EdSight

Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, polymath, and visionary of the twelfth century whose astonishing body of work — spanning theology, medicine, natural science, music, poetry, art, theater, linguistics, ecology, and architecture — places her two centuries before the Renaissance men typically associated with polymathic achievement. Born around 1098 in Bermersheim, near Alzey in present-day Germany, the tenth child of noble parents, Hildegard was given to the Church at the age of eight — most likely as a tithe, though possibly because of her fragile health or her family's inability to provide a marriage dowry — and placed under the care of the young noblewomen Jutta of Sponheim in the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. The first four decades of her life were spent in obedience, silence, and self-denial with no autonomous voice; it was only with Jutta's death in 1136 that Hildegard assumed the role of magistra (female leader and teacher), and with a profound spiritual awakening at the age of forty-two — when she described “a burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven” that poured into her mind, unlocking her understanding of scripture and the cosmos — that she received papal sanction to make her visions public. After years of correspondence with popes, emperors, bishops, queens, and abbots across the Catholic world, she built and founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, in approximately 1150 — one of the rare women of her era to do so — and later established a sister house at Eibingen. Between 1158 and 1171 she undertook at least four preaching tours, unusual for any woman in the medieval Church, reaching diverse audiences from rulers and clergy to common people. She died on 17 September 1179, having served as abbess for forty-three years and overseen close to eighty nuns; in 2012 Pope Benedict XVI canonised her as a saint and elevated her to Doctor of the Universal Church, recognising her as “a great woman who truly stands out crystal clear against the horizon of history for her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching.” Scholars acknowledge significant faults alongside her achievements: she expressed the anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual biases prevalent in her Church, held hierarchical views of gender and class, admitted only noblewomen to Rupertsberg, and did not challenge prevailing misogynistic structures on behalf of other women.

Hildegard's scientific writings — among the most widely known of her works during her lifetime — constitute a comprehensive medical and natural encyclopaedia that earned her the informal titles of first woman doctor and first woman scientist. Her Physica (Wholesomeness of Creation, 1150–1158) covers medicine, zoology, botany, mineralogy, and earthly elements together with their medicinal properties, demonstrating a reading, absorption, and individual interpretation of Latin medical literature that Glaze (1998) judges places her “in the company of the most advanced thinkers of her day.” Her Causae et Curae (Cause and Cure of Illnesses, 1150–1158) examines the causes and cures of diseases, the role of plants and herbs in healing, human sexuality, psychology, and physiology; Hildegard was the first scientific writer to discuss sexuality and gynecology from a female perspective. Her monastery was distinctively advanced in medical knowledge: all existing documentation shows that women's religious orders outside Hildegard's owned no medical literature before the thirteenth century. In Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works, 1163–1170), Hildegard explored medicine, geometry, astronomy, and microcosm-macrocosm theory within a theology of salvation — a synthetic cosmology composed over one hundred years before Dante's Divina Commedia. Hildegard maintained that her knowledge came directly from God, that she was merely a vessel; contemporary scholars read this claim as both an authentic spiritual conviction and a rhetorical strategy that enabled a woman to hold and exercise intellectual authority in a deeply patriarchal Church.

Hildegard's creative achievements as an originator are without parallel in the medieval world. She invented both a Lingua ignota (unknown language) — a vocabulary list of over a thousand nouns organised by category — and a corresponding Litterae ignotae (unknown letters): a twenty-three-symbol alphabet that stands as the only imaginary language to survive from the Middle Ages. Her musical output, all composed in the second half of her life, comprises seventy-seven songs and chants — collectively known as Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations) — as well as the morality play Ordo virtutum (Order of the Virtues). Her biography is the earliest known biography of any Western composer; all her songs save one were set to original poetry by Hildegard herself, in a “free verse” and kunstprosa (“art prose”) style original for her era. Her musical notation employs symbols not found elsewhere. She considered music a cosmological force: “the whole universe is vibrating with music, making melody,” and “the word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.” The illustrations in her books — whose production she oversaw and to which she likely contributed rough sketches — enlarge rather than merely depict the meaning of her visions. The morality play Ordo virtutum, the oldest surviving morality play known to scholars, was both an artistic and an explicitly educational work: its seventeen roles, performed by her nuns, taught the sisters about individual moral struggle and “the ways in which their model of life served to explain and sustain the central meanings of faith.”

Hildegard's approach to education — which Matthew Fox has called “folk education” because “it excludes no one: not the old, young, the undereducated, the peasant, not even the educated” — centred on teaching the whole individual, with a particular emphasis on virtue, morality, and the individual's inner life. As magistra and abbess, she “conceived the care of souls as animated as much by teaching as by ruling,” and was addressed by her nuns as both “mother” and “teacher.” She praised educators who “sing righteousness into the hearts of human beings” and viewed her monastery itself as a school for virtue. Hildegard insisted that the purpose of education was not the transmission of information but the building of a person — the cultivation of wisdom through creativity, leading ultimately to wisdom as compassion. She located learning everywhere: in the movement of nature, in sound, in the physical senses, in community life. “Our greatest treasure is a living intellect,” she wrote, and she never ceased allowing her understanding to evolve. Hildegard's insistence that the whole body knows — that God is “reflected in our senses” — led her to call upon sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch in her texts, making her writings sensory as well as doctrinal experiences. This holistic vision anticipated later pedagogical movements: her belief that every individual carries meaning within themselves — “man holds heaven and earth and other created things within himself” — resonates with Dewey's argument against schooling that causes the child to “lose his own soul,” and with Nel Noddings's ethic of care and her call for educators to help students identify what makes them feel whole.

Eight centuries before the current climate crisis, Hildegard articulated a theology of ecology grounded in a moral and spiritual interdependence between humanity and the natural world. “All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. Without it we cannot survive,” she wrote, and she declared with equal force: “The earth must not be injured, the earth must not be destroyed!” For Hildegard, caring for the world and all its flora and fauna was an act of compassion inseparable from her broader educational mission. She found spiritual meaning in the rhythms of nature — hearing music in the cosmos, seeing the divine at work in the seasons and streams — and she embedded this ecological vision in her scientific works, her poetry, and her theology. The concept she expressed in her writing, viriditas (greening power or life force), figures a vitality flowing through all creation that humans are morally obliged to protect and foster. Her ecological perspective was also practical: as the designer and overseer of Rupertsberg monastery, which included modern amenities such as piped running water, and as a cultivator of medicinal gardens, Hildegard enacted a daily relationship with natural systems. Contemporary applications of her ecological philosophy align closely with calls in today's educational literature for direct, hands-on environmental projects that foster a visceral personal connection between students and nature — connections Hildegard believed were foundational to human wisdom and virtue.

Hildegard was not a passive contemplative. She publicly denounced corruption in the clergy in her preaching tours, wrote letters to emperors demanding reversals of ecclesiastical decisions, and threatened Frederick Barbarossa directly: “Hear this, if you wish to live! Or I run you through with my sword!” Her 400 surviving letters — written knowing they would be read aloud and shared beyond their immediate recipients — were instruments of public teaching and advocacy as much as personal correspondence. They reached rulers, abbots, and religious communities as far as England and Jerusalem. Hildegard also developed what scholars now recognise as a complete educational curriculum: the songs, dramatic work, and theological expositions contained within Scivias constitute “a particular educational program” designed for her nuns, and her scholarship created the core of a desideratum library for Rupertsberg. At the heart of this curriculum was arts integration — the use of poetry, painting, music, and theater to convey teaching in ways accessible to both the learned few and the illiterate masses. Hildegard identified a union between creativity and knowledge, believing that “human actions were determined more by art than technology, since they were ultimately a reflection of the Creator.” She used every form of representation at her command — prose, verse, composition, visual art, performance — to open the hearts and minds of her audiences, anticipating by centuries Eisner's (1994) argument that a “reliance on linguistic examples alone may very well limit what some students are able to understand” and his call for alternative forms of representation in the classroom.

• Hildegard von Bingen. (1141–1151). Liber Scivias [Know the Ways]. [English trans.: Bingen, H. (1986). Scivias (B. Hozeski, Trans.). Bear & Co.]
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1150–1158). Causae et Curae [Cause and Cure of Illnesses].
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1150–1158). Physica [Wholesomeness of Creation — Natural and Effective Power of Things]. [English trans.: Hildegard, B. (1998). Hildegard von Bingen's Physica: The complete English translation of her classic work on health and healing (P. Throop, Trans.). Healing Arts Press.]
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1151–1170). Symphoniae [Songs].
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1156–1163). Lieber Vitae Meritorum [The Book of Life's Merits].
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1163–1170). Liber divinorum operum [Book of Divine Works].
• Hildegard von Bingen. (1147–1179). Epistolae [Letters].