oa Images and Chants for a Digital Model of the Cosmos

This paper introduces a digital model of the cosmos in the twelfth century, as envisioned in sight and sound by the Benedictine polymath Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Ours is a thirty-five-minute full-dome digital model that takes Hildegard’s vision of creation from her illuminated theological treatise Scivias and brings it from page to public. The model uses the twenty-two speakers in Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater (DVT) for the music, recorded by students in the Sacred Music Program at Notre Dame. Creating the work required the construction of a model depicting stages of the ‘Cosmic Egg’ - from Hildegard’s description of a Big Bang within a dark chaos to a spinning and zoomable globe that grows through six ‘days’ of development - each with appropriate music composed by Hildegard, as another aspect of her cosmological understanding. This complex digital model of the cosmos and its stages of creation, read theologically, ushers in a new mode of scholarly investigation: one that joins music, art, cosmology, and theology, and moves these into the world of the digital humanities, to promote a broader understanding of the Middle Ages.