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, spanned by a bridge to which
still clung the name of the pagan Drusus (see Fig. 1). At this spot, 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, 1180.
[Illustration: Fig. 1. THE HILDEGARD COUNTRY]
Hildegard was a woman of extraordinarily active and independent mind.
She was not only gifted with a thoroughly efficient intellect, but
was possessed of great energy and considerable literary power, and
her writings cover a wide range, betraying the most varied activities
and remarkable imaginative faculty. The best known, and in a literary
sense the most valuable of her works, are the books of visions. She
was before all things an ecstatic, and both her _Scivias_ (1141-50)
and her _Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis_ (1163-70) contain
passages of real power and beauty. Less valuable, perhaps, is her
third long mystical work (the second in point of time), the _Liber
vitae meritorum_ (1158-62). She is credited with the authorship of an
interesting mystery-play and of a collection of musical compositions,
while her life of St. Disibode, the Irish missionary (594-674) to
whom her part of the Rhineland owes its Christianity, and her account
of St. Rupert, a local saint commemorated in the name ‘Rupertsberg’,
both bear witness alike to her narrative powers, her capacity for
systematic arrangement, and her historical interests. Her extensive
correspondence demonstrates the influence that she wielded in her own
day and country, while her _Quaestionum solutiones triginta octo_, her
_Explanatio regulae sancti Benedicti_, and her _Explanatio symboli
sancti Athanasii ad congregationem sororum suorum_ give us glimpses of
her activities as head of a religious house.
Her biographer, the monk Theodoric, records that she also busied
herself with the treatment of the sick, and credits her with miraculous
powers of healing.[1] Some of the cited instances of this faculty, as
the curing of a love-sick maid,[2] are, however, but manifestations of
personal ascendancy over weaker minds; notwithstanding her undoubted
acquaintance with the science of her day, and the claims made for her
as a pioneer of the hospital system, there is no serious evidence that
her treatment extended beyond exorcism and prayer.
For her time and circumstance Hildegard had seen a fair amount of the
world. Living on the Rhine, the highway of Western Germany, she was
well placed for observing the traffic and activities of men. She had
journeyed at least as far north as Cologne, and had traversed the
eastern tributary of the great river to Frankfort on the Main and
to Rothenburg on Taube.[3] Her own country, the basin of the Nahe
and the Glan, she knew intimately. She was, moreover, in constant
communication with Mayence, the seat of the archbishopric in which
Bingen was situated, and there has survived an extensive correspondence
with the ecclesiastics of Cologne, Speyer, Hildesheim, Trèves, Bamberg,
Prague, Nürnberg, Utrecht, and numerous other towns of Germany, the Low
Countries, and Central Europe.
[Illustration: Folio 17 r col. b Folio 32 v col. b Folio 205 r col. b