Hildegard of Bingen
Speak and write what you see and hear: the world is God’s living work.
Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine magistra in the Rhineland who, from 1141, set down in Latin the visions she said she received from the “living light”. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg and Eibingen, wrote three great visionary works, books on nature and medicine, liturgical songs and a sung morality play, corresponded with popes and emperors, and preached in public, an exceptional role for a woman of her time.
What does the living world reveal to those who learn to see and hear it?
The essentials
A life in dates
Biography- 1098Birth at Bermersheim
- 1112Enclosure at Disibodenberg
- 1147–1148Synod of Trier
- 1150Rupertsberg
- 1179Interdict and death
Biography
Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine magistra in the Rhineland who, from 1141, set down in Latin the visions she said she received from the “living light”. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg and Eibingen, wrote three great visionary works, books on nature and medicine, liturgical songs and a sung morality play, corresponded with popes and emperors, and preached in public, an exceptional role for a woman of her time.
Philosophy
Viriditas, greenness, names the moist, life-giving vigour that God pours into plants, bodies and souls; its opposite is dryness, the withering of nature and of virtue alike.
Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
Who came before, who came after.
Above the timeline, each solid arc marks a documented reading, back in time or forward; dotted arcs pair kindred questions.
Kindred questions4
A first reading.
The ways of vision
Follow how the Scivias turns each vision into teaching, from the call of 1141 to the images of the cosmos and of the Church.
Scivias (Know the Ways)Nature and healing
Explore how the Physica classifies plants, stones and animals by their qualities and links knowledge of nature to the care of body and soul.
Physica (Book of Simple Medicine)The Soul and the Virtues
Read the Ordo Virtutum as a sung drama of choice, fall and return, in which music itself marks the difference between good and evil.
Ordo Virtutum (The Play of the Virtues)Linked thinkers
- Kindred questions