Hildegard of Bingen: Nun, Composer, Inventor of a Secret Language

In 2012, something rare happened: Pope Benedict XVI declared a woman a Doctor of the Church who had died more than 830 years earlier. Hildegard of Bingen was only the fourth woman in the history of the Catholic Church to receive this honor, and along with Albertus Magnus one of only two Germans to hold the title. Yet she was just a Benedictine nun living on the Rhine in the 12th century who still did things hardly foreseen for a woman of her time.

She wrote about her visions, composed chants and one of the oldest surviving morality plays, developed a language of her own complete with an alphabet, wrote about plants and illnesses, went on preaching tours, and at the end of her life refused to have a dead man exhumed, even though her convent was punished for it.

In short: Hildegard of Bingen (around 1098 to 1179) was an abbess, mystic, composer, and naturalist on the Rhine, known as the "Sibyl of the Rhine."

Hildegard was born around 1098 in Bermersheim, into a noble family, as the tenth child, sickly from birth. It was customary to promise the tenth child to the Church. So as a child, at seven, eight, or fourteen depending on the source, she was sent to Disibodenberg, a remote hilltop monastery, into the care of Jutta of Sponheim. Jutta was a noblewoman who lived as an anchoress, enclosed in a cell for the rest of her life.

There Hildegard continued her education with the monk Volmar, who was not much older than she was and later became her secretary and lifelong friend. When Jutta died, the women elected Hildegard their magistra, their mistress, in 1136. For decades she had been one nun among many, until everything changed five years later.

In 1141, at around 42 years old, Hildegard received, by her own account, a command in a vision to share her visions and write them down. She hesitated at first, out of reluctance and because of what people might say. She confided in her abbot Kuno, who encouraged her to write. The result was her first major work, the "Scivias" ("Know the Ways"), a collection of 26 visions with commentary, completed around 1151 or 1152, with Volmar as scribe. She supervised the illustrations in the Rupertsberg manuscript herself.

The decisive step came in the winter of 1147/48: at the Synod of Trier, parts of the work were brought before Pope Eugene III, who had them read aloud to the assembled clergy and authorized Hildegard to publish everything she received in visions. Bernard of Clairvaux, then one of the most powerful religious voices in Europe, is also said to have endorsed the visions as genuine. That gave a nun papal backing, a shield she would need again later.

Hildegard wanted more independence for herself and her nuns. After a vision in 1148, she asked to move with her community to the Rupertsberg near Bingen, a hill above the Rhine. The move wasn't uncontested: the monks of Disibodenberg resisted, partly because of her fame. By around 1150, the new convent stood, and Volmar served there as provost, confessor, and scribe. In 1165 a second house followed, the empty Augustinian monastery at Eibingen, which nobles and non-nobles alike could enter.

Her reputation as the "Sibyl of the Rhine" reached far: people seeking advice and healing came from England to Byzantium. That this success had a price is shown by the story of Richardis, her closest collaborator. When two archbishops wanted to move her away, Hildegard at first refused to release her and even involved the pope. In the end, the archbishops prevailed, and Richardis left Rupertsberg.

That a nun preached in public was unusual in the 12th century. From 1158 on, Hildegard undertook four preaching journeys, according to one source rather apocalyptic in tone. Other major works date to the same years: between 1158 and 1163 she produced the "Liber vitae meritorum," the "Book of Life's Merits" with six visions and commentaries, and between 1163 and about 1173/74 the "Liber divinorum operum," the "Book of Divine Works."

In doing so, Hildegard, so it is recorded, always distinguished between her own opinions and what she understood as divine inspiration. And the convent of Eibingen, which she founded in 1165, still exists today, even though the present building dates from 1904.

From the 1140s on, Hildegard composed, and she also wrote poems. Later she collected her chants in a cycle, the "Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum," roughly "Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations." She also wrote the "Ordo Virtutum," a sung play in which virtues and the soul appear, regarded as one of the oldest surviving morality plays.

That is unusual: for most musicians of the 12th century, we know neither name nor biography. For Hildegard, we have both. She is therefore regarded as one of the earliest named women composers of the Latin West and as one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony.

Between 1150 and 1158, Hildegard developed something with few parallels in the history of languages: the "Lingua Ignota," the "unknown language." It survives as a glossary with 1,011 words, mostly nouns and a few adjectives, and with an alphabet of its own made up of 23 letters, the "Litterae Ignotae." The glossary begins at the top, with God (aigonz) and the angels, and works its way down through the world, from saints and devils through church and monastic life to herbs, flowers, and insects. Each word comes with a Latin, sometimes a German, translation. The word for devil is diuueliz, for duck luschia, for vestment scolmiz.

What she intended with it, no one knows for sure. Hildegard herself called it "an unknown language brought forth by the simple human Hildegard." The only surviving sample text is mostly Latin, with just five key words from the secret language, and only one of those (loifol, "people") appears unambiguously in the glossary. That shows the vocabulary was larger than the surviving 1,011 words. No developed grammar survives. The Lingua Ignota is regarded as the oldest documented constructed language in history. Whether it was meant as a mystical language, a cipher, or a word game remains speculation. She is said to have used the letters only a few times in her correspondence.

The most important copy lies in the "Riesencodex," a magnificent volume weighing around 15 kilograms. It is said to have survived the bombing of Dresden and is now kept in Wiesbaden.

In the 1150s, Hildegard wrote two volumes on nature. The "Physica" is a natural-history and medical reference work with an herbal, a bestiary, and a lapidary. "Causae et Curae," "Causes and Cures," is a handbook of physical and mental illnesses and their treatment, with extensive material on sexuality as well. Some therefore see Hildegard as a founder of natural-history research in Germany.

It's worth keeping in mind that 12th-century knowledge isn't today's. Her texts rest on humoral theory, not on modern medicine. What they show is something else: that in the Middle Ages an abbess systematically collected and wrote down knowledge about plants, animals, and the human body.

In the last year of her life, Hildegard was drawn into the sharpest conflict of her life. In the Rupertsberg cemetery lay a man who, in the view of the Mainz church leadership, had died excommunicated and therefore couldn't rest in consecrated ground. Hildegard insisted he had reconciled with the Church and received the sacraments, and she said she had received permission for the burial from God. When the Mainz clergy demanded exhumation, she refused. It was her one clash with Church rules, and it hinged on a point of fact, not on doctrine.

The punishment hit her convent hard: an interdict was placed on Rupertsberg, no Mass, no sacraments, and no music. Hildegard found the ban on singing especially insulting. She complied with the ban on singing and communion but didn't obey the order to dig up the body, and appealed to higher church authorities. In March 1179 the interdict was lifted, a few months before her death on 17 September 1179. The sisters later reported that at the hour of her death they saw two streams of light in the sky crossing over her room.

A year after her death, two monks who had worked under her began her biography. After that, Hildegard quickly faded into the background, and her writings were copied only rarely. Locally she was always venerated as a saint, and her name appears in the Roman Martyrology, but a formal canonization process was never completed. That changed only in 2012. On 10 May, Pope Benedict XVI extended her veneration to the whole Church in a so-called equivalent canonization, and on 7 October he named her a Doctor of the Church. She is the fourth woman with this title, after Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux. Her shrine stands in Eibingen Abbey. As early as 2010, Benedict XVI had spoken about her in two general audiences, praising her humility and the "rich theological content" of her visions.

Of the Germans, only Albertus Magnus holds the title besides her. That closes a long arc: a woman who fought for a hearing her whole life was officially declared a teacher of the Church more than eight hundred years after her death.

For an overview, the key stations, so nothing gets lost among so many works and dates.

Hildegard shows why an era needs more than a single person. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and her story touches all five: she herself as a person, Rupertsberg as a place, the interdict of 1178 as an event, the idea that the human being mirrors the cosmos as an idea, the Riesencodex as an object. That's how the Tales of Chivalry season builds the whole picture of a time, how people lived, believed, and thought, not just a list of knights and battles.

Hildegard of Bingen lived in a world that offered women hardly any public roles. She was heard anyway: by popes, by clergy, and by people seeking advice from England to Byzantium. And when they tried to silence her at the end of her life by forbidding her convent to sing, she didn't give way on a matter that was, for her, a question of truth. Afterward she nearly fell into oblivion, until a Church that had never formally declared her a saint made her a teacher centuries later. Perhaps that is her greatest work: that her voice, despite everything, was not lost.