Please reference as:  Tamboukou, Maria. 2026. "Hildegard of Bingen", https://sites.google.com/view/soundscapesandechoes/home/hildegard-von-bingen

A Life in Vibration: Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) reaches us first as a vibration. Before dates, before categories — mystic, composer, abbess, healer — there is a voice: lifted, tensile, carrying further than the walls that enclosed her life. She does not enter history quietly. She arrives in sound and light, in visions that blaze across parchment, in melodies that arc beyond the expected limits of breath. To approach her is not to assemble a neat biography, but to move within a field of intensities where writing, music, body, and cosmos remain in restless conversation.

Enclosed in religious life from childhood, Hildegard grew within structures designed to contain women’s speech. Yet what formed in her was not silence, but a different kind of authority — one she located in the experience of visionary seeing. She described her visions as lucid, wakeful encounters suffused with brightness, accompanied by a knowledge that was sensory as much as intellectual. These experiences did not remain private. They insisted on mediation: in the vast allegorical canvases of Scivias, in theological and medical treatises, in an extraordinary correspondence network that connected her to popes, emperors, abbots, and laypeople seeking counsel. Writing became the medium through which vision entered the shared world.

But Hildegard’s thought is never confined to the page. It moves in breath and tone. Her musical compositions — gathered under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum — stretch the liturgical voice into sweeping, ecstatic lines that seem to trace the very motion of her visions. In the Ordo Virtutum, one of the earliest surviving liturgical dramas, abstract qualities take on sonic bodies: Virtues sing; the Devil shouts, unable to sustain melody. Theology here is not argued; it is staged, heard, and felt.

Across her writings runs the pulsing image of viriditas — greenness, vitality, the moist, generative force that courses through plants, bodies, and souls. It is at once metaphor and material principle, a way of naming the world’s ongoing creativity. Humans, in this vision, are not sovereign over creation but woven into its textures, microcosms resonating with larger cosmic patterns. Illness signals a rupture in these harmonies; healing is a work of re-attunement. Knowledge, too, is ecological: it grows, withers, and flourishes in relation.

What emerges, then, is not a singular, stable “self,” but a life composed through relations — to the divine, to community, to the elements, to the institutional Church she both inhabited and addressed with startling boldness. Hildegard preached publicly, founded independent convents, advised powerful men, and left a body of work that exceeds the categories later assigned to it. Yet her presence endures less as monument than as movement: a continual crossing between enclosure and world, humility and command, listening and proclamation.

To follow Hildegard’s traces is to encounter a medieval archive alive with sound, colour, and breath. Her legacy does not simply tell us what a twelfth-century woman achieved; it invites us into a different understanding of knowledge itself — as something sung as much as written, embodied as much as reasoned, received as much as made. In the long echo of her voice, the boundaries between matter and meaning, earth and heaven, human and more-than-human, begin to shimmer — and, for a moment, to sing.

Works by Hildegard von Bingen

Selected Bibliography on Hildegard von Bingen

Theses and Dissertations

Bain, Jennifer Selected Antiphons of Hildegard von Bingen: Notational and Structural Design. M.A. Thesis. McGill University: Montreal. 1995.

Jeffreys, Catherine M. “Melodia et rhetorica: the devotional song repertory of Hildegard of Bingen.” Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 2000. 

Lomer, Beverly R. Music, rhetoric and the creation of feminist consciousness in the Marian songs of Hildegard of Bingen (1098--1179. PhD Dissertation. Florida Atlantic University 2006.

On line publications

Jones, Jeannette D. A Theological Interpretation of Viriditas in Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great  Portfolio of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology. Boston University. 

Mews, Constant J. Process Thought, Hildegard Of Bingen And Theological Tradition. Available at http://concrescence.org/ajpt_papers/vol01/01_mews.htm. 

Musical work:

• Complete Discography at medieval.org

• McGuire, K. Christian. Symphonia Caritatis: The Cistercian Chants of Hildegard von Bingen (2007)

List of Compositions

Manuscripts of Hildegard’s Music

Riesenkodex, Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 2 (ca. 1180-85) - Digitized and accessible online here

Dendermonde Codex, Belgium, St.-Pieters-&-Paulusabdij Cod. 9 (Villarenser codex) (ca. 1174/75) - Digitized and accessible online here

Muenchen, University Library, MS28156

Leipzig, University Library, St. Thomas 371 Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS 1139

Musical Editions

Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl. Ed. The Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard of Bingen: Critical Studies. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992.

Escot, Pozzi (Ed.); Three Antiphons by Hildegard of Bingen; Antiphons 9, 16, and 53; Literal English Translations from the Latin by the Editor; Hildegard Publishing Co. 1991.

Recordings

Hildegard of Bingen and Her Time, Augsburg Early Music Ensemble, Christophorus 74584 (CD), 1990 (Songs by Hildegard and Abelard).

The Lauds of St. Ursula, Early Music Institute of Indiana University, Focus 911 (CD), 1991.

Jouissance: Hildegard and Abelard, Viriditas, Spectrum Publications (CD), 1994.