Translating Hildemar

Sometime in the middle of the ninth century, the Civate monk Hildemar wrote a commentary on that most important of medieval monastic texts: the Rule of Benedict. Meticulously commenting on (nearly) every verse and sentence of the Regula, his Expositio is a very sizeable book. Over 600 pages in its (relatively) modern edition! Very few people nowadays make it through 600 pages of Latin commentary with ease, which is probably partly to blame for the fact that this important testimony to ninth-century monastic thought and practice has not received more interest by historians. This led to the initiative of Albrecht Diem (Syracuse), Julian Hendrix (Carthage College, WI), Corinna Prior (Toronto) and Mariel Urbanus (Utrecht) to ask fellow scholars to translate bite-size sections of the Expositio, together forming the first English translation of this long text. The results are slowly filling the project’s website, complete with Latin text, background information and forum. In a time when historians are no longer awarded indefinite contracts to work on decade-long projects on their own, this approach to a huge task could be the key for future projects.

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