Rich, exuberant testament of one liturgical year in the life of the great 12th-century mystic, as envisioned by a 20th-century medieval scholar. "A true telling and a healing fiction, clearly inspired by the Great Lady herself. The power of her presence permeates each page."--Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human. Lachman bases this fictitious journal accompanied by lengthy scholarly notes (which appear as sidebars to the text proper) on the life of a medieval mystic. From childhood on, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) received visions, but she began to record them only at age 43, thereafter producing illuminated books on the spiritual visions as well as poetry, music (she is considered by many to be the foremost female Western composer before the twentieth century), a compendium of healing arts, and a descriptive catalog of flora and fauna. She was also an abbess who ruled with an absolute and patriarchal hand and believed women to be inherently inferior to men. Though she sometimes feared her dreams came from the devil, Hildegard also felt "the dreams could be speaking to me, and through me, to my women, of the need to understand more about the nature of responsibility." Throughout Lachman's imaginative recreation of this remarkable woman, we see Hildegard's astonishing range of capabilities, from her sensitivity for the subtlety of a hymn or the complexities of the pelican to her genuine affection for the women in her charge, as when she is fretting about three in particular whose "monthly bleeding is agony." Whitney Scott Not, as the title suggests, the actual journal of Hildegard (1098-1179), the best-known female Catholic mystic of the early Middle Ages, but rather a fictional tour-de-force by debut writer Lachman. Hildegard's immense output included books of visions, natural histories, herbal cures, and poetry, as well as innovative chants and mandala-like paintings of cosmic Christian scenes. But she never wrote a journal. Lachman gives us the next best thing--a mocked-up version that captures the flavor of Hildegard and her extraordinary times. The entries cover a bit more than a year, from December 11, 1157, to January 6, 1153; during this 13-month stretch, Hildegard struggles to establish her own monastery, designs a cloister church, weaves a Lenten cloth, mothers a brood of nuns, and heals the sick, all the while performing the many daily offices required of Benedictine nuns through the liturgical year. Subsidiary characters come and go--Volmar, priest and confidant; Rikkarda, a rebellious nun--but the focus is always on Hildegard, above all on her feverish interior life, aflame with visions, premonitions, and symbolic dreams that she attempts to decipher without benefit of Freud. Lest the reader be swamped by 12th-century monastic arcana, Lachman provides a glossary as well as splendidly copious notes (indelicately crammed alongside--not underneath, as is customary--the main text on each page, making the book sometimes hard to read). Trivial as story--nothing much happens, and dramatic tension is nil--but altogether a more accurate portrait of the medieval mind than, say, The Name of the Rose. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "A dazzling work of historical imagination. With her rich knowledge of liturgical music, steeped in the subtle rhythms of the church year, Barbara Lachman has a deep understanding of the monastic life as Hildegard lived it. In lyrical, uncannily authentic prose, she conveys the intrepid seer's earthy pragmatism as well as her soaring Godward elan and her shrewd observations of the world around her." Barbara Newman, author of Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of tile Feminine From the Trade Paperback edition. ant testament of one liturgical year in the life of the great 12th-century mystic, as envisioned by a 20th-century medieval scholar. "A true telling and a healing fiction, clearly inspired by the Great Lady herself. The power of her presence permeates each page."--Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human.