Note 375 — Chapter IV · THE SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD 1100–1250 A. D.

Some scholars, notably Singer, Visions of Hildegard, 1917, pp. 12–15, have cast doubt upon the genuineness of the Subtilitates and Causae et curae. See, however, Thorndike, Magic, 1923, vol. ii, pp. 128–129. See also below, pp. 423–424, notes 91–93.

The Causae et curae is the only one of the works which cannot be dated with considerable accuracy (see Thorndike, op. cit., p. 127). The present writer, who has not studied the writings of Hildegard in any detail, hazards the following suggestion for what it is worth. Two passages in the Causae et curae can only be explained on the supposition that its author believed in a flat earth (see below, p. 425, note 101). Passages in the Scivias (written between 1141 and 1150) and in the Liber divinorum 397operum (written after 1163) speak explicitly of the earth as a globe (see below, p. 423, note 92). May it not be possible that the Causae et curae is an early work and that in the course of her subsequent life Hildegard gained a wider knowledge of current views of cosmology, which found their expression in the records of her visions?