Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim vor der Höhe, a village in the Rhineland then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Her parents, Hildebert and Mechtild, belonged to the lower nobility, and Hildegard was the youngest of as many as ten children. Families of their rank often dedicated a child to the Church as a form of tithe, and Hildegard, the tenth, was chosen for that path while still very young ^[1].

By her own later account, she began experiencing vivid visionary episodes in early childhood, perceiving light and images that others around her could not see. She learned to keep quiet about them. Around the age of eight, and formally by fourteen, she was placed in the care of Jutta of Sponheim, a noblewoman who lived as a religious recluse attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg ^[2].

Life in Jutta's enclosure was austere. Hildegard received a modest education there: she learned to read the Latin psalter and to sing the monastic office, though she would later insist that she was an unlearned woman, a claim scholars read partly as convention and partly as a shield. Other young women joined the enclosure over time, and it grew into a small convent under Benedictine rule alongside the monks of Disibodenberg ^[1].

When Jutta died in 1136, the nuns elected Hildegard, then thirty-eight, as their leader. For several years she governed quietly. The turning point of her life came around 1141, when she reported receiving a divine command to write down what she saw and heard in her visions. She hesitated, fell ill, and finally began the work that became Scivias (short for Scito vias Domini, know the ways of the Lord), a record of twenty-six visions with extensive theological commentary ^[3].

Writing theology was a hazardous undertaking for a woman with no formal schooling in the discipline. Hildegard sought validation carefully. Her account of her visions reached Pope Eugenius III at the Synod of Trier in 1147 to 1148, reportedly with the encouragement of Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the age. The pope examined portions of Scivias and gave her permission to continue writing, an endorsement that transformed a provincial nun into a figure of European reputation ^[2].

Papal approval gave Hildegard leverage at home. Against the strong objections of Abbot Kuno of Disibodenberg, who did not want to lose the prestige and income her community brought, she moved her nuns around 1150 to a new foundation at Rupertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine. The relocation was contested and difficult, but it gave her independence as abbess of her own house. About 1165 she established a second convent across the river at Eibingen to absorb the community's growth ^[1].

Any account of Hildegard of Bingen achievements has to range across an unusual number of fields. Her three major visionary works form the core: Scivias, completed around 1151; the Liber vitae meritorum (Book of Life's Merits), written in the late 1150s and early 1160s, which pairs vices with their corresponding virtues; and the Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works), finished in the 1170s, a sweeping meditation on the relationship between God, humanity, and the created cosmos ^[3].

She also wrote what amount to scientific and medical treatises, unusual productions for any monastic author of the period and nearly unique for a woman. The material, assembled around the 1150s, survives in two works: Physica, a catalog of the healing properties of plants, animals, stones, and metals, and Causae et curae, which discusses the causes of disease and their treatment within a framework of the four humors. These texts draw on monastic infirmary practice and local plant lore, and they have made Hildegard a touchstone in the history of medieval medicine ^[4].

Her music may be her most widely encountered legacy today. Hildegard composed more than seventy liturgical songs, gathered under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations), with melodies notable for their wide range and soaring, ornamented lines. She also wrote the Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues), a sung morality drama in which personified virtues contend with the devil for a human soul. It is among the earliest surviving works of its kind, and modern recordings of her music have sold in large numbers since the revival of interest that began in the late twentieth century ^[5].

Beyond these, she invented a private constructed language, the Lingua ignota, with an accompanying alphabet, and left a correspondence of nearly four hundred surviving letters exchanged with popes, emperors, abbots, and laypeople across Europe. The letters show her advising, consoling, and at times bluntly rebuking the powerful, including Emperor Frederick Barbarossa ^[2].

Hildegard's personal world was the convent, and her closest documented relationships were with collaborators and members of her community. The monk Volmar of Disibodenberg served for decades as her secretary and confidant, helping to set down and correct her Latin until his death in 1173. She grieved his loss keenly, and his role was later filled by others, including the monk Guibert of Gembloux, whose questions to her about the nature of her visions prompted some of her most revealing self-descriptions ^[2].

Among the nuns, her strongest attachment was to Richardis of Stade, a young noblewoman who assisted with the writing of Scivias. When Richardis was appointed abbess of a distant convent in 1151, Hildegard fought the transfer with letters to archbishops and to the pope himself, without success. Richardis died the following year, and the episode, preserved in the correspondence, shows Hildegard at her most human: possessive, wounded, and finally resigned ^[1].

Her health was fragile throughout her life. She described recurring, incapacitating illnesses, often arriving when she resisted what she understood as divine instruction. Some modern writers, following the neurologist Oliver Sacks, have suggested that features of her visions, such as showers of light and fortification patterns, resemble migraine aura, though this remains an interpretation rather than a settled diagnosis ^[6].

Old age did not slow her public activity. Remarkably for a woman, and in her seventies, Hildegard undertook preaching tours through the Rhineland and beyond, speaking publicly at cathedral cities including Cologne and Trier. Her sermons attacked clerical corruption and the Cathar heresy, and clergy who heard her wrote asking for copies of her words ^[1].

The final year of her life brought a painful confrontation with church authority. In 1178 the clergy of Mainz ordered the exhumation of a man buried in the Rupertsberg cemetery, claiming he had died excommunicate. Hildegard refused, insisting he had been reconciled to the Church before death, and reportedly concealed the grave. The prelates placed her convent under interdict, forbidding the nuns to sing the liturgy or receive the Eucharist. For a woman who understood music as an echo of heaven, the silence was a severe punishment. She protested in a forceful letter on the theology of music, and the interdict was lifted in March 1179 ^[3].

Hildegard died on September 17, 1179, at Rupertsberg, aged eighty-one. Accounts written by her early biographers describe signs in the sky over the convent at her death. Her community preserved her writings, and within a few years the monks Gottfried and Theoderic completed the Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, the biographical source on which much later knowledge of her life depends ^[2].

Formal recognition came slowly. Attempts to canonize Hildegard began in the thirteenth century but stalled, even though she was venerated locally and entered martyrologies as a saint. The question was finally resolved on May 10, 2012, when Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the universal Church, an act known as equivalent canonization. On October 7 of the same year he named her a Doctor of the Church, a title held by only a handful of figures whose teaching is judged of benefit to all Catholics; she was the fourth woman so honored, after Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux ^[7].

Her afterlife in scholarship and culture has been just as striking. Musicologists study her chant as a rare medieval repertory attributable to a named composer, and ensembles such as Sequentia have recorded her complete works. Historians of science read Physica and Causae et curae for evidence of twelfth century medical practice, while historians of women and religion treat her as a central case of female authority in the medieval Church. Her name now attaches to herbal medicine movements, especially in Germany, where interest in so-called Hildegard medicine persists whatever its distance from her actual texts ^[4].

For anyone asking who was Hildegard of Bingen, the shortest honest answer is that she was several things at once: abbess, visionary, composer, naturalist, correspondent of emperors, and reformer. Few medieval lives were documented so richly by their subject's own hand, which is why any Hildegard of Bingen biography can draw on her books, her letters, and her songs directly. Nine centuries on, the basic Hildegard of Bingen facts still surprise: a girl given to a hermitage at eight became one of the most complete minds of her century ^[5].