Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt

Author:Mary Sharratt [Sharratt, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-10-09T06:00:00+00:00

PART II

The Greenest Branch

O noblest greening, who have your roots in the sun.

—Hildegard von Bingen

9

SUDDENLY WE WERE free, my sisters and I. In place of the bricked-up passageway stood an oak door that bolted only from the inside. With Volmar as our guide, we learned to find our way around the abbey and its grounds, not only in the church, library, and scriptorium, but in the kitchen gardens, medicinal gardens, pastures, and fields. After my hours of work and prayer, I burst out of the gates and made for the forest, that living Eden where I felt myself renewed, greening like a willow in spring. Though I was thirty-eight, a second youth came upon me, the many sad years I had accumulated in that anchorage-hell melting away.

But I also served, spending hours in the hospice and infirmary helping old Brother Otto, who passed his wisdom on to me. It was one thing to study books of medicine, quite another to work with patients under the guidance of a master physician who had devoted his life to the healing arts. My head sang with the new knowledge. I was giddy, the whole world opening to me.

Likewise, my sisters found far more useful employment than they had in the confines of our enclosure. Guda tended the altars, arranging them with the cloths and banners she had sewn, and she sweetened the rushes on the church floor with dried lavender and rosemary. Adelheid spent her days in the scriptorium, copying texts in her excellent hand. She only regretted never having learned the alphabets of the Greeks and Arabs. As much as I coveted scholarly books, I myself would not have been able to bear spending all the daylight hours inside stone walls—I couldn’t allow a single day to pass without the sun and wind on my face, something growing and alive touching my hands.

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