Hildegard of Bingen, Saint

(1098–1179)

German abbess, one of the most brilliant and versatile women of the Middle Ages, called by contemporaries “the Sibyl of the Rhine.”
Simply as an administrator, Saint Hildegard was outstanding: she founded a large convent on unpromising ground at the Rupertsberg, above the Rhine near Bingen, and gave it a most uncommon facility, a proper supply of piped water. She wrote an encyclopedic treatise on natural history, physiology, and medicine, the earliest surviving scientific work by a woman. Her stature as a musical composer has only begun to be fully realized in recent times. She corresponded voluminously with popes, emperors, kings, and bishops, often to advocate reforms in the Church.
Hildegard had visionary experiences that have been compared to those of William Blake, and she put many of them into a major work entitled Scivias. In this and in some of her letters, she looked ahead, and her glances at the future give her a place in the history of prophecy. She warned of disasters threatening the Church because of its corruption. They eventually happened in the Great Schism in the fifteenth century and the Protestant breakaway in the sixteenth. Admittedly, these were a long time coming. But her special achievement was to initiate a broadening of prophetic scope. Previously, Christians had developed a scenario of the end of the world but had said little about anything before that. After Hildegard it was beginning to be acceptable for Christian seers to foreshadow happenings in the interim, by reinterpreting Scripture or otherwise. The great medieval name here is Joachim of Fiore.