Introduction

It was an extraordinary event for medieval philology the study of historical language and literature that, within three years around 1983, three new manuscripts by a single author—Hildegard of Bingen—were discovered (in Florence, the Vatican, and Freiburg). These discoveries gave much clearer form to the natural history work of arguably the most significant woman of the German Middle Ages, which until then had been known only through very fragmented and scattered traditions (Hildebrand 2001).

The new edition presented here strives to let these changed forms stand out clearly. It accounts for the highly diverging textual tradition by using a three-fold differentiated critical apparatus a system of notations used by editors to show variations between different manuscript versions. The textual quality of the Florence manuscript provided the definitive foundation, allowing it to serve as the lead manuscript for this edition with only minor adjustments.

The discrepancies in the texts have two causes, which must be sought in the complex nature of the original work. First, the original could not have been a text written in a single draft. After the first impulse to create a book solely on plants, it only later—and thus secondarily—expanded to include further books on trees, stones, metals, and the animal kingdom. Second, one must assume that alongside a core text, there was a continuously expanded marginal supplementary text notes added in the margins of the pages over time, which was only merged with the core text after Hildegard's death in some of the surviving versions.

The first phase of the plant-only book originally comprised 173 chapters. The 173rd chapter, as the original concluding chapter, contains the most extensive text because the various distinct types of fungi are treated only as subsections of this final chapter. However, all existing versions contain an additional 44 chapters; these clearly formed a later collection of various other plants, as well as eleven chapters on basic foodstuffs like milk, eggs, honey, sugar, and salt, and finally even resin, pitch, and sulfur. Interspersed are another 14 "duplicate chapters" which agree entirely or in part with one of the preceding 173 original chapters, with the sole exception that nearly all of Hildegard's original German words Hildegard often used local German names for plants alongside Latin descriptions were replaced by Latin ones in these sections.