A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

32 franz j. felten
Norm and practice in promoting the separation of convents for men and
women were reinforced by exhortation. The Speculum virginum (“Mirror of
Virgins”), which probably originated in the reform circle of the Rhineland
in the 12th century, polemicized against sanctimoniales who erected their
houses next to monasteries—precisely the situation at Disibodenberg—
and offfered as the central reason that which, since the time of the Church
Fathers, had discouraged too great a proximity between men and women:
the concern for chastity.87 Only the “enclosing” of women could help—a
strict active and passive enclosure, which in these decades almost became
the symbol of a cloistered life in accordance with the rule, especially for
the supposedly weaker sex.
This development from the enthusiasm for a vita apostolica, represented
by men and women living in the same place yet still separate from each
other (according to the chronicler of the reform monastery Petershausen
at Constance),88 to an emphasis on strict physical division increased in the
time just before and after Jutta’s death. It is thus no surprise that, much
later, after this ideal had become well established, the written sources
emphasize spatial separation even in writing about years past. Hence,
Guibert, who was certainly in a position to know about Hildegard’s and
Jutta’s conditions, even from his home monastery in Gembloux, describes
Hildegard’s cloister as an immured location in order to avert any suspicion,
and represents Hildegard from the beginning as a true female Benedictine.
He presents her teacher Jutta as conforming to this ideal as well,
in that he smoothes over her difffijicult path at Disibodenberg, and causes
her characteristic hardships to vanish into simple asceticism and prayer.
According to this portrayal, the departure from Disibodenberg to Bingen
would not have been a break, but rather a logical development.
If we did not have Jutta’s Vita, which was fijirst edited in 1992 by Franz
Staab, we would not know the great extent to which Hildegard sought
to distance herself from Jutta’s ascetic ideals, fijirst at Disibodenberg, but
above all at her own monastery. Jutta’s Vita underscores her sense of duty
and obligation, in that it records her transmission of regulations that
were to be strictly observed. However, if Kuno, Jutta’s trusted friend, commissioned
her Vita in order to bind the sisters to her ideal,89 a diffferent
87 Speculum virginum, ed. Jutta Seyfarth, CCCM 5 (Turnhout, 1990), p. 70.
88 Chronik von Petershausen, ed. Otto Feger, Schwäbische Chroniken der Stauferzeit 3
(Sigmaringen, 1956, 2nd ed., 1978), p. 24.
89 Vita Juttae, Prol. 5, p. 178: “sua instituta strenue observans custodienda fijiliabus
tradidit.”