The visions of Hildegard of Bingen. 1928.

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098, of noble parentage, at Böckelheim, on the River Nahe, near Sponheim. Destined from an early age to a religious life, she passed nearly all her days within the walls of Benedictine houses. She was educated and commenced her career in the isolated convent of Disibodenberg, at the junction of the Nahe and the Glan, where she rose to be abbess. In 1147 she and some of her nuns migrated to a new convent on the Rupertsberg, a finely placed site, where the smoky railway junction of Bingerbrück now mars the landscape. Between the little settlement and the important mediaeval town of Bingen flowed the River Nahe. The stream was, and is, here spanned by a bridge of Roman origin, to which still clings the name of the pagan Drusus (15 B.C. to A.D. 19). At this spot (Figure 93), a place of ancient memories, secluded and yet linked to the world, our abbess passed the main portion of her life, and here she closed her eyes in the eighty-second year of her age on September 17, 1179. EDITOR’S NOTE: Hildegard of Bingen (1089 to 1179) was a notable figure in medieval Scholastic thought both because she was a creative and independent thinker and an influential woman in a time and culture we think of as dominated by the male-oriented Latin church. She devoted considerable thought to understanding the natural world and was reputed to be a gifted healer. Of special note is the impact of her visions on her own cosmology as well as on later thinkers. Even today, there are popular cults of mysticism associated with Hildegard, and one can buy current recordings of music she supposedly composed. Her visions are accessible to us through several manuscripts that include drawings and illustrations thought to be in her own hand.