Synesthésie et composition musicale chez Hildegarde de Bingen L’exemple de l’Ordo Virtutum

Hildegarde von Bingen was an exceptional twelfth-century character: an abbess, a doctor, and a mystic, she was also a musician and visionary. The Scivias, written in the 1150s, recounts the numerous “visionary crises” she was subject to since childhood, and the physiological sensations which accompanied them. The originality of Hildegarde’s approach was to have tried to objectivise and transmute certain of her visions into a liturgical drama, the Ordo virtutum, studied in this paper in its links with the Scicias and from the point of view of the synaesthesia.