A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard of bingen and the hirsau reform 61
sion in humility of life not do it with imprudent and inconsiderate haste,
but examine the matter with wise discretion and not force them to do so
without their consent what the people themselves could not bear.” If such
a child was forcibly constrained in this way, “he will certainly run away,
physically or mentally, unless God guards him by a miracle.”15 Hildegard
would certainly have been aware that William of Hirsau had sought to
abolish the practice of child oblation, condemned by the Cistercians and
other new religious orders in the early 12th century. Yet these reforms
were never fully implemented.
While William admired the discipline he believed was practiced at
Cluny, as well as the monastery’s detachment from secular authority, he
never adopted its practice of bestowing vast power on its abbot, who had
binding authority over all its dependencies.16 Unlike Cluny, monasteries
established or reformed by abbots sent out from Hirsau were not subordinated
to an all-powerful abbot, but rather became part of an informal
network held together by common values and core elements of a shared
liturgical tradition, which could be developed in any number of ways.
This network, much less formal than the ordo established by abbeys that
derived from Cîteaux, which came together every year in a General Chapter,
was ultimately held together more by ties of friendship than by any
institutional structure. Between 1075 and 1091, however, the movement
was held together by William’s conscious policy of establishing Hirsau as
a center for reform, in a manner that never happened at Cluny. His biographer,
Haimo, writing soon after William’s death in 1091, recalled that he
was admired for inspiring people from widely diffferent social backgrounds
to follow a religious life: “He incited nobles and common-folk, rich and
poor, men and women, to reject the world, kindling each of them to love
of heavenly life by word and example.”17 He encouraged laymen to pursue
15 Scivias 2.5.45, pp. 213–14.
16 See Klaus Schreiner, “Hirsau und die Hirsauer Reform. Spiritualität, Lebensform und
Sozialprofijil einer benediktinischen Erneuerungsbewegung im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert,” in
Hirsau. St. Peter und Paul 1091–1991, ed. Klaus Schreiner, Forschungen und Berichte der
Archäologie des Mittelalters in Baden-Württemberg 10 (Stuttgart, 1991) pt. 2, pp. 59–97.
On the Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, printed in PL 150:923A–1146D, see Norbert Riemann,
“Die Konstitutionen des Abtes Wilhelm von Hirsau,” in Hirsau. St. Peter und Paul 1091–1991,
pt. 2, pp. 101–08.
17 Vita beati Wilhelmi abbatis 6, ed. Wilhelm Wattenbach, MGH SS 12:213: “Nobiles et
ignobiles, divites et pauperes, viros et mulieres, ad contemptum mundi incitabat, ac singularos
ad amorem caelestis vitae verbo et exemplo accendebat.”