Hildegard of Bingen is one of the most extraordinary minds the medieval West produced. A Benedictine nun who founded her own monastery on the Rupertsberg above the Rhine, she experienced visions from early childhood, finally accepting in her forties the call to write them down. The result, her Scivias, is a record of twenty-six visionary experiences accompanied by extended theological and cosmological commentary.
She was also a composer of liturgical music whose surviving compositions are now widely performed, a natural philosopher whose works on medicine and the properties of plants and stones still circulate, a poet, a playwright, and the author of a constructed language. She corresponded with popes, kings, abbots, and the leading scholars of her age, who wrote to her seeking counsel.
Her central image is the living light, a divine luminosity that she claimed to perceive directly and to which all her teaching pointed. Her cosmology is integrative: human beings, the natural world, and the divine are woven together in what she called viriditas, a word she coined that translates roughly as the green vital power flowing through all things.
Hildegard was canonised and named a Doctor of the Church in 2012. There is no public-domain English translation of her major mystical works yet available, so we link out to the authoritative modern translations rather than hosting text bodies. The Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series volume on Hildegard, translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, is the standard scholarly edition. The Bear and Company collections by Matthew Fox provide accessible thematic anthologies.
