María ESTHER ORTIZ

Original title: Símbolo y experiencia visionaria en el Epistolario de Hildegarda de Bingen (1098-1179)

Published in The Medieval Aesthetics

Keywords: Epistolary, Hildegard of Bingen, Symbol, Visionary experience.

Hildegard of Bingen’s epistolary gathers, in its almost four hundred letters, a very rich biographic material with XII century historic and cultural data. It also presents a particular style, closed related to her visionary gift. Inside the exploration of this mundus imaginalis, a real aesthetic experience takes place: the symbols constellations that appear in these texts (mainly from nature) correspond with similar images from other languages used by Hildegard such as pictorial and musical ones. By means of some examples, this article inquires to what extent and in which way this perspective broadens the hermeneutic horizon in the epistolary texts.