Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegarde de Bingen
Résumé
Book cover
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages pp 1–5Cite as
Palgrave Macmillan
Hildegard of Bingen
Hannah Victoria
Living reference work entry
First Online: 06 September 2022
14 Accesses
Abstract
Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), “Sibyl of the Rhine,” was a Benedictine abbess, a mystic, an infirmarian, and a poet. She is recognized today as one of the most remarkable women of her era, a figure who made a name for herself in what has long been considered a “man’s world.” She was politically astute, widely read, theologically savvy, and scientifically inclined. And all of this not in spite of, but because, she was very much a woman of her time. A prolific writer, she is recognized in the Western tradition as the oldest named female composer and the oldest named female physician, and she wrote the earliest attested morality play. Her surviving works are Liber Scivias (1141–1151), Liber Vitae Meritorum (1158–1163), Liber Divinorum Operum (1163–1173), Physica (1152–1179?), Causae et Curae (1152–1179?), Ordo Virtutum (c. 1152), Symphoniae (1152–1176), Lingua Ignota, and Epistolae. There also remains one complete extant Vita and excerpts of a second, as well as the records from her canonization trial in the early thirteenth century. Thus, an astounding amount of information exists about Hildegard, making her a very visible example of female authorship in the Middle Ages.