ABSTRACT
Hildegard of Bingen's fifth vision personifies the people of the covenant in the form of a woman, Synagoga (see fig. 1), who is “mother of the incarnation” and thus the mother-in-law of the Christian Church, Ecclesia, who is the bride (sponsa) of Christ. Hildegard adopts the terms of Biblical exegesis of the Song of Solomon along with medieval iconography in which the two female figures are rivals: Synagoga because of her unbelief, and supplanted in favor of Ecclesia. She begins with what she sees:
After this, I saw the image of a woman, pale from her head to her navel and black from her navel to her feet; her feet were red and around her feet was a cloud of purest whiteness. She had no eyes, and had put her hands in her armpits; she stood next to the altar that is before the eyes of God, but she did not touch it. And in her heart stood Abraham, and in her breast Moses, and in her womb the rest of the prophets, each displaying his symbols and admiring the beauty of the Church. She was of great size, like the tower of a city, and had on her head a circlet like the dawn. 1
