(c) She pleaded in person before clerical tribunals.
(d) One of the least remarkable and most credible of her ‘miracles’, the expounding of certain letters found upon an altar-cloth (Migne, col. 121), depends entirely on a knowledge of Latin.
(e) In the Liber divinorum operum (Migne, col. 922) she writes ‘firmamentum celum nominavit quoniam omnia excellit’, a derivation taken from Isidore and incomprehensible to one ignorant of Latin. There are many other passages in her works in which the sense depends on the Latin usage of a word.
(f) No mention of this ignorance is made by Guibert in the short sketch of her life that he wrote almost immediately after her death (1180; see Pitra, p. 407). On the contrary, he suggests that she had been an industrious student.
(g) The Liber divinorum operum may especially be pointed out among her works as betraying a very considerable degree of learning. Notably her elaborate doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm must have involved extensive reading.
The general question of Hildegard’s knowledge of Latin has also been discussed by Pitra and by Albert Battandier in the Revue des questions historiques, vol. xxxiii, p. 395, Paris, 1883.
[33] See chapter viii.
[34] It is, however, just possible that she had consulted the astrological work that had been translated from the Arabic by Hermann the Dalmatian for Bernard Sylvestris, and is represented in the Bodleian MSS. Digby 46 and Ashmole 304.
[35] See Baldassare Boncompagni, Della vita e delle opere di Gherardo Cremonese, Traduttore del secolo duodecimo, e di Gherardo di Sabbionetta, Astronomo del secolo decimoterzo, Rome, 1851; also K. Sudhoff, ‘Die kurze “Vita” und das Verzeichnis der Arbeiten Gerhards von Cremona, von seinen Schülern und Studiengenossen kurz nach dem Tode des Meisters (1187) zu Toledo verabfasst’, in Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin, Bd. viii, p. 73, November 1914.
[36] Another translation of the Almagest was made in Sicily in 1160, direct from the Greek. See C. H. Haskins and D. P. Lockwood, ‘The Sicilian Translators of the Twelfth Century and the First Latin Version of Ptolemy’s Almagest’, in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, xi. 75, Cambridge, Mass., 1910. It is wholly improbable that Hildegard had access to this rendering, which is only known from a single MS. of the fourteenth century.