Today's Mouse Tower, a replica, not labeled as such, as far as I remember
I've been reading about medieval history lately for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) I've been taking on Medieval English Literature. This period of history ran approximately from 450 to 1450 depending on where you are (England, Germany, Italy, China), and what you are studying (literature, music, art, medicine, etc.). My recent readings are about the fourteenth century, and if you know anything about the Middle Ages, that means catastrophe after catastrophe: the Great Schism, the Great Famine, the Hundred Years' War, and the Black Death.
A legend about the Black Death, where European towns and villages lost a third of their population to this mysterious illness, caught my attention because it happened in Bingen, on the Rhine. There are different versions of the story, but basically, there was this Archbishop named Hatto II who forced starving peasants to pay him in food which he hoarded in his castle tower. He dismissed his servants and locked the doors and gates to keep people out. Folks left Bingen to try their luck somewhere else. Hatto was congratulating himself on becoming the last remaining living person in Bingen with all the food he could eat, feeling rather smug, when he climbed up to the top of his tower and looked down. "Shucks!" he said, or something like that, when he saw all of the mice and rats from miles around converging on his tower. They could smell the food, of course. Well the story goes they made a meal of Hatto and his food, starting with his ears, nose, fingers, then toes, and the tower became known as the Mouse Tower.
Well, I had been in Bingen once. It's just north of Cologne, and that's where our tour group embarked on a charming Rhine cruise to see the many medieval castles on either side of the river. It turns out I've had a picture of Hatto's creepy Mouse Tower all along, but didn't know of the legend until today's reading. That's it at the top of the blog and again just above this paragraph.
Another Bingen boat
Musicians will recognize Bingen for another reason. Hildegard of Bingen was a famous nun from there. Hildegard lived from 1098 to 1179, well before the Great Famine and Hatto II. Her parents gave her to a monastery as a seven-year-old girl, (she was their tenth child), and she was put under the care of a nun named Jutta. Jutta was actually an anchoress, and the type of nun who studies and worships in complete seclusion. Jutta's father was a man of some means and he built her a cell in which she could be closed-off from the world, and the seven-year-old Hildegard was placed in there with Jutta. Hildegard always said nice things about her mentor, Jutta. The older nun taught her to read and probably also taught her about music. Hildegard officially became a Benedictine nun when she was 15. The pair became famous and actually attracted more affluent ladies looking to devote themselves to a life of prayer. The original cell was expanded, and when Jutta died when Hildegard was 38, the nuns elected Hildegard as their abbess.
Hildegard was always a sickly person, suffering from what were probably migraines. Contemporary scholars attribute her famous visions to migraine hallucinations, but the fact is that Hildegard left some pretty amazing music whether it was inspired by headaches or not. She was a literate woman and wrote letters to popes and world leaders, and also wrote on many topics including religion and science. At one point she confided in her spiritual leader, a monk named Volmar, and painted a now famous painting of that occasion because she was a painter, too.
Hildegard telling Volmar about her visions
Hildegard's music should really be the focus of this post, but her story is so fascinating it is difficult to abridge. Her music falls into three main categories:
Symphonia are groups of sacred songs from the 1140s.
The Ordo Virtutum ("Play of the Virtues") is the first morality play and dates from the 1150s. The parts were sung by nuns (not unusual for nunneries, but unusual in the Middle Ages), and a priest got to sing the part of the devil.
The Chants for the Feast of St. Ursula probably meant the most to Hildegard because St. Ursula was her alter-ego. The Christian Ursula was supposed to marry a pagan king, but she did not want to. (Arranged marriages were the thing then, remember.) In order to put off the wedding, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome with 11,000 virgins if you can imagine that. Sadly, in Cologne (near Bingen), all were martyred and a church was built there in their memory.
Hildegard died in 1179 at the age of 81. She was so popular among her nuns and those outside the monastery that a kind of cult formed. The procedure for her canonization was begun in 1227, but a document was returned needing another part. The Pope himself requested that the clergy of Mainz resubmit the complete document in 1243 (this was Pope Innocent IV) but they didn't (or at least there is no record) and Hildegard never actually was canonized.
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