She called herself “a poor little woman, unlearned and frail.” She also moved an entire convent against the wishes of powerful monks, wrote to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa with the words “I see you like a little boy or some madman,” composed seventy-seven songs that sound like nothing else from the twelfth century, and produced a body of work spanning theology, music, medicine, natural science, cosmology, and linguistics.
The humility was a strategy.
Hildegard of Bingen is one of the most documented figures of the Middle Ages, not because she was typical but because she was so spectacularly not. She was a woman doing the work of theologians, preachers, diplomats, and scientists in an age when women were expected to remain silent. She managed it, in part, by insisting at every turn that the words were not hers. They came from the Lux Vivens, the Living Light. She was just the vessel, the feather on the breath of God.
Whether that was sincere belief, political calculation, or both at once is a question nine centuries have not resolved.
The Girl in the Wall
In 1098, in the village of Bermersheim bei Alzey in the Rhineland, a girl was born to Hildebert and Mechthild, a family of free lower nobility. She was their tenth child, and according to tradition (though some scholars question the neatness of this story), she was offered to God as a tithe.
What that meant in practice was this: Hildegard was placed in the care of an anchoress named Jutta of Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. The standard hagiographic account says she was eight years old. Modern scholarship (Mews 2009, Silvas 1998) draws a distinction: she was probably placed in Jutta’s care at eight, then formally enclosed on November 1, 1112, at fourteen. The difference matters. A child placed in care is one thing. A child sealed into a cell is another.
Jutta was a severe ascetic. Hair shirts. Extended fasting. Self-mortification. The cell attached to the monastery church was small, and Hildegard’s world contracted to its stone walls, a narrow window into the church, and whatever Jutta chose to teach her: the psalter, basic Latin, singing.
But there was something else inside those walls. From her earliest memories, Hildegard experienced visions. Not dreams, not ecstatic trances. She saw luminous images in what she later called “the shadow of the Living Light,” and she saw them while fully conscious and awake. Cosmic structures. Burning figures. Rivers of fire. Symbolic creatures that didn’t correspond to anything in the physical world.
For decades, she told only Jutta. She had learned early that speaking of visions could bring accusations of demonic possession.
The Living Light
Hildegard’s visions were not a single phenomenon. She distinguished, carefully, between two kinds of illumination.
The first she called lux vivens, the Living Light itself: a rare, overwhelming, direct encounter with divine radiance. She experienced this only a few times in her life.
The second, and far more constant, was the umbra viventis lucis, the shadow of the Living Light. This was the permanent background illumination she lived with daily. Every vision she recorded appeared in this light. As the scholar Barbara Newman has explained, the umbra was a reflection of the divine, not the divine itself. Hildegard spent her life seeing the world through a filter no one else could perceive.
In 1136, Jutta died, and the women who had gathered around the anchoress elected Hildegard as their magistra. She was now the leader of a small community of nuns, still housed within the monastery of Disibodenberg.
Then, in 1141, at forty-two, the visions demanded something new. They demanded to be written down.
The passage Hildegard left describing this moment is famous: a fiery light of exceeding brilliance permeated her whole brain, inflamed her whole heart, not like a burning but like a warming flame. And suddenly she knew the meaning of the Scriptures.
She was commanded to write. She resisted. She fell ill, as she consistently did when she tried to ignore the visions. It was a pattern that would repeat throughout her life: resistance brought sickness, obedience brought relief. Whether we read this as psychosomatic, divine, or something else entirely depends on which framework we bring to it.
She confided in the monk Volmar, who became her lifelong secretary and collaborator. Volmar told the abbot. The abbot told the Archbishop of Mainz. The machinery of the medieval church began to turn.
Scivias and the Missing Manuscript
What the church’s machinery had to evaluate was Scivias, Scito Vias Domini, “Know the Ways of the Lord.” Hildegard worked on it from 1141 to 1151, and the result was one of the strangest and most ambitious theological works of the Middle Ages.
Three parts. Twenty-six visions. A complete map of salvation history from creation through the Last Judgment.
The visions are not gentle. Hildegard saw a cosmic egg containing the universe, with humanity trapped at its center. She saw the Church as a woman giving birth in agony while demons assaulted her. She saw Lucifer as a worm. She saw virtues as crowned maidens locked in combat with monstrous vices. Each vision came with elaborate illustrations, likely created under Hildegard’s direct supervision, and they remain some of the most striking images in medieval art: gold backgrounds, flaming wheels, hybrid creatures that belong to no bestiary.
The question was whether any of this was legitimate.
The medieval church had a formal process for evaluating claimed divine visions: discretio spirituum, the discernment of spirits. Hildegard needed approval from someone with authority. She got it from two of the most powerful men in Christendom.
Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of the age, wrote a cautious endorsement in 1146. He did not vouch for the content. He encouraged her to continue. It was enough.
Then came the Synod of Trier in 1147-1148. Pope Eugenius III, himself a former Cistercian and Bernard’s protege, had a portion of Scivias read aloud to the assembled bishops. He authorized Hildegard to continue writing. The Sibyl of the Rhine now had papal backing.
What we study today, though, is not what Eugenius saw. The original illuminated Rupertsberg manuscript of Scivias was transferred to Dresden for safekeeping in 1942. It disappeared after February 1945, during the Allied bombing and the Soviet advance into the city. It has never been found.
What saved Scivias visually was foresight. Between 1927 and 1933, four nuns at St. Hildegard’s Abbey in Eibingen created a meticulous hand-painted facsimile, with Sister Josepha responsible for the paintings of the illuminated manuscript. That copy is what we have.
And there is another survival story. The Riesencodex (“Giant Book”), a massive manuscript of 481 folios weighing roughly fifteen kilograms, contains the largest surviving collection of Hildegard’s works. It too was sent to Dresden. In March 1948, nuns Margarethe Kuhn and Caroline Walsh smuggled it back to the west. It is now at the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain in Wiesbaden. We know Hildegard’s work because individual women decided her manuscripts were worth risking a journey across occupied Germany to save.
Richardis
Before we follow Hildegard’s public career any further, there is a story that reveals something the theological works never quite show: the depth of her human attachments.
Richardis von Stade was a noblewoman who served as Hildegard’s companion and secretary at Disibodenberg and then at Rupertsberg. She was Hildegard’s closest collaborator, probably her closest friend. Her brother, Hartwig, was the Archbishop of Bremen.
Around 1151, Hartwig arranged for Richardis to be elected abbess of the convent at Bassum. It was a promotion. It was also, for Hildegard, a catastrophe.
Hildegard fought it with every weapon she had. She wrote to the pope. She wrote to Hartwig. She wrote to Richardis herself, in language that breaks through every layer of theological rhetoric. “Woe is me, mother, woe is me, daughter,” she wrote. “Why have you forsaken me like an orphan?”
She lost. Richardis left for Bassum.
On October 29, 1152, Richardis died. Word reached Hildegard that before her death, Richardis had expressed a wish to return to Rupertsberg.
The scholars who study Hildegard’s letters point to this correspondence as among the most emotionally raw documents in medieval monastic literature. It is also a reminder that the woman who mapped the cosmos and corresponded with emperors was a human being, and that the loss of a single person could wound her more deeply than any theological controversy.
Breaking Free
The move to Rupertsberg had already happened by then, around 1150. Hildegard claimed a vision commanded her to leave Disibodenberg and establish an independent convent on a hill near the town of Bingen, where the Nahe River meets the Rhine.
The monks of Disibodenberg resisted fiercely. They had profited from the famous visionary’s presence: pilgrims, donations, prestige. Losing Hildegard meant losing revenue.
Hildegard fell gravely ill. This was, by now, her established pattern, and whether we interpret it as psychosomatic or divinely orchestrated, it worked. She left with eighteen to twenty nuns and established herself at Rupertsberg, where for the first time she was truly independent: her own convent, her own authority, her own budget.
She later founded a second convent across the Rhine at Eibingen. From Rupertsberg, she would spend the next three decades writing, composing, corresponding, and building.
The Music
Hildegard composed seventy-seven liturgical works, collected under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, “Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations.” The catalog (per Barbara Newman’s edition) includes forty-three antiphons, eighteen responsories, seven sequences, and four hymns, among others.
To modern ears, they sound like nothing else from the twelfth century. Standard Gregorian chant moves in careful stepwise motion within roughly one octave. Hildegard’s melodies soar and plunge across more than two octaves, with leaps of a fifth, a seventh, even a twelfth. “Columba Aspexit,” written for St. Maximin, covers a range that most trained singers would find demanding. “O Viridissima Virga,” a hymn to the Virgin, is drenched in the green imagery of viriditas.
Then there is the Ordo Virtutum, the “Play of the Virtues,” the earliest known morality play with music. Eighty-two melodies. Seventeen Virtues, each a singing character, battle for the Anima (the Soul). There is also a Devil.
The Devil cannot sing.
This is not a dramatic convenience. It is theology. In Hildegard’s understanding, music is the echo of the harmony that existed in paradise before the Fall. To sing is to participate in divine creation, to heal the rupture between heaven and earth. Evil, which is the absence of that harmony, is literally voiceless. The Devil can speak, he can shout, he can taunt. But he cannot make music. He is excluded from the one thing that connects humans to the angels.
This is the same theology that Hildegard called the philosophy of cosmic harmony, the idea that sound is not decoration but the structure of reality itself.
Viriditas: The Green Force
If you want to understand Hildegard’s mind in a single word, viriditas is the one.
Usually translated as “greenness” or “greening power,” it meant something far larger to her than botany. Viriditas was the vital force flowing through all creation: divine energy made visible in growth, healing, and creative work. Trees have it when they put forth leaves. Humans have it when they act with virtue and compassion. God has it as the generative power that sustains the universe.
Its opposite is ariditas, dryness. Sin, for Hildegard, is not primarily a legal transgression. It is a drying out, a loss of sap, a withering. The sinner’s soul becomes like a dead branch. Redemption is the return of moisture, of life, of green.
This vision evolved over three decades. In Scivias (1141-1151), Hildegard described the cosmos as a cosmic egg, with humanity at the center, surrounded by concentric spheres of elements, stars, and fire. In her final visionary work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (“Book of Divine Works,” 1163-1173), the egg has become a cosmic wheel, more dynamic and interconnected. At the center stands the homo universalis, the universal human, arms outstretched, touching every part of creation.
Everything connects. The human body mirrors the structure of the cosmos. The seasons correspond to the temperaments. Moral choices affect physical health. This is not metaphor for Hildegard. It is cosmology.
The Liber Vitae Meritorum (“Book of Life’s Merits,” 1158-1163) takes a different approach: thirty-five dialogues in which vices speak in first person, making their case, and virtues respond. The vices are not cartoons. They are persuasive. Hildegard gives them good arguments before demolishing them.
The Healer’s Library
Hildegard’s medical-scientific works are the strangest part of her legacy, partly because they sit so uncomfortably between centuries.
The Physica covers nine books and approximately five hundred substances, with roughly two thousand remedies drawn from plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals. Some entries are pure medieval humoral theory. Others are eerily practical.
On wormwood (Capitulum 109), she wrote that it was “the most important master against all exhaustions,” prescribing wormwood wine for melancholy and kidney health. On hops (Chapter 61), she recorded their use as a beer preservative, the oldest surviving written reference to this practice. She championed spelt as “the best of grains,” a claim that modern health food markets have enthusiastically rediscovered.
She also wrote about gem therapy: emeralds held against the forehead for headaches, sapphires for the eyes. This is the point where the modern reader wants to dismiss, and the honest response is to note that Hildegard was working within a framework (the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, the belief that creation’s properties are encoded in its substances) that made internal sense, even if it does not match our own.
The Causae et Curae (“Causes and Cures”) is more systematic: a theory of disease based on the four temperaments, the four humors, and the relationship between body and cosmos. It is also startlingly frank. Hildegard wrote about human sexuality, including female pleasure and the process of conception, with a directness that scholars have called the earliest surviving description of female orgasm in Western medical literature.
For a twelfth-century nun enclosed since adolescence, this is either remarkable observation, remarkable reading, or remarkable willingness to ask questions. Other women would follow her path as writers on science and secrets, but Hildegard was four centuries ahead of the next one.
The Unknown Tongue
Among Hildegard’s more puzzling creations is the Lingua Ignota (“Unknown Language”), a constructed vocabulary of 1,011 words with its own alphabet of twenty-three characters, the Litterae Ignotae.
The words cover a wide range: Aigonz means God. Diuueliz means Devil. Zeonz means man. There are terms for body parts, plants, clothing, religious concepts, and everyday objects. The vocabulary is large enough to be functional, if anyone had ever used it for communication.
Why would a medieval abbess invent a language?
No one knows. The hypotheses range from the mystical (a secret tongue for communion with the divine) to the practical (a bonding exercise for her monastic community, an inside language that created group identity) to the experimental (pure linguistic curiosity, a desire to see how language works by building one). Some scholars have suggested she was exploring the original Adamic language, the tongue that existed before Babel.
Whatever its purpose, the Lingua Ignota makes Hildegard the earliest known creator of a constructed language in European history. Esperanto would not arrive for another seven hundred years.
The Prophet and the Emperor
Hildegard’s surviving correspondence runs to approximately 353 letters, addressed to four popes, two emperors, kings, queens, archbishops, abbots, abbesses, monks, nuns, and ordinary people seeking advice. She did not soften her tone for rank.
To Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, she wrote: “I see you like a little boy or some madman.” This was not an insult. It was a prophetic rebuke: change your ways or face divine consequences. Barbarossa, who was in the middle of an ongoing conflict with the papacy, apparently took it seriously enough to continue the correspondence.
Between 1158 and 1171, Hildegard undertook four preaching tours through the Rhineland, addressing monastic communities and laypeople in Mainz, Trier, and Swabia. A woman preaching publicly was almost unheard of in the twelfth century. Hildegard managed it because she was not, technically, preaching as herself. She was delivering the words of the Living Light. The humility topos did its work.
The final crisis came in 1178, when Hildegard was eighty years old. A nobleman had been buried at Rupertsberg. The cathedral chapter of Mainz claimed the man had been excommunicated and demanded exhumation. Hildegard refused. She said the man had received last rites and had been reconciled to the Church before death.
The punishment was an interdict. Rupertsberg was banned from celebrating the Eucharist and, crucially, from singing the Divine Office.
For any monastic community, this was severe. For Hildegard, who had spent her life arguing that music was the echo of paradise, that singing was humanity’s connection to the angels, that the Devil himself was defined by his inability to make music, it was an attack on everything she believed.
She wrote a long theological defense. Banning music, she argued, was not merely a punishment. It was a cosmic injury. It severed the community from the harmony of creation. It sided with the very silence that the Devil represented.
The interdict was lifted in March 1179. Hildegard had six months left to live.
Divine Vision or Migraine?
In 1913, the physician Charles Singer presented a paper to the Royal Society of Medicine proposing that Hildegard’s visual experiences matched the patterns of migraine aura: the concentric rings of light, the geometric patterns, the shimmering fields. In 1970, the neurologist Oliver Sacks expanded on this in his book Migraine, describing Hildegard’s visions as a “shower of phosphenes” and identifying what he saw as scintillating scotoma patterns consistent with classical migraine.
The idea took hold. It offered a clean, modern explanation: the visions were neurological events. The theology was interpretation layered on top of a medical condition.
There are problems with this.
The historian Katherine Foxhall (2014) argued that the migraine hypothesis rests on a circular argument: it begins with the conclusion (these are migraines), then selects visual evidence that fits while ignoring everything that does not. Migraine aura can produce geometric light patterns. It does not produce twenty-six visions with complex narrative and theological structures, populated by specific symbolic figures engaged in specific dramatic actions. The light phenomena were the background to Hildegard’s visions, not the content. Reducing the content to the background is like explaining a novel by analyzing the paper it was printed on.
There is also the question of what the diagnosis accomplishes, even if it were correct. Suppose Hildegard did experience migraines. She also produced three major visionary works, seventy-seven musical compositions, two scientific encyclopedias, a constructed language, and a cosmological system. If migraine was the trigger, what we need to explain is not the trigger but the output. A neurological event that produces a flash of light is not the same thing as a neurological event that produces a theology.
The honest position is this: the visual similarities between migraine aura and some of Hildegard’s descriptions are real and worth noting. The leap from “some visual patterns resemble migraine” to “the visions were migraines” is much larger than it appears. We can hold both observations without pretending that one resolves the other.
After the Light
Hildegard died on September 17, 1179, at approximately eighty-one years old. Her nuns reported that two streams of light appeared in the sky above her cell at the moment of death.
The medieval church tried repeatedly to canonize her, beginning under Pope Gregory IX in 1227. Formal protocols were submitted, rejected, resubmitted. Paperwork was lost in transit between the local diocese and Rome. The process stalled under successive popes and was never completed. Hildegard remained officially uncanonized for nearly eight centuries, venerated locally in the Rhineland but not recognized by the universal church.
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI resolved the matter through “equivalent canonization,” a process that recognized a longstanding cult of veneration without a formal trial. On May 10, Hildegard was officially inscribed among the saints. On October 7, she was declared a Doctor of the Church, only the fourth woman to receive that title, after Teresa of Avila (1970), Catherine of Siena (1970), and Therese of Lisieux (1997).
The modern reception of Hildegard began in earnest in 1982, when the ensemble Gothic Voices released A Feather on the Breath of God, a recording of Hildegard’s music directed by Christopher Page. It became the bestselling album of medieval music in history. The ensemble Sequentia followed with a project to record Hildegard’s complete musical works. In 2009, director Margarethe von Trotta released the film Vision, starring Barbara Sukowa as Hildegard. The New Age movement adopted her viriditas, her gem therapy, and her spelt advocacy with varying degrees of accuracy.
What gets lost in the modern enthusiasm, sometimes, is the political shrewdness behind the mystical persona. Barbara Newman’s scholarship has shown that Hildegard’s repeated self-description as a “poor little woman” was not modesty but strategy. The humility topos gave her cover. By insisting she was unlearned, she could say extraordinary things without being accused of teaching. By attributing every word to the Living Light, she could rebuke emperors without appearing to claim personal authority.
The last letter worth mentioning is the one from Tenxwind of Andernach, a fellow abbess who objected that Hildegard’s nuns wore their hair unbound with gold crowns and white veils on feast days. Hildegard’s response was pure theology: virgins are brides of Christ and may adorn themselves for their bridegroom. Married women and widows must cover their hair because they have already chosen an earthly husband.
Even in questions of dress code, Hildegard had a cosmology.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias (1141-1151), critical edition by Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 43-43A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Vitae Meritorum (c. 1158-1163), critical edition by Angela Carlevaris, CCCM 90 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum (1163-1174), critical edition by Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke, CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, trans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Causae et Curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903)
- Hildegard of Bingen, Ordo Virtutum, ed. and trans. Peter Dronke in Nine Medieval Latin Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
- Hildegard of Bingen, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, 3 vols., trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994-2004)
- Gottfried of Disibodenberg and Theodoric of Echternach, Vita Sanctae Hildegardis (c. 1180-1190), trans. Hugh Feiss as The Life of the Saintly Hildegard (Toronto: Peregrina, 1996)
- Charles Singer, ‘The Visions of Hildegard of Bingen,’ in Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 1-58
- Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989; 2nd ed. 1998)
- Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
- Barbara Newman (ed.), Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
- Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chapter on Hildegard
- Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age (London: Headline, 2001)
- Katherine Foxhall, Migraine: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)
- Oliver Sacks, Migraine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970; rev. ed. 1992), appendix on Hildegard’s visions
- Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter Litterae Apostolicae declaring Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Church, 7 October 2012 (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana)
- Pope Benedict XVI, decree of equivalent canonization of Hildegard of Bingen, 10 May 2012
- Constant J. Mews, ‘Religious Thinker: A Frail Human Being on Fiery Life,’ in Newman (ed.), Voice of the Living Light (1998)
- Margot Fassler, ‘Composer and Dramatist: Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse,’ in Newman (ed.), Voice of the Living Light (1998)
- Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, Wiesbaden, MS 1 (the Riesenkodex / Wiesbaden Giant Codex containing the Scivias text and Hildegard’s collected works)
