BOWIE, Fiona (Lampeter) HILDEGARD OF BINGEN AND MEDIEVAL WOMEN'S SEXUALITY DISKUS, 2 (1994) no. 1, pp. 1-14 Contact Address: Dr Fiona Bowie Department of Theology and Religious Studies University of Wales, Lampeter Lampeter SA48 7ED UK "When Adam gazed at Eve, he was entirely filled with wisdom, for he saw in her the mother of the children to come. And when she gazed at Adam, it was as if she were gazing to heaven, or as the human soul strives upwards, longing for heavenly things - for her hope was fixed in him. And so there will be and must be one and the same love in man and woman, and no other." (Hildegard, Dronke 1988:176) "You are the devil's gateway... you are she who persuaded him whom the devil did not dare attack... Do you not know that every one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt of necessity lives on too." (Tertullian, Pagels, 1988:63) There are two very different views of male and female relations, and of female sexuality presented in these two passages. While there are many things that could be said concerning them I would like to draw attention to a couple of points which will illustrate the subject of this article.<1> The first and most obvious contrast between the two is the tone. For Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century Benedictine abbess from the German Rhineland, there is something essentially good about the relationship between men and women, both as here between Adam and Eve before the Fall, and afterwards in the complexities of the real world. Although it is true that Hildegard, like her contemporaries and predecessors, saw procreation as the primary reason for copulation, indeed in this passage it is the only reason mentioned, she is almost alone in the middle ages in emphasising the importance of love between a married couple. She also stresses an equality between the sexes, `there will be and must be one and the same love in man and woman'. The second quote is from Tertullian, a north African Christian apologist writing at the beginning of the third century. Tertullian had much to say about women, most of it in a similar vein to the quote reproduced here. There is a profound disparity between the sexes, which in this example is given theological justification by reference to Eve's seduction of Adam in Eden. All women, like Eve, can be seen as a danger to men, who are more truly spiritual and more fully human. Male fear and hatred of women, and in particular of female sexuality, is a dominant theme of Christian theological writings from Church Fathers of the first centuries, through the middle ages, and into the present. A near contemporary of Hildegard, Odo, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Cluny in France, for instance, stated that `to embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure', while Thomas Aquinas, finding ready ammunition in Aristotle, regarded women as mistaken males, produced through some defect and contrary to nature's original intention, a mistake which does however have a secondary purpose. Women are necessary, but only because of their procreative role (Ranke-Heinemann,1990:165-6). This article examines some of the theological and gynaecological views of women current in the West during the middle ages, and the extent to which these views influenced the ways women were treated and in which society was structured. A second theme will be the internalisation of dominant views of female sexuality by women, and their responses to them. Some women, like Hildegard of Bingen, appeared to accept the conventions of their day, but managed to manipulate them in such a way as to remove or soften their anti-feminist aspects. In a discussion of the Fall, for instance, Hildegard asserted that although it is true that Eve fell first, because she was weaker, this was a good thing as women are also more amenable to correction. If the sin had been Adam's there would have been no salvation possible (Cadden, 1984:153). Whereas for the majority of male commentators, female sexuality has been and is scapegoated as a primary source of sin, for Hildegard this is emphatically not the case. Other women, however, internalised the negative images of femininity presented to them and resorted, often with male encouragement, to self-mutilation, deprivation and denial of their sexuality.<2> From the stories of reformed sinners who lived extreme ascetical lives in the Egyptian desert, and who were praised for their austerities and for their ability to become `like men', to the suffering and sexless saints of the Catholic Church held up as images of idealised feminity down to the present day, women have been encouraged to view their bodies in a distorted mirror of male misogyny. Women have always succeeded in developing and maintaining parallel views of themselves, and in gaining some benefits in terms of power and respect within the church and society, through playing along with male stereotyped images. An analysis of women's alternative views and of the strategy of acquiescence to male power lies, however, beyond the scope of this article. SCIENTIFIC VIEWS OF WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE AGES Of fundamental importance to the understanding of women's sexuality in the middle ages are the four elements (air, fire, earth and water) with their dual qualities (heat/dryness, coldness/moisture) and the corresponding four humours and temperaments (blood/sanguine, yellow bile/choleric, black bile/melancholic, phlegm/phlegmatic) which linked human beings, their physiology, psychology and spiritual natures to the rest of the creation. This understanding of the physical order, as developed by the second century Greek physician Galen, constituted the foundation of medieval science. =========================================================== [DISKUS Editors' note: when printing out the following diagram, you are advised to use a non-proportionally spaced font such as Courier, and turn off text justification if you have it on. If printed in a proportionally-spaced font such as Times, Helvetica etc. the columns may not line up as on-screen. This note may be deleted from your _personal_ copy only of DISKUS without infringing copyright.] ============================================================ The Medieval View of the Four Elements, Seasons, Humours and Temperaments EAST Air MOISTURE Spring HEAT Blood Sanguine Water _ELEMENT_ Fire NORTH Winter _SEASON_ Summer SOUTH Phlegm _HUMOUR_ Yellow bile Phlegmatic _TEMPERAMENT_ Choleric Earth Autumn COLDNESS Black bile DRYNESS Melancholic WEST Two primary divisions within this scheme are those between cold and dry, and those between left and right (East, associated with the rising sun and for Christians the resurrection, was placed at the top). If a perpendicular line were drawn through the middle of the diagram, everything to the left would be associated with women and the feminine, and to the right with men and the masculine. The health of an individual depended upon trying to maintain an equilibrium between these various forces, but it was accepted that both males and females as categories and as individuals contained these elements and humours in different proportions. Women were seen as being primarily cold and moist and men as dry and hot. Galen stated that the right womb and right testicle are hotter and purer than the left, and that they therefore produce a male. The left testicle and womb (the womb was thought to be composed of cavities, a belief which gained some credence from dissections of pigs) would correspondingly produce a female. Heat, a male property, was seen as essential to the production of sperm. Aristotle went so far as to identify the virtue present in sperm with divine virtue, and then went on to establish a link between sperm and the divine intellect, placing it in some respects above matter. Women, being by nature too cold to produce sperm, could contribute to conception only inferior products. The debate as to whether or not there was such a thing as a female seed occupied physicians and theologians for centuries, but all were agreed that there was a basic physiological imbalance between the sexes, one which had definite hierarchical implications. Women could at best only play a minor role in the drama of generation. Two related medical and theological debates which have a bearing on medieval notions of women's sexuality will now be considered in turn. The first is the idea of a female semen or sperm, and the second relates the arguments as to the value and purpose of marriage, phrased in terms of procreation versus pleasure. Both of these areas of concern had profound repercussions on the treatment of women, the formation of social mores, and the drafting and enforcement of laws regulating women's behaviour. Female seed or sperm It was observed that women, as well as men, produce a secretion during intercourse or when sexually aroused. Vedic literature from around the 5th century BCE mentions the existence of a female sperm, but the notion that the woman was anything more than a passive receptacle for the implantation of the male seed was resisted by many scientists and theologians in the West until the middle ages and beyond. Galen defended the notion of female semen, claiming that it had a dual function, that of generation and that of arousal. This view predominated at least until the twelfth or thirteenth century, when the translations of Aristotle's works into Latin assisted in engendering a more hostile attitude towards women. Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century tended to support Galen's views, but in their translations and exposition of Aristotelian thought provided ready ammunition for those wishing to deny women any role in conception. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a pupil of Plato, writing in the fourth century BCE. In his _Treatise_on_the_Generation_ of_Animals_ Aristotle asserts that: "Now it is impossible that any creature should produce two seminal secretions at once, and as the secretion in females which answers to semen in males is the menstrual fluid, it obviously follows that the female does not contribute any semen to generation; for if there were semen, there would be no menstrual fluid; but as menstrual fluid is in fact formed, therefore there is no semen." (Jaquart and Thomasset, 1988:61) In answer to the criticism that women do indeed produce a secretion other than their menstrual flow, Aristotle retorted: "There are some who think that the female contributes semen during coition because women sometimes derive pleasure from it comparable to that of the male and also produce a fluid secretion. This fluid, however, is not seminal; it is peculiar to the part from which it comes in each [and every] individual." (ibid. p.61) The physical origin of sperm, in men and in women, was also debated. The brain, the head in general, the body as a whole and the reproductive organs more specifically all had their supporters. The medieval mind liked to work by analogy, and the whiteness of the brain was likened to the whiteness of semen, the spinal cord providing a physiological link between these two substances. Both semen and breast milk were believed to derive from blood, undergoing a series of purifications during which they lost their colour. Men, needless to say, were thought to purify their blood more completely, thanks to their hotter nature. Emission of both menstrual blood and semen were thought to remove impurities from the body. The retention of these products could poison the system, and sexual activity, including masturbation, was sometimes recommended by doctors as a cure for various ailments. Churchmen were left to debate whether in such circumstances sexual activity constituted a sin, or was necessary for the health of the body. Poisonous women Women's `semen' and menstrual blood, with their inherent impurities, were regarded as potentially dangerous to men who came into direct physical contact with them, causing leprosy among other things, and to women themselves if they were retained by the body. Virgins, widows and post-menopausal women were thought to be particularly vulnerable, suffering numerous disorders, such as `suffocation of the womb'. As one early commentator, Constantine the African explained: "The cause of passion is the abundance of sperm or its corruption. It occurs when women are deprived of union with a man: the sperm increases, becomes corrupt and begins to resemble a poison. Widows suffer particularly from it, especially if they have had several children." (ibid. p.174) Deep-seated male fears of women were thereby given a quasi- scientific justification. It was believed that women were naturally inclined towards sexual relations with men, and suffered when deprived of them, and that women were inherently dangerous, both to men and to themselves, due to the corrupt nature of their biological processes. This widespread belief in women's inherent destructive potential found horrific expression in later witchcraft purges, directed primarily against the old, single and vulnerable, in other words those women whose bodies were seen as the most corrupt. This type of belief is exemplified by the following thirteenth century writing which states that (ibid. p.75): "If old women who still have their periods, and certain others who do not have them regularly, look at children lying in the cradle, they transmit to them venom through their glance.... One may wonder why old women, who no longer have periods, infect children in this way. It is because the retention of the menses engenders many evil humours, and these women, being old, have almost no natural heat left to consume and control this matter, especially poor women, who live off nothing but coarse meat, which greatly contributes to this phenomenon. These women are more venomous than others." As this passage illustrates, sexually active women were not exempted from this male horror of women's destructive potential. Albert the Great, among others, asserted that the look of a woman could alone cause disease thanks to the flow of menstrual blood. He argued that the eye, being a passive organ, receives during the woman's period the menstrual fluid which can then harm everything she looks at. The air can act as an intermediary, conducting the noxious vapour given off by the eye (ibid. p.191). The crying of children, the curdling of milk, the clouding of mirrors, any type of sickness or disease, could therefore be laid at the door of woman, whatever her age or sexual proclivity. Celibacy and the purpose of marriage A distaste of human sexuality, and indeed of all bodily functions, has been an unfortunate inheritance of the Christian tradition. Women, seen by male commentators as the object and therefore the cause of male concupiscence have, as the quote from Tertullian at the beginning of this article demonstrates, been scapegoated for all manner of crimes. One of the most influential and oft quoted of the Church Fathers in the middle ages was Jerome, the fourth century translator of the Bible into Latin, who combined a need for female company with a morbid horror of the female and corporeal. In a telling letter which Jerome wrote to a Spanish nobleman who had made a vow of continence with his wife we find the approving statement that: "You have with you one who was once your partner in the flesh, but is now your partner in the spirit, once your wife but now your sister, once a woman, but now a man, once an inferior, but now an equal." (Barr, 1990:91) The fourfold attributes - flesh, wife, woman and inferior are contrasted with their transformed counterparts - spirit, sister, man and equal. By implication the female and bodily aspects of existence are inferior to the spiritual male aspects. In a letter to a woman contemplating a second marriage Jerome expressed his distaste for this institution with the words: "You've already learned the miseries of marriage. It's like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again like a dog to its vomit?" (Barr, ibid. p.97) In a letter to a young woman who had taken a vow of chastity Jerome lists the disadvantages of marriage, including the swelling of the womb in pregnancy, the wailing of babies, unfaithful husbands, and so on. In fact the only positive assessment of marriage which can be attributed to Jerome, is that marriage, by means of procreation, `gives him virgins'. Jerome's distaste for sexuality and for the female body led him to recommend an extreme asceticism to his female followers. When one young woman died as a result of her austerities, Jerome rebuked her grieving mother by telling her that, `If you are a true ascetic you should be pleased to be rid of ties', and he promised to make the girl immortal by praising her actions, believing that this would compensate his friend for the loss of her daughter (Barr ibid. p.92). Lest Jerome's dislike of marriage and promotion of the virginal state be interpreted as sympathetic to women in general, it is worth recalling his upholding of a husband's right to do what he likes with his wife, whatever the woman's own wishes: "I care nothing for what you say about the violence of an abductor, the offering of a mother, the authority of a father, the whole troop of relatives, the tricks of slaves, the parent's loss of property. As long as the husband lives, even if he is an adulterer, even if he is a homosexual, even if he has been an accomplice in every crime and has been abandoned by his wife for these crimes he is accounted her husband and it is not lawful for her to take another husband." (`Letter to Amandus', Lucus, 1988:66) The attribution of absolute power of a husband over his wife was often sanctioned by recourse to 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, which refers to man as woman's head (which in turn recalled Christian interpretations of `the Fall' in Genesis). Theological justification for wife-beating was seized upon eagerly by otherwise moderate men. Odo, chancellor of the University of Paris in the middle of the twelfth century declared that if a wife demanded intercourse on a holy day the husband must not only deny her request but `quell her impudence with fasting and beating'. There was no suggestion that a wife should similarly punish her husband, presumably because of the belief in women's more lascivious nature (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990:134-5). It is worth noting that the number of holy days in the seventh century numbered some 273, dwindling to around 140 by 1600. To these some churchmen added Saturdays, Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays as days on which the married should avoid intercourse, together with all of Lent! One of Jerome's most popular writings in the middle ages was his polemical attack on Jovinian, a monk who held that marriage and virginity were equally virtuous, and who was condemned as a heretic for this among other beliefs. For Jerome, as for many of his predecessors, the parable of the seed bringing forth fruit was interpreted in terms of virginity and marriage. The virgin could yield 100%, the widow 60% but the married only 30%. Thanks to the influence of Thomas Aquinas, who repeated Jerome's typology, this thinking remained influential in the Roman Catholic Church at least until the time of the Second Vatican Council. Not only was marriage, for Jerome, vastly inferior to celibacy, it was also an occasion for sin. By repeating a saying attributed to Sextus the Pythagorean, Jerome gave wide publicity to the notion that `[H]e who loves his wife too ardently is an adulterer'. The opposition to sexual pleasure in marriage was a topos throughout the middle ages. The primary, and for many commentators, only justification for marriage was procreation, and although some degree of sexual arousal was necessary to fulfil this intention, the primary purpose of any act of intercourse remained paramount. In the Early Church Christians were often advised to abstain from sex within marriage once the obligation to procreate had been fulfilled. In the later middle ages and into the twentieth century, the emphasis of Catholic teaching was on the sin of preventing conception and of attempting to limit family size. This thinking has its roots in Origen, who argued that Lot's daughters should not be judged harshly for copulating with their father for the sake of begetting children, claiming that in so doing they were more virtuous than women who resisted intercourse with their husbands when conception had occurred (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990:40). More common, however, was the view expressed by Ambrose, the fourth century bishop of Milan, who allowed that marriage had a remedial nature, following Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:9 where he states that `it is better to marry than to burn with desire', but underlining the procreative purpose of marriage. It followed that intercourse with a menstruating, pregnant or post-menopausal wife was illicit, as conception could not occur. There was, however, a general understanding in the middle ages that woman's pleasure was a prerequisite for her fertility. A woman who was raped or a prostitute could not therefore conceive. The observed low fertility of prostitutes may well have been the result of venereal infections in the days prior to antibiotics, but the supposed infertility of rape victims received a more sinister interpretation. William of Conches, in the first half of the 12th century, explained that, `[A]lthough in rape the act is distressing to begin with, at the end, given the weakness of the flesh, it is not without its pleasures' (ibid. p.64). This dangerous viewpoint, that women derive pleasure from rape, is still unfortunately widespread today, actively promoted by the lucrative and powerful pornography industry. A hardening of social and theological attitudes towards women is discernible towards the middle of the twelfth century. Not only were the works of Aristotle becoming better known in the Latin West, but there was also a decline in women's social and economic status and a preoccupation with supposed female sinfulness. In 1140 the Church in Lyon introduced a Feast of the Immaculate Conception, celebrating the sin-free conception of Jesus' mother. This was opposed by the Cistercian reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux, who held the Augustinian view of the transmission of sin by the sexual act. Only Jesus' conception could, he argued, be immaculate, because only Jesus was conceived without intercourse having taken place. To declare that Mary is Immaculate would be to assert that she too was born of a virgin. The debate at this time underlines the twin but logically contradictory desires to elevate Mary above the level of the ordinary human and contaminated female, while attesting the sinfulness of human sexuality. In 1139 the Second Lateran Council continued the attacks of reformers on clerical marriage, declaring that the marriages of priests should be broken up, that both parties must do penance and stripping those who refused of their clerical positions and benefices. Children of such unions were declared illegitimate and forbidden to become clerics themselves and even, according to some authorities, to marry (Brundage, 1987:220). Attempts to enforce monastic enclosure on women religious and to control the extra-regulars, such as beguines, who lived outside the confines of a cloister, also exemplified the hardening of attitudes towards women at around this time (see Bowie, 1989). HILDEGARD OF BINGEN AND FEMALE ATTITUDES TO SEXUALITY Having dealt at some length with the misogynistic attitudes towards women current in the Latin middle ages, I would like to turn to the way in which these notions could be both accepted as normative and transformed by women, as exemplified in the writings of the twelfth century visionary theologian, Hildegard of Bingen.<3> Of considerable influence throughout the middle ages was the work of the 6th and 7th century Isidore of Seville. Isidore collected and summarised the philosophical and scientific learning preserved since the Roman Empire, which still informs much of our thought even today. Hildegard shared with Isidore a determination to explain the world and to understand the signs that God had laid down in things, together with a more pragmatic attempt to understand the workings of nature and of the human body. The human body was regarded as a microcosm of the entire universe, so that philosophical, theological, dietary, astrological and medicinal advice and speculations all found a place in medieval encyclopaedias. (Jacquart and Thomasset, 1988:2) In the scientific and medical volumes of his great work, _Etymologiae_, Isidore categorised the human organs according to their function and appearance, using analogies which linked the object described to other objects by means of an analogical sequence. Language was held to have a divine origin and, until the translations of Aristotle in the twelfth century and the rediscovery of the arbitrary nature of the sign, the words used by Isidore continued to resonate and to shape the ways in which people thought. Some examples from Isisdore's classification of the sex organs will demonstrate the way in which his system worked. The _genitalia_ are so called because they _engender_ offspring. The penis or _veretrum_ is explained as being `proper to the male', _viri_est_tantum_, while the testicles (_testiculi_) are named from the diminutive of the word for witness (_testis_), for to be a testimony there must be at least two people. The word for man, _vir_ referred to his force (_vis_), whereas woman, _mulier_, was so named because of her softness (_mollities_). Thus each time the terms _vir_ or _mulier_ were used, the sexual stereotypes which informed them appeared as self-evident and were reinforced. (Jacquart and Thomasset, 1988:11-14) Hildegard accepted these standard assumptions concerning male and female nature, often referring to herself as `a poor little figure of a woman' and stressing the weakness and inadequacy of her female nature, but she managed at the same time to invert (or subvert) these categories. According to Hildegard the twelfth century was `an effeminate age'. Men had lost their virile strength and had given way to all types of corruption and depravity. She referred in particular to the abuses of the clergy, castigating them for living a life of ease, preoccupied with worldly affairs, instead of setting an example of piety and ministering to their flock. Because the age had become womanish, said Hildegard, so God had made women virile. Without appearing to challenge the ruling that a woman could not preach, Hildegard claimed that to answer the needs of her times God had been obliged to make women manly, thereby justifying her own public mission of teaching and preaching. As the quotation at the start of this article indicates, Hildegard never appeared to pay more than lip service to women's supposed inferiority. Her insistence on the equality and harmony between the sexes, and their mutual dependence, is a striking feature of much of her writings. In her gloss on I Corinthians 11:9, for example, Hildegard modifies the statement that `the man was not created for the woman but the woman for the man' by saying: "Thus it is written: `Woman is created for the man' and the man is made for woman, since she is made from man and man from her, neither is separated from the other in the unity of producing offspring, because they produce one thing in a single work just as air and wind are each involved in the work of the other." (Bynum, 1987:83-4) Hildegard on virginity Another area in which Hildegard radically reinterprets male presumptions is that of virginity. Following Jerome, Hildegard certainly elevates the celibate state above that of marriage, but in such a way as to celebrate the female. In Hildegard's hierarchy of the blessed the female virgins are presented as the peak of God's creation, before male virgins, bishops and lay men and women. She is also careful to give marriage a central place and from her medical and scientific observations concludes that not everyone is suited to celibacy, and that no one should be forced into a way of life that is not of their calling. Hildegard's letters and visionary writings indicate that she counselled moderation and discernment towards the body, and not an extreme asceticism. Indeed, fasting and penance could be a covert form of pride, making way for the Devil to enter the soul. Far from trying to hide all signs of their femininity so that they would become `like men', Hildegard decked her nuns in splendid clothes with crowns, jewels and sacred symbols, in which they celebrated the liturgical feasts accompanied by the rich and haunting music written by Hildegard herself. Hildegard on the Fall Also subtly different from that of male commentators was Hildegard's understanding of the relationship between Adam and Eve in Eden. As we have already seen, Hildegard was unusual in stressing married love, which was widely deemed inappropriate - debasing the relationship to that between a man and a prostitute or, with the rise of courtly love confined to the relationship between a man and his mistress. Following Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom (among others), Hildegard accepted that before the Fall Adam and Eve's love was not sexual and that an unfallen humanity would have multiplied in an angelic fashion without recourse to copulation. For Gregory, however, to be created in God's image implied being sexless. The distinction between the sexes was a direct result of sin, and not part of human nature as such. Hildegard's many and detailed writings on human sexuality and personality indicate that for her we are complete beings, in the image of God, with our sexual natures intact. Even more striking, however, is Hildegard's description of the Fall, as described in two visions and recorded in her book _Scivias_ (or `Know the Ways of the Lord'). Illuminations of these visions, produced alongside the text in the original manuscript, help to illustrate the extraordinary nature of Hildegard's message (high quality facsimiles of the illuminations are to be found in Boekler, 1987). In Book One, Vision Two of _Scivias_ we find Hildegard's account of the Fall, to which the quote with which we began also belongs, and an accompanying illumination illustrating the vision. There are many conventional elements, but others which are peculiar to Hildegard (and to the artist expressing her vision). At the top of the illumination we see the army of heavenly spirits who persisted in divine love who are separated, but only just, from a great black cloud with branch-like arms, representing Lucifer and the fallen angels. Eve is symbolised by a cloud emanating from Adam's side. It is full of stars because she bears in her body the whole multitude of the human race. Although Eve was tempted first, being weaker than Adam, she is described as `innocent of soul'. Whereas so many of the Church Fathers equated sin with female concupiscence _per_se_, Hildegard asserts that the Devil tempted Eve knowing that she was more susceptible than Adam, but without presenting Eve as the harlot and temptress familiar from Christian iconography. A second illumination from the first vision of Book Two depicts the whole cycle of Creation, the Fall and Redemption. Shimmering gold and blue circles at the top of the page represent Hildegard's image of the Trinity. Beneath the Trinity, contained within a second globe, are six smaller circles illustrating the six days of creation, and at the bottom of this a little clod of earth which is being touched with the divine a dazzling shaft of light emanating from the Trinity. From the warmth and breath of this flame a human creature is formed. In her description of the vision Hildegard tells us that having created a human form `the blazing fire, by means of that flame which burned ardently with a gentle breath, offered to the human a white flower, which hung in that flame as dew hangs on the grass' (Hart and Bishop. 1990). Hildegard goes on to describe how, `Its scent came to the human's nostrils, but he did not taste it with his mouth or touch it with his hands, and thus he turned away and fell into the thickest darkness, out of which he could not pull himself' (ibid. p.149). The vision goes on to reveal the rekindling of the divine will in the darkness, and the appearance of a Redeemer, whose golden flames reach out to touch the fallen Adam, now wizened, white-haired and sunk into a pit of blackness. What is of most interest from our point of view is Hildegard's description of the Fall itself. The sin of humanity, represented in this vision by Adam alone, was not sexual but intellectual. There is certainly no mention of Eve the temptress. In her explication of this vision Hildegard tells us that the scented flower represents the sweet odour of sanctity which `trickled from the Father in the Holy Spirit through the Word and brought forth fruit in greatest abundance, as the dew falling on grass makes it grow'. Adam's sin lay in failing to appreciate this gift with his whole being, understanding it only by means of his mind, his intelligence, or as Hildegard puts it: "ITS SCENT COMES TO THE HUMAN'S NOSTRILS, BUT HE DOES NOT TASTE IT WITH HIS MOUTH OR TOUCH IT WITH HIS HANDS;<4> for he tried to know the wisdom of the Law with his intelligence, as if with his nose, but did not perfectly digest it by putting it in his mouth, or fulfil it in full blessedness by the work of his hands. AND THUS HE TURNS AWAY AND FALLS INTO THE THICKEST DARKNESS, OUT OF WHICH HE CANNOT PULL HIMSELF. For, by the Devil's counsel, he turned his back on the divine command and sank into the gaping mouth of death, so that he did not seek God either by faith or by works; and therefore, weighed down by sin, he could not rise to true knowledge of God, until He came Who obeyed His Father sinlessly and fully (Hart and Bishop, 1990:153) Hildegard reminds us of an alternative interpretation of divine history, and an alternative interpretation of female sexuality. She presents a theological story, that of humanity's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, in a radically new way. Instead of pinpointing concupiscence, or sexual knowledge, as the forbidden fruit, the plucking and eating of which led to expulsion from paradise, Hildegard claims that it was the denial of our full human nature and its potential which is the original sin. Far from elevating the spirit at the expense of the body, Hildegard points to Adam's attempt to understand the Law with his mind alone as the cause of human suffering. The goodness of God should be savoured with the senses and with the body, and not just through the intellect. What Hildegard is articulating is a more integrated female perspective on human nature and sexuality than that which is presented as normative by male commentators. Hildegard was exceptional in that as a woman she succeeded in conveying her message to a wide audience, being one of the most respected and influential people of her day, but she serves to remind us of the alternative views of women which are so often hidden from history. ------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES <1> This article was first presented as a guest lecture at a Staff/Student History Colloquium of the University of Wales at Gregynog. <2> The twelfth century Flemish beguine, Mary of Oignies, for instance, became so convinced of her sinfulness that she cut out pieces of her own flesh, then hid them out of shame, a fact recorded with not a little awe by her highly placed clerical biographer, Jaques of Vitry (see Bowie 1989). See also Bynum, 1987, _Holy_Feast_and_Holy_Fast_..., which discusses medieval women's relationship to food in a religious context. <3> See Bowie and Davies, 1990, which includes a bibliography of works by and secondary works on Hildegard of Bingen. <4> The use of CAPITALS indicates the part of the vision which Hildegard heard and saw by a kind of `divine dictation' directly from the source of her inspiration, the `living light', although inspired status was also claimed for her interpretation of the visions. In her visionary works, Hildegard starts by recounting what she saw and heard, and then over several pages, with many digressions, expounds the inner meaning of the rich and complex visual and aural images received during the vision. Although not exact representations of the written description, the illuminations do convey something of the visual dynamism of the original inspiration. The illuminations in the original _Scivias_ manuscript are contemporary with the text, and may well have been supervised (although probably not executed) by Hildegard herself. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barr, Jane, `The Influence of Saint Jerome on Medieval Attitudes to Women'. In Janet Martin Soskice, (ed.), After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition. Collins, 1990, pp.89-102 Bowie, F., Beguine Spirituality: An Anthology. SPCK, 1989 Bowie, F. and Davies, O., Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology. SPCK, 1990 Brundage, J.A., Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1987 Bynum, C.W., `Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages' in Raitt, J. (ed.), Christian Spirituality: The High Middle Ages and Reformation. Routledge, London, 1987a, pp.121-39 Bynum, C.W., Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press, 1987b Cadden, Joan, `It Takes All Kinds: Sexuality and Gender Differences in Hildegard of Bingen's "Book of Compound Medicine".' _Tradition_ XL, Fordham University Press, NY, 1984, pp.149-174 Dronke, P., Women Writers of the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1984 Hart, Mother C. and Bishop, J. (ed. & trs), Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias. Paulist, New York, 1990 Jaquart, D. and Thomasset, C., Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Polity Press, 1988 Lucas, A.M., Women in the Middle Ages: Religion, Marriage and Letters. Harvester, Brighton, 1988 Pagels, E., Adam, Eve and the Serpent. Penguin,1988 Ranke-Heinemann, U., Eunuchs for Heaven: The Catholic Church and Sexuality. Andre Deutsch, London, 1990