50 Fun Facts About Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen's nature writings are often cited as an early source on which plant preserving beer?

Hops kept beer from spoiling, she noted in her 12th-century book on nature. It is often cited as the earliest source, though hopped beer is documented three centuries before her.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks argued that Hildegard of Bingen's visions were caused by which condition?

Migraine was his verdict: he called her visions indisputably migrainous, and the bright lights and auras she described do resemble an attack. He added that this took nothing away from what she made of them.

Which rare Catholic title, also held by Teresa of Ávila, did Hildegard of Bingen receive in 2012?

Doctor of the Church is an honour for saints whose writings shaped doctrine, and she was only the fourth woman to receive it. The pope who conferred it called her perennially relevant.

In Hildegard of Bingen's musical play Ordo Virtutum, which character never sings and only shouts?

The Devil is denied music because, in her view, he cannot produce divine harmony. Every other role, from the Virtues to the human soul, is sung in plainchant.

898 Hildegard, thought to be named after Hildegard of Bingen, is what kind of celestial object?

An asteroid about 12 km wide, it circles the Sun in the main belt every four and a half years. German astronomer Max Wolf discovered it from Heidelberg in 1918.

Hildegard of Bingen described divine vitality as viriditas, a Latin word that literally means what?

Greenness, for her, was the force that lets plants put out leaves and bodies heal. She treated medicine as a kind of gardening, tending that power in the sick.

In her first book of visions, Hildegard of Bingen described the universe as having the shape of what?

An egg was her image of the cosmos in a book of 26 visions that took her ten years to finish. A later work pictured the universe as spheres around a human figure.

Hildegard of Bingen told the monk Guibert of Gembloux that her visions always came to her in what state?

Wide awake, day and night, with her eyes open, was how she said she saw them, never in ecstasy. She wrote this at the age of 77, adding that she saw with her soul alone.

Unusually for a medieval woman, Hildegard of Bingen made four tours of Germany in order to do what?

To preach in public was almost unheard of for a woman, yet she addressed clergy and laity alike. Her main themes were corruption among churchmen and the need for reform.

Which German emperor, who later drowned on the Third Crusade, corresponded with Hildegard of Bingen?

Frederick Barbarossa was one of many rulers among her correspondents, alongside popes and abbots. He drowned crossing the Saleph River in 1190, eleven years after her death.

The glossary of Hildegard of Bingen's invented language consists almost entirely of which part of speech?

Nouns fill its list of about a thousand coined words, ranked from heaven down to plants and insects. With no verbs or grammar, it could label the world but not make a sentence unaided.

Musician Kristin Hayter took which Latin stage name from a creation of Hildegard of Bingen?

Lingua Ignota, Latin for unknown language, was the name the abbess gave her invented vocabulary. Hayter released music under it from 2017 until she retired the project in 2023.

The modern nuns of the abbey that Hildegard of Bingen founded in 1165 are known for producing which drink?

Wine comes from the vineyard the sisters work themselves. Their community was dissolved in 1804, refounded a century later, and expelled by the Nazis from 1941 to 1945.

Hildegard of Bingen is nicknamed the Sibyl of which river, close to the two convents she founded?

The Rhine flows past the town in her name, where it meets the smaller Nahe. A sibyl was a prophetess of ancient Greece, so the nickname marks her fame as a seer.

Hildegard of Bingen spent her whole religious life in which monastic order, nicknamed the Black Monks?

Benedictines take the nickname from the colour of their habits. She entered the order as a child and went on to lead her own community of nuns for more than forty years.

Which countess, enclosed in a cell at Disibodenberg, taught the young Hildegard of Bingen to read and write?

Jutta von Sponheim was only about six years older than her pupil. A fierce ascetic, she wore a chain under her clothes and prayed barefoot in the cold of winter.

Shortly before her death, Hildegard of Bingen defied the clergy of Mainz by refusing to do what?

To exhume a buried man from her convent's ground would be a sin, she said. Though he had once been excommunicated, she insisted he was reconciled to the Church before he died.

Hildegard of Bingen blamed disease on an imbalance of four bodily fluids known as what?

Humors, in her version, came in ranks: blood and phlegm stood above the two biles, and sickness followed when the lower pair took over. She traced the imbalance back to the Fall of Adam and Eve.

Nearly 400 of what survive from Hildegard of Bingen, among the largest such collections of the Middle Ages?

Letters went from her convent to popes, emperors, abbots and abbesses, many of whom had asked for her prayers or advice. One, written at 77, describes what her visions were like.

Hildegard of Bingen insisted that the novices admitted to her convent come only from which social group?

The nobility alone supplied her nuns because, she argued, mixing ranks would divide the community. Her own parents belonged to the free lower nobility.

Which book of visions by Hildegard of Bingen has a title meaning Know the Ways in Latin?

Scivias, her first major work, describes 26 visions and was read in part to the pope while still unfinished. It ends with a set of her songs.

Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum is the earliest known example of which kind of medieval drama?

Morality play is the label for dramas where virtues and vices fight over a soul, and hers predates the next known example by more than a century. It contains 82 melodies.

In Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum, which Virtue is named the queen of all the others?

Humility leads the sung Virtues, who served as role models for the nuns performing them. Together they win back a straying soul and bind her tempter.

Which Cistercian abbot, preacher of the Second Crusade, did Hildegard of Bingen ask for advice on her visions?

Bernard of Clairvaux replied that her visions were indeed from God and that he would not interfere. He later spoke up for her work before the pope.

Which pope heard part of Hildegard of Bingen's first book read aloud at the Synod of Trier?

Eugene III, the first Cistercian pope, sent her his blessing after the reading. It was later treated as papal approval for everything she wrote.

Hildegard of Bingen left Disibodenberg with about twenty nuns to found a convent on which hill?

Rupertsberg, named for a saint who had lived there, meant a move from a well-established stone abbey to temporary quarters. The convent she built stood until 1632.

What happened to Hildegard of Bingen that finally persuaded Abbot Kuno to let her nuns leave Disibodenberg?

She was struck by paralysis and lay unable to move from her bed, which she put down to God's displeasure at the delay. The abbot relented when he himself could not shift her.

Which monk was Hildegard of Bingen's teacher, confessor and secretary for some sixty years?

Volmar was the first person to tell her that her visions were genuine, and he urged her to write them down. She grieved deeply when he died in 1173.

Which close friend of Hildegard of Bingen left to become abbess of Bassum despite the older nun's protests?

Richardis von Stade had helped her write her first book, and the abbess appealed all the way to the pope to keep her. She died soon after leaving.

According to her nuns, what appeared in the sky as Hildegard of Bingen lay dying?

Two streams of light were said to cross above her as she died on 17 September 1179, aged about 81. That date is now her feast day.

Which nine-part work by Hildegard of Bingen sets out the healing uses of plants, fish and metals?

Physica rates each plant and creature as hot, cold, wet or dry. It was sent to Rome about fifty years after her death as evidence in the inquiry into her sainthood.

Besides herbs and tinctures, Hildegard of Bingen became well known for healing with which other material?

Precious stones get their own section in her book of remedies, alongside plants, fish and metals. She reasoned from Genesis that everything on earth was put there for human use.

Hildegard of Bingen advised that bloodletting was best carried out at which point in the lunar cycle?

Waning moon was her rule for opening a vein, with the amount judged by what a thirsty person could swallow in one gulp. A waxing moon, she held, suited conception and sowing seeds.

Scholars have called Hildegard of Bingen the founder in Germany of which branch of science?

Natural history is the study of plants, animals and minerals, the subject of her nine books on creatures. They drew on her years running her convent's herb garden and infirmary.

Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Life's Merits gives an early description of which realm of the afterlife?

Purgatory appears there as a place where each soul works off its debts before entering heaven. Her punishments are gruesome on purpose: the book was meant as a practical guide to penance.

Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works is largely a meditation on the opening of which Gospel?

John opens by declaring that in the beginning was the Word, and a vision of about 1163 convinced her that this Word was the key to all of creation. The book took her roughly a decade.

Hildegard of Bingen holds which distinction among all the known composers of the Middle Ages?

Most surviving chants is her distinction: 69 compositions with her own words, plus a full music drama. She is also one of the few medieval composers known to have written both text and tune.

The chants of Hildegard of Bingen are highly melismatic, a term that describes which feature of a melody?

Many notes per syllable give her melodies their soaring, florid sound. The longest run in her music drama stretches a single word over thirty-nine notes.

Which ten-stringed instrument, a relative of the zither, did Hildegard of Bingen probably learn as a girl?

Psaltery strings are plucked across a flat soundboard, and her teacher at Disibodenberg probably showed her how, alongside chanting the psalms of the daily office.

The frontispiece of Hildegard of Bingen's first book shows her sketching a vision on what as she dictates?

A wax tablet is in her hands while a monk writes down her words. Scholars still argue whether she painted the book's 35 miniatures herself or only directed the work.

The illuminated original of Hildegard of Bingen's first book vanished after wartime evacuation to which city?

Dresden was meant to be a safe haven, but the manuscript disappeared there in 1945. Its images survive only because nuns had hand-painted a faithful copy between 1927 and 1933.

What does Riesencodex, the German nickname for the volume of Hildegard of Bingen's collected works, mean?

Giant codex fits a book that weighs about 15 kg, with 481 vellum leaves bound in pigskin over wooden boards. Soviet authorities held it after the war until it was quietly swapped for a lookalike in 1948.

The first convent founded by Hildegard of Bingen was destroyed in 1632 during which European war?

Thirty Years' War soldiers from Sweden looted the house, and the nuns fled to their sister convent carrying the great volume of her collected works.

Which village near Rüdesheim holds the relics of Hildegard of Bingen and the second convent she founded?

Eibingen keeps her relics in its pilgrimage church, and nuns returned to a newly built abbey there in 1904. The abbey belongs to a UNESCO World Heritage landscape.

Which British ensemble made Hildegard of Bingen a bestseller with the album A Feather on the Breath of God?

Gothic Voices, directed by Christopher Page and joined by soprano Emma Kirkby, made it their very first disc. It became one of the best-selling recordings of pre-classical music ever made.

Which electronic duo sampled a chant by Hildegard of Bingen on Belfast, a rave-era track from 1991?

Orbital lifted the voice from a 1980s recording of her song O Euchari. The Beloved had used the same recording two years earlier on their single The Sun Rising.

Which American film director produced Lux Vivens, a 1998 album of Hildegard of Bingen's music?

David Lynch produced it for the singer Jocelyn Montgomery. Its Latin title means living light, the abbess's own phrase for the source of her visions.

Which artist gave Hildegard of Bingen a place setting in the feminist installation The Dinner Party?

Judy Chicago set 39 places for women from myth and history around a triangular table, with the names of 998 more women inscribed on the floor beneath it.

Which British actress played Hildegard of Bingen in a 1994 BBC documentary drama about the abbess?

Patricia Routledge, better known as the snobbish Hyacinth Bucket, played the abbess for the BBC's Omnibus arts strand while Keeping Up Appearances was still on air.

Which German director made Vision, the 2009 film about Hildegard of Bingen starring Barbara Sukowa?

Margarethe von Trotta first sketched scenes for it in the 1980s, then shelved the idea for years because she doubted any producer would back it. It was shot in real medieval cloisters.