Listen: there was a fullness of vision within me. I did not learn it from any human being.
FIELD NOTES — Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Scriptorium, Quarter of Justice The Scriptorium occupies the central cloister of the Quarter of Justice — a vaulted space of stone columns supporting a ceiling painted with constellations in gold leaf on ultramarine. The gold leaf is real. The ultramarine is real. In the world outside, the pigment would be ground lapis lazuli, more expensive than gold; in the Cité, it appears to grow from the stone the way lichen grows, slowly and persistently. Hildegard von Bingen tends this space. She is tall, erect, and composed in the way that someone who has been arguing with God since childhood is composed — the composure of long practice, not of indifference. She wears the black habit of a Benedictine abbess with a white wimple. Her hands are strong: healer's hands, gardener's hands, hands that have mixed medicines from the recipes in her Physica, composed over seventy liturgical songs, invented an alphabet (the Lingua Ignota — a constructed lang...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.