Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, writer and composer. She reported visions from childhood, and in her forties she began recording them in Scivias ('Know the Ways'), a large account of creation, redemption and the Church, illustrated with images of what she saw. She went on to write on ethics, cosmology, medicine and natural history, composed liturgical songs and a musical drama, and corresponded with popes and emperors. She shows how a medieval woman could claim intellectual authority through revelation. In 2012 she was canonised and named a Doctor of the Church.

Key ideas

• Her visions, which she said came while she was fully awake, were a source of knowledge carrying divine authority.
• The human being is a microcosm whose body and soul mirror the structure of the cosmos.
• Viriditas, or 'greenness', names the life-giving power of God at work in nature and in the soul.
• Virtues and vices are locked in a dramatic struggle for the soul, which she staged in her Ordo Virtutum.

Major works

• Scivias (1142–1151)
• Liber Vitae Meritorum (1158–1163)
• Liber Divinorum Operum (c. 1163–1174)
• Ordo Virtutum (c. 1151)
• Physica (12th century)

In the Book corner

• Scivias 1141–1151 · Intermediate
  A book of visions completed around 1151 by Hildegard, a Benedictine abbess in the Rhineland. The title shortens Scito vias Domini, 'know…

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