Gone Medieval - Hildegard of Bingen - Prophetess, Composer, Mystic

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

How did a cloistered, twelfth century nun become a visionary, composer, healer, preacher, and adviser to popes and emperors?Despite having visions from childhood - even in the womb, she claimed - Hildegard of Bingen waited until the age of 42 when she heard a divine command to “write what you see and hear”, a moment that launched one of the most remarkable careers of the medieval world, including as creator of the most distinctive surviving sacred music of the Middle Ages.Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr Hetta Howes, to explore the extraordinary life, dazzling theology, and legacy of Hildegard.MORE:Julian of NorwichListen on AppleListen on SpotifyLives of Medieval NunsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. we delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

Within the cloistered silence of her convent, beneath the Rhineland Hills, Hildegard of Bingham lived a life of prayer and service. To her fellow nuns, she seemed a woman of calm authority, modest and disciplined. But Hildegard harbored an incendiary secret. Since childhood, she had seen things that others did not. A brightness that shimmered at the edges of the visible world. Voices that spoke not to the ear, but directly to the soul. Her visions came not in dreams, but in full waking awareness.

Then, in the year 1141, the divine presence that had hovered for decades descended upon her with irresistible force. Her cell filled with an unearthly fire that was alive with intelligence. It showed her cosmic shapes of creation, the circling of stars, the structure of the heavens, the life force of God that ripens and revives all beings. She saw the Trinity revealed as three parallel lights, interwoven as flame is with flame. And she saw herself as a feather on the breath of God, lifted and directed by divine will. And in that moment of blinding clarity, she heard a voice. Vast, resonant, and commanding, that gave her a personal charge that would define the rest of her life.

To speak and write what she saw and heard. For years, Hildegard had kept her visions private. But now, the command was explicit and urgent. Her fame began to spread, and word reached the highest authorities. Pope Eugenius III was astonished by her visions, treating them as authentic expressions of the Holy Spirit operating through a humble vessel. And he encouraged her to continue writing, for the glory of God. Hildegard's convent became a destination for pilgrims and correspondence. Kings, popes, and emperors sought her counsel.

Yet she never viewed her fame as her own achievement. She saw it as the unfolding of the heavenly command first uttered within that blazing vision. Today I'm joined by Dr. Hedda Howes, senior lecturer at City University of London. We've spoken before on Gone Medieval in the episodes Medieval Writers, Extraordinary Women, and Chaucer's wife of Bath, medieval feminist. Both are well worth revisiting. But today we're going to get to grips with Hildegard Bingham, one of the most discussed figures of the 12th century,

both for the sheer range of her activity and for the unusual authority she wielded as a woman in the medieval church. Hedda, welcome back to Gone Medieval. Yay, thank you so much. I'm so excited. I am so so excited to have you on today because you are so well placed to discuss one of my favorite people of all time Hildegard of Bingen.

Ah, Heldegar. I mean, that's the thing is you just have to sigh because what a phenom. I suppose with Hildegard, we're going to have to begin at the beginning. So can you tell me a little bit about her early life? You know, we know about

her visions, and those started out already when she was a child. Is that correct? Yeah, she had her first vision when she was just three years old. Although she also writes about kind of having sort of some experience in the womb as well. So it's very, very early days for her that she sort of has this, has this experience.

Three is mad. My daughter is coming up to three. And I'm like, whoa, that is really little. Like she can barely, barely feed herself and having visions. But yeah, so right from the start, she is destined, if you like, for this particular religious life, which is lucky for her because her parents decided to give her to the church as what we call a tithe, which again, bearing in mind how young she was when that happened, she was sort of around eight years old when she was given by her parents to the church.

She was a tenth child of a noble family. And if you were the tenth child, it was almost tradition that you would be handed over to some sort of religious institution just because it's really expensive to be handing out dowries and, you know, trying to bankroll lots of family members. So that was sort of not uncommon, but what was quite uncommon in Hildegard's case is that she didn't go to a convent. She went to an anchor hold, which is sort of a bricked in cell, basically. Not alone. She was with at least two other women, possibly three.

But yeah, it seems to be coincidental that she had these visions and then was given to the church. She actually tried very hard to conceal her visions for a really, really long time, like for most of the first half of her life. she didn't tell anyone much that she was having these experiences because she was worried how they would be taken. Obviously, there's all kinds of concerns about are these from the devil? Is she making it up? Is it heresy? So she keeps quiet about it for quite some years. But yeah, it's happening for her from a really young age. So I find this quite interesting because I think that there's a tendency to not quite understand how it is that monasteries and nunneries function.

And really, members of the lower nobility are who they are built upon, right? You know, that's who gets given as a monk or a nun is spare noblings, I guess, if that makes sense. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Do you have a spare child given to the church? And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't considered cruel or they didn't have to have a particular vocation or, you know, everyone's religious, but it's not necessarily to do with anything other than just tradition. Yeah. And this being a really powerful institution as well.

And this idea that actually for women, you know, you get a really good education, you get a little bit more autonomy sometimes. You don't have to get married and have children if that's not your bag. So there were upsides to it. But yeah, it wasn't remotely unusual what happened to Hildegard in that respect. She probably, even at such a young age, had an idea what was coming. Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah, when she's sent over at about eight, that is about the time that I would expect people to go up as a novice. when you get taken over to the monastery, they usually start you pretty young.

We definitely know that there are fairly young ladies in nunneries learning and studying and things. But I suppose you've already hit on it. What is interesting is how she ends up in this particularly enclosed life. And so here she's in Dismodembourg and she's with a fairly famous anchores off the bat, right? But also I think that this is an important point because I think when we tend to talk about anchorites, everyone is picturing Julian of Norwich and quite right too. We love her. Yes, of course. But it's not always that there's one person in a tiny little cell.

Sometimes we have kind of like classrooms where people can come and go and things like that. And it's more like house arrest and less like room arrest. I guess is that what's going on here? Yeah. And so firstly, I think when we think about anchorites and Julianne of Norwich, we think about someone being alone, which in Reality was often never really true for many anchorites at all, and it certainly doesn't seem to be true for Hildegarde. She definitely lived with Jutta von Sponheim, who was, like you say, a famous mystic, who died around middle age, very extreme in her devotional practice. But it also taught Hildegard's, you know, Latin and taught her, it looks like quite a lot of different things when they were together.

It looks like there were probably two other women with them. Whether or not they could come and go, we don't know for sure. but we do know that after Jutter died, the women who remained became much more free moving. So whereas before they'd been enclosed and didn't leave the anchor hold, it seems likely they didn't leave. They became novices afterwards and actually said, you know, Hildegard set up, became head of that community and then later on set up her own monastery elsewhere. And I think in early research, for a long time research from Hildegard of Bingham,

it was thought that she went into the cell when, she was eight. But it now seems as if what actually happened is she was with Jutta's family near Dissabodenberg until she was maybe about 14, still very young to be like for us. But actually, you know, in terms of the time period, there's something quite horrifying, I think, about the idea of an eight-year-old going into a cell and perhaps not 100% understanding and the sort of restriction of movement and it being a much more severe form of life, even if you do have some company and sort of some upsides in terms of education. 14 is very young but feels a bit more palatable, I think, when you're sort of imagining it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also, if you have a close look at what she's doing, right, because we have these pieces of information that say she's working as the pigmentarius in there. And that's quite an interesting role, you know, because that's like, oh, you're doing some herbalist stuff. You're doing some gardening. Yes. You're doing a little bit of work as essentially, definitely. person who looks after the ill. So she's got this particularly interesting job there. And I think we've got to see that spill over into her later writings, right? I think in all of her writings,

I think one of the things that's most distinctive about Hildegard of Bingham of all the kind of medieval female mystics, or all mystics from that time, is just how saturated all of her writings, her letters, her sort of medical books, her documents of her visions are in the natural world, this sense of everything needing to be in harmony and sort of the healing power of the outside world and needing to pay attention. And one wonders if perhaps being enclosed

for quite a number of years, I think she was about 38 when she wasn't enclosed anymore and became more of a sort of run-of-the-mill none or other than anchores. You know, how much of that is sort of being forced to slow down and pay attention to the outside world

and perhaps natural affinity as well. But it is fascinating how alert she is to nature and what nature can offer and how to sort of care for and look after the body with nature, but also care for and look after nature itself. We could learn a lot from her. Oh, so much. I will never stop saying it.

Can we talk a little bit about her early visions? You know, you've said already she's having them from the time she's a toddler, which is absolutely bogg her. What's she's seeing? And she's keeping them very quiet, but these are ecstatic visions. Can you imagine as a three-year-old not reporting this to your parents? No, absolutely not. And I guess there's a couple of different types of prophecy.

So there's a really famous story about her, which is that she's kind of keeping all these things quiet, but she lets slip that she knows the markings that there's going to be on this calf that's yet to be born. So she sees a pregnant cow and she sort of says, oh, I think, you know, let's slip that she knows. is what the markings are going to be on the cast. So there's this prophecy power that she has, this sort of foretelling. But there's also, as you say, these sort of ecstatic visions, which are usually accompanied by orbs of very bright light, quite distinctive in the sense that they're often female figures.

So she sees figures sapientia, knowledge, love, these sort of beautiful female figures telling her things about sort of divine. And then when she gets to middle age, She has like the mother of all visions, which she describes as being completely overwhelming. And after that vision, she is able to know the scriptures. She's able, she knows sort of songs that she's never learned. She knows languages that she's never learned. She basically gets this sort of like full body injection of divine knowledge, even though she says

there's absolutely, you know, this isn't human learning. This has all been transmitted through her. So it's almost like she's been in training her whole young life, getting these visions of things and glimpses. And then around Middle Age, it sort of hits her full force. And that's when she really becomes quite famous as a mystic and sort of is compelled to reveal what she has seen. I find these visions quite interesting because there's been a bit of debate. You know, there are people who have said, oh, she's seeing these lights.

Maybe this is actually just a migraine. Maybe this is epilepsy. Right. And I don't find that particularly convincing because, you know, I get migraines and I have yet to learn the divine knowledge of the cosmos. I'm mostly just I'm mostly just ouchy. A hundred percent. But what do you think about this? I was just thinking exactly the same as he was talking.

I also, every now I get migraines, I've had them with the flashing lights. I have not produced the body of work that the Lord of God being and did. I have not had the prophecies. I have not had, you know, and I think you said you're not convinced. I think I feel exactly the same. I'm not convinced and I'm also not hugely interested because I think in terms of the way I see my role looking into her as a sort of researcher, historically, but also in terms of what she wrote, I'm taking her at her word and she for sure felt that they were real. And what she did with the experience, whether it was the migraine,

some sort of extreme migraine that gives you visions of holy figures or whether it was, in fact, to her real, you know, it sort of doesn't matter because she did so much with that knowledge for so many different people. She became this sort of counselor, agony aunt. She was telling off Pope, she was telling off Frederick Barbarossa himself, you know, she was making real waves in a way that no one had really prior to her. And I find, yeah, I mean, I think there's a tendency that you're hinting at there as well, which is that oftentimes when you get women in the Middle Ages who are doing incredible things, there's a tendency to try and pathologize them that we don't get with their counterparts. And, you know, if the line of thinking is maybe they

were migraines, but then she also was doing all these incredible things. Fine, I can get on board with that. But if it is like, oh, Hildegada Bingen was just having some migraines, I'm like, nah, she did, she was, you know, she had this extraordinary life, she did all these incredible things. The visions feel the way she writes about them really vivid, but also kind of lead her to, you know, do really incredible things, like move all her nuns to a completely new place and build up a whole monastery on her own, you know, this sort of energy that this woman had. which is interesting given how she was quite sickly. The energy always fascinates me.

Whenever I feel I'm really, I'm not very productive when I'm unwell. And I always think about Hildegarde of Bingham just being so productive through so many bouts of illness. Because she does talk about suffering a lot and she does talk about lots of different bouts of illness. Some of them related to her vision, some of them not. But it doesn't seem to have stopped her in the slightest. Well, can we talk a little bit about how she gets to this point? I mean, so she's having these visions, basically her entire life. But how does she kind of move from being, you know, the nice little pigmentarius out in the garden to being the head of this religious community?

Yeah, it's an astonishing question, really, isn't it, to think? So essentially, what seems to have happened is from her, because one thing I should say about Hilda God actually that I love about her is that she is a first saint that we have where her, like, official biography includes some autobiographical passages. That was really unusual. Normally people were just writing about you, but her sort of official Vita has sections that she herself dictated, probably didn't write, but, you know, in her own words. And there's sort of a sense in which her scribes didn't want to tamper too much,

or at least the saying they didn't want to tamper too much with her words. But her sort of narrative, and it's corroborated by others who've written about her, is that she sort of had this sort of amazing vision in middle age. And in it, God said to her, you have to tell people about these visions now. You know, you've hid them too long. But for a while, like a number of, you know, she's too frightened to. She does disclose them to a man called Volmer, who was a really good friend of hers, like throughout her life.

She'd known it. It seems like she'd known him. He was a monk at Dissabodenberg, and they'd known each other and continue to know each other until he died. And she disclosed to him, he believed in her. He started writing down some of her visions for her. She says he changed nothing. Some other men say that he polished her Latin

and made it all kind of a bit more grammatically correct. We can believe who we want to believe on that. And then he, it sort of, then it became a bit of a chain going upwards between sort of increasingly influential men. Volma mentions it to one of his sort of more senior people at the monastery. And word gets quite quickly to Pope Eugenius III. the actual pope. He can't go any higher. He hears about Hildegard and he sends for some of her

writing. She's not finished her first book yet, but there's extracts of it. He sends for them and he's so impressed that he reads them out aloud and he reads them to archbishops and cardinals, all the clergy. There's some reports that Bernard of Clevo was there at that time and sort of says, yes, this woman is a prophet, this woman is a real deal. And from that moment on, she's got the Pope sanction and things accelerate quite quickly. She goes from being sort of a local minor celebrity who people have started to hear rumblings of in terms of, oh, she maybe has some visions and she was an anchoress, so people have visited her in that capacity too. And she starts to become this absolute powerhouse who speaks through what she calls

the living light, which is essentially God, and uses that to, you know, like I said, chastised popes, chastised emperors, basically negotiate her own monastery, which nobody at Dizbodenberg wanted her to leave because she was, you know, celebrity and brought in, you know, fame and acclaim and all that. So it sort of happens quite rapidly. But I love that it happens for her in middle age. I think, again, I find that really comforting sometimes when I'm reading about her. It like, you know, oftentimes, you know, when you're reading about medieval women, everything happens quite young or influential people in that time at all. Hildegarde start. getting famous around, you know, in her 40s and then lives to 81.

Do you know, a real inspiration to all of us, I have to say. But can we just talk a little bit about this? You've mentioned it already. But when she is initially an abbess at Disipodenburg, you know, she's still under the thumb of the abbot there, right? You know, nunneries don't necessarily exist in their own right, particularly at this point in time. They're technically offshoots a lot of the time of other monasteries. And she isn't exactly free to do whatever it is she wants to, right? Exactly. So she isn't even technically, people call her Abbas in letters and other things,

but she wasn't technically an Abbas even after she moved. And when before she moved, she was extremely subject and the women in her sort of community were subject to the abbot. And it seems like when she said that she wanted to move, everyone was very astonished. So she says she wants to move to this other. location, Rupertsburg, which isn't too far away, but it is a distance, you know, to travel away. And the monks can't understand. The abbot can't understand. And at first, the abbot says absolutely not, you're not leaving because, you know, we want you to stay here where we can kind of keep an eye on

you. And he only eventually agrees to release her after she has this sort of bodily sickness that she says, God has sent and that she won't be able to move or do anything until she's allowed to leave. But in terms of, you know, this puzzling over why did she want to, it sounds like things have got a bit crowded for the women at Dizabodembourg. You know, she's attracted lots of new women to come and join her. But it seems like that could have been worked out. And what's more at stake here is that Hildegard wanted autonomy. She wanted to go and be in charge of herself and be in charge of her community

and do things the way that she wanted to do them. Now, she was always pretty orthodox. And there were only a couple of ways in which she sort of turned heads, I think. But even so, it feels to me like there was a sense that she just wanted her and sort of the women under her care to start again somewhere where it could be on their own terms. And there was a lot of wrangling. She did a lot of arguing with the Abbott over, for example, the dowries that were given to Dizabodenberg when these women joined. Could she take those dowries with her? What was her role?

How much could she do things autonomously? And there was a lot of back and forth. and she describes the monks of Dizabodenberg gnashing their teeth at her because they were so angry that she wanted to leave and how could she be abandoning them just when she's got, you know, this gift from God? But yeah, I think she wanted to start out on her own and have some more autonomy and leadership somewhere else. Can we talk a little bit about the basically the scene that unfolds

when she manages to negotiate this? Because, you know, you've already hinted at it, But this is one of my favorite stories about her. You know, she's saying, well, that's it. I want to go down the road. And Kuno, her, Abbott, says, no, you may not. And so she says, oh, that's it. I'm sick.

I'm unable to get out of bed. And Kuno kind of stirms in there, doesn't he? And is eventually forced to relent because he can't move her either? Yes. He tries to lift her up physically to be like, get up. What are you doing? And he says, well, the accounts tell us that she was as heavy as a stone. And it was at that point that he realized that he had to let her go that this was a real physical illness.

But it's interesting because there's a really famous historian of medieval mystics called Peter Dronker, who said that Hildegovina had the touch of a megalomaniac about her. And I think the reason he says that is because oftentimes these illnesses, or speaking through God are quite strategic and come at a really opportune moment. And who's to say whether, you know, the sickness was real or not, but certainly it must have looked to this abbot Kuno, like she's just doing it because she wants to move and I'm not going to let her move, but then, you know, he goes into her room and sort of sees that actually this seems to be legitimate.

And there's also another story about a monk who speaks up against them leaving. He's very vocal about it. And he's struck down with this horrible illness. His tongue swells up. He's like near death. And he only is freed from the sickness when he sort of stops speaking out against Hildegard leaving. And we're told that he goes to Rupertseburg himself and starts moving like vines out the way to start building this site. Because he's realized the error of his way.

So yeah, there's a lot of this sort of sense in which you're like, oh, okay, at just the right time, this illness. And we're told that, I love this little detail. We're told that as soon as he agreed and relented and said she could move with her sister, she leaps out of bed as lightly as if she had never been immobile at all. I love it because it just strikes me of, you know, like a child having a temper tantrum or something. Yes. And it works because, you know, if you've got, I mean, this is a thing that she got away with that later mystics would never have done.

She came at just the right time, really. Women later, there was a lot more forbidding climate in terms. terms of sort of looking for heretics and all of that. But she, she gets away with a lot because she has the Pope sanction. He's said that she's a prophet. So if she says, I'm having this vision from God and you need to do this or God is telling you this is what you need to do, she's got the highest sort of church authority on side. And everyone is a bit helpless in the face of that. So on the one hand, in real term, she's got not very much power at Dizabodenburg. She's under the thumb of the abbot. She's not even an abbess. But then she also has this,

other kind of power that is so much higher than everyone there, that it sort of creates this real tension between the men who are used to being in charge and now this new sort of upstart woman that has the highest religious authority in sort of the Christian kingdom on her side. I just love this for her, you know. Who amongst us hasn't wanted to simply throw a tantrum in the face of our boss at a point in time? Oh my God, yes. This is such great stuff. But she does it.

You know, as you say, she not only gets the go-ahead to create her own nunnery at Rupert'sburg, but she does it. You know, they move her down the road. Here we go. What is this new nunnery like? Like, what are the characteristics going on there? What are the women involved in doing? So when they first arrive, it's terrible. It's a catastrophe because there's nothing there.

There's like a couple of old farmhouses and nowhere for anyone to stay. And what is quite characteristic of the sisters of Hildegard, and she gets attacked for this by at least one other abbess, is that everyone's from quite noble stock. All of the women in her community tend to be pretty well to do. And all of a sudden, these women who've had a pretty comfortable life at Dizobodembourg, find themselves in this sort of dilapidated farmhouse-type landscape where there's no real place to stay,

and everything needs to be built from the ground up. And this is where we sort of see, Hildegar's tremendous energy, but also her skill in so many different directions. You know, we've already said, you know, she's got a real talent for gardening. She has these visions. She's very attuned with nature. She composes beautiful music. It also turns out she can like oversee construction because she pretty much single-handedly

according to the reports anyway. And of course, people, and she's not doing the physical building. But she's making sure it all happen. She's bringing in money by allowing sort of nearby noble families to bury the dead in the graveyard at the new monastery. She's, you know, coming up with the plans and how it should all look. And one monk, Guibet of Gemblow, who writes an unfinished beta of her and lived with her for a couple of years at Rupert'sburg, wax is lyrical about how wonderful by the end of her life this monastery is, that it has, you know,

it's got, you know, lovely garden, it's got like a medical center. it's got kind of the library, it's got all the things that you could possibly want. All these wonderful women are there. Everyone's living in harmony. But there are some mixed reports. He calls it a sort of paradise of delights, but there were some other commentators, particularly when it was being constructed who referred to it as like a military training camp

or a prison. Because it was, you know, all these women are used to this very comfortable way of life and all of a sudden Hildeguards, possibly just in the pursuit of sort of independence and autonomy. It's like, right, ladies, off we go. Let's build a new one. and it must have been a real shock and she did lose some, some did leave her at that point. And she talks about how difficult and challenging that was to sort of try and keep everyone's spirits up whilst they're building this new monastery.

But it's so successful in the end that she has to build another one. They get one down the road like just across the river at Evindon, which is where her body, parts of her relics still are today. So it was a success story, but it was it was a challenge. You know, she wasn't sort of arriving at this nice pre-made monastery. She was taking on a real work of labor and, you know, everyone looking up to her and, you know, can you make this work? But it probably, she probably had some experience of this because it looks like Dizabodenberg was pretty dilapidated when she joined. But because Jutta, the mystic that she was kind of enclosed with was from such a wealthy family, her dowry basically paid for Dissabodenberg to be reconstructed and done up.

And she would have witnessed much of that building work happen. I mean, to be fair, she does it, right? Like, Rubbertsburg becomes this nice nunnery. And they get down to some pretty serious theological work, or at least Hildegard does. I mean, at this point in time, we really have this flowering of her output. Can you tell us a little bit about what her theology looks like? You know, it's very heavily visionary, but what sorts of things is she writing about? Well, she writes a lot of different texts in a lot of different genres. So she's got her first book which she writes largely before the move is Skivias,

Know the Ways, which is sort of an account of all her visions. But then she also has two medical books that she writes that have, of course, a theological edge to them. She writes the first no morality play about the progression of a soul. She writes, you know, hundreds of letters on theological subjects. So we have this sort of huge body of work. There's a few distinguishing features. One, I think we've sort of already touched on already,

this idea that the natural world is really important to the spiritual world and you're sort of trying to work with nature to find the spiritual harmony. And she talks about this thing called veriditas or sometimes translate to sort of greenness or freshness, this sort of green energy that is God but also is nature. And it's sort of the harmony of the cosmos and sort of this sort of sense of how everything fits together cosmologically, like the human body and how that works, humans' relationship with animals, the relationship between the forest and God, all of these things are sort of coming together in sort of perfect harmony. And it's all very much coming back to this idea of the natural world and natural energy. But there's also a real sort of feminine edge to it.

So Barbara Newman is probably the most famous sort of historian to have worked on Hildegarde a beginner. She has done a number of different writings on just how sort of interested in the feminine Hildegarde of Begin is in these works. So a lot of the figures that she sees in her visions are female figures and sort of a real emphasis on nurture, on moderation, on mercy. You know, we're not seeing any of the Old Testament stuff with Hildeguard. But she can be firm and she certainly takes people to task when she needs to,

but there's a real sort of compassion and sort of sense of being attuned to the world around her and how that all comes together that is springing out of complete orthodoxy. You know, a lot of sort of contemporary and then later writers are in a similar vein. But I think the things that make hers really distinctive is this sort of emphasis on greenness of viridates and the sort of feminist, not feminist edge, she's not a feminist, but feminine edge to theology. Yeah, got to be careful with that word on you. Yeah, I mean, 100% absolutely not.

No, we love and respect Hildegard in this house, obviously, but I'm not going to go and call her a feminist or anything. But I do think it is true that it's interesting she has this real way of centering femininity that men simply do not at the time. For example, since I do a lot of work on sexuality, I really think she's interesting because she's one of the only people who actually says, well, I don't think that women are voracious sexual harpies, actually. Yes.

Which is a really big deal at the time. Yeah. And she says I was rereading something this morning. I was like, she's so good, isn't she? Like she basically has a whole passage, and I think it's one of the medical texts. She writes a lot on gynecology, which was really unusual for a woman to do at the time. that men should sort of leave women alone when they're on their periods because they're actually suffering enough.

That's right. And like, give them a break. And I was like, preach, sister. She is, yeah, she doesn't see, she says women are much more able to restrain themselves and men. In the way she writes about sex, men come off much more as a sort of insatiable sort of off-kilter. And as you say, traditionally,

in writings of this time about women's sexuality, it's this idea that they're, you know, almost vampiric in their desire and that they can't stop themselves and the temptresses and you don't see any of this. She sometimes will do the sort of humility topos about being a woman. You know, I'm just a weak and feeble woman writing to you in the mouthpiece of God. But there isn't really anything in her actual writings that suggests that she buys into a lot of the misogynist rhetoric.

And she doesn't directly challenge it. She just doesn't really acknowledge it. And she has kind of much more positive readings. And that's not to say, you know, in terms of the sexuality stuff, she's extremely damning on like masturbation and homosexuality as one probably would expect at the time. But we do get these glimpses of a much more progressive way of thinking about sex. And honestly, just the fact that she seems to know quite a bit about it is astonishing, given her life.

It's absolutely true. She's, you know, gone to be a recluse at, you know, 14. She's lived in an an encode and then in a convent until, you know, she starts writing. And she seems to have a pretty good working. knowledge of it all. But then, of course, Pilgrims will be coming and chatting to her all the time. And I think my husband's cheating on me or I accidentally went to this brothel and I should have done. So maybe that's where she got it from. But also she writes a lot of music and plays, which I think is a really interesting thing about her because she's a real polymath, right? Like, what kind of things is she writing

about when she's writing down music? Interestingly, a lot of the sort of music seems to be tied into this idea of sort of greenness and branches growing and sort of love and charity and community. She tells us that she didn't really have any learning in music and that it's sort of all been given to her by visions. But I was just listening to some this morning and it is the most beautiful stuff. The thing, the music that she wrote is it does feel very heavenly. And it's also lovely to hear music at this time for sort of female voices as well. Because I think oftentimes the really famous ones are sort of for monks, but she's writing, sometimes for the monks, but also for her community. But there seems to be, yes, she wrote so much in so many different genres, but there

seems to be this connecting thread of hope, keeping going, perseverance, emphasis on little details, like the branch that grows and flourishes and how to tend to it. In a lot of the letters that she writes, she's always telling people not to give up. And I think her music feels is very hopeful and optimistic and has that message in it too, you know, keep going, don't give up and this is what you will get if you kind of persevere. But again, lots of natural imagery, lots of very beautiful imagery of nature, which seems to connect all of her writings that I can see. And I find this incredibly innovative, right? Because, you know, yeah, I'm used to seeing also religious music from the Middle Ages. I swear, there's nothing in

between. It's either knights and ladies, something's something about a dragon, jokes about farts and penises or God. Those are the three ways of talking about things. And I'm not saying that Hildegard isn't writing religious music, but it does really have a differing quality. And certainly also, if you hear it, and people still perform Hildegard's music all the time. Yeah, and it's what she's probably the best known for, I think, nowadays. I think most people have you said to them, like, have you heard of Hildegard of Bingham would have heard of a...

for her music more so than, you know, her medical writings or even perhaps her visions. It's the music that kind of when it was sort of rediscovered and sort of sort of being played a lot more, I think in like the 90s, that was when she became much more of a household name, I think. And I wonder if more so than other medieval music that survives, it has that more relatability, perhaps because like you say, there's sometimes a real earthiness to it or a real humanity to it that sometimes feels missing in the more austere music at the time. But does it actually get beyond the walls of the nunnery at the time, or is this just something that the nuns are doing for themselves?

It seems like the music was known about, but didn't have the legacy that you would hope for it, much like all of her writings actually. Like she has a cult and she, you know, as soon as she dies, everyone sort of hustles to try and get her canonization documents ready, but she isn't actually canonized. She's known in England as a prophetess, but not really as a musician. And I think that's true of most other places in Europe. So there's a sense of people know about her. They know that she is writing all these different things, but it seems to be something that remains for the most part within, as you say, the sort of convent walls,

something that really devastates her towards the end of her life is she gets in hot water with church authorities over a complete misunderstanding. You wonder if they had a bit of a, if they were sort of doing it out of spite if they had a bit of an issue with her.

Because basically her and the nuns bury this noble man and to their knowledge doing her wrong. And then she's accused of burying someone who sort of died as communicated, which is a sin. say she needs to dig up the body. And she refuses because she says, no, I know that this man died penitent.

I know that he died absolved. He wasn't excommunicated. He'd been reconciled to the church. I've not done anything wrong. I'm not digging up the body of like a Christian saved soul. And they say, okay, if you don't dig it up, we're going to put an interdict on your whole convent. So they're not allowed to take sacraments or sing the divine office.

Whoa. Huge. Like a huge. And that's not to say that's all. all the nuns too. And she writes this beautiful letter pleading with the church authorities to take this interdict off the monastery. And she's sort of saying that, you know, music is how we talk to God. And to be, for that to be taken away is the cruelest punishment. And actually even more than not being able to take the sacraments, it seems that it's singing the divine office that is not being

able to sing the divine office that is most painful to her. I mean, that's so interesting and moving, right? Because It shows you how different people can have these really complex relationships with the sacral, with varying church offices. Because, you know, I think that we tend to see, especially in the later medieval period, more of an emphasis on that disconnection from the Eucharist. So to see her really feel connected to the music is, that's remarkable, I think. Yeah. And I think, you know, thank God you never got really seriously accused of heresy. There are other later mystics that get in much more hot water than her. She worries about it, but for the most part, because she's had this action from the Pope, she's okay.

But yeah, there's such a growing obsession with the sacraments that starts off around the time she's alive and then gets worse and worse. And this sort of increasing sense of that sacraments are the domain of men and priests and sort of female mystics rubbing up against that in the wrong way. And she never does that. Like I said, she's very orthodox. But that's the only bit where I was, you know, when you're reading her letters or writing, we're like, oh, yeah, to be so much more focused on the music than the sacraments is really feels interesting at this time. Not enough to get her in any trouble, but certainly surprising.

Can we also talk a little bit about lingua ignata because I think this is such an interesting thing because she invents her whole own language and alphabet. What's the deal here? Yeah, I mean, who knows, honestly, is the answer. I've wrote down how many words it was. I think it's a thousand. Oh, wow. Yeah, lingua ignota, a glossary of a thousand words in the language that she made up,

most of which seemed to be related to, like, nature or the body. So, like, perhaps for something to do with the medical texts. No one has any idea why she made up this glossary, this own language, or what she used it for. I have no idea. I was wondering, I was thinking about her a few weeks ago and I was like, was she just really, you know, looking for stimulation, like, in the way people like play Sudoku or whatever, was she just like, I just, her brain was so massive.

Like, look at all the works that she's done, all the different kind of genres that she had command of and knowledge she had command of. And maybe she was just literally doing it for fun. Or maybe there was something about wanting to do it for the medical texts. Is it some kind of, you know, I don't know, could it be like a secret coding? She's like worried about the books being, you know, at a time when people did worry about what they were writing and sort of, you know, getting on the wrong side of church law. Could it be something to do with that? Hey, I have no idea, but it blows my mind.

You know, all these very serious endeavors that she's doing. And then she's also like making up her own language. It's the kind of thing like people do when they're quite, you know, young, isn't it? But it was very serious. And, you know, it's like I said, it's a big text and, you know, she commanded it to vellum, which, you know. Expensive. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Isn't cheap. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I have no idea why she did it, but it's fascinating. It's just, yes, another thing. You're like, oh, my goodness, I'd love to meet you. I have, I have so many additives in my head that I think would describe her. But I think if I met her, I would just, I can't visualize what she'd be like because

the work is so massive. Then accounts of her are so many, you know, who was this woman that was, you know, writing about sex in such a candid way for a novice and then making up her own playful language. I don't know. Well, yeah. And then, plus, on top of all of this, she's also got this really extensive knowledge of medical corpus, right? You know, now she's really kind of revered as one of the premier what we call natural philosophers of the Middle Ages. And again, for her to be doing that as a woman, astonishing.

The only other woman that we have, like, recorded the name of who was doing medical writing during this period is Trota of Salerno, who is sort of the pinnacle of medical writing. But her medical writing is extremely well respected if you kind of look at it alongside contemporary medical accounts that were kind of being used all the time. She seems to have had a really excellent working knowledge. Surely she must have worked in the infirmary for some point in her life as a nun. Perhaps even as an... Perhaps even as an Ancrest, because I don't understand. I mean, she was clearly very well read, so some of it, you know, she might have got her hands on some text. But there's innovation in there too, writing on gynecology.

And there's a lovely quote by there's a guy called Johannes Trithemias, who is a Renaissance writer, who was really interested in medical text. And he says, in the medical book, she records with a subtle exposition, the many wonders and secrets of nature in such a mystical sense that only from the Holy Spirit could a woman know such things. Now, of course, there's a sly digger women at the end. Of course there is. This is the middle ages. But this sense in which, you know, this sort of well-respected Renaissance medical writer is like, yeah, this is exactly what we would expect to see the knowledge is there. She seems to have a really good working sense of how to heal people. And of course, there are healing miracles associated with Hildegard.

You know, many recorded in her canonization documents. But it seems that she did also heal people perhaps from certainly seems like from these texts with sort of herbles as well. It's again, much like with the sex thing, I'm like, where did you get all this knowledge? Was it just extensive reading and then working in the infirmary? But other people were working in the infirmary and not writing these incredible texts. Right. That's the thing. It's not as though there aren't plenty of women who are doing some medical work, but they're not necessarily growing the corpus of medical information in the same way.

I mean, it is, like I said, that it is a really distinctive body of work to extremely robust texts written by a woman at this time. You know, almost, you know, where does she, how, where does she come from? It's incredible. I find this is such an interesting legacy too, because now I think that there is a tendency to see her as kind of this precursor to what we're seeing now in terms of emphasis on herbal. remedies and healings and this sort of alternative medicine that goes on now. What do you think about that as a tendency? Yeah, I'm not in love with it because, again, I feel like it's a bit like what we talked about with the migraines.

Like, yes, maybe she'd have migraines, but it feels like sometimes with this kind of writing, there's a bit of a downplay tendency. Now, that's not to say that alternative medicine should be thought of as any less respected than actual medicine. and I think someone who was a real enthusiast about alternative medicine and celebrated her that would feel different. But I think sometimes when it's coming from a sense of like, oh, there's real medicine over here. And then there's these women doing some herbal medicine over here. Actually, you know, at the time Hildegarde Bigham was writing women were still clinging on just to medicine and being in charge of that over the years, it became more and more the sort of gatekeeping of men.

But yes, there are herbal remedies in there because that was, you know, what was available to most people for healing in the middle ages. But, you know, I sort of feel like if she'd been alive now, she would have been doing some really innovative stuff with like, you know, cutting edge neuroscience or something. I don't know. She, she, it feels like a little bit of a downplaying tendency to me. However, you know, one of the things that's lovely about her as a figure is she has so much to offer. So I think if it's done in good faith, that kind of thinking, great. if she becomes an idol for you because you're really invested in that kind of medicine and you see her as really attuned with nature and doing some really progressive things in terms of being an

environmentalist as well in some sense is great. But yeah, where it feels like slight denigration, I'm uncomfortable with it. I agree with you on this because I think it's important for us to point out that at this point in time, herbal medicine is just called medicine. Yeah. Right? Like that's just, that's just medicine, right? And that's what was of and also probably what worked the best at the time, really. Yeah, because all of the really classical learned medicine, you know, that we're seeing pass down from, for example, the ancient Greeks and Romans, it doesn't actually work because humours are not real.

Yes, and exactly. But if that is the, you know, your guiding principle and, you know, and was for ages, you know, for years after Hildegald of Bingham was writing, people were subscribing to the theories of gone and the humors. And you can see that what she does with it is really creative. So, yeah, I agree. I think we forget sometimes that the state of play in medicine was very different when women like Hilda Godabingham were alive.

And actually, it's extremely remarkable that she had the breadth of knowledge that she did from, you know, whether she was getting it from all the books. But it seems like it's not clear what her sources were. There's no direct source for all of it. Right? Yeah. Yeah, which is so interesting to me. But, like, look, I think that she's quite interesting because we've already hinted at this a lot.

She's doing all these incredible things. She's making up languages in her spare time. She is working in the garden. She's writing about herbs. She's composing music. She is also just telling everyone about her visions. And then she's also telling off the Pope, telling off the emperor. And this is the sort of stuff that would ordinarily get you in so much trouble just as a religious person generally, let alone as a,

woman. But these letters are actually received in fairly goodwill, right? Yeah. You don't get any sort of anger replies that she has such a position of authority. And again, I think this is very much of her time. She'd been born 100 years later, it wouldn't have worked. But she's sort of on the cusp of the change. And oftentimes these men are writing to are quite chastened, you know, and oh, please give me more advice. You know, they are looking to her as a counselor, as someone who has divine authority and they might not necessarily like what she's saying but they they don't they don't clap back you know often the replies are you know you thank you so much and and um you know i will take your advice and i'll i'll think on it and these are you know not just the pope but also

like the emperor she wrote to she wrote to the king of england she wrote i mean there is no one that hildegarde thinks is you know out of reach for her and that alone is astonishing for anyone like you say, let alone a woman to be, she doesn't mince her words, you know, she's not couching all of this. Catherine of Siena, who is a later mystic when she's writing to Pope, she does a lot of couching, which I think that, you know, we all probably

do on jobs. Hilda Garda Bingen doesn't do any couching. She's like, the living light says, you are being unworthy. She calls, what is it? She calls Frederick Barbarossa a juvenile fool. The Frederick Barbarossa, and not long after, she tells him it's all going to go to hell in a handbasket. If he doesn't listen to her, he does

die. And this happens a couple of times when she says to, you know, she does it to, I think it's one of the habits. It's at Edel Bartchie. One of them she says, you know, if you don't get yourself together, you will be cut off from grace and he, a few months later is murdered. Whether she just was very good at figuring out the situations and understanding political situations and could see where things were headed, I think is more likely than actually prophesying anything. But yeah, she's, and she bless her, she gets completely plagued by letters. You know, one of the things that I think really humanises her is reading all the snippy letters she gets from people who are annoyed she's not written back yet.

She's like, no, this does not find me well, this letter. Yeah, they're like, you know, you get all these kinds of various different people, monks, sabbasses, you know, noble people saying, oh, did you, I wonder if you didn't get my last letter because I haven't had a reply from you yet. Or I'm so surprised not to have had a reply from you, given you're such a a holy woman. I thought you would have made the time. I hope you don't think it's because I am poor, because that would be awful of you to think that, you know, all these kind of different approaches. And she's, you know, extremely busy, sick most of the time, getting older. And a lot

of the time is sort of, you know, having to apologize for not writing back in a more timely fashion. But she seemed to receive such an astonishing amount of letters. A really funny example of this is when Gwbert of Gembert of Gembert of Gembert, who I mentioned earlier, he lives with her in the last two years of her life. And some nearby monks use them as a bit of a go-between. And they write 38 really difficult theological questions and want her to answer them at length. And then send like multiple letters. Like, why have you not replied to us?

And it's like, give her a break. 38 questions. And like, on like the biggest theological questions and you're like, she's got stuff going on. She's busy. And she's tired and sick. Leave her alone. Well, and this is the thing. as you say, she's keeping up these correspondents as well into old age.

And she lives for quite some time, no? 81. 81. That is mad. Good innings. Really good innings. Good innings. I think a lot of it is because she was very moderate. So a lot of, you know, Jutter, who she lived with, the mystic that she was sort of enclosed with, was extremely ascetic. You know, she's, you know, fasting, not eating anything.

wears like a chain with like literal like nails in it under her hair shirt, you know, she dies at like 44, I think. Hildegarde who preaches moderation to everyone keeps going to 81. She's going on a preaching tour in her 70s. Crazy. Crazy. And that, I mean, the fact that she's even allowed to preach is this is a thing with Hildegarde.

There are so many things where like, oh my God, you know, women were not allowed to preach. This is not a thing. She's pretty much the only one who was given sanction. by the Pope to preach. It's unheard of, you know, at that time for a woman to be able to do that. And then she's sort of wandering around in her 70s, you know, preaching to people, you know,

telling them to do better, trying to get the church in ship shape because she feels like it's really sinking into corruption. Just such energy. I mean, and this is the thing, too, she's still having visions right up until the end as well, isn't she? Yes. And even after she dies, it's, you know,

apparently, you know, rainbows of light appeared. And she is up until the end writing two people as the living light, you know, getting these messages from God. He, you know, helps her through this whole kind of difficulty over the sanction when she and a nuns are not allowed to sing anymore. What's interesting for Hildegar with her visions that I should have mentioned earlier is that when she has them, her normal sight isn't interrupted, which is I, the only, I don't, I can't think of any other mystic during that time who has said. said that usually if you had a vision, you're like transported somewhere else and you lose your bodily and inverted commas site. But she saw everything as it was, but then also the vision on top of it. And yeah, and she was having these. And they were often, you know, took a lot out of her. You know, she talks about what a toll they had on her physically and mentally.

Yeah, you know, seeing the living light of God will do that, I think. Yes, I've got to imagine. It's rather a lot, right, you know. But we absolutely, know as well that as you say, you know, the reports that there are all these rainbows when she dies, this is kind of part of this effort to canonize her. But that doesn't get anywhere. I mean, it was just a few years ago, really. It was, you know, in 2012, wasn't it? Yeah, 2012, which is, you know, and people refer to as a saint throughout history. You get kind of people throughout Europe after she's died writing about her as a saint. She had tons of miracles to her name. She was was prolific, you know, she had the sanction of the Pope. My understanding is it was extremely

difficult at this time for anyone much to be canonised. And by the time they got round to doing the sort of inquiry into canonisation, about 60 years had passed because there's a little girl who gives testimony when she's sort of an older woman who sort of says, this is what I saw when I was at her deathbed and just kind of, the reason she didn't get it was almost like on a technicality. the details of the miracles were not specific enough. Oh, gosh. Listen. In the accounts.

The church rules. But then so many years are gone by, right? The church wilds me out with us because it's like this is, we're smack dab in the middle of the St. Bernardo Clairvo era with her. And he gets canonized right away. And all he ever did was be a jerk. And it's like, you know, as though that's some kind of a miracle. No.

Whereas, you know, she does all of these incredible things and, you know, we're fighting for it. in the 21st century, right? Yes. That's such a good comparison, actually, the fact that Bernard, who was just a grumpy, angry man, wandering around, yelling at everyone, you know, got it so quickly. And as you say, you know, she had far more miracles than he did.

It was probably as if not better known than he was by that point. You know, it feels, I couldn't believe it, actually. I was like, and of course, when you're reading some of the older books about her, some of the older scholarship, you know, And she's still not a saint because they were in pre-2012. And you're like, God, imagine. That's crazy. You know, and I remember being quite shocked because I think that I was raised in such a Catholic

context that she was often presented to me as a saint. Yes. And so, yeah, I don't know. Like it's, I don't know, the Jesuits were running cover on that one pretty hard, I guess. So that's good for that. Yeah. But yeah. But she's like, yeah, she's the saint who everyone referred to as a saint but didn't get her canonization.

She's the abbess who never actually got to be an abbess, even though it was referred to by everyone as an abbess. She sort of, even though she did so many incredible things, I wonder, I feel like she must have had a sense always of these things that were still slightly out of reach, even for her, even though she was doing all these things that other people couldn't have done or wouldn't have dreamt of. And I wonder if that's what kept her striving so hard. I mean, I think that it is actually quite an interesting testament that even in the year

of our Lord 2012, when it is that she was canonized, you know, people were. still clamorating for it. People like us really wanted to see it happening. And I think that it is certainly the case that this is a woman who certainly has a legacy that is still influencing people now. Yeah. And I think that's testament to the body of work and the variety, but also I think just to the humanity of her. Like whenever you're reading her letters or her writing, she just seems like the kind of teacher you would have wanted at school, like really firm, but really encouraging, really kind and like really inspiring a motivational. She always seems to strike such a good balance between, you know, like I'm marking a lot

of essays at the moment. You try and like balance like being critical with being encouraging. But she just seemed to really, really care, very loyal, made such strong attachments, got things done. And I think there's also, I wonder now because there's this real emphasis on the environment. And I think we all, as we should be, are paying more attention to that. she really does speak to people in a lot of different ways. But I mean, for me personally, it is just the sheer energy and compassion of her.

You know, oftentimes when people are this powerful and influential, they don't seem that nice. Like, you know, we're joking about Bernard of Claervo, but she seems to have kept this real even keel all the way through her life, which given, you know, that she, who knows how she felt about being given to the church at a young age, and she made this whole life out of it and seemed to have really cared for. the nuns under her charge and have developed really strong affection for them. And yeah, it just feels very like, oh, she would have been really nice to, like, have a cup of tea with and tell your problems too. Oh, God. And I mean, it's interesting because certainly that is true enough that all sorts of powerful men in the Middle Ages were doing it.

And if it's good enough for them, I'm pretty sure it would be good enough for us. Yeah, exactly. Well, do you know who else strikes a perfect balance at all times? That's you, Hedda. Oh, thank you. Thank you so, so much for coming to talk to us again. It is just always such an unmitigated pleasure to speak with you. It was such a dream.

Like, couldn't have thought of anything nicer to do on this sweltering day. It's kind of taken me out of the heat for a little bit of time into a nice, cool Germany. Well, thank you so much, Hedda. Thank you. My thanks again to Dr. Hedahouse. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV document. including my recent film with our very own Matt Lewis on the rise to power of Eleanor Vakwitaine and Henry II, as well as at free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com

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