Abstract
The year 1998, the nine hundredth anniversary of the birth of St. Hildegard near Bingen in the valley of the Rhine, provided an occasion for scholarly scrutiny of her textual, visual, and musical works, as well as more popular treatments. This review article is highly selective. The new edition of Sabina Flanagan's book will continue to provide one of the better general introductions to Hildegard's biography and writings. In updating the first edition of 1989, when the author noted that of her writings still lack modern critical editions (p. xi), a second preface acknowledges the progress made in providing these crucial sources (p. xiii); indeed most titles in the Corpus Christianorum series, as well as the best modern translations into English, postdate 1989 (pp. 217-19). The author herself is also responsible for a new anthology of a wide range of texts in translation that might well complement the present volume in the classroom (Secrets of God: Writings of Hildegard of Bingen, Boston, 1998). In her Visionary Life a biography based on Hildegard's own writings and on several contemporary accounts intersects with central chapters that describe the various texts assigned to Hildegard. The author is an unabashed admirer of Hildegard, setting her achievements in natural history, medicine, and cosmology, ... music, poetry, and theology above those of of her male contemporaries and particularly lauding her visionary beauty and intellectual power (pp. ix-x). Flanagan's biographical chapters (1-3) are ambitious and daring given the scarcity and taciturn nature of the sources. The clarity and certainty this author conveys are both the strength and the weakness of the book, depending on the reader's needs. Although she introduces many quotations from Hildegard herself, she had to work hard at filling the gaps in order to meet twentieth-century prerequisites for a biography, one that not only winnows the facts of the narrative from mythologies but also demands to understand causes and personal motivation. Thus Flanagan speculates whether Hildegard felt less orphaned by Jutta's death
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