Magda Hayton (CMS 2015) has been awarded this year’s Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize by The Canadian Society of Medievalists. Here is what the chair of the award committee wrote: “Magda Hayton’s Inflections of Prophetic Vision: The Reshaping of Hildegard of Bingen’s Apocalypticism as Represented by Abridgments of the Pentachronon is a truly magisterial work completed at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Joseph Goering. The project traces, in exemplary scholarly fashion, the reception of Hildegard of Bingen and her works, as they were handed on, repackaged, elaborated and utilized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries especially by Cistercian writers and also by secular university masters at Paris and elsewhere. She identifies three distinct periods of reworking: a specifically ‘Cistercian apocalyptic’ moment of the 13th century that saw widespread re-reading and re-working of Hildegard in mostly [French and German] Cistercian houses; a second moment in the 13th century – also largely associated with the Cistercians – where we see a convergence of Hildegard’s apocalyptic vision with that of Joachim of Fiore; and finally, Hildegard’s powerful influence on the 14th and 15th century theologian and conciliar leader Pierre d’Ailly, where Hayton shows how crucial Hildegard’s voice was informing the theological soul-searching of the late medieval church. The project – which rests upon truly fundamental codicological work – … is accompanied, in the form of an appendix, by an edition of Pierre d’Ailly’s Invectiva Ezechielis and the so-called Schism Extracts. As her external examiner, John Van Engen writes, through it all, ‘Hayton is a sensitive interpreter of the religious dimensions of quite dramatic stuff: prophecies of the overthrow of the clerical church, a general purging, and a new spiritual age.’”
Dr Hayton is currently an associate research member of McGill University’s Centre for Research on Religion in Montreal where she is preparing a book manuscript currently titled Inflections of Prophetic Vision: Hildegardian Apocalypticism and Religious Culture in the Thirteenth Century.