Hildegard of Bingen 1098 – 1179

Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess, polymath, and one of the most important religious figures of the twelfth century. From the age of three she experienced visions of the divine, which she only began to record in her forties on the instruction of her confessor. Her trilogy Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, and Liber Divinorum Operum presents a sweeping cosmological and ethical vision in which the order of nature mirrors the inner life of God. She also composed liturgical music, treatises on natural medicine, and a vast correspondence, and she founded two monasteries on the Rhine. She was named a Doctor of the Church in 2012.

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 at Bermersheim in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a family of the lesser nobility. Promised as a tithe to the Church, she was placed from the age of around eight in the care of the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, and on Jutta's death in 1136 she was elected magistra of the small women's community there. In 1150 she founded an independent convent at Rupertsberg near Bingen.

From around 1141 she received papal authorization to publish the visions she had experienced from childhood. The great visionary trilogy comprises Scivias (1141-1151), the Liber Vitae Meritorum (1158-1163), and the Liber Divinorum Operum (1163-1174); to these she added the natural-historical and medical works Physica and Causae et Curae, the morality play Ordo Virtutum, the immense musical corpus of Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, an extensive correspondence, and lives of Saint Disibod and Saint Rupert. She undertook four preaching tours and corresponded with popes, emperors, abbots, and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Hildegard's combination of visionary cosmology, exegesis, natural philosophy, and music is unique among medieval writers, and her reputation has only grown since her formal canonization and elevation to the rank of Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. She died at Rupertsberg in September 1179.