Sonja Drimmer Lecture "Facsimulation: Mediating Hildegard's Scivias in Weimar Germany and Pandemic America"

Please join us on Wednesday, March 2, at 3:00 p.m. in the IASH conference room (LN 1106) for the next lecture in the CEMERS Spring Speaker Series:

Sonja Drimmer
Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Facsimulation: Mediating Hildegard's Scivias in Weimar Germany and Pandemic America

The central object of this talk is a work of art that you cannot see: the twelfth-century illuminated manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen's visionary summa Scivias. Either lost, stolen, or destroyed during WWII, the manuscript, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. And yet an exuberant array of copies of it abound, from black-and-white photos, and the hand-copied and hand-painted facsimile made by nuns of Eibingen Abbey between 1927 and 1933, to the modern deluxe, printed facsimiles that reimagine the original manuscript through the lens of its twentieth-century recreations. My discussion of the Scivias manuscript will situate it within two contexts: an intense debate about the educative value of facsimiles, which took place across the pages of the journal Der Kreis in 1929, precisely the moment when the hand-produced facsimile of Scivias was being made; and a seminar devoted to the lost manuscript, which I taught remotely over Zoom in spring 2021. I consider in particular how the relationship of the reproduction to the original changes when the original is a simulacrum, and ask, What are the political stakes of such a relationship particularly when it is conjured in the digital classroom?

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