A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

70 constant j. mews
life to come serves to warn the faithful of the gulf that separates what is
truly pleasing to God from the appearance of external piety. The combination
of text and visual image echoes the much better known combination
of text and image in the Rupertsberg manuscript of Scivias.
While Bernard’s description of his vision cannot compare with the scale
and sophistication of Hildegard’s accounts of her visions (perceived, she
insists, not in a dream, but while awake), it does show how it was not
unusual for individuals to communicate in this way within a monastic
context, particularly in the early years of the Hirsau reform. Many of the
visions that the Petershausen chronicler reports are of a more conventional
variety: stories about how Bernard himself had been seen wandering
through the monastic cloister after his death, or visions of the
afterlife.47 All these stories serve to press home the chronicler’s theme
that the early monks and nuns of Petershausen lived out the evangelical
excitement of the early Church, and were often entrusted by the Holy
Spirit with remarkable insight.
Hildegard and the Speculum virginum
A treatise that in many ways embodies the commitment of the Hirsau
reform to promoting the spiritual life of religious women who had withdrawn
from the world is the Speculum virginum, attributed by Trithemius
to Conrad of Hirsau—an author about whom frustratingly little is
known for certain.48 The Speculum virginum is written in the form of an
extended dialogue between a learned and inquiring woman, Theodora,
and her spiritual advisor, Peregrinus. The goal of the treatise is to lead
religious women to reflect on the virtues, through reflecting on a series of
visual images related to the cross and the tree of life. The author implies
that dialogue between a learned woman and her spiritual advisor was not
in itself as dangerous a phenomenon as some might believe. In his eyes,
spiritual women, devoted to the life of perfection, could in fact serve as
models of virtue in the same way as any monk.
47 Monasterii Petrishusensis 3.19–20, 22; 4.3, 19, MGH SS 20:653, 654–65, 661, 664.
48 Speculum virginum, ed. Jutta Seyfarth, CCCM 5 (Turnhout, 1990). On its author, see
Constant J. Mews, “Virginity, Theology and Pedagogy in the Speculum virginum,” in Listen,
Daughter, pp. 15–40. An important new study on Conrad, confijirming his authorship
of various texts attributed to him by Trithemius, is Marco G. Rainini, “Oltre il velo delle
immagini. Il ‘Dialogus de cruce’ (Clm 14159) e Corrado/Peregrinus di Hirsau,” Rivista di
storia del cristianesimo, 6.1 (2009): 121–58.