Part 5

10. Facsimile of the last page of Manfredi’s Prognosticon ad annum 1479 102

11. Diagram showing the ten Layers of the Head, the Cerebral Ventricles and Cranial Nerves, and the Relation of the Nerves to the Senses (from M. Hundt, Antropologium, 1501) 112

12. The Layers of the Head (from the Anatomia of Johannes Dryander, 1537) 112

13. Diagram showing the Ventricles of the Brain (from Illustrissimi philosophi et theologi domini Alberti magni compendiosum insigne ac perutile opus Philosophiae naturalis, 1496) 114

14. Diagram of the Senses, the Humours, the Cerebral Ventricles, and the Intellectual Faculties. To illustrate Roger Bacon, De Scientia Perspectiva, (British Museum MS. Sloane 2156, fo. 11 r) 116

15. Diagram illustrating the general ideas on Anatomy current at the Renaissance (from K. Peyligk. Philosophiae naturalis compendium, 1489) 116

16. Diagrams of the Cerebral Ventricles viewed from above and from the side (from K. Peyligk, Philosophiae naturalis compendium, 1489) 117

17. The Localization of Cerebral Functions (from the 1493 edition of ‘Ketham’) 117

18. Diagram of the Ventricles and the Senses, with their relation to the intellectual processes, according to the doctrine of the Renaissance anatomists (from G. Reisch, Margarita philosophiae, 1503) 117

19. The Anatomy of the Eye (from G. Reisch, Margarita philosophiae, 1503) 120

20. The Anatomy of the Eye (from Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, 1543) 121

21. The Heart (from the Roncioni MS., Pisa 99) 127

22. Diagram showing the two Lateral Ventricles and the ‘Central’ Ventricle, (from Johannes Adelphus, Mundini de omnibus humani corporis interioribus menbris Anathomia, 1513) 128

23. The Heart (from Hans von Gersdorff, Feldt- und Stattbüch bewerter Wundartznei, 1556) 129

DR. JOHN WEYER AND THE WITCH MANIA

Portrait of Dr. John Weyer at the age of 60, 1576 189

THE SCIENTIFIC VIEWS AND VISIONS OF SAINT HILDEGARD (1098-1180)

By Charles Singer

PAGE

I. Introduction 1 II. Life and Works 2 III. Bibliographical Note 6 IV. The Spurious Scientific Works of Hildegard 12 V. Sources of Hildegard’s Scientific Knowledge 15 VI. The Structure of the Material Universe 22 VII. Macrocosm and Microcosm 30 VIII. Anatomy and Physiology 43 IX. Birth and Death and the Nature of the Soul 49 X. The Visions and their Pathological Basis 51

I. INTRODUCTION

In attempting to interpret the views of Hildegard on scientific subjects, certain special difficulties present themselves. First is the confusion arising from the writings to which her name has been erroneously attached. To obtain a true view of the scope of her work, it is necessary to discuss the authenticity of some of the material before us. A second difficulty is due to the receptivity of her mind, so that views and theories that she accepts in her earlier works become modified, altered, and developed in her later writings. A third difficulty, perhaps less real than the others, is the visionary and involved form in which her thoughts are cast.

But a fourth and more vital difficulty is the attitude that she adopts towards phenomena in general. To her mind there is no distinction between physical events, moral truths, and spiritual experiences. This view, which our children share with their mediaeval ancestors, was developed but not transformed by the virile power of her intellect. Her fusion of internal and external universe links Hildegard indeed to a whole series of mediaeval visionaries, culminating with Dante. In Hildegard, as in her fellow mystics, we find that ideas on Nature and Man, the Moral World and the Material Universe, the Spheres, the Winds, and the Humours, Birth and Death, and even on the Soul, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the Nature of God, are not only interdependent, but closely interwoven. Nowadays we are well accustomed to separate our ideas into categories, scientific, ethical, theological, philosophical, and so forth, and we even esteem it a virtue to retain and restrain our thoughts within limits that we deliberately set for them. To Hildegard such classification would have been impossible and probably incomprehensible. Nor do such terms as parallelism or allegory adequately cover her view of the relation of the material and spiritual. In her mind they are really interfused, or rather they have not yet been separated.

Therefore, although in the following pages an attempt is made to estimate her scientific views, yet the writer is conscious that such a method must needs interpret her thought in a partial manner. Hildegard, indeed, presents to us scientific thought as an undifferentiated factor, and an attempt is here made to separate it by the artificial but not unscientific process of dissection from the organic matrix in which it is embedded.

The extensive literature that has risen around the life and works of Hildegard has come from the hands of writers who have shown no interest in natural knowledge, while those who have occupied themselves with the history of science have, on their side, largely neglected the period to which Hildegard belongs, allured by the richer harvest of the full scholastic age which followed. This essay is an attempt to fill in a small part of the lacuna.

II. LIFE AND WORKS

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098, of noble parentage, at Böckelheim, on the river Nahe, near Sponheim. Destined from an early age to a religious life, she passed nearly all her days within the walls of Benedictine houses. She was educated and commenced her career in the isolated convent of Disibodenberg, at the junction of the Nahe and the Glan, where she rose to be abbess. In 1147 she and some of her nuns migrated to a new convent on the Rupertsberg, a finely placed site, where the smoky railway junction of Bingerbrück now mars the landscape. Between the little settlement and the important mediaeval town of Bingen flowed the river Nahe, spanned by a bridge to which still clung the name of the pagan Drusus (see Fig. 1). At this spot, a place of ancient memories, secluded and yet linked to the world, our abbess passed the main portion of her life, and here she closed her eyes in the eighty-second year of her age on September 17, 1180.

Hildegard was a woman of extraordinarily active and independent mind. She was not only gifted with a thoroughly efficient intellect, but was possessed of great energy and considerable literary power, and her writings cover a wide range, betraying the most varied activities and remarkable imaginative faculty. The best known, and in a literary sense the most valuable of her works, are the books of visions. She was before all things an ecstatic, and both her Scivias (1141-50) and her Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis (1163-70) contain passages of real power and beauty. Less valuable, perhaps, is her third long mystical work (the second in point of time), the Liber vitae meritorum (1158-62). She is credited with the authorship of an interesting mystery-play and of a collection of musical compositions, while her life of St. Disibode, the Irish missionary (594-674) to whom her part of the Rhineland owes its Christianity, and her account of St. Rupert, a local saint commemorated in the name ‘Rupertsberg’, both bear witness alike to her narrative powers, her capacity for systematic arrangement, and her historical interests. Her extensive correspondence demonstrates the influence that she wielded in her own day and country, while her Quaestionum solutiones triginta octo, her Explanatio regulae sancti Benedicti, and her Explanatio symboli sancti Athanasii ad congregationem sororum suorum give us glimpses of her activities as head of a religious house.