rarely.16 But in Hildegard’s
music, vocabulary, and writing, to some degree and for some time
at least, were aural, verbal, and written elements that served to bond the
magistra’s monastic communities.
16 See, for example, the manuscript Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek,
Sammelhandschrift theol. et phil. 4° 253, where some rubrics were written transliterally
with these letters; an example is illustrated in Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language,
p. 140 (Plate 4).