THE VISIONARY Hildegard of Bingen

Illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Hildegard receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary

Nine hundred years ago, the young Hildegard of Bingen was given by her parents to the Catholic Church. She was literally “walled up” in a tiny convent, completely cut off from the outside world. But over the course of her long and varied life, she emerged from the walls to embrace the world. She founded her own convents and traveled across Europe on preaching tours. She spent decades caring for the sick and infirm, resulting in her seminal medical text that endured for centuries. She is also much celebrated today as a composer; she wrote hauntingly beautiful music that was rediscovered just 100 years ago. But she is perhaps most famous for her vivid and prophetic religious visions. She did what her visions told her to do, even if it meant defying the Pope himself.

Our guest is Professor Alice Chapman, author of Sacred Authority and Temporal Power in the Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux and Associate Professor of Medieval History at Grand Valley State University.

Digital files of many of the images of Hildegard’s manuscripts are available at this beautiful website.

Watch the full video of Revd Prof June Boyce-Tillman’s presentation on Hildegard von Bingen at the Sunday Forum series at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Huge thanks for St. Paul’s for allowing us to use sections of this footage in the episode.

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A facsimile of Hildegard’s lost Scivias Manuscript

Hildegard’s vision of the Church as a mystical body, formed by estates of the secular, clergy, and religious

Disibodenberg, where Hildegard lived for nearly forty years before founding her own convent

Eibingen Abbey, founded by Hildegard in 1165, rebuilt in 1904

The shrine containing Hildegard’s remains at Eibingen Abbey

The endtimes when the anti-Christ brings the five kingdoms represented as five animals

Hildegard’s vision of the universe, surrounded by the symbolic divine voice

The “Lingua Ignota,” a new alphabet invented by Hildegard von Bingen

A 17th century engraving of Hildegard von Bingen by William Marshall

Alice Chapman is Associate Professor of Medieval History in the History Department at Grand Valley State University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the author of Sacred Authority and Temporal Power in the Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, and she has published articles focusing on the role of the papacy in disputes between ecclesiastical and royal power including “Disentangling Potestas in the Works of Bernard of Clairvaux,” and “Ideal and Reality: Images of a Bishop in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Advice to Eugenius III (r. 1145-53). She is also working on a second book project focused on the role of Christ as Physician (Christus medicus) in the Middle Ages.