Hildegard of Bingen: The Medieval Woman Who Did Everything

Imagine being a woman in the year 1130, inside a Europe that expected you to be silent, obedient and more or less invisible. Now imagine becoming, from within that same world, a physician, a natural scientist, a composer whose music still moves people nine centuries later, a widely read author, an adviser to popes and emperors, and a visionary the Church itself would one day honour. That was Hildegard of Bingen, and almost nothing about her life should have been possible.

The world that tried to keep her small

Hildegard was born in 1098 in the German Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family, and given to the Church as a girl, which was a common fate for a daughter a family could not easily place. She grew up enclosed in religious life at a time when most women, however gifted, lived and died without leaving a single written line behind them. Education belonged to men, and so did authority. The expectation for a woman, even a clever one, was a quiet existence inside walls, and the world saw no reason to expect anything more from her. What she did with that narrow life is the astonishing part.

A healer who wrote it down

Hildegard became one of the great medical minds of her century. She compiled works on the natural world and on healing, describing hundreds of plants, trees, stones, fish and animals, along with the remedies she believed each could offer. Like every physician of her age she worked within the old framework of the four humours, the idea that health depended on a balance of fluids in the body, and yet she brought to it an unusually careful eye and a real insistence on noticing what actually helped. She wrote about what to do for a fever, how to dress a wound, which herb might quiet a sleepless or sorrowful mind. She even championed particular foods as medicine in their own right, among them spelt, the old grain she considered especially nourishing and gentle on the body, advice that sounds startlingly modern to anyone who has wandered through a health food shop lately. Did she understand the chemistry behind any of it? Of course not, because nobody could. Yet she was doing something close to early science, gathering observations, organising them, and committing them to paper at a moment when scarcely any woman was permitted near the act of writing at all.

A philosophy of the whole person

What sets Hildegard apart is that she never treated the body as a thing separate from the rest of a person. She wrote about food and sleep and joy and sorrow as forces that acted directly on the flesh, convinced that a troubled mind could sicken a body and that a well-tended body could steady a mind. She wrote about women's health, and about desire and conception, with a frankness that was genuinely remarkable for a nun in the twelfth century, describing the female experience from the inside rather than borrowing it from male authorities. In an era that often regarded the body, and the female body especially, with suspicion, she approached it as something intricate, meaningful and worth understanding on its own terms. That instinct, that the physical and the emotional are one system rather than two, is exactly where modern medicine has slowly and belatedly arrived.

Viriditas, the greening power

At the very heart of her thought sits a single word, and it is almost uncanny how well it fits a world named for a garden. Viriditas, usually translated as greenness or the greening power, was Hildegard's name for the moist, vital life force she saw running through every living thing, the same energy that pushes sap up a stem and turns a plant toward the light. A flourishing body, a flourishing soul and a flourishing garden were, to her, expressions of the same greenness, and illness was what happened when that force dried out. She was describing, in the language of the twelfth century, something we are still reaching for today, the sense that vitality in the body and vitality in the spirit are one continuous thing.

Music that still sounds like nothing else

Then there is the music, which may be the part of her that reaches us most directly. Hildegard composed a large body of sacred song, soaring and strange, full of long unspooling melodies that behave quite unlike the plainchant of her surroundings, and she also wrote what many consider one of the earliest surviving musical dramas. She once described herself, with disarming humility, as a feather carried on the breath of God, and her music has that very quality, as though it were being breathed rather than built. Here is the part that should genuinely astonish you. Her melodies were all but forgotten for centuries, and then, within our own lifetimes, recordings of her work found a wide and devoted audience, climbing the classical charts and filling concert halls. A medieval nun became, quite improbably, a recording artist some eight hundred years after her death.

The visions she would not hide

From early childhood, Hildegard saw things, vivid waking visions of light and image that she experienced as messages from God. For decades she told almost no one, frightened of how they would be received by a Church quick to suspect women of heresy. When she finally began to record them, in a great illustrated book, she did something shrewd as well as brave. Rather than risk being dismissed or condemned, she sought examination and approval, and won the backing of powerful churchmen, including the Pope himself. That protection handed her something almost no woman of her era possessed, the sanctioned right to write, to teach, and to be heard in public.

A woman who spoke to kings

Having gained that footing, she used every inch of it. She founded her own monasteries and led them with a firm hand, even moving her community against the wishes of the men who oversaw it. She kept up a correspondence with the most powerful figures in Europe, popes and emperors and bishops and kings, and she did not flatter them, choosing instead to advise, challenge and occasionally rebuke, and they wrote back to her. In her later years she did something close to unthinkable for a medieval nun, travelling on preaching tours and speaking publicly to clergy and laypeople alike. Picture the sheer nerve that required, a woman standing before crowds to teach in a world that had firmly decided women had nothing worth teaching.

Why she belongs to Among Roses

What makes Hildegard feel so close to everything this world is built around is her flat refusal to split the things we still keep apart. She saw no wall between science and spirit, between medicine and music, between the intellect and the soul. She could study a healing herb in the morning, compose devotional music in the afternoon, and record a vision at night, and to her these were one continuous way of paying attention to a living world. In 2012, more than eight hundred years after her death, the Church named her a Doctor of the Church, a title held by only a handful of people in all of history and by very few women. She stands, in a sense, as the patron of the whole Among Roses idea, that beauty and knowledge belong together, that the green world and the inner one were never meant to be strangers, and that a woman paying deep enough attention can become something the centuries find themselves unable to forget.