[87] The MS. from which Plate XVI is taken (Paris, Bibl. nat., Latin 11229) was written about the end of the fourteenth century. It has been described by K. Sudhoff, Arch. f. Gesch. d. Med., ii. 84, Leipzig, 1910. The relation of the central figure to the signs of the zodiac in this plate bears a manifest resemblance to the relation of the central figure to the beasts’ heads in Plate vii. The lines which cross and recross the figure in Plate VII are analogous also to the lines of influence of Plate XVI. The verse above the figure in Plate XVI is taken from the Flos medicinae scholae Salerni; cp. de Renzi, loc. cit., i. 486. This Melothesia and that of the next figure is identical with that propounded in Manilius, ii. 453 (edition of H. W. Garrod, Oxford, 1911).

[88] Plate XVII is from an early German block book. It exhibits a scheme closely parallel to Plate VII. The universe in Plate XVII is represented as a series of concentric spheres, earth innermost, followed by water, air, and fire. In the outermost zone hover the angels who have replaced the beast’s head of Hildegard’s scheme. The whole world is embraced by the figure of the Almighty, much as in Plate VII.

[89] See E. Wickersheimer, ‘La médecine astrologique dans les almanachs populaires du xxe siècle’, Bulletin de la Société française d’histoire de la médecine, x (1911), pp. 26–39.

[90] Migne, col. 757. This phrase is reproduced in a mediaeval Irish version of the work of Messahalah. See Maura Power, An Irish Astronomical Text, Irish Text Society, London, 1912.

[91] The word cancer is here used, but the crab goes sideways, not backwards. By cancer Hildegard, who had never seen the sea, probably means the crayfish, an animal fairly common in the Rhine basin. It is the head of a crayfish or lobster that is figured in the miniatures of the vision of the macrocosm in the Lucca MS., and a similar organism frequently serves for the sign Cancer in the mediaeval zodiacal medical figures, as in Plate XV of this essay.

[92] Migne, cols. 3, 791–2.

[93] An illustration of this parallelism between Paracelsus and Hildegard is afforded by certain passages in the Labyrinthus medicorum errantium and the Scivias, lib. i, vis. 4. Especially compare p. 279 et seq. of Huser’s edition of the Opera, Strasbourg, 1603, with Migne, col. 428.

[94] A good example is furnished by a work of Isaac Myer, Qabbalah. The philosophical writings of Solomon ben Yehudah ibn Gebirol or Avicebron and their connection with the Hebrew Qabbalah and Sepher ha-Zohar, Philadelphia, 1888.

[95] The most accessible edition is in S. de Renzi’s Collectio Salernitana, vol. ii, p. 388.

[96] Printed in de Renzi, vol. ii, p. 391.