NONFICTION : The Girls Next Door: A 12th-Century Mystic, a Spy, an Aviatrix, a Persian Princess, a Mother and a Journalist

THE JOURNAL OF HILDEGARD OF BINGEN: Inspired by a Year in the Life of a Twelfth-Century Mystic by Barbara Lachman. (Bell Tower: $20; 187 pp.) Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a mystic, healer, composer and abbess of an autonomous community of Benedictine nuns. Her writings, primarily descriptions of her visualizations, her music and her musings have only just been published in English in the last decade. Like a good saint or a valuable gem, Hildegard has many facets that glitter throughout these journal entries, reconstructed by Lachman after two decades of living and breathing Hildegard of Bingen; reading her notes and letters in the original Latin and listening to her music. Lachman writes in the preface that Hildegard brings mystery back into an over-analyzed world. But to this reader her visions are the least mysterious part of her daily life in this year, 1152. More amazing is how music came to her: “Like a string of gold . . . dreaming its way through the fabric of the melody.” Also fascinating are the descriptions of the laying on of hands, through which Hildegard heals the sick, the raving, the depressed, the deluded and the possessed: “In my zeal for routing out the Devil, in my excitement to open the way for God’s righteousness to enter, and caught up in my concern for seizing the most powerful words I could find, I was hardly breathing at all, and this in turn curtailed his (the patient’s) breathing. . . . I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, so busy routing out the Devil in him while I was getting all puffed up with pride. He laughed as well. . . .” There is something for everyone here, even weary managers who feel cheated out of contemplative time and a need to rekindle their own creativity: “My life becomes a series of interruptions rather than nestling in the precious beads of the Divine Office that make up a necklace . . . broken hearts and bones, spoiled meat, scorched altar cloths, exhaustion of medicines, withering spirits, the never-ending jealousies of the novitiate.”