Lux vivens: Hildegard of Bingen and the Medieval Imaging of God as Light

Anna-Sophia Zingarelli presented Lux vivens: Hildegard of Bingen and the Medieval Imaging of God as Light.

In the wake of many excellent but narrowly gender-oriented studies on Hildegard of Bingen, one must be careful to remember that Hildegard's gender did not divorce her from the intellectual currents of her time. This paper examines the importance of light imagery in Hildegard's visionary work Scivias and its place in a medieval discourse on light as a manifestation of the divine. This theme appears, with similar import, in the works of other such diverse thinkers as St. Benedict, Hugh of St. Victor, Robert Grosseteste, and St. Bonaventure. In both the text and images of Scivias, Hildegard relayed the revelations made to her by a God whom she described first and foremost as an extraordinary Light - a characterization unusual in the visual arts of the time, but more apparent in the writings of her peers, even, for St. Bonaventure, emerging as the true imago Dei.