Hildegard of Bingen and Encyclopedism. The Case of the Books on Animals from the Physica

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Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth century German nun, is not only known for her mystical works, her lingua ignota, and her musical writings. She is also the author of the scientific work Liber subtilitatum, known, since Jean Schott’s 1533 Strasbourg edition, as the Physica . The work focuses on the presentation of the natural world according to elemental theory. The Physica is an eight book composition dealing with plants, herbs, rocks and animals in a series of short notices, each focusing on particular species. Despite this formal composition, and the subject of the work, the links between the hildegardian opus and the encyclopedic texts of the twelfth and thirteen centuries are not certain, and it has very rarely been considered in light of the problematics of this medieval genre, either in Latin or in vernacular languages. The zoological section of the Physica, from book VI to VIII, will enable us to consider this text as a work of natural philosophy. Dealing as it does with encyclopedic goals, topics and literary organization, the Physica could in fact be thought of as a new site for the study of how medieval texts were able to write knowledge. How, then, does the Physica manage to order, classify, and name the diversity of living animals in the section of the project dedicated to this subject?Â