Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179), known as the 'Sibyl of the Rhine,' was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, theologian, composer, naturalist, and pharmacologist whose output across so many disciplines has no close parallel in the medieval world. Hildegard was born into a noble family in the Rhineland and, as the tenth child, was offered as a tithe to the Church at around age eight, placed in the care of the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. After Jutta's death in 1136, Hildegard was elected magistra (mother superior) of the small community of nuns. She later founded two independent monasteries: Rupertsberg near Bingen (1150) and Eibingen across the Rhine (1165). Hildegard had experienced mystical visions since early childhood but kept them private until 1141, when, at around age forty-three, she received what she described as a divine command to 'write what you see and hear.' With the encouragement of her secretary Volmar and the formal approval of Pope Eugene III — obtained, according to tradition, through Bernard of Clairvaux at the Synod of Trier — she began producing theological works of startling originality. Her three major visionary works — 'Scivias' (Know the Ways), 'Liber Vitae Meritorum' (Book of Life's Merits), and 'Liber Divinorum Operum' (Book of Divine Works) — present a comprehensive cosmology integrating theology, ethics, and the natural world. As a composer, Hildegard left more surviving chants than any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is among the few known to have written both music and words. Her liturgical corpus includes the morality play 'Ordo Virtutum' (Play of the Virtues), arguably the oldest surviving morality play. Her scientific works, 'Physica' (Natural History) and 'Causae et Curae' (Causes and Cures), document the medicinal properties of hundreds of plants, stones, and animals; scholars have identified her as a founder of scientific natural history in Germany. She also invented a constructed language, Lingua Ignota. Hildegard maintained a vast correspondence with figures including Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Henry II of England, and four popes, and she undertook four preaching tours across Germany — highly unusual for a woman in the medieval Church. Pope Benedict XVI granted her equivalent canonization on 10 May 2012 and named her a Doctor of the Church on 7 October 2012, only the fourth woman to hold that title.