Life of the Mind Seminar: Margot Fassler on Hildegard of Bingen (Registration Required)

Registration Deadline is Friday, November 24 at 5 PM. Apply Here

About Registration:

• Seminar participation is limited to facilitate discussion in a spirit of intellectual freedom and mutual respect. 
• Undergraduate and graduate students are especially encouraged to apply. 
• Dinner is served at all seminars, and light readings will be assigned.
• You must complete a questionnaire to be considered for acceptance. Registrations close one week before each seminar.

About the Seminar

Hildegard of Bingen: Music for Church and Community

In this seminar the speaker first outlines the musical compositions of the Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and their liturgical contexts. After the overview of Hildegard's artistic works, Fassler will look more closely at three kinds of musical compositions, one for the Divine Office, one for the Mass, and a the third, an innovative and unique liturgical play. Each kind of work addresses the life of a particular community and also creates a statement about the Church writ large. Hildegard was a religious reformer and used the arts of music, poetry, and drama to score theological points and to draw both listeners and singers more deeply into a hoped-for spiritual journey. The seminar will be accompanied by musical and painted examples from Hildegard's oeuvre.

Margot Fassler is Keough-Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy, University of Notre Dame and Robert Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History, Yale University. Recent books include The Virgin of Chartres; Music in the Medieval West and Anthology; Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent (with Jeffery Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti); Medieval Cantors and Their Craft (ed. with Katie Bugyis and AB Kraebel); and Cosmos, Liturgy and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias. A digital model for the planetarium based on the illuminations of Scivias (with C.Jara and B.Wolff) will appear at the Medieval Academy of America, Notre Dame, 2024.