Plate XVI. A MELOTHESIA OF ABOUT 1400] [Illustration: From the _SYMBOLUM APOSTOLICORUM_ Plate XVII. A GERMAN BLOCK BOOK First Half of XVth Century. Heidelberg University Library] [Illustration: From BODLEIAN MS. ASHMOLE 399 fo. 18 r Plate XVIII. AN ANATOMICAL DIAGRAM OF ABOUT 1298 From the Five-Figure Series. Cp. Plate XXXIII] [Illustration: Fig. 6.] [Illustration: Fig. 7. MELOTHESIAE From R. Fludd, _Historia utriusque cosmi_, Oppenheim, 1619, pp. 112 and 113.] [Illustration: Fig. 8. THE MICROCOSM From R. Fludd, _Philosophia sacra seu astrologia cosmica_, Frankfurt, 1628, p. 52.] Macrocosmic schemes of the type illustrated by the text of Hildegard and by the figures of the Lucca MS. had a great vogue in mediaeval times, and were passed on to later ages. Some passages in Hildegard’s work read curiously like Paracelsus (1491-1541),[93] and it is not hard to find a link between these two difficult and mystical writers. Trithemius, the teacher of Paracelsus, was abbot of Sponheim, an important settlement almost within sight of Hildegard’s convents on the Rupertsberg and Disibodenberg. Trithemius studied Hildegard’s writings with great care and attached much importance to them, so that they may well have influenced his pupil. The influence of mediaeval theories of the relation of macrocosm and microcosm is encountered among numerous Renaissance writers besides Paracelsus, and is presented to us, for instance, by such a cautious, balanced, and scientifically-minded humanist as Fracastor. But as the years went on, the difficulty in applying the details of the theory became ever greater and greater. Facts were strained and mutilated more and more to make them fit the Procrustean bed of an outworn theory, which at length became untenable when the heliocentric system of Copernicus and Galileo replaced the geocentric and anthropocentric systems of an earlier age. The idea of a close parallelism between the structure of man and of the wider universe was gradually abandoned by the scientific, while among the unscientific it degenerated and became little better than an insane obsession. As such it appears in the ingenious ravings of the English follower of Paracelsus, the Rosicrucian, Robert Fludd, who reproduced, often with fidelity, the systems which had some novelty five centuries before his time (Figs. 6, 7, and 8). As a similar fantastic obsession this once fruitful hypothesis still occasionally appears even in modern works of learning and industry.[94] VIII. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY Hildegard’s ideas on these subjects are set out in the fourth vision of the _Liber Divinorum Operum_, which is devoted to a description of man’s body according to the macrocosmic scheme. This setting makes her account by no means easy to read, while it increases the difficulty of tracing the origin of her views.