or, why Rosalía and I love the twelfth century
„Hildegard encapsulated so many things I was interested in at the time - botany, philosophy, mysticism, and if not exactly ‘feminism’ then the ways in which women might be permitted to write, and live among each other. She invented an ‘unknown’ language, the lingua ignota, that indexed plants, animals, illness and tools for mystical purposes; she designed dresses for her nuns to wear and let them leave their hair loose, adorned with jewels. I loved her music, and that she was so many things it made her difficult to categorise (in a recent interview with Bella Freud, Rosalía described herself as wanting to be ‘a student of everything’). It seemed to me that Hildegard was writing ecologically before the term was coined 700 years later, and that her concept of viriditas had a lot to offer the new materialist theories that were at that time making waves in academia, particularly in the nascent ‘environmental humanities’.“