Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the earth, rooted in the sky: Hildegard of Bingen and premodern medicine, Studies in Medieval History and Culture, New York and London, Routledge, 2006, pp. xviii, 326, illus., £55.00, $75.00 (hardback 0-415-97634-0; 978-0-415-97634-3).

Abstract

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess, mystic, physician, poet, and composer, has been the subject of a renaissance of sorts over the past twenty-five years. Historians of medicine and religion, literary critics, musicians, and even new-age medical practitioners have revived the Rhineland abbess as a unique and formidable intellectual figure of the twelfth century. While previous historians of medicine have looked broadly at Hildegard's medical views or narrowly at her pharmacological knowledge of plants, Victoria Sweet provides a solid and fruitful monograph on the connections between humoral theory and practical knowledge in Hildegard's thought. After an initial biographical chapter, which includes a definitive rejection of the theory that Hildegard's mystical visions were caused by migraines, Sweet turns to the impact of the abbess's probable training in horticulture (as monastic infirmarian) on her understanding of the body and humoral theory. Sweet argues that Hildegard's text Causes and cures (c. 1150) was a medical manual for a student infirmarian at her abbey, and as such can allow us to see how “concepts of premodern medicine were understood and used by a particular practitioner” (p. 7). Sweet argues that she is using an “anthropological” approach in this work, investigating the world of her informant, Hildegard the practitioner. This approach is in reality a form of historical analysis that pays close attention to intellectual traditions and wider, symbolic cultural meanings and contexts. Sweet keenly identifies Hildegard's distinct interpretations of such classical medical concepts as the four elements (chapter 3) and the four humours (chapter 4). Most revealing is Sweet's study (chapter 5) of the Hildegardian term viriditas (“greening,” the fertile power of all living things) from the perspective of horticultural and humoral knowledge in medieval thought. Where other scholars search for the symbolic and spiritual meanings of the term, Sweet demands that we take seriously the concrete reality behind Hildegard's notion of viriditas as a form of juice or sap in plants, a liquid which provides both sustenance for the plant and possible pharmacological succour for the ill. While the abbess may have borrowed the term from the theological tradition, she applies it broadly to the idea of fecundity and health in the natural world. The book argues well that Hildegard's views on the body and healing can best be understood by looking at the organic, natural imagery that underlies medieval medical thought. Sweet very nicely places Hildegard's unique vision and all of humoral theory in this context. But the author is less successful in the conclusion, where she attempts to place Hildegard's medical and horticultural ideas in the larger context of pre-Copernican geocentric views of the cosmos. Sweet argues that the crucial image uniting all pre-modern medical concepts is the fixed earth and the temporal changes (in the seasons, qualities, humours, and elements) that ensue as the moving firmament circles it. Hildegard was certainly concerned with the symbiosis of the macrocosm of the world—with its winds and seasonal changes—and the microcosm of the body, but her thought remains markedly anthropocentric rather than geocentric. It is revealing that the only Hildegardian evidence that Sweet supplies comes not from her medical writings but from her mystical and visionary treatises, which did not require strict adherence to natural philosophical or medical views. Most medical theory took into account fluctuations in the environment, but did not reduce health or illness to such shifting contextual factors. The author attempts to create a sense of coherence within a massive body of medical knowledge that resists any single theory, even within the work of a single author. The argument is intriguing and provocative, and requires more elaboration than it receives in the concluding pages of the monograph. None the less, the book's strength lies in its ability to identify a systematic natural philosophy that underlies Hildegard's medical material. Sweet does so by studying Hildegard's views of humours and viriditas, and by revealing the experiential and botanical underpinnings of Hildegard's life and thought. In all of this, Sweet hints at the relevance of Hildegard's medical ideas to the connections between gender, natural science, and medicine.