Oral Presentations and Performances: Session II
Project Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Elizabeth Hubble
Faculty Mentor’s Department
Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Hildegard of Bingen (1098- 1179) was a twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, mystic, author, composer, and theologian. Despite the heavily patriarchal and restrictive culture of her day, Hildegard managed to gain autonomy and authority within her community. She benefited from a boom in popularity in the mid-1990s, which saw a broadening of research subjects, including focus on the gender dynamics at play in Hildegard’s life. This scholarship has died down significantly since. Given the breadth and depth of her work, Hildegard of Bingen’s work deserves to be revisited through more recent theoretical lenses that can provide significant insights into her relevance to understanding gender dynamics in the 21st century.
Throughout her letters, Hildegard writes in several different registers to construct her public persona, depending on the identity of her recipient. Her letters to men of higher authority adopt a self-deprecating tone, while she is vastly more confident when writing to women or men seeking advice. It is when Hildegard’s authority is challenged that these carefully crafted rhetorical personas fall apart, revealing the vulnerable and real Hildegard of Bingen underneath. Contemporary linguistic research uses the term “code-switching” to describe the practice of altering your behavior, speech, or appearance based on context to access authority. Most research has focused on code switching in bilingual contexts or with racial minorities and has rarely been applied to medieval context. Hildegard’s register changes reveal that she understood the gender dynamics of the 12th century and knew how to deploy “code-switching” to gain power and privilege.
Category
Humanities
Poor Little Woman and Sybil of the Rhine: Code Switching in Hildegard of Bingen’s Writing
UC 330
Hildegard of Bingen (1098- 1179) was a twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, mystic, author, composer, and theologian. Despite the heavily patriarchal and restrictive culture of her day, Hildegard managed to gain autonomy and authority within her community. She benefited from a boom in popularity in the mid-1990s, which saw a broadening of research subjects, including focus on the gender dynamics at play in Hildegard’s life. This scholarship has died down significantly since. Given the breadth and depth of her work, Hildegard of Bingen’s work deserves to be revisited through more recent theoretical lenses that can provide significant insights into her relevance to understanding gender dynamics in the 21st century.
Throughout her letters, Hildegard writes in several different registers to construct her public persona, depending on the identity of her recipient. Her letters to men of higher authority adopt a self-deprecating tone, while she is vastly more confident when writing to women or men seeking advice. It is when Hildegard’s authority is challenged that these carefully crafted rhetorical personas fall apart, revealing the vulnerable and real Hildegard of Bingen underneath. Contemporary linguistic research uses the term “code-switching” to describe the practice of altering your behavior, speech, or appearance based on context to access authority. Most research has focused on code switching in bilingual contexts or with racial minorities and has rarely been applied to medieval context. Hildegard’s register changes reveal that she understood the gender dynamics of the 12th century and knew how to deploy “code-switching” to gain power and privilege.