Hildegard Von Bingen

Born during the summer of 1098 to noble parents in Bermersheim near Alzey in what is now Rheinhessen, the infant received the baptismal name Hildegard. Visions began for her at age five, after which her parents committed the child at eight to a modest nunnery. Across an eighty-one-year lifetime this extraordinary figure would head the Abbey at Disibodenberg, establish two additional convents, compose three major theological texts plus shorter writings on natural history, herbalism, and healing, create the earliest surviving morality play, and produce numerous hymns, antiphons, and sequences. Her letters offered guidance to leading contemporaries, among them Frederick Barbarossa. She conducted healings, a famed exorcism, and—exceptional for a woman—several officially approved public preaching tours. Hildegard of Bingen, earliest composer whose life is documented and first known to have written both music and its accompanying texts, ranked among the most striking and vigorous personalities of medieval Europe.

Hildebert and Mechtild, her parents, had dedicated their tenth child to ecclesiastical service and therefore placed the gifted eight-year-old novice with Jutta of Spanheim, head of a small group of nuns linked to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg near Bingen and the cathedral city of Mainz. Hildegard pronounced her vows at fifteen and, upon Jutta’s death in 1136, became prioress of the modest eremitic community. In 1141 a vision of flaming tongues descending from heaven prompted her to devote the remainder of her life to recording such revelations. At the Synod of Trier in 1148 Pope Eugenius III formally approved those visions and authorized their written preservation. While attracting more women to the community, she founded—over the objections of her male superiors at Disibodenberg—a new abbey at Rupertsberg in the Rhine valley between 1147 and 1150; around 1165 she added a daughter house at Eibingen. Four preaching tours through German territories followed in the 1160s. After her death in 1179, Popes Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Clement V, and John XXII each advanced her canonization without success.

Assisted by her monastic secretary Volmar, Hildegard began transcribing her revelations in 1141; twenty-six visions form her initial work, the Scivias, assembled over ten years. Later prophetic volumes comprise the Liber vite meritorum (1158–63) and Liber divinorum operum (1163–70). Between these she produced Physica and Causae et curae on natural history and medicine, a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, biographies of two saints, and assorted surviving sermons. Devotional poetry first appears within the Scivias; in the early 1150s she assembled numerous liturgical and devotional poems, each paired with music, under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, which also contains her liturgical drama Ordo virtutum—an anthology she continued to expand throughout her life. The “Sybil of the Rhine” additionally left roughly three hundred letters conveying counsel, prayers, teachings, encouragement, and rebuke to popes, emperors, kings, archbishops, abbots, and abbesses across Europe.