Envisioning Divine Didactics: Didactic Strategies in the Visionary Trilogy of Hildegard of Bingen

Abstract

This article examines the implications of Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary trilogy (Scivias, Liber vite meritorum and Liber divinorum operum) being both a series of visions and a didactic treatise. Specifically, it looks at how the conditions underlying a visionary narrative are employed to provide the didactic with rhetorical force. First, a narratological analysis shows how the voice of God establishes itself as the main and omnipresent narrator who even crosses the boundaries of the text itself in order to speak directly to the reader. Second, the rhetorical uses of this situation are illustrated. The rhetorical construction of direct access to the reader allows the text, on the one hand, to take on the shape of a sermon and, on the other, to dramatize the reading of the text by incorporating the reader into the text. Thus, features of the visionary experience like God’s direct presence and authority are rhetorically extended from the seer to the readers of the text in order to exert a great amount of control over their learning process.