Annette ESSER, The Hildegard of Bingen Pilgrimage Book. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2022, pp, 327, $29,95 pb. ISBN 9780814667651 (pb). Reviewed by  Andrew D. CIFERNI,  O. Praem. Daylesford Abbey, Paoli, PA, 19301.

From the time of her death (1079) until the contemporary rediscovery and publication of her writings, the name of (St.) Hildegard of Bingen (Germany) andknowledge of her life and writings were restricted to a small area of Germany and an equally small number of scholars.

The work reviewed here is a translation from the German and is the fruit of decades of research and publication. It is a quite attractive publication replete with full color reproductions of images from Hildegard’s texts, maps, and four-color photos of the natural environment in which Hildegard and her monastic communities were founded and flourished,

Interspersed with the above are selected texts from the works of Hildegard, in turn interspersed with closely related texts from her contemporaries and a sampling from writers of our own days.

The literary structure of the work is, as the title suggests, a pilgrimage from Herrstein to Rüdesheim, an attractive work that fits into no one genre. The author is a credentialed scholar, but the text is minimally footnoted; location of places photographed is barely identified. The ten “pilgrim stations/chapters” are followed by a generous anthology of poems and texts of songs.

The arrangement of texts herein can be problematic. The use of images and photography might make this an attractive primer, but considerable loss of meaning may occur when what is selected is read outside its larger context. The book may best be used as: 1) a primer for a group led by a scholar very knowledgeable with the material; 2) as a work bringing together and summarizing biography, history, and geography for those well acquainted primarily with the writings of Hildegard.