Physica - Hildegard von Bingen

...had been set, including, as with Hildegard, the sea and the earth or the lands.

As proven elsewhere, Hildegard had initially become acquainted with the second version of the Summarium Heinrici The "Heinrich’s Summary" was a popular medieval Latin-German encyclopedia used as a reference for vocabulary and classification. (Revision B) and took the thousand words of her "Unknown Language" original: "Lingua ignota"; a constructed language created by Hildegard, possibly for mystical or private use among her nuns. from it (Hildebrandt 1996). The last quarter of these thousand words (i.e., 250 words) is, in turn, largely identical to the chapter headings of three books of her Physica: those on Trees (Book III), Plants (Book I), and Birds (Book VI). Since Revision B of the Summarium—and thus also the "Unknown Language"—contains no discussions on gemstones, unlike Revision A of the Summarium, Hildegard must have also used Revision A when drafting her Physica, at the latest by the beginning of Book IV, On Stones original: "De lapidibus". However, the fact remains without a plausible explanation that Hildegard chose 75 birds as the only animal complex to feature as the final part of her "Unknown Language," which corresponds exactly to her Book VI in the Physica.

Regarding the animal books in the Physica, it can further be observed in comparison to the Summarium that Hildegard changed their sequence: In both versions of the Summarium, the sequence is: land animals, fish, birds; however, with Hildegard, it is: fish, birds, land animals. This aligns, however, with the general observation that Hildegard never treats the keywords within the individual chapters in the same order as the Summarium, but always makes rearrangements. Furthermore, it must, of course, be noted that the Summarium served as a model only for the framework of keywords; all the substantive explanations regarding the nature and healing effects of each subject spring, as always, from Hildegard’s own originality.

In the appendix to this introduction, we offer a tabular list of all parallel passages in Hildegard’s two works and the two versions of the Summarium Heinrici.

Conjectures regarding the nature of the original and

the resulting stemmatological consequences.

In the preceding discussions, it was explained that Hildegard’s material borrowings for her natural history work stem largely from the Summarium Heinrici, though she developed her own organizational concept. This concept only took concrete shape during the work itself and had not reached a final result regarding the subsequent Book II. This is also shown by the fact that the other eight books are each preceded by a Preface original: "Praefatio", while for Book II...