The recent reissue by Siruela of the book Vida y visiones de Hildegard von Bingen (The Life and Visions of Hildegard von Bingen), edited and translated by Victoria Cirlot, joins the collection El Árbol del Paraíso, dedicated to texts on mysticism and spirituality read from a critical and contemporary perspective.
Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), a German Benedictine abbess, began to experience visions from childhood, describing them as conscious perceptions of an intense light, which she called “shadow of the living light” (umbra viventis lucis). These experiences occurred in a state of lucid wakefulness and were accompanied by physical phenomena such as weakness and cranial pressure. From the age of 42, she began to dictate these contents, which were later transcribed by members of her monastic community. This edition brings together, along with the Vita written by Theodrich von Echternach, a selection of miniatures associated with the visions, significant letters, liturgical musical pieces, and an epilogue that offers keys to their interpretation from the present day.
The visions collected in the treatises Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, and Liber divinorum operum form a highly complex symbolic system in which theological, cosmological, and anthropological structures are intertwined. Each visual representation is accompanied by an exegesis that inscribes it within Christian doctrine without neutralizing its specificity. Contemporary interpretations of these experiences have generated diverse approaches: some, from the field of neurology, have linked the perceived forms to phenomena such as migraine with aura; others, from phenomenology and cultural history, privilege their internal dimension and their discursive function within the monastic context of the 12th century. The inclusion of visual materials in this edition allows us to examine how these contents were conceived simultaneously as revelation, allegory, and ordering of knowledge.
The edition prepared by Cirlot includes epistles in which Hildegard reflects on her experiences with ecclesiastical interlocutors, as well as liturgical chants of her own composition, which allows her work to be analyzed from a comprehensive ascetic perspective. Asceticism, understood not only as bodily discipline but also as a regime of perception and symbolic elaboration, structures both her cosmological thought and her aesthetic praxis. The combination of vision, writing, music, and correspondence reveals a conception of the body and language as instruments of mediation between the visible and the invisible. This operative logic allows us to situate her work within an anthropology of the visionary, in which the extraordinary is not reduced to anomaly but becomes a cultural document.
The epilogue draws a comparison between Hildegard’s symbolic configurations and certain modern forms of visionary figuration, such as those found in the work of Max Ernst. This counterpoint allows us to question the historical conditions of the visible and explore the ways in which different eras construct legitimacy for non-empirical images. Hildegard’s later reception finds echoes, albeit in secular registers, in authors such as William Blake, whose work also articulates vision, text, and image within an autonomous system. From an anthropological perspective, these bodies of work can be read as forms of inscription of the extraordinary in specific discursive frameworks. In this context, Hildegard’s prose—marked by her monastic origin and the influence of psalmody—deploys a rhythmic and symbolic syntax that approaches medieval Kunstprosa, with a lexicon that mixes the technical and the visionary. Despite her secretaries’ corrections, Hildegard defended the original structure of her language as proof of its inspired origin.
