Booklog: Hildegard and Julian

[nebroadwe]

Last of the Lenten nonfiction!

Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age

A decent introduction to the life of the early twelfth-century German abbess, scholar, composer, mystic and gadfly, this book covers the basics of her life with reasonable attention to her Sitz im Leben. It is arranged roughly chronologically, taking a topical approach to Hildegard's mature years (e.g. one chapter deals with her extensive correspondence, another with her music, another with her scientific works, and so forth). The author is willing to make inferences about Hildegard from the source material, but stops short of presenting these as fact, which I like. That Hildegard might have suffered from migraine, for instance, is interesting as a possible source for her visual imagery, but since she herself didn't have that as a interpretive framework, it doesn't pay to reduce her intellectual and spiritual investment in her visions to an illness-coping strategy. The reader already familiar with Hildegard will find nothing new here, but someone investigating her life for the first time will find this biography accessible.

The Revelation of Divine Love in Sixteen Showings Made to Dame Julian of Norwich (translated with a new introduction by M.L. del Mastro)

On May 8, 1373, a recluse attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich, England, suffering from an illness near death, experienced a series of "showings" from God. On recovering, she wrote them down; then meditated on them for some twenty years and expanded her interpretation into a second, longer text, but the whole of the message is simply, "Love." This is one of my favorite medieval Christian spiritual works for several reasons. First, despite the fact that the author (known usually as "Dame Julian") makes it clear that she wishes the reader to pay attention to the message, not the messenger, this is a personal work, and the sense of a real human being praying, meditating and struggling with the meaning of what she has experienced is engaging. Second, the work is inherently optimistic; it does not deny human sinfulness, but it is adamant that the love of God for each human being is so constant and personal that it is the height of folly to despair of salvation. Finally, the work was written in the vernacular and the further into it you read, the more impressive the author's use of language becomes; she expresses extremely complex theological concepts using very simple terms and metaphors. It's a kind of masterclass in less-is-more. Mastro's translation is fine; the introduction is skippable.