Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

by Mary Sharratt

  Just after the Feast of All Souls, which marked our second anniversary in the anchorage, Volmar gifted us with a white lily bulb in a pot of earth.

  “I planted it myself,” he said. “It will grow and blossom in time for Easter.”

  Cradling the pot, I gazed at the black soil and imagined the bulb opening, the plant bursting forth like a trumpet on Easter morning. The lily, pure and sweet. Jutta’s favorite flower.

  5

  AT FIFTEEN, I’D GROWN into a gawky thing, dwarfing Jutta, who seemed baffled that I, her handmaiden, stood taller than she did. Perhaps when she first took me into her care, she imagined I would remain a child forever, pliant and docile.

  Now I was an ordained nun, having made my permanent vows of poverty, renunciation, obedience, and stability to Disibodenberg Monastery—as if I, an anchorite, had any other choice. No family members had come for my ordination, nor had the new Archbishop of Mainz, Adalbert, appeared, for he was held prisoner for daring to oppose Emperor Heinrich, a man so drunk on his own vainglory that he would have taken the pope captive to get his way. Instead, Archbishop Otto of Bamberg had made the long journey from distant Bavaria to perform the rite outside our anchorage screen while I prostrated myself on the cold stone floor and swore my obedience to God and to Jutta. The man had made such a monumental journey not for my sake, but because he was in thrall to Jutta and her holy reputation. Her disciple, I remained in her shadow, my entire existence relegated to submission and humility.

  As far as my education was concerned, Jutta regarded me as finished. Though my grasp of Latin grammar was only elementary, I could read and write it as well as my magistra. I could recite each psalm from memory. The Rule of the Order of Saint Benedict and the lives of the saints had been drilled into me. Yet still I thirsted for a real education, the kind that my brother Rorich was receiving under the patronage of the prelates of Mainz. How I fevered to study the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The closest I could come to scaling such heights was to devour every book Volmar brought me from the library and to compose my own chants and antiphons on Jutta’s ten-stringed psaltery.

  My herbs flourished. I sowed and harvested in accordance to the phases of the moon and the feasts of the saints. After hanging my plants up to dry, I ground them with a mortar and pestle to make the philters and tinctures I passed through the hatch to Brother Otto, who administered them to pilgrims who came to be healed.

  Watering my plants, I dreamt of the forest, so filled with greening. In my visions, I strode beneath rustling boughs loud with birds. The pictures streamed inside my head, one after the other, as unstoppable as blood, until one morning I awakened from a dream of a radiant cloud pregnant with a million stars. Drawing back my blanket, I discovered a red stain on my thighs, the curse of Eve. Even in this prison of shadows where Jutta dwindled and consumed herself, I witnessed the miracle of my own unfolding flesh, my girl hands turning to young woman hands as I repotted the chaste tree Volmar had given me. From my flat chest, swathed in shapeless wool, breasts emerged like new buds.

  Every month the moon waxed to fullness, unleashing the flow that made me unclean. Jutta’s never came—she had grown too thin for her woman’s flesh to betray her in that way. Indeed, she ate and drank so sparingly that she hardly needed the privy pot. Her joints creaked and cracked as she hauled her frame, more bone than flesh, around our two tiny rooms.

  Mirrors were forbidden, so I contrived to hold a pan of water in the sunlight, seeking to capture my reflection, but I only saw a pale, rippling phantom. Still I felt myself flourish. My body ripened, breasts and hips filling out, and I prayed I might grow into something as stately as a silver birch. According to Walburga’s ballads, this burgeoning womanhood was the zenith of a girl’s existence. This time should be special and tender, even for me. I thought I should at least have the liberty to walk in the full sunlight of the monks’ cloistered garden rather than make do with the narrow shaft of daylight that was all our anchorage courtyard contained.

  Mutiny raged inside me. I plotted how I might nab Jutta’s shears from their locked casket and hurl them over our wall into the Nahe River so that my magistra could never again hack off my hair. I secretly wished she would pray herself into a stupor while I hid my growing tresses beneath my veil until they cascaded, gleaming and waving, down to my waist. Sometimes, when Jutta was having one of her spells, I seized the hair she had sliced off me the first day. Fingering that braid’s softness, I tried to imagine its weight on my head.

  How I longed to take one of my earthen garden pots and smash it through the wooden screen, forcing open a way to freedom. I’d bolt out of the gates into the forest, never to return. But before quitting this place, I’d seek Volmar, grab his wrists, make him look me full in the face so he could witness my transformation, that I was no longer a child but a woman. When I peeped at him through the slatted wood, I saw that he, too, had changed—now a young man and an ordained monk and priest. Yet whenever he spoke Jutta’s name, his eyes glittered with love and sorrow.

  Autumn drew in, heaping leaves of garnet and gold in our courtyard as my plants shriveled to stalks. Cupping each brilliant leaf in my palm, I traced every vein and curve. This was my devotion, my contemplation, during those short days when twilight stole in early and October fog muffled the church bells.

  Around this time my chest seized up with the premonition that something was about to happen. At the pit of my stomach, I feared that Meginhard would return. After Jutta had banished him, he had established a brand-new Benedictine abbey in the shadow of his castle at Sponheim. For all we knew, he might have taken holy orders just to have an excuse to force an audience with his sister.

  One afternoon Volmar announced an unexpected visitor at our screen. Blessedly, it wasn’t Meginhard, but a woman of middle years who looked half-feral, as though she had been living in the wildwood with the lynx and deer.

  “This is Trutwib,” Volmar said. “The hermit.”

  I gaped hungry-eyed through the screen. A female hermit, living free, not enclosed but wandering wherever the spirit willed her? And what a creature she was with her graying hair, unveiled and unruly, looking as if a comb had not touched it in months. Her hands, as brown as acorns, were grained with dirt. She smelled of leaf mold and rich earth, of pine needles wet with rain. How did she survive, a woman alone outside the protection of monastery walls?

  “Where is the holy Jutta?” the hermit demanded, her eyes wide and frank. “I’ve traveled many days to seek her.”

  Trutwib’s broad vowels revealed her to be of peasant stock.

  “My magistra is praying in the courtyard.”

  Jutta was huddled bare-kneed on the cold stone with rain pelting down on her. Her sufferings would bring salvation to others—this was what she swore. If Volmar’s calling was to be a scribe and scholar, Jutta seemed to think that hers was to inflict as much pain upon herself as she could bear. This is what God has called me to do, Hildegard. I am a living sacrifice.

  “The holy woman must not be disturbed,” Volmar informed our guest.

  “I’m a holy woman, too,” Trutwib countered, hands on her hips. “Though I was never mad enough to let anyone brick me in a cell. I’ll wait until she appears.”

  “What makes you a holy woman?” I asked.

  Volmar had told me plenty about male hermits who, inspired by John the Baptist and the Desert Fathers of ages past, lived in the wilderness, some of them attracting hordes of disciples despite their professed desire to be left alone. He’d explained that the first nunneries were founded when enough female hermits gathered in the same place and they needed to provide asylum and shelter for themselves. But no one had told me that an ordinary peasant woman, no more exalted than Walburga, could declare herself holy, abandon her family and her overlord, and simply choose to live in the woods like a vagabond. Perhaps she was a heretic, one of the Cathari that Jutta had spoken of—men an
d women who called themselves the Perfecti, the pure and perfected ones who rejected the Church and all earthly possessions to wander around preaching, men and women alike. Or maybe Trutwib’s low birth and lack of dowry, coupled with her willfulness and pride, prevented her from entering a religious house, even as a lay sister.

  “I call myself holy,” Trutwib said, “because God has granted me the gift of prophecy. I see visions, my girl.” Her eyes burned into mine.

  Every part of me prickled. Trutwib’s visions were sacred, then? Who had told her so, what priest? Or had the hermit simply decided for herself? I decided that Trutwib must be one of the sarabaites that the first chapter of the Rule of Saint Benedict warned about—those stubborn souls who refused to submit to the authority of any religious order, who shunned the guidance of prior and abbot to elect only themselves as the best judge of what was holy and good.

  “You may wait in the refectory,” Volmar told her. He sounded awkward, as though unsure of how to address a woman of such low rank who seemed to exhibit every intention of courting heresy.

  “No, I’ll stay right here. Fetch me a stool, boy,” she said. “I’ll rest my bones until the holy Jutta is ready to see me.”

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked, when Volmar, now muttering to himself, went off to hunt for a stool. “What do you eat?”

  “I sleep on a bed of branches, far cleaner than any bed of straw, dear girl. I am never bitten by fleas nor troubled by lice. I eat whatever God sends my way. I set snares for rabbits—”

  “You eat the flesh of four-footed animals?” I asked, both scandalized and thrilled.

  With no abbot or magistra standing over her, Trutwib was free to do whatever she pleased.

  “Look at my cloak,” Trutwib said, holding it up to the screen. “It’s made of rabbit pelts sewn together with sinews. Nothing goes to waste. Besides, I’m no refined lady like your mistress with pilgrims to heap gifts upon me.”

  “How do you know your visions don’t come from the devil?” I asked, my eyes darting to Volmar as he lumbered through the church door with a three-legged stool.

  Trutwib’s glowing green eyes looked at me, looked into me. The hermit smiled. “I just know.” She turned to Volmar. “Thank you, boy. Now fetch me a mug of beer, if you please.”

  I giggled before I could stop myself, watching Volmar, exasperated beyond reason, struggle not to snap at her impudence.

  “We do not take refreshment in the church,” he huffed. “If you wish to eat and drink, you must go to the refectory.” He looked so pained that I winked at him.

  “And you, my girl,” Trutwib said, continuing to inspect me after Volmar had left. “How did the holy Jutta come to choose you as her companion?”

  “I was only eight when she brought me here. She had no other takers. My mother wanted to be rid of me.” The words spewed from my mouth with a bitterness that made me cringe.

  “You’re an honest one,” Trutwib said. “Without illusions. This is good, my girl. Keep your clear head. It will be your salvation in years to come.”

  “Were you really going to drink beer in the church?”

  “Who doesn’t? The nave of the church belongs to the people. If you had any experience of life outside these walls, you would know that. Besides,” she said, beaming at me, “beer is most wholesome and pleasing to God.”

  Smiling back at Trutwib through the screen, I longed to follow her out into the forest, adopt her as my new magistra. But just then Trutwib lifted her eyes and looked into the space behind me.

  “There she is at last, the holy anchorite,” said the hermit.

  I turned and tried to see Jutta as Trutwib did—a woman of twenty-one, but as scrawny as an undeveloped child. My magistra had no breasts or hips, yet she was beautiful, her eyes as blue as larkspur, her cheeks stung pink from the cold.

  “Who is this?” Jutta asked me, making a great show of ignoring the peasant woman who presumed to address her so directly.

  Our guest spoke before I could. “I am Trutwib the Prophet. I have come to reveal your future.”

  Jutta lifted her chin in disdain, an aristocrat looking down at a tramp. “A prophet, you say? Only the pope himself may bestow such a title.”

  Trutwib didn’t blink. “I know your destiny, my lady. Will you hear it or not?”

  Jutta knit her hands together. She seemed as flustered as Volmar had been, not knowing how to contend with this person.

  “Hildegard, leave us,” she said.

  Drooping in my disappointment at not being able to hear what the prophet had to say, I trudged out of the room, pulling the curtain in the doorway behind me. In the outer chamber, I pricked my ears to their murmurings. At first I only made out a few words here and there, but as Trutwib went on speaking, her voice picked up volume and power until I heard her prediction ring out, her words that changed everything.

  “The one who lives under your wing, my lady, shall grow and grow until she outshines you. You will die, forgotten and obscure, and she shall blaze like the sun.”

  There being no brazier in the outer room, I was doubled over from cold when Jutta finally allowed me back in the main room where the shutters were now bolted to block the screen. Trutwib, I wagered, was long gone, her broad peasant feet taking her into the thick of the woods. I hoped the monks had found some beer for her, though it was more likely that Trutwib had to content herself with our sour apple wine.

  “Come stand before me,” Jutta said, her voice imperious. “Take off your veil so I can see you.”

  Trembling, I obeyed. Jutta’s eyes were so hard and cold that I couldn’t bear to meet them.

  “That woman says you see visions. Is that true?”

  Dumbstruck, I froze, tears flooding my eyes. Trutwib had only to look at me to divine my secret shame and then she had pulled the scales from Jutta’s eyes. My magistra glared at me as Mother once had, as though I had betrayed her out of spite. No longer could I be Jutta’s pet, the living doll she hugged for comfort when her anguish and loneliness overpowered her. No longer could I be her trusted handmaiden. Trutwib’s revelation had turned me into my magistra’s rival. First cast out of my childhood home and now out of Jutta’s confidence, my heart raced in panic. I truly had nowhere left to hide.

  Her bony fingers dug into my arms. “Tell me what you see.”

  As I stared at her, I saw the skull beneath her skin. The stench of her breath, rank from fasting, struck my face, forcing me to recoil. I could only sputter and stammer about things far too strange to understand. The Lady at the axis of the wheel of creation, the greenest branch sprouting from her and flowering. The sapphire man emerging from her bosom, his hands outstretched. Adam lay before him, naked and asleep, and from Adam’s side, the blue Christ conjured a white cloud pregnant with a million stars and that brilliant cloud’s name was Eve, shining and innocent till the serpent rose to throttle her in his great black fist.

  “Nonsense,” Jutta spat. “Those aren’t visions, just wicked and heretical fancies. I must inform the abbot. Once he knows the truth, he’ll cast you out.”

  I couldn’t say anything more for the pounding of my heart. Could Jutta truly convince the monks to banish me? If my long-cherished dream came true and I could leave this place, where would I go? Mechthild, I was certain, wouldn’t take me back. I could no longer flee to Rorich, who was owned by the Church as much as I was. What happened to the tithed souls the Church no longer wanted?

  A throbbing ignited in my head, a poker-sharp pain behind my left eye that left me queasy. As Jutta continued to berate me, I saw her mouth open and close, but I could no longer hear her voice. God has struck me deaf and mute for my presumption, my unholy vision. The Church has used me up and now she will spit me out.

  Somehow I groped my way to my pallet. Lying as corpse-still as I’d done when they first laid me in this tomb seven years ago, I waited for something to happen. For Abbot Adilhum to appear at the screen, drag a confession out of me, and then lay on a penance that would make he
ll seem merciful.

  Instead, a cloud descended and from that billowing mist emerged a pale blue woman, crowned in majesty. My name is Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church. In her great arms, she cradled a company of consecrated virgins. They weren’t veiled, weren’t starving or frightened. They sported neither hair shirts nor scourges but were dressed like royal women, robed in crimson damask, crowned in gold, their unshorn hair flowing free. Faces alight with joy, they lifted their hands in prayer. The most beautiful girl with long black tresses smiled at me as though I were her dearest friend in all the world. Have courage and endure. One day I shall come to you.

  As the apparition vanished, I sat bolt upright, my face burning, as though Jutta had caught me in some shameful act. My magistra regarded me with eyes as glittering and cold as frost.

  Awaiting my audience with the abbot, I hovered between dread and mad hope. Let them toss me out. I had prayed for this moment for so long. Oh, to be free of this place, free of the fog of Jutta’s pain, that poisonous vapor I was forced to breathe every living moment. I imagined myself staggering out of the monastery gates, an outcast left to find my own way in the forest. I’d set off like a lost pilgrim until Trutwib heard my cries and took me under her protection. Trutwib was a seeress—she would know how to find me. She would teach me how a free and masterless woman could embrace God. Let the abbot come. I would hurl my most heinous sins at Adilhum to force his hand. I never desired this life. I hate this place. I hate Jutta. I hate you.

  The meeting never transpired. After another week dragged by, I understood that Jutta had thought better of the idea. Why should my magistra draw attention to my visions? Why should she take my fancies, as she called them, the least bit seriously? Perhaps she feared that if she divulged my secret to Adilhum, I might be tempted to reveal hers—that the holy Jutta was in fact no virgin.