Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess of the 12th century who became one of the most remarkable writers of the Middle Ages: a visionary theologian, a composer of sacred music, an author on medicine and the natural world, and a correspondent of popes and emperors. She lived her whole life in the Rhineland, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, founding two convents near Bingen. More of her chants survive than those of any other medieval composer, and in 2012 the Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church.

Hildegard was born around 1098, probably at Bermersheim, into a family of the minor free nobility; the exact year is not recorded. She was sickly, and later said she had experienced visions from early childhood, first seeing what she called the shade of the living light at the age of three.

Her parents gave her to the religious life at the monastery of Disibodenberg in the Rhineland. She was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, a noblewoman a few years older, and the two were formally enclosed in 1112, although Hildegard's own account suggests she was placed with Jutta at eight. Jutta taught her to read, and the monk Volmar became her teacher and later her secretary.

When Jutta died in 1136 the nuns elected Hildegard as their leader. Seeking independence from the monks, she resolved to move her community to Rupertsberg, on the Rhine at Bingen. Abbot Kuno refused, but with the backing of the Archbishop of Mainz, and after an illness that left her bedridden and which she attributed to divine displeasure, she prevailed. About 20 nuns moved there in 1150. In 1165 she founded a second house at Eibingen.

In 1141, at about 42, she felt a divine command to write down what she saw and heard. The result, Scivias ("Know the Ways"), written between 1142 and 1151, describes 26 visions covering creation, redemption and the history of salvation. During the synod held at Trier in 1147–1148, with support from Bernard of Clairvaux, parts of the unfinished book were read to Pope Eugenius III, who sent her his blessing, which gave her writing great authority. Two further visionary books followed: the Book of Life's Merits (1158 to 1163), a drama of virtues and vices, and the Book of Divine Works, finished in the early 1170s, a vast vision of the human being as a small copy of the cosmos.

Hildegard wrote both words and music for some 69 surviving liturgical songs, gathered in a cycle called the Symphonia. Her Ordo Virtutum, a sung play about a soul torn between the devil and the virtues, is the earliest known musical drama not tied to the liturgy.

Her practical work in the monastery's garden and infirmary fed two books on natural science and medicine, known as Physica and Causae et Curae, which describe the properties of plants, stones and animals and the causes and cures of diseases in terms of the four humours. Physica is thought to contain the first recorded mention of hops as a preservative in beer. She also invented a private vocabulary of about 1,000 words, the Lingua Ignota, with its own alphabet.

Unusually for a woman of her time, Hildegard undertook four preaching tours in Germany from about 1160, denouncing corruption in the church. Nearly 400 of her letters survive, addressed to popes, abbots, abbesses and rulers, including the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. She died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179.

Efforts to canonise her stalled in the Middle Ages, though she was long venerated as a saint locally and her relics lie at Eibingen. In 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the whole church and declared her a Doctor of the Church. Since the late 1970s her music has been widely recorded, and she has drawn interest from feminist scholars and the New Age movement.

Our 1100 and 1200 maps show the Holy Roman Empire, including the Rhineland around Bingen, Mainz and Trier, in the century of her life.