UNKNOWN LANGUAGE by Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey
130mm x 200mm, 232 pages, black and white offset printing throughout, die cut cover with colour inner sheet, perfect bound, 2020
With an introductory story by Bhanu Kapil and an afterword by Alice Spawls.
A mutant fiction of speculative mysticism.
Long before the collapse of the Information Age, in the twelfth century since the appearance of the prophet Christ, young Hildegard finds grace.
In this story of survival and miracles, Hildegard encounters love, both queer and divine, and great peril. As the visionary healer travels through the unfamiliar landscape following a great cataclysm, she discovers the mythic quantum energy of viriditas in the natural world around her. Her journey becomes one of return, to the sacred truth of her own being.
Hildegard’s tale is received in the plague year of 2020 by Alice Spawls, and then in the next century, in a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls. On planet Avaaz, once known as Earth, Bhanu Kapil’s Pinky Agarwalia finds fragments of a beautiful codex. Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's unknown language, bears seeds of renewal for a world in flux.
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