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The significance of viriditas (greenness) in Hildegard of Bingen’s writing is well known, but how original was her thinking, and how important was it to her concept of preaching? This chapter surveys Hildegard’s activity as a preacher before broadly probing the content of her writing for signs of her adaptation of patristic models. Comparing Hildegard’s use of viriditas to the works of Sts. Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory shows her following their inspiration, but she is seldom derivative. Rather, her exegesis and homiletics rely on a method akin to the intratextual hermeneutics on view in her Exposition of the Gospels. Like the church fathers, she uses her knowledge about natural science to convey a spiritual understanding of scripture, but her exegetic method is more dramatic and visionary as she explains the unifying forces of greenness. Borrowing salient concepts, words, and phrases from her models, she teaches her reader about the opposition of greenness and dryness as well as the relevance of internal and mental greenness to preaching and to prove that God’s greenness is manifest in her community of nuns.

Two stalagmites from Devil's Icebox Cave, central Missouri, display similar δ13C and δ18O values and trends during the late Holocene. Positive δ13C excursions at 3.5–2.6 ka and 1.2–0.9 ka are interpreted to reflect drier conditions. These elevated stalagmite δ13C values could have plausibly been driven by increasing C4 plant abundances over the cave or an increased contribution of bedrock carbon, both of which could reflect decreased effective moisture. A lack of corresponding oxygen isotopic anomalies during these intervals suggests that neither mean annual temperature nor the seasonality of precipitation changed concomitantly with dryness. Both of the δ13C excursions identified in our stalagmite record are roughly coincident with dry intervals from a number of sites located across the Great Plains.

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Chapter 6 - From the Roots to the Branches: Greenness in the Preaching of Hildegard of Bingen and the Patriarchs

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Episodes of late Holocene aridity recorded by stalagmites from Devil's icebox Cave, Central Missouri, USA

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Chapter 6 - From the Roots to the Branches: Greenness in the Preaching of Hildegard of Bingen and the Patriarchs

Summary

Episodes of late Holocene aridity recorded by stalagmites from Devil's icebox Cave, Central Missouri, USA