Hildegard of Bingen

Their life

Benedictine abbess who did more kinds of work at the highest level than almost anyone in her millennium: seventy-seven surviving songs and the earliest known morality play set to music, visionary theology (Scivias), treatises on medicine and the natural world, an invented language — and letters that admonished emperors and popes by name. Given to the church at eight, she founded and led two monasteries and preached publicly in an age when women did not.

Known for

• Scivias and visionary theology
• Symphonia: 77 surviving chants
• Ordo Virtutum, earliest known morality play
• Physica and Causae et Curae, medicine
• Lingua Ignota, an invented language
• Letters admonishing popes and emperors

The road they walked

Hildegard was born in 1098 in Bermersheim, a village in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a family of minor nobility who, as was customary for a tithe child, gave her to the Church at around age eight. She was enclosed with a young anchoress named Jutta of Sponheim at the monastery of Disibodenberg, and grew up walled into a life of prayer and Latin psalms in an era when a woman's theological voice, if it existed at all, was expected to stay silent and unread. The Rhineland of her youth was a world reshaped by the Investiture Controversy, where emperors and popes were locked in a struggle over who held ultimate authority — the same two seats of power she would later write to without hesitation.

When Jutta died in 1136, the small community of nuns chose Hildegard, then in her late thirties, as their leader. She had experienced vivid visions since childhood but had kept them mostly private; around 1141 she began, on what she described as divine instruction, to dictate them to a monk named Volmar. The resulting book, Scivias, drew the attention of Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the age, whose endorsement helped bring the work before Pope Eugenius III at the Synod of Trier in 1147–48. Papal approval transformed Hildegard from a cloistered visionary into a sanctioned religious authority — rare for any layperson, unprecedented for a woman. Around 1150 she moved her community from Disibodenberg to found her own monastery at Rupertsberg near Bingen, and later a second house at Eibingen, asserting an independence that some of her male superiors resisted.

In the decades that followed, Hildegard produced an almost improbable range of work: two more visionary theological volumes, treatises on medicine and natural science drawn from close observation of plants, stones, and the body, a cycle of liturgical songs and the morality play now considered the earliest of its kind, and an invented language and alphabet whose purpose still isn't fully settled among scholars. In her sixties she undertook preaching tours through the Rhineland and beyond, addressing clergy and laity publicly — an act so unusual for a woman that it drew comment in its own right — and she carried on a vast correspondence, admonishing popes, bishops, and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa alike when she believed the Church had strayed. Historians continue to debate what underlay her visionary experiences, with some proposing they align with symptoms of migraine, though this remains interpretation rather than settled fact.

How their story ended

Hildegard died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179, in her early eighties, not long after an interdict placed on her monastery over a burial dispute had finally been lifted. Her earliest biographers described lights seen in the sky by her sisters at the moment of her death, a detail from hagiography rather than verified record. She was recognized informally as a saint for centuries before Rome made it official; in 2012 Pope Benedict XVI canonized her and named her a Doctor of the Church, one of only four women to hold that title.

In their words

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