Long known for her visions, the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) has won over an increasingly large audience in recent years thanks to two other of her gifts. This brilliant Benedictine woman, whose long life was particularly active, tried her hand with equal success in music and medicine, fields in which few women have left their name. Her liturgical chants (of which she composed the text and music herself) have been preserved in contemporary manuscripts of their author, and are widely played and recorded. Its natural science, on the other hand, although it attracts an ever-increasing number of followers looking for alternatives to traditional medicine, does not present the same guarantees of reliability: the medical precepts of Hildegard, which the public is rediscovering today with enthusiasm, were transmitted to us in late manuscripts, and therefore likely to have undergone a number of modifications. Are the scientific writings that she conceived and wrote really confused with those that have come down to us? Was the edition given during the Renaissance in Strasbourg based on a manuscript that has now disappeared, or is it a complete infidelity? And if Hildegard's astonishing naturalistic knowledge is indeed hers, where did this supposedly uneducated nun get this knowledge from? So many questions that the author tried to resolve by spinning these medical treatises through the centuries: the results of the investigation form the story of the adventures and avatars of a rare bird, a scientific work composed by a woman out of the ordinary in the West of the 12th century. - [Author]

Includes descriptions of and commentary on the five surviving full manuscript copies of the Physica as well as the fragments.

Language: French