Hildegard of Bingen

Who they were

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Benedictine abbess, composer, visionary, correspondent of popes and emperors, and author of the earliest surviving medical writing by a woman in Western Europe. Canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012, more than eight centuries after her death.

Where they came from

Given to the church at around eight years old as the tenth child of a minor noble family, and enclosed with the anchoress Jutta at the monastery of Disibodenberg. She succeeded Jutta as magistra in 1136, and later founded her own house at Rupertsberg against considerable institutional resistance.

She reported visions from early childhood and said nothing about them for decades. At forty-two she described a vision instructing her to write, and — significantly — sought and obtained approval before doing so, including from Bernard of Clairvaux and eventually Pope Eugenius III. That approval is why she was able to write at all, and why she was able to preach publicly on four tours, which was extraordinary for a woman of her period.

She wrote three visionary works, an enormous body of music, a morality play, an invented language, and two medical works: Physica, a natural history of plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds and animals with their medicinal uses, and Causae et Curae, on the causes and treatment of disease.

What they taught

Her medicine is Galenic and conventional, and this is the point most worth making. She works with humours, with heat and cold and moisture, and with the ordinary monastic pharmacy of her time. There is nothing visionary in it. She lists plants, says what they are good for, and describes preparations.

She kept the two apart deliberately. The visionary works claim divine authority explicitly — they open by saying so. Physica and Causae et Curae do not. They read as practical compilations from monastic tradition, from Dioscorides via the standard channels, and from local German folk practice, with her own observations added. A woman who was entirely willing to say "I was shown this" did not say it about her medicine.

Her distinctive contribution is viriditas — "greenness" or "greening power" — the vital force she describes running through creation and through healthy bodies. It functions in her writing as something between a theological idea and a physiological one, and it is the concept modern readers usually take from her.

She also wrote about sexuality, conception and gynaecology with a directness that has surprised every generation of readers since, including a description of female orgasm that is generally reckoned the earliest by a woman in Western literature.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the German folk material in Physica is genuinely valuable. A substantial number of her plants are local German ones absent from the Mediterranean-derived classical tradition, and she gives them German names. It is one of the better windows onto twelfth-century folk practice that exists, precisely because a literate woman inside an institution wrote down what the people around her actually used.

We can say the modern "Hildegard medicine" industry is not her. There is a substantial commercial trade — particularly in German-speaking countries — in spelt products, "Hildegard" supplements, and dietary regimes sold under her name. Much of it descends from the work of a mid-twentieth-century Austrian doctor, Gottfried Hertzka, rather than from her texts, and it makes therapeutic claims she did not make and that have no evidential support. Her actual medical writing is a twelfth-century compilation and contains, among the useful entries, remedies involving gemstones and a good deal that does nothing.

We can say she was not the proto-feminist she is sometimes made into, and was not conventional either. She wrote within an entirely orthodox framework and expressed thoroughly medieval views about women's nature — while also arguing successfully with archbishops, founding houses against opposition, preaching in public, and dying under interdict for refusing to disinter a man her superiors said had been excommunicated. She was right about that, incidentally, and the interdict was lifted.

And we can say her real significance for this section is documentary. She is the earliest voice we have from inside the monastic medical tradition that is not a copy of a copy of Dioscorides — someone who ran an infirmary, saw patients, knew the local plants, and wrote it down. Almost everyone else doing that work in her century left nothing.

We cannot separate the compiler from the compilation. What can be said is that a woman in the twelfth century wrote two practical medical books, kept them carefully free of the divine authority she claimed elsewhere, and thereby left better evidence than most of her contemporaries.

Further reading

• Physica, in Priscilla Throop's English translation.
• Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom (1987) — the standard scholarly treatment.
• Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (1989), for the biography without the supplements.