Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Queer Mysticism In The High Middle Ages: Pain, Love, Earth, And The Female Body In The Illustrations Of Hildegard Of Bingen’S Scivias, Becky Bushnell

Undergraduate Research Posters

Many view Hildegard of Bingen as one of the most important female theologians of the 12th century, and her writing and sphere of influence is remarkable considering her gender. Many scholars, like Barbara Newman, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Carolyn Worman Sur, agree that Hildegard’s portrayals of God in Scivias are distinctly feminine. Scholars like Karma Lochrie, Sheryl Chen, and Flora Lewis have written on Christ’s wound as a metaphor for the womb or vulva. Yet what scholars don’t seem to focus on, as Lochrie writes in “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” is the ways that the work of many female mystics …