Hildegard von Bingen
Hildegard von Bingen was, simultaneously and without apparent tension, a Benedictine abbess, a visionary mystic whose ecstatic experiences she carefully recorded and illustrated, a composer of liturgical chant, a natural historian, a medical writer, and the inventor of an entire constructed language. More chants by Hildegard survive than by any other composer of the Middle Ages, and her Ordo Virtutum — a musical drama of virtues battling for a human soul — is the earliest surviving morality play in Western history, composed roughly three centuries before the genre is usually said to begin.
The Sibyl of the Rhine
Hildegard entered religious life as a child, placed under the tutelage of the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim at the monastery of Disibodenberg, and was elected magistra (mother superior) of the community in 1136. She went on to found her own monasteries at Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165, establishing the institutional independence that let her direct an unusually wide-ranging body of intellectual and creative work.
She experienced visions from early childhood but did not begin systematically recording them until her forties, when — by her own account — she received a divine command to write down what she saw. The resulting work, Scivias ("Know the Ways," 1141–1151), combines twenty-six visionary experiences with theological commentary, illustrated by miniature illuminations she personally supervised. Her later visionary trilogy, particularly The Book of Divine Works, developed into an extended meditation on the Gospel of John's prologue, "In the beginning was the Word."
Ordo Virtutum and Lingua Ignota
Hildegard wrote both the words and the music for her surviving liturgical output — hymns, antiphons and sequences composed for use within her own community — making her one of the few named composers of the entire medieval period whose music can be attributed with confidence, and one of the very few women in that category at all. More of her chant survives than that of any other Middle Ages composer, and she remains, remarkably, one of the most recorded composers in modern classical music despite writing nine centuries ago.
Her Ordo Virtutum ("Order of the Virtues") sets a battle between the Devil and a chorus of personified Virtues for possession of a human soul, entirely in music and song — an early example of liturgical drama that predates the conventionally cited beginnings of morality-play theatre by roughly three hundred years. She additionally invented the Lingua Ignota ("unknown language"), a constructed vocabulary of over 900 words with its own alphabet, used within her community for devotional purposes — one of the earliest documented constructed languages in European history, centuries before more famous examples.
I saw a great splendour in which resounded a multitude of living voices, saying: We are the elements which move the universe.
— Hildegard von Bingen, SciviasA Multi-Disciplinary Mind, Sainted Late
Alongside her theology and music, Hildegard wrote substantial works of natural history and medicine — Physica and Causae et Curae — that a number of scholars credit as founding contributions to scientific natural history in the German-speaking world. Her canonisation process was unusually protracted by medieval standards; regional Catholic calendars listed her as a saint for centuries before her formal universal canonization was completed in 2012, alongside her declaration as a Doctor of the Church — one of only a small number of women ever to hold that title.