Who was Hildegard of Bingen really?

Hildegard of Bingen is one of the best-documented women of the Western Middle Ages. Born in 1098 and dying in 1179, this Benedictine nun was a community leader, monastery founder, author of three major visionary works, composer, letter writer, preacher, and observer of the natural world. Her modern legacy has also assigned her other identities: herbalist, physician, forerunner of ecology, inventor of “holistic” medicine, and even founder of naturopathy. Some of these connections are based on her actual work; others project much more recent categories onto the 12th century.

To understand Hildegard, one must enter her own world. She was not an occultist in the sense the word would acquire in the 19th century: she was a Christian nun for whom the Bible, liturgy, theology, cosmology, medicine, and contemplation of creation still belonged to the same sacred order. Her visions were not separate from her work; they were one of its deepest sources and gave her view of the world the luminous intensity that runs through her texts.

It is precisely this context that makes her life remarkable. Very few women of the 12th century left behind a body of work comparable in scope: visionary treatises, songs, a liturgical drama, letters, texts on nature and health, saints’ lives, and even a lexicon of invented words. In 2012, nearly nine centuries after her death, Benedict XVI officially extended her veneration to the universal Church and then proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church.

A Birth into Rhineland Nobility

Hildegard was born in 1098 into a noble family from the Rhineland region. Tradition places her birth in Bermersheim, although the details of her early years are less certain than those of her adult life. Medieval sources present her as the tenth child of her parents, Hildebert and Mechthild, a detail that has sometimes been interpreted symbolically as the offering of a “tithe” to God. Historians remain cautious about this type of hagiographic reconstruction.

The future abbess states that she experienced unusual visual phenomena from childhood. In the texts in which she looks back on her life, she describes a luminous perception received while awake, without loss of consciousness. She insists that she does not see with the eyes of the body as in an ordinary vision and that she does not fall into ecstasy. This way of describing her experiences would later play an essential role in the legitimacy she would grant them.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, some authors have sought to explain her visions as migraine with aura. The historian Katherine Foxhall has shown how fragile this retrospective interpretation remains. There is therefore no reason to reduce Hildegard's images to a symptom: in her own texts, they are experienced as an inner light, a received form of knowledge, and a spiritual experience of exceptional power.

Jutta of Sponheim and the entry into Disibodenberg

On November 1, 1112, at about fourteen years of age, Hildegard officially entered a small women's community established beside the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. There she lived under the direction of Jutta of Sponheim, a noblewoman who had chosen a secluded religious life.

Iconographic source: My Catholic Life.

Jutta played a decisive role in Hildegard's formation. The young nun learned the Psalter, liturgical reading, and the practice of Benedictine life. Her education was unlike that of a cleric who had attended cathedral schools; Hildegard would in fact emphasize her lack of advanced scholarly instruction. This does not mean that she was illiterate or unfamiliar with the culture of her time. Her writings show a considerable assimilation of the Bible, the liturgy, and Christian authors, also aided by the learned men who worked with her.

The women's community at Disibodenberg was then dependent on the men's monastery. Hildegard was not yet an “abbess” in the full institutional sense. After Jutta's death in 1136, the nuns elected her magistra, that is, leader of their community. From this position, she would gradually acquire remarkable autonomy.

1141, the order to write down the visions

The year 1141 marks the great turning point in her literary life. Hildegard recounts that at the age of forty-two she received the order to write down what she had long seen and understood. She hesitated and, according to her own account, fell ill, then began composing the Scivias.

She does not work alone. The monk Volmar serves as her secretary, adviser, and Latin corrector. Richardis of Stade, a nun from her community to whom Hildegard is deeply attached, also takes part in the work. This collaboration is important for understanding the materiality of her work: Hildegard's voice is central, but her books emerge from a monastic workshop in which dictation, copying, correction, and formatting involve several people.

The Scivias, whose title can be understood as “Know the Ways,” was completed around 1151. It brings together twenty-six visions accompanied by theological interpretations. Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Church, the sacraments, and the end times are arranged within a vast Christian architecture.

Richardis of Stade was not an anonymous copyist. Born into an aristocratic family, she became one of Hildegard's closest collaborators during the writing of the Scivias. Their relationship emerges with unusual force in the surviving correspondence.

Around 1151, Richardis was chosen to become abbess of the monastery of Bassum. Hildegard strongly opposed her departure. She wrote to the archbishop of Bremen, Pope Eugene III, and Richardis's mother in an attempt to prevent the separation, asserting that she feared the appointment was motivated by family status rather than a genuine vocation.

The efforts failed. Richardis left Rupertsberg and died shortly afterward, in 1152. The letter Hildegard subsequently addressed to her brother Hartwig reveals her grief and offers rare insight into her emotional life. The episode also shows the limits of her power: her recognized authority as a visionary did not allow her to control ecclesiastical appointments or the strategies of noble families.

Before disseminating her visions, Hildegard sought recognition for them. She wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the great religious authorities of his time. He encouraged her cautiously.

Decisive recognition came at the Synod of Trier in 1147-1148. Excerpts from the Scivias were presented to Pope Eugene III. According to ecclesiastical sources, the pope read part of the text and authorized Hildegard to continue her writing. This approval completely transformed her position.

She was no longer merely the head of a small Rhineland community. Her reputation as a Christian visionary spread through ecclesiastical circles. Correspondents came to seek her advice, and her letters circulated among abbots, bishops, popes, princes, and emperors.

The Departure from Disibodenberg and the Founding of Rupertsberg

Around 1150, Hildegard undertook to transfer her community to Rupertsberg, near Bingen, on the Rhine. The decision met with resistance. Disibodenberg Monastery would lose not only the nuns but also some of the prestige and resources associated with their presence.

Nevertheless, Hildegard defended her project and ultimately secured the move. The new monastery gave her far greater institutional autonomy. It was at Rupertsberg that most of her writing, music, correspondence, and administrative work developed.

Contrary to the romantic image of a place isolated from the world, Rupertsberg was situated within an active network of river, religious, and political travel. Visitors passed through, letters were sent from there, and manuscripts were produced and copied. The abbey became a center of female intellectual activity, whose work has survived in part thanks to its scribes.

Iconographic source: Romantischer Rhein.

In 1165, Hildegard acquired a former Augustinian establishment in Eibingen, on the opposite bank of the Rhine. She established a second community of nuns there while continuing to reside mainly at Rupertsberg.

This foundation shows that she was not merely an author confined to study. She administered property, led communities, negotiated with ecclesiastical institutions, and made practical decisions. Her religious reputation therefore also rested on concrete experience in monastic governance.

The Scivias and the Visionary Images

The illuminations associated with the Scivias are now among the most readily recognizable medieval images. Circles of fire, symbolic architectures, cosmic figures, and luminous forms have been reproduced in countless works devoted to Hildegard.

Nevertheless, a common oversimplification should be avoided: there is no evidence that Hildegard personally painted each of these illuminations. Research on the Rupertsberg manuscript, however, indicates that she probably played a direct role in their conception and educational purpose. The images are not mere decorations; they serve to organize and explain the theological material of the text.

Iconographic source: Le Pèlerin.

This detail is important because the images later acquired an existence almost independent of the text. Today, they are used to illustrate cosmology, feminine spirituality, or medieval esotericism, even though they originally belong to a work of Christian theology.

The Scivias is only the first part of a much larger whole. Hildegard subsequently composed the Liber vitae meritorum, the Book of the Merits of Life, followed by the Liber divinorum operum, the Book of Divine Works.

These three works form a coherent theological structure. The first presents the history of salvation and the organization of the Christian faith. The second portrays virtues and vices in a moral reflection. The third unfolds a cosmological vision of creation and the place of human beings in the world.

Current interest in Hildegard’s cosmic imagery sometimes leads to isolating her diagrams from the rest of her work. Yet her universe is not an independent treatise on astrology or cosmic magic. The correspondences between the cosmos, the human body, and the order of the world serve a theology of creation.

The Latin word viriditas recurs regularly in Hildegard’s work. It literally means greenness, vegetal vigor, or the state of being green. In her writings, the term also becomes an image of fruitfulness, vitality, and participation in God’s creative work.

Modern reception has repeatedly turned it into a kind of universal subtle energy comparable to concepts from traditions with no historical connection to medieval Christianity. This assimilation is anachronistic.

Research devoted to her preaching shows that viriditas is rooted in biblical and patristic language. Hildegard develops the opposition between greenness and desiccation to speak of spiritual life, fruitfulness, sin, and restoration. She develops this vocabulary with great originality, but does not describe a measurable therapeutic energy or an occult principle independent of her theology.

An exceptional female composer of the Middle Ages

Hildegard left behind a remarkably extensive musical corpus. Her songs are collected under the title Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. Antiphons, responsories, hymns, and sequences are intended for the liturgy or the devotion of her communities.

Her music is distinguished by highly developed melodic lines and a vocal range that can create a different impression from the more familiar monophonic liturgical chant. These features have contributed greatly to her musical rediscovery in the 20th and 21st centuries.

It would nevertheless be misleading to portray Hildegard as an independent composer in the modern sense. Her music is inseparable from monastic life, the liturgy, the calendar of saints, and her theology. She writes for religious voices and for communities that live daily through song.

Ordo Virtutum, completed around 1152, occupies a unique place. This sung drama in Latin features the Soul, the Virtues, and the Devil. The Virtues seek to reclaim a soul tempted by the world, while the Devil is the only character who does not sing: he cries out or speaks, because musical harmony is denied to him.

The work is sometimes presented as the “first opera” in history. The comparison is appealing but anachronistic, since opera emerged several centuries later in a completely different context. It is more accurate to speak of a sung moral and liturgical drama, conceived for the female Benedictine environment of Rupertsberg.

Recent research shows how deeply the Ordo Virtutum is rooted in the Benedictine rule, the consecration of virgins, and the convent’s processional practices. Its artistic singularity should therefore not detach it from its monastic framework.

Physica and Causae et curae

Hildegard’s contemporary fame rests largely on two works connected with nature and medicine: the Physica and the Causae et curae. Their manuscript history is complex, and their modern titles do not necessarily correspond to the titles Hildegard herself would have given them.

The Physica presents itself as a vast encyclopedia of plants, trees, animals, stones, fish, birds, and other elements of the natural world. It describes their qualities and many therapeutic uses. The Causae et curae focuses more on the body, illness, humors, sexuality, generation, and remedies.

These texts are not modern medical manuals. They combine knowledge inherited from Greco-Roman medicine, healing traditions, medieval pharmacology, observation, and a Christian view of the human being. The historian of medicine Faith Wallis emphasizes that their reputation as medical texts was built partly after Hildegard’s death and that the manuscripts were compiled and revised by people in her circle.

It is therefore possible to study the history of medieval medicine and materia medica through them, but not to automatically turn each remedy into a therapeutic recommendation for today. For plants and their historical uses, our Botanical Grimoire makes it possible to explore separately the traditions attributed to plants without confusing ancient documentation with medical advice.

No. This claim, very widespread on wellness websites and in certain popular editions, projects a modern discipline onto a 12th-century author. The word naturopathy and the movements associated with it emerged in much later contexts. Hildegard never proposes a system called that. She understands health according to the frameworks of her time: humoral theory, diet, the qualities of plants, bloodletting, living conditions, the relationship between body and soul, and the Christian order of creation.

The “medicine of Hildegard” known today is itself a 20th-century construction. The Austrian physician Gottfried Hertzka and later Wighard Strehlow selected and reinterpreted elements from medieval texts in order to create a contemporary therapeutic method. A study devoted to this reception explicitly notes that the expression and system of “Hildegard-Medizin” do not appear in the original writings.

This distinction does not diminish the historical interest of the Physica. It simply avoids turning a medieval compilation of natural and medical knowledge into a health program validated for the 21st century.

Hildegard is regularly presented as “the inventor of hopped beer” or as the woman who taught monasteries how to brew. These claims do not correspond to the historical evidence.

The use of hops in brewing is documented in Europe before her birth. Written sources already connect it with brewing activities several centuries earlier, and archaeology also provides ancient evidence.

The Physica nevertheless remains a remarkable testimony. Hildegard notes there that the bitterness of hops can slow the spoilage of certain beverages. She therefore understood its preservative value. This observation does indeed belong to her work and deserves to be preserved, but it does not make her the inventor of hopped beer.

The modern success of this legend reveals its legacy: each era tends to reconstruct a Hildegard corresponding to its own concerns, whether natural medicine, ecology, cooking, or craft brewing.

The Lingua ignota and the Litterae ignotae

Among her most astonishing works is the Lingua ignota, the “unknown language.” The surviving document contains slightly more than a thousand invented words accompanied by translations or glosses in Latin and German. Hildegard also used an alphabet of signs called Litterae ignotae.

She is commonly presented as the inventor of Europe’s first constructed language. This claim requires qualification. We do not possess a complete language comparable to Esperanto, with an autonomous grammar and lengthy texts. What survives is primarily an organized glossary, supplemented by a few uses of invented words in Latin passages.

The exact purpose of this glossary remains debated. Monastic secret, intellectual exercise, symbolic language, assertion of inspired authority: several interpretations have been proposed. Research by Sarah Higley and other specialists shows above all that the Lingua ignota must be understood within the medieval history of glossaries, sacred language, and lexical invention. Nevertheless, it is an extremely rare creation for the 12th century and bears witness to Hildegard’s extraordinary intellectual range.

A correspondence that spans Europe

Nearly four hundred letters are attributed to the Hildegardian corpus. They are addressed to religious figures, communities, bishops, popes, laypeople, and rulers. This correspondence should not be read as a collection of private conversations in the modern sense. Some letters were copied, reorganized, or revised to form collections intended to preserve the abbess's authority. They nevertheless remain a major source for assessing her network.

Hildegard does not hesitate to admonish the powerful. She writes to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and criticizes certain political or ecclesiastical decisions. Her status as a woman does not prevent her from claiming a prophetic voice, precisely because she presents this voice not as an expression of personal authority, but as a mission received from God.

Once she reached maturity, Hildegard undertook several preaching journeys through the Rhineland and beyond. She spoke in Mainz, Trier, Cologne, and other cities or religious communities.

This role is remarkable in a world where institutional public preaching remains largely a male preserve. Hildegard overcomes this limitation through her status as a recognized prophetess and the authority granted to her visions.

Her sermons call for the moral reform of the clergy, denounce corruption, and remind communities of their religious duties. She also opposes movements she considers heretical. Her freedom of speech does not place her outside the Church: it is exercised at the very heart of the Christianity of her time, which she seeks to call to order, purify, and reform through the authority she attributes to her visions.

An independent woman, but not a modern feminist

Hildegard exercises exceptional authority for a medieval woman. She leads her own communities, writes to rulers, preaches, composes, teaches, and negotiates with abbots and bishops. This position explains why she became a major figure in women's history.

It would nevertheless be anachronistic to directly attribute the categories of contemporary feminism to her. She does not claim institutional gender equality in the modern sense and accepts several ecclesiastical frameworks of her time, notably the exclusion of women from the priesthood.

Her strategy of authority frequently even involves asserting her own weakness. She presents herself as an uneducated woman whom God commands to speak. This language of humility allows her to claim a very powerful voice without asserting that she derives this authority from her personal rank.

This does not prevent her work from showing a woman capable of creating a considerable intellectual and religious space within a system dominated by men. It is this historical reality, rather than a modern political identity projected onto her, that gives her life its full force.

The success of her cosmic diagrams, her texts on stones and plants, and her Lingua ignota encouraged her inclusion in anthologies of esotericism. This connection can be useful for studying her reception, but it becomes misleading when it is used to define her historical identity.

The word “occultism” refers to a set of currents that took shape much later. Hildegard practiced neither the ceremonial magic of the Renaissance, nor modern Hermeticism, nor 19th-century occultism. Nor did she attempt to establish a religion parallel to Christianity.

Her stones, plants, visions, and cosmological correspondences belong to a medieval Christian conception in which nature is a readable and ordered divine creation. The boundaries between theology, natural philosophy, and medicine did not yet correspond to current disciplinary categories.

Her place in a history of esotericism must therefore be explained: Hildegard is important for the way later centuries reused her imagery, cosmology, and medicine, but she must first be understood as a 12th-century Benedictine nun.

Toward the end of her life, Hildegard faced a serious conflict with the local ecclesiastical authorities. An excommunicated man had been buried in the Rupertsberg cemetery. The diocesan officials demanded that his body be removed. Hildegard refused, asserting that he had reconciled with the Church before his death.

The community then faced a liturgical ban that restricted singing and public celebration. For Hildegard, whose entire thought assigned music a central role in divine praise, the sanction was particularly serious.

She wrote to defend her decision and developed a genuine theology of music. The ban was eventually lifted. The episode reveals a Hildegard who was elderly but still capable of opposing male authorities when her religious conscience required it.

Death and Cult

Hildegard died at the Rupertsberg monastery on September 17, 1179. Her reputation for holiness had already been firmly established during her lifetime. Canonization procedures were initiated in the Middle Ages, but they did not succeed according to the legal forms that would later become standard. Her cult nevertheless continued for centuries, particularly in German-speaking regions and within the Benedictine order.

Iconographic source: Saint Hildegard Abbey of Eibingen.

On May 10, 2012, Benedict XVI carried out an equivalent canonization: instead of a new traditional canonization ceremony, the pope officially extended throughout the Church the cult of a person venerated as a saint for a very long time and entered her in the catalogue of saints.

On October 7, 2012, he then proclaimed Hildegard a Doctor of the Universal Church. This distinction is not based on her medicine or her naturalistic works, but on the recognized importance of her theological teaching.

Hildegard’s current fame is much more recent than one might imagine. Her works circulated in the Middle Ages, then part of her corpus became less visible. From the 20th century onward, academic, musical, and spiritual interest exploded.

Her chants are recorded, her illuminated manuscripts reproduced, her medical texts translated, and her persona adopted by very different circles: women’s history, early music, alternative medicine, spiritual ecology, Christianity, popular culture, and contemporary esotericism.

This rediscovery had a paradoxical effect. It made it possible to recover a major medieval female author, but it also produced imaginary Hildegards: “first naturopath,” “inventor of beer,” “energy healer,” “feminist before her time,” or possessor of therapeutic secrets revealed directly by God.

Historical work does not diminish her portrait by correcting these images. On the contrary, the real Hildegard is much richer: monastic leader, theologian, visionary, composer, observer of nature, and author capable of producing one of the most substantial bodies of work by a woman in the Middle Ages.

Sources and reference points

The most useful academic overview today is The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, edited by Jennifer Bain and published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. The book brings together specialists in her history, theology, music, manuscripts, and medicine. Michael Embach’s chapter on her life establishes the chronology from the main biographical sources and emphasizes the gaps that remain. The book is presented on Cambridge Core.

For the medical texts, the chapter by Faith Wallis, “Hildegard of Bingen: Illness and Healing,” in the same volume, is particularly important. It shows that the Physica and Causae et curae should be situated within 12th-century medicine and their manuscript history, rather than read as manuals of a contemporary therapeutic system. The entry is available on Cambridge Core.

The distinction between medieval texts and modern “Hildegard medicine” is also documented in the study “Traditional European Medicine—After all, is Hildegard von Bingen really right?”, which notes that this modern system was developed in the 20th century based on the work of Gottfried Hertzka and Wighard Strehlow. The reference is available on ScienceDirect.

Regarding her visions and retrospective diagnoses of migraine, Katherine Foxhall’s article, “Making Modern Migraine Medieval,” published in Medical History, traces the emergence and spread of this interpretation in the 20th century. It is available on Cambridge Core.

The Lingua ignota was the subject of a dedicated study by Sarah L. Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion. The work edits and examines the approximately one thousand surviving words and places them within the history of medieval linguistic invention. The book’s presentation is available from Springer.

Finally, Hildegard’s ecclesiastical status in 2012 is directly documented by the Holy See. Benedict XVI extended her veneration to the universal Church on May 10, 2012, through equivalent canonization, then proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church on October 7. The apostolic letter of October 7, 2012 recounts her life and explains this recognition.