A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

what do we know about the life of jutta and hildegard 35
sivity against the criticism of Tenxwind.105 There is clearly no ground in
the sources for the (modern) notion that Eibingen, formerly a convent of
Augustinian canons that was taken over by Hildegard in 1165, could have
been planned for girls of lower social rank. In the early modern period,
when the convent of Rupertsberg had found a new home in Eibingen after
the destruction of the original monastery, a fundatio claimed that Hildegard’s
convent had been founded for girls with unquestionable noble
descent in both their father’s and their mother’s lineages, and that the
sisters from common families had been given to the nobles as servants.106
Since the late Middle Ages, such foundation stories have circulated in many
places in order to establish that a convent’s exclusivity was truly based
on the will of the founder,107 but hardly ever with such well-documented
support as is found in Hildegard’s letter to Tenxwind. Nevertheless, in the
18th century, the nuns of Eibingen thought they could still make amends
and rewrote Hildegard into a second Countess of Sponheim.108
We do not know what Jutta, the actual Countess of Sponheim, thought
on this point, and so we cannot say whether Hildegard turned against
the instituta of her teacher in this case as well. When Hildegard aggressively
asserts against Tenxwind, the daughter of a ministerialis, her conviction
that one should not bring people of diverse social rank together
in one convent, just as one does not enclose diffferent types of animals in
one stable, she is not only formulating her personal opinion (although
remarks of this type were very rare at the time). When examined from a
social-historical point of view, Hildegard is actively supporting the interests
of the noble class to which she herself belonged: in the 12th century,
the freemen (liberi), as they programmatically called themselves, consistently
distinguished themselves from the rising class of ministeriales, who
were “unfree,” even if the upstarts were often economically and politically
more powerful—one need only think of the Bolander or the so-called
105 Epistolae, I, 52, pp. 125–27.
106 Ms. Fundatio, cited in Franz J. Felten, “Zum Problem der sozialen Zusammensetzung
von alten Benediktinerklöstern und Konventen der neuen religiösen Bewegung,” in
Umfeld, p. 228, n. 185.
107 Franz J. Felten, “Wie adelig waren Kanonissenstifte (und andere weibliche Konvente)
im (frühen und hohen) Mittelalter?” in Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. Irene Crusius,
Veröfffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 167, Studien zur Germania
Sacra 24 (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 39–128; reprinted in: Vita religiosa sanctimonialium. Norm
und Praxis des weiblichen religiösen Lebens vom 6. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Christine
Kleinjung, Studien und Texte zur Geistes- und Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters 4 (Korb
am Neckar, 2011), pp. 93–163, esp. 104–17 resp. 143–153.
108 Felten, “Zum Problem,” in Umfeld, p. 228.