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On The Discovery of the Society
by Dr. Naomi Woo
My first knowledge of the society was due to a chance encounter in my own family archives. While exploring old photographs at the home of my cousin Bruce, I found a newspaper clipping featuring my great-aunt Minnie. Minnie was a legend in my family, a fierce and feisty woman who never married, but was an avid reader, diarist, and bookbinder, as well as an especially talented and devoted allotmenteer. The clipping documents her advocacy—as the sole female member of the Birmingham and District Allotments Council—on behalf of women gardeners, and desire for more women to become involved in the allotment movement.
Her cap and curious expression intrigued me, and I asked my cousin if he knew more about her role in the allotment society. He had heard a rumour that following the publication of this story, Minnie had begun to assemble a clandestine group of women gardeners regularly in her home.
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Minnie Bolton, society member c. 1930?
Sparked by my initial curiosity about Minnie and her secret gatherings of women, I asked my colleague and friend Dr. Sophie Seita to join me in investigating other quiet collectives of women gardeners and gatherers. Our discoveries led us to Maria Sybilla Merian, a woman who shunned the company of men in order to run the only all-female scientific illustration workshop in Europe, to the gardener and artist Mary Delany, who was vocal about the value of female friendship and its superiority to marriage, to the Chinese poet, courtesan, and botanist Xue Susu, who devoted herself to supporting and travelling with her female companions.
It soon became abundantly clear that these women had something in common beyond their surface level similarities, and traced the trail back to a secret society founded by Hildegard von Bingen at Eibingen Abbey around 1169. The only reference to the founding of this fellowship is in her text, Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, in which she describes the vox inauditae linguae she had been developing, a secret unknown language, which was designed to pass on ‘divine knowledge for the future’. It has been assumed until now by all scholars that there were no initiates of the language to pass on the knowledge it could convey, and that her dream of a society of women who might carry on her legacy and mystical botany vanished with her death in 1179.
However, we now believe that a whisper network of women carried on this language and knowledge, mostly orally, under the guise of gardening together, living together, praying together, writing together, and especially, singing together. The peak of the society appears to have been in the 19th century, when we are confident a group of women met regularly in the home of Madame de Stael under the auspices of her Parisian salon. The book that we obtained suggests a resurgence of the group also in St. Ives, meeting in the Sculpture Garden of Barbara Hepworth, likely brought from a collective in South Africa into which the composer Priaulx Rainier had been inducted.
We refer to this society as The Hildegard von Bingen Society of Gardening Companions, though we believe it has also at various times operated under other names, including The Hildegard von Bingen Society for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Women Gardeners, Hildegard’s Starlets, Sorceresses, Sapphists, and Llamas, and likely many others.
Yet, from there, our trail runs cold. These women’s collective work was often secretive by nature, because of the difficulties of being a woman in such male-dominated fields of the natural sciences. Individual women occasionally withstood the conventions of society and made their names in the field, but only through the guise of poetry, art, music—acceptable women’s work. Those who did so were necessarily of a certain class. But we know the society itself to have been an act of resistance, and that enclaves of the society were also ways of keeping knowledge hidden from the hungry ears of colonialism. A secret decolonized botany in the margins.
The absence of documentation about the activities, membership, and creative work of this society makes it difficult to present our findings in the usual scholarly channels, or to authenticate them by conventional historical means. We believe, however, that Hildegard’s eventual intention was for the legacy of the society to become public and widespread, for the vox inauditae linguae to become heard. As such, we are actively, insouciantly, eagerly pursuing our research with the ardent fervor of a germinating seed.
Back to the Garden Shed
On The Discovery of the Society
by Dr. Naomi Woo
My first knowledge of the society was due to a chance encounter in my own family archives. While exploring old photographs at the home of my cousin Bruce, I found a newspaper clipping featuring my great-aunt Minnie. Minnie was a legend in my family, a fierce and feisty woman who never married, but was an avid reader, diarist, and bookbinder, as well as an especially talented and devoted allotmenteer. The clipping documents her advocacy—as the sole female member of the Birmingham and District Allotments Council—on behalf of women gardeners, and desire for more women to become involved in the allotment movement.
Her cap and curious expression intrigued me, and I asked my cousin if he knew more about her role in the allotment society. He had heard a rumour that following the publication of this story, Minnie had begun to assemble a clandestine group of women gardeners regularly in her home.
Minnie Bolton, society member c. 1930?Sparked by my initial curiosity about Minnie and her secret gatherings of women, I asked my colleague and friend Dr. Sophie Seita to join me in investigating other quiet collectives of women gardeners and gatherers. Our discoveries led us to Maria Sybilla Merian, a woman who shunned the company of men in order to run the only all-female scientific illustration workshop in Europe, to the gardener and artist Mary Delany, who was vocal about the value of female friendship and its superiority to marriage, to the Chinese poet, courtesan, and botanist Xue Susu, who devoted herself to supporting and travelling with her female companions.
It soon became abundantly clear that these women had something in common beyond their surface level similarities, and traced the trail back to a secret society founded by Hildegard von Bingen at Eibingen Abbey around 1169. The only reference to the founding of this fellowship is in her text, Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, in which she describes the vox inauditae linguae she had been developing, a secret unknown language, which was designed to pass on ‘divine knowledge for the future’. It has been assumed until now by all scholars that there were no initiates of the language to pass on the knowledge it could convey, and that her dream of a society of women who might carry on her legacy and mystical botany vanished with her death in 1179.
However, we now believe that a whisper network of women carried on this language and knowledge, mostly orally, under the guise of gardening together, living together, praying together, writing together, and especially, singing together. The peak of the society appears to have been in the 19th century, when we are confident a group of women met regularly in the home of Madame de Stael under the auspices of her Parisian salon. The book that we obtained suggests a resurgence of the group also in St. Ives, meeting in the Sculpture Garden of Barbara Hepworth, likely brought from a collective in South Africa into which the composer Priaulx Rainier had been inducted.
We refer to this society as The Hildegard von Bingen Society of Gardening Companions, though we believe it has also at various times operated under other names, including The Hildegard von Bingen Society for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Women Gardeners, Hildegard’s Starlets, Sorceresses, Sapphists, and Llamas, and likely many others.
Yet, from there, our trail runs cold. These women’s collective work was often secretive by nature, because of the difficulties of being a woman in such male-dominated fields of the natural sciences. Individual women occasionally withstood the conventions of society and made their names in the field, but only through the guise of poetry, art, music—acceptable women’s work. Those who did so were necessarily of a certain class. But we know the society itself to have been an act of resistance, and that enclaves of the society were also ways of keeping knowledge hidden from the hungry ears of colonialism. A secret decolonized botany in the margins.
The absence of documentation about the activities, membership, and creative work of this society makes it difficult to present our findings in the usual scholarly channels, or to authenticate them by conventional historical means. We believe, however, that Hildegard’s eventual intention was for the legacy of the society to become public and widespread, for the vox inauditae linguae to become heard. As such, we are actively, insouciantly, eagerly pursuing our research with the ardent fervor of a germinating seed.
Back to the Garden Shed