Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Room 220, St. Paul's College
12:00 - 1:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Bain
In 1175 the monk Guibert of Gembloux initiated and carried out correspondence with Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), for whom he had great admiration. He would become Hildegard’s final secretary, but during the two-year period from 1175 to 1177, he was one of her most demanding and persistent correspondents.
He sent her repeated requests to answer 35 biblical and theological questions compiled by the monks of Villers Abbey. Hildegard kept delaying in providing answers to the questions, but she unexpectedly, and puzzlingly, sent him a collection that is known today as the Dendermonde Codex, currently held at the Maurits Sabbe library at KU Leuven.
This manuscript is very well known to musicologists and performers of Hildegard’s music because it is one of the two main manuscripts that transmit her musical repertory; the music, however, is only one part of the compilation manuscript, which includes visionary works by Hildegard of Bingen and her contemporary Elisabeth of Schönau, and an anonymous dialogue between a priest and the devil.
While disciplinary experts have studied each of the elements in the manuscript to greater and lesser degrees, no one has tried to assess how the various elements fit together, and what that assessment might then tell us about Hildegard’s motivation for compiling and sending the collection.
In this talk, Dr. Bain will consider the manuscript compilation in content and as a material artefact—in light of the correspondence with Guibert—to suggest what the larger function of the Codex might have been in the twelfth century.