Romanesque

Vision of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Scivias,1050-1079

This illumination was included as a frontispiece in the Liber Scivias. It shows Hildegard receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary. Hildegard was a writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and arguably the oldest surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature illuminations. The Scivias is an illustrated work by Hildegard van Bingen describing 26 religious visions she experienced. Though it is unclear what her role was in the illumination of the manuscript, she has been assigned every role from being uninvolved, to directing others to create them, to being their direct creator. Regardless of her precise relation to the art; however, the fact that she, as a woman, was accepted as a living oracle and permitted to document her experiences is impressive.