The Woman Philosopher with the Unicorn. Animal Knowledge and Human Knowledge in Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica

Hildegard of Bingen, abbess and mystic of the twelfth century, devotes a significant part of her scientific writings to the animal world. Through the many records of the last four books of her Physica, she studies the fauna according to traditional criteria of presentation. To some extant, she follows informations that could also be found in encyclopaedias and bestiaries, composed and wide spread in Europe through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These texts share the same classic and late antique authoritative sources on animals, such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville and the Physiologus. However, Hildegard seems to take distance from these genres. This article aims to outline her peculiar and personal choices. We show that Hildegard builds for herself an innovative and visionnary autorship figure while recomposing the traditional medieval discourse about fauna in order to reach her own philosophical goal. For example, she tends to leave out the injunctive tone and catechetical purpose of the allegorical writings, as comparisons with the Latin bestiaries could illustrate. Hildegard rather aims for the “subtilities”, invisible and underlying links established between forms of the living world in the universe. In order to do so, the abbess often recomposes the zoological information that was accessible to her. She gives original notices so as to propose to man a way to achieve the knowledge of the natural world which man is not the only owner. Thereby, she draws attention to the role of sight and proposes original models of knowledge throughout the text of the Physica. - [Abstract]

Language: French

2557-8839; DOI: 10.4000/rursuspicae.1321