VIII

Preface

...essentially underscores the conceptual basic text as one branch of the stemmaA stemma is a family tree of manuscripts showing how different copies of a text are related to one another..¹

— Within the framework of Raimund Struck's dissertation, a Freiburg manuscript became known which contains only Book IV, On Stones original: "De lapidibus". This text is largely identical to that of the Florence manuscript and thus supports the thesis of a conceptual supplementary text integrated into the basic text. Through the resulting doubling of the total text, the second branch of the stemma achieved its distinct form.

In the 1990s—apart from the previous efforts to popularize Hildegard's works by Heinrich Schipperges—Marie-Louise Portmann and Peter Riethe distinguished themselves through scientifically sound translation work on the Physica Hildegard's "Physica" is her famous 12th-century encyclopedic work on the natural world and healing., based on the only existing text edition from the year 1855, while partially incorporating new discoveries.

The development of the text edition presented here was significantly shaped by the philological principles that were already decisive for the edition of the two volumes of the Summarium Heinrici The "Summarium Heinrici" is a 12th-century Latin-German encyclopedia and dictionary.. Only in the course of the work did the substantive dependence of both works become a certainty, alongside this methodological consistency, under the guiding principle: ‘Summarium Heinrici, the textbook of Hildegard of Bingen.’ Future research will have to draw its conclusions from this realization.

As with the Summarium Heinrici, a third volume consisting of a commented index of German words is in preparation for Hildegard’s Physica, in addition to the two edition volumes. Essential foundations for this have already been laid with personnel support from the German Research Foundation original: "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" (DFG). For accompanying and advisory correspondence regarding the volumes presented here, thanks are due—in addition to the aforementioned Petrus Becker OSB—above all to Konrad Vollmann, Gundolf Keil, Laurence Moulinier, Rainer Berndt SJ, and Michael Embach. The co-editor Thomas Gloning was recruited for responsible collaboration during a decisive phase of the text production.

That the sub-field of ‘historical German vocabulary’ represents a special research interest in Hildegard’s work is certainly not surprising for a Germanist acting as editor, especially not when he also dedicated himself to German dialects during his active university career as an editor and co-publisher of the 22-volume ‘German Word Atlas’ original: "Deutschen Wortatlasses". His activity as a long-standing institute—

1 Cf. the introduction to this edition regarding questions of the manuscript tradition and the stemma.