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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

Vita Sanctae Hildegardis. M. Klaes, Coprus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, CCCM 126 (Turnhout Brepols, 1993)

Hildegardis Bingensis, Opera minora. H. Feiss, C. Evans, B. M. Kienzle, C. Muessig, B. Newman, P. Dronke eds., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 226  (Turnhout Brepols, 2007)

Hildegardis Bingensis, Opera minora II. C. P. Evans, J. Deploige, S. Moens, M. Embach, K. Gärtner eds., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 226a  (Turnhout Brepols, 2014)

Hildegard von Bingen. Hildegard von Bingen's Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. trans. Priscilla Throop. Healing Arts Press. 1998.

Hildegard of Bingen Homilies on the Gospels. ed. Beverley Mayne Kienzle. Cistercian Studies. 2011

Highley, Sarah L. Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language. An Edition Translation and Discussion. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia: a Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum [symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations]. ed. and trans. Barbara Newman. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia vol. 3 : The Holy Spirit. Edited by Marianne Richert Pfau with translations by Barbara Newman. Bryn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing Company, 1997. 

LETTERS

Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium pars prima I-XC edited by L. Van Acker, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 91A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991) 

Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium pars secunda XCI-CCLr edited by L. Van Acker, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 91A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993) 

Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium pars tertia CCLI-CCCXC edited by L. Van Acker and M. Klaes-Hachmoller, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis XCIB (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001) 

Hildegard of Bingen. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Volume I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Hildegard of Bingen. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Volume II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Hildegard of Bingen. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen: Volume III. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Baird, Joseph L. (ed.), The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen  New York: Oxford University Press, 2006

SCIVIAS

Hildegardis Bingensis, Scivias. A. Führkötter, A. Carlevaris eds., Corpus Christianorum Scholars Version vols. 43, 43A. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003) 

Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias. trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. Paulist Press 1990.

Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias by Hildegard of Bingen: The English Translation from the Critical Latin Edition. trans. Bruce Hozeski. Bear & Co. 1985.

LIBER VITAE MERITORUM

Hildegardis Bingensis, Liber vitae meritorum. A. Carlevaris ed. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 90 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995) 

Hildegard of Bingen. The Book of the Rewards of Life: Liber Vitae Meritorum. trans. Bruce W. Hozeski. Oxford University Press. 1997.

LIBER DIVINORUM OPERUM

Hildegardis Bingensis, Liber divinorum operum. A. Derolez and P. Dronke eds., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 92 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996)

Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Workswith Letters and Songs. Abridged. Edited by Matthew Fox with Translation by Robert Cunningham et al. Santa Fe: Bear and Co, 1987

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. 

MEDIA

ONLINE VIDEO

Hildegard Society Channel on Youtube

CINEMA

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009)

RADIO & PODCASTS

Hildegard of Bingen. In Our Time. BBC Radio 4. June 26, 2014.