Hildegard of Bingen
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50 free Hildegard of Bingen trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Hildegard of Bingen packed several careers into one cloistered life. A twelfth-century German abbess, she set down the visions she had experienced since childhood, composed music that is still recorded today, wrote about plants and healing, invented a private vocabulary, and told popes and princes exactly what she thought of them. This quiz gathers the fun facts people look for about her: the strange images in her visionary books, the play she set to music, her remedies and ideas about the body, the monks, nuns and rulers in her story, and the films, albums and artworks she has inspired centuries later. It suits music students, medieval history fans, and anyone who has just met her name and wants to know why a nun from twelfth-century Germany keeps turning up in concert halls, science histories and pop culture. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hildegard of Bingen's nature writings are often cited as an early source on which plant preserving beer?
Hops
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.
Q 02Neurologist Oliver Sacks argued that Hildegard of Bingen's visions were caused by which condition?
Migraine
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.
Q 03Which rare Catholic title, also held by Teresa of Ávila, did Hildegard of Bingen receive in 2012?
Doctor of the Church
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.
Q 04In Hildegard of Bingen's musical play Ordo Virtutum, which character never sings and only shouts?
The Devil
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.
Q 05898 Hildegard, thought to be named after Hildegard of Bingen, is what kind of celestial object?
An asteroid
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.
Q 06Hildegard of Bingen described divine vitality as viriditas, a Latin word that literally means what?
Greenness
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.
Q 07In her first book of visions, Hildegard of Bingen described the universe as having the shape of what?
An egg
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.
Q 08Hildegard of Bingen told the monk Guibert of Gembloux that her visions always came to her in what state?
Wide awake
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.
Q 09Unusually for a medieval woman, Hildegard of Bingen made four tours of Germany in order to do what?
Preach in public
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.
Q 10Which German emperor, who later drowned on the Third Crusade, corresponded with Hildegard of Bingen?
Frederick Barbarossa
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.
Q 11The glossary of Hildegard of Bingen's invented language consists almost entirely of which part of speech?
Nouns
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.
Q 12Musician Kristin Hayter took which Latin stage name from a creation of Hildegard of Bingen?
Lingua Ignota
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.
Q 13The modern nuns of the abbey that Hildegard of Bingen founded in 1165 are known for producing which drink?
Wine
Q 21Which book of visions by Hildegard of Bingen has a title meaning Know the Ways in Latin?
Scivias
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.
Q 22Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum is the earliest known example of which kind of medieval drama?
Morality play
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.
Q 23In Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum, which Virtue is named the queen of all the others?
Humility
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.
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.
Q 14Hildegard of Bingen is nicknamed the Sibyl of which river, close to the two convents she founded?
The Rhine
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.
Q 15Hildegard of Bingen spent her whole religious life in which monastic order, nicknamed the Black Monks?
Benedictines
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.
Q 16Which countess, enclosed in a cell at Disibodenberg, taught the young Hildegard of Bingen to read and write?
Jutta von Sponheim
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.
Q 17Shortly before her death, Hildegard of Bingen defied the clergy of Mainz by refusing to do what?
Exhume a buried man
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.
Q 18Hildegard of Bingen blamed disease on an imbalance of four bodily fluids known as what?
Humors
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.
Q 19Nearly 400 of what survive from Hildegard of Bingen, among the largest such collections of the Middle Ages?
Letters
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.
Q 20Hildegard of Bingen insisted that the novices admitted to her convent come only from which social group?
The nobility
The nobility alone supplied her nuns because, she argued, mixing ranks would divide the community. Her own parents belonged to the free lower nobility.
Q 24Which Cistercian abbot, preacher of the Second Crusade, did Hildegard of Bingen ask for advice on her visions?
Bernard of Clairvaux
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.
Q 25Which pope heard part of Hildegard of Bingen's first book read aloud at the Synod of Trier?
Eugene III
Eugene III, the first Cistercian pope, sent her his blessing after the reading. It was later treated as papal approval for everything she wrote.
Q 26Hildegard of Bingen left Disibodenberg with about twenty nuns to found a convent on which hill?
Rupertsberg
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.
Q 27What happened to Hildegard of Bingen that finally persuaded Abbot Kuno to let her nuns leave Disibodenberg?
She was struck by paralysis
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.
Q 28Which monk was Hildegard of Bingen's teacher, confessor and secretary for some sixty years?
Volmar
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.
Q 29Which close friend of Hildegard of Bingen left to become abbess of Bassum despite the older nun's protests?
Richardis von Stade
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.
Q 30According to her nuns, what appeared in the sky as Hildegard of Bingen lay dying?
Two streams of light
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.