Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at www history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Begin the Beguin, Hardevich and Mechtild of Marg de Bourg.

By now you probably feel you have a good understanding of what philosophy was like in the 13th century.

It was often highly technical, marked as it was by the use of new logical tools.

Though theology was the highest science, philosophical problems were often pursued with less

reference to religious doctrine than to Aristotle and other works made newly available

in Latin translation, and of course it was undertaken at the newly founded universities

by men who were usually clerics and always wrote in Latin.

For this episode, you can forget all that.

We're about to see that at this same time,

philosophical works were written outside the university context,

by women, without using Aristotle or the newfangled logic and in vernacular languages instead of the Latin of the schoolmen.

The protagonist of our story will be Hadevich and Mechtil of Magdeburg.

Hadevich's dates are uncertain, but she lived in the first part of the 13th century.

Mechtild was born in about 1208 and died in about 1282 at the convent of Helfta.

They were extraordinary figures, though not entirely unique.

Among the thinkers we've met so far, the obvious comparison is Hildegard of Bingen.

But the occasional use of a German word notwithstanding, Hildegard wrote in Latin, as much a part of her claim

...