Reorienting Disorientation: Hildegard von Bingen’s Depiction of the Female Body as Erotic, Fertile, and Holy
Résumé
In this chapter, Lauren Cole and Hannah Victoria track the evolution of how the twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen wrote about women by contextualizing Hildegard’s lexical choices regarding Mary and Eve as models of holy femininity across several major texts. Focusing on how personal experiences of movement, including her physical move to the religious community at Rupertsberg in 1150 and the loss of her beloved companion Richardis in 1152, impacted her readings of the female body. Cole and Victoria argue that this period demonstrates a reorientation in Hildegard’s thinking about embodied femininity. They conclude that her later texts, such as her Symphoniae and Causae et curae demonstrate a turn from negative depictions of women to a positive—even desiring—attention to the female body.