Reading Hildegard of Bingen’s Antiphons for the 11,000 Virgin-Martyrs of Cologne: Rhetorical ductus and Liturgical Rubrics

Hildegard of Bingen’s antiphon series for the 11,000 Virgins is found solely in two notated manuscripts that present the repertory as liturgical music destined for the service of Lauds. The two most recent and influential critical editions of these texts treat them as a single, unified poem, one relegating the rubrics to the critical commentary and the other presenting speculative liturgical assignments within the text. This study proposes an alternative reading of the antiphon series that fully acknowledges the prompts given by the liturgical rubrics and preserves the logic of its rhetorical structure.