by Melvyn Bragg
Hildegard wanted to see the pope ruling religious appointments. She also wanted to see a really strong reforming spirit within monasticism itself, and her letters were all about raising consciousness and getting people as engaged in this work as she was.
Hildegard’s first visions came in 1141 and were the basis of her first book, Scivias (‘Know the Ways’). She described her manner of seeing, several times during her life, William Flynn said, and she tried to differentiate hers from the way that others had visions, which came in ecstasy, in trances or in dreams.
WILLIAM FLYNN: Hildegard insisted that all her visions, except for one, came while she was completely awake. They seem to me to be related to listening to things read to you, absorbing a lot of material, and then a sudden flash where all of that makes sense, all of her memorised material comes to her as a picture. That is actually related to memory techniques that are taught to Benedictines and taught since classical times.
She said everything made sense to her at once, and it came to her in a series of pictures that she then wrote a book for, to explain every element of each picture in a very detailed manner that would be teaching for the rest of her nuns. Scivias was a huge work, 600 pages long, and it took Hildegard ten years or more to complete.
Almut Suerbaum translated the fuller meaning of Scivias as ‘Know the Ways of the Lord’. It contains three books, with twenty-six visions divided between them, where the first book is about the creation and the creator God, the second about salvation, and the third about salvation history, using some quite abstract images.
ALMUT SUERBAUM: It starts with a vision of light emanating from the peak of a mountain, and these images, in the manuscripts that are probably composed very close to her lifetime and perhaps with some input by her, also have illuminations. All the central moments, the key images of most of these visions, are illuminated.
These images are then elucidated and explained. The visions are prophetic, allegorical, symbolist, they are images given to her by divine inspiration to communicate with others. Most of the images used spectacular amounts of gold leaf and silver, so they reflect light. What is often foregrounded is the apocalyptic, the warning to watch out, for the sake of the Church, and to reform.
Some of the images that William Flynn has studied are of the angelic host, and are done in a series of nine concentric circles with the normal nine of the angelic hosts being two angels or archangels, then five powers and then two cherubim and seraphim. They are placed around what could be interpreted as a mirror, where the angels are light, reflecting God’s light.
WILLIAM FLYNN: That image is related to two other images – one of the Trinity, which has also concentric circles, but it has a sapphire figure, a human figure, in the middle of it, and then colours of gold and silver, to make a trinitarian one. Another one is about the sacraments of the Church, especially baptism, where that trinitarian figure dissolves into a blue pool, sapphire again, and gold and silver around, and then it becomes a baptismal font.
Hildegard claimed she did not write like the philosophers wrote, William Flynn added. That could mean she wrote like a divinely inspired person, not like somebody who has been schooled the ‘right’ way.
What Hildegard was also doing, Miri Rubin emphasised, was treading the very fine line of communicating her ideas with everyone while in a position of total subordination to divine will.
MIRI RUBIN: She is always emphasising: ‘This isn’t my idea, God tells me this. I am as nothing, I am a channel, I am an aqueduct, I am merely conveying this.’ People will listen to her because she is not claiming to be a wise woman, a clever woman. She is just the chosen woman, perhaps for her unlearnedness, she says, therefore she is a pure vehicle. Because there is no place for a woman to get up and talk in the Church in the twelfth century.
When Hildegard did preach, she travelled to other convents for this, offering sermon commentaries during mealtimes rather than addressing laypeople.
ALMUT SUERBAUM: She takes parts of the gospel, explains them, referring to the commentaries, and she takes on the voice of a preacher, except she usually stresses that she has been invited to speak. There is a double legitimisation: she is authorised because she speaks through God and she speaks that which God has inspired her to say; and she speaks because others have asked her and they seek her advice.
The extraordinary thing, to Melvyn, was that her visions made Hildegard famous throughout the western Christian world. She was famous everywhere, Miri Rubin agreed. A letter survives from John of Salisbury, one of the great intellectuals of the twelfth century, to another important monk who was travelling in Germany, in which he asked him to get his hands on some copies of the amazing visions of Hildegard. He wanted to read them as she may have had solutions for the troubles of the Church. She was taken very seriously and wrote some very effective, powerful and passionate letters in support of her aims.
Many of Hildegard’s letters survive, 400 or so, and the only writer of that time with so much surviving correspondence was Bernard of Clairvaux. In some cases, there is a two-way correspondence, both her letters and the replies, and these were collected in her lifetime and probably redacted.
ALMUT SUERBAUM: It really ranges from letters to Bernard of Clairvaux – where she consults him about whether she should carry on writing down her visions, and he encourages her very firmly to do that – to letters to the emperor, letters of criticism to her fellow bishops. But, also, letters where she is asked for advice by a woman whose husband is terminally ill and to whom she replies about how to prepare for a good death, or letters from fellow abbesses who clearly have trouble running their own convents and to whom she gives advice.
Turning to Hildegard’s music, William Flynn stressed that the main thing to understand was her accommodation of music and words, her completely fresh, brilliant poetry with unusual but regionally recognisable music. The works, only rediscovered after 800 years, condensed her visions, as the words often related to visions and then the music perfected them. She was working out of a regional tradition.
WILLIAM FLYNN: It is of largely south German, translated through Hirsau reform monastery networks, so William of Hirsau and Theogerus of Metz, but the fundamental people are Hermannus Contractus and Berno of Reichenau. They created a chant theory that also influenced the actual compositional style. It doesn’t sound like a Gregorian chant, but it sounds much more modern, even modern in our terms, because it has a very strong, fundamental note and a strong note at the fifth, that’s the regional style. She is different, though.
Not only did Hildegard write the music, Miri Rubin added, but she allowed her nuns to perform it in extraordinary ways. People complained that she allowed them to wear glorious white shimmering garments with beautiful crowns, so when they performed they were living this liturgy, it was very real.
Hildegard also wrote scientific and medical texts, works on nature, flora, fauna, and stones and their qualities.
MIRI RUBIN: Throughout the early Middle Ages, since late antiquity, every monastery had a full collection of herbals, medical books and so on. These are institutions that have to care for themselves, and also offer care for others. So medical books are galore. Anyone who has access to a monastic library and is able to read Latin, as clearly she could, would be able to access this material and, in her case, bring them to a tremendous synthesis. She talks about sexuality, conception, things she did not experience herself in an active way.
Hildegard was talking about sexuality, Miri Rubin suggested, as she believed in marriage and procreation and worked from her imagination and these medical writings. Her texts were in demand, and there was a copy in York in the fourteenth century. William Flynn noted that there were widows in the monastery and there may have been married lay sisters there, too, with at least one reporting that Hildegard had helped her through problematic pregnancies in her youth.
Some of Hildegard’s language in her medicinal texts is taken from vernacular words, which Almut Suerbaum thought was an indic
ation that she had seen the medicinal herbs in the gardens and had talked to people about them. Some of her cures were a mix of benediction, incantation and charm, probably through practices she encountered, and she is known in Germany today for her herbalism.
MIRI RUBIN: Her sense of authorship was overwhelming. And that is why, even today, she is the patron saint of Die Grünen, the Greens (Green Party) in Germany. She is considered to be someone who has impacted on thinking about the environment. You can go to any worthy bakery in Germany and get Hildegard Brot, which is wholemeal and healthy.
Volmar died in 1173, which was a huge loss for Hildegard, and she wrote movingly about his life. In her final years, Hildegard was still fighting. She had allowed the burial of someone in her graveyard who turned out to have been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Mainz, who then put the convent under an interdict, which meant that they could not receive sacraments or sing. She went to two competing archbishops and succeeded in lifting the interdict, only to die six months later.
ALMUT SUERBAUM: [Her] legacy at the time, as the manuscripts show, is that of a visionary, of a prophetess, of an apocalyptic prophet who criticised the Church, who looked at the end of the world and the need to reform. The musician is a modern rediscovery.
In the studio afterwards, there was discussion of the way that Hildegard interests Protestants and Catholics today for the common themes she raised. Melvyn asked if the relationship between Hildegard and Volmar was not unlike that of Abelard and Hélöise, only to hear that it was better than that, as Volmar suppressed his own ego and did not interfere.
THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
In 1692, in the New England colony of Massachusetts, two young girls, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, had fits, started twitching and would not wake up. They and their families blamed their behaviour on witchcraft and the hunt was on for the supposed witches responsible. This was in Salem village. The puritans living there and in the surrounding Essex County started to find witches wherever they looked, with neighbour accusing neighbour and many confessing in the hope of avoiding the noose. It was no use onlookers arguing there was no such thing as witchcraft as this was taken as proof that they themselves were witches. Once the trials were over, there were justifications, reparations, but over 100 innocent women, men and children had been accused and held in jail by then. Twenty had been put to death, most of them women.
With Melvyn to discuss what became known as the Salem witch trials were: Susan Castillo-Street, emerita Harriet Beecher Stowe professor of American studies at King’s College London; Simon Middleton, associate professor of early American history at the College of William and Mary, Virginia; and Marion Gibson, professor of Renaissance and magical literatures at Exeter University’s Penryn Campus.
An engraving depicting a witchcraft trial.
Salem village was settled in 1626, Simon Middleton told us, becoming absorbed into a larger puritan colony. The settlers were mainly farmers, all associated with the puritan migration. By the time of the witchcraft trials, the village had become a rural hinterland to a more successful Salem town, which was trading with the West Indian plantations.
SIMON MIDDLETON: [The puritans] left England to try to build pure churches in the New World. They worry greatly that the Anglican Church retains too many corruptions and Catholic practices. The importance of establishing a pure church is because the puritans are also Calvinists, they believe in predestination, meaning that some are bound to go to heaven. Most are bound to go to hell.
The only way to learn what your fate would be was to study the Bible and the self, while being part of a pure church, led by a minister who was trustworthy and well informed. You could then look out for signs that you may be one of the saved. There was a split in Salem village between those who lived further away from Salem town, who wanted a church in the village to serve them better, and those nearer Salem town, who were content to travel there.
The people who had emigrated to Massachusetts were Congregationalists who, unlike the Presbyterians, believed very strongly that the congregation should be in charge of its own church.
SIMON MIDDLETON: This is one of the reasons you see, in New England, a fragmentation as groups break away from the early settlement and settle around the colony, each with their own particular variation and view of how the religious practice should be ordered. When they’re all fighting against Anglicans in England, they’re joined together, but, when they get to the New World, they part and fall out with each other, very famously in the Antinomian Controversy of the 1630s.
There were about 600 people in Salem village. One of the many splits within it was between the Putnam family, who supported the new church, and the Porters, who opposed it. These families had arrived at the same time, at the founding of the village, and, since then, the Porters had flourished through trade and the Putnams had declined, and they were feuding.
The puritans believed in a world of invisible spirits, a world of devils and witches, none of whom could be seen. They also believed in the importance of confession, which would prove very important in the trials. What was paramount was the integrity of the community.
SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: They did have the idea that they were the inheritors of the Israelites, as the chosen people of God. But the difference was that they believed that they could create the perfect society not in heaven but here on earth and, specifically, in America. Their rhetoric is very much in terms of biblical typology; the persecution from the Stuart kings was rather like the Israelites and pharaoh in Egypt. The crossing of the Atlantic was like the crossing of the Red Sea.
For these settlers, any kind of difficulty was a badge of honour, because this showed that the devil considered them a threat and they were being tested. They believed that the devil could work through someone’s spectre, an invisible presence that could carry out malefic witchcraft, which some people said they could see through.
SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: The afflicted girls, the young women who began all of this, claimed that they could see spectres tormenting others. The problem there is that there’re no external corroboration so someone can allege that someone’s spectre is tormenting them, even if that very person has a perfectly good alibi and is physically present somewhere else.
Salem was also on a frontier. The colonists had burnt Native American villages to the ground, something that Melvyn recalled the puritans thought was a ‘sweet blessing of the Lord’, and the Native Americans had made raids and taken away prisoners, so the threat was ever-present.
SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: There was a kind of invasion psychosis, really. So many of the people who were the accusers in the witch trials had very direct experience of the battles. For example, Mercy Short was taken captive by the Wabanaki. While she was there, she was made to witness the dismemberment of one of the captives as a lesson to other captives not to flee. Another, Mercy Lewis, was orphaned and lost her family. She then was a servant with the Putnams.
The first accusers were two girls, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, who fell ill and started to accuse people of bewitching them. Betty was about nine years old and Abigail was about eleven or twelve.
MARION GIBSON: We know [how old they were] because John Hale, one of the preachers who was called to try to find out what was wrong with them, tells us their ages. These are changed by later writers, but we know that they were actually quite young girls. They start being afflicted. They think that demonic creatures are pinching them, they start twitching and writhing and their bodies are contorted in strange ways, so their hands are turned backwards and their limbs are twisted.
MELVYN BRAGG: Do they show these backward-turned hands or are we expected to believe that?
MARION GIBSON: We’re expected to believe that.
It is not clear what was going on, whether the children were consciously putting their bodies into strange shapes, or whether it even happened at all. The girls were living in the house of Samuel Parris, the minister who was causing much dissent in Salem village. Betty was
his daughter and Abigail was said to be his niece, and the first person they accused was his slave, Tituba. There was tremendous pressure on this household to be godly and on the girls to be silent, to be submissive, to respect the adults around. Also, importantly, Abigail probably had no father and mother. It may have been that Samuel Parris listened to them as they were saying things he wanted to hear.
MARION GIBSON: He wants to hear that he is a godly man and that therefore the devil hates him and wants to attack his family. And he feels persecuted anyway because, in the wider community, he’s not well liked and there are dissensions and problems in the community surrounding the minister. He already feels under threat and this confirms his sense that the devil is after him.
It is possible that he put the girls up to all this, but there is no evidence for this other than that they were living in his household.
Samuel Parris was in the centre of a really vicious fight between the factions in Salem village. The Porter faction had gained control of the church government the previous October and stopped giving him his salary.
Cotton Mather, a Conregationalist minister whose writings include a commentary on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts.
SIMON MIDDLETON: There’s also Cotton Mather, this brilliant intellectual minister, and, in 1689, he publishes a book called Memorable Providences of Witchcraft and Possession, in which he describes the case of the bewitchment of some children in Boston, the Goodwin children, and it describes exactly the kind of behaviour and afflictions that then appear in Salem. And it’s not too much of a stretch to see Parris (everybody would have been aware of Mather’s publication) reading that, and then highly suggestible children in the household picking up on that.
