![]() ![]() Five years later she began her first book, Scivias, her interpretation of a series of complex visions that she had experienced. When Jutta died unexpectedly in 1136, Hildegard was elected magistra. Her religious instruction was entrusted to Jutta, the magistra of the women's side of Disibodenberg it comprised a Latin education based on the Bible and the patristic writers. The idea of double monasteries, which housed both men and women, resurfaced during the early years of the century, and Hildegard's entry into Disibodenberg probably meant that she had more access to literate, male culture than she would have had in a more conventional monastery. Her parents, Hildebert and Mechthild, had promised their tenth child as a tithe to the church, and so, at the age of fourteen, she entered the double monastery of Disibodenberg on the rivers Nahe and Glan in the lower Rhineland. ![]() Her life thus spanned the "twelfth-century renaissance," an era in Europe of expanding population and growing new cities, of the reinvention of a money economy, of written law, and of government bureaucracy - a time that encouraged the creation and circulation of new knowledge. ![]() Hildegard of Bingen was born in the rural Rhineland in 1098, two years after the First (and only successful) Crusade, and she died in 1179, just after the Third Lateran Council. I will begin with an account of her life and work I will then present an analysis of her medical text in its twelfth-century context, and will conclude with a discussion of her medicine as a praxis that both reflects and expresses the premodern relationship of humans with the natural world. This paper introduces Hildegard as an untapped source for our evolving understanding of premodern European medicine. In the past two decades, scholarly as well as popular interest in her visions, music, theology, and medicine has taken off, leading to the first recordings of her music, the first translations of her texts, and the first attempts - for better or for worse - to practice "Hildegardian medicine." During this same period, anthropologists have changed our understanding of medical systems, clarifying their relationship to the sociocultural ecologies from which they arise recently, historians have begun to apply these insights to Western medicine. Hildegard of Bingen's fame is on the rise, eight hundred years after her death. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73.3 (1999) 381-403 ![]()
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