Hildegard of Bingen

Last post written while drinking for a bit (though not last post in general, you don’t get off that easy) so let’s talk Hildegard of Bingen, because she’s been in my head for some reason.

*12th century nun, mystic, all-around brilliant lady

*Produced a substantial amount of visionary writing, endorsed by the Pope as being authentically from God, including one of the earliest known descriptions of purgatory

*There are 36 Doctors of the Church in Catholicism. 4 are women. Hildegard is one of them.

*Back in her time it wasn’t cool for women to speak publicly about religion, but Hildegard went on a whole ass speaking tour and was quite popular

*Used her relative protection and good rep to speak out against abuses in the church

*Okay I know, I hear what you’re saying. Great, another nun doing nun shit, thanks a lot snoooooore

BUT

*Hildegard also did science shit! She wrote books about medicine, and actually knew what she was talking about with a lot of stuff. People medicine AND veterinary medicine. I mean sure, some of it was weird, it was the 12th century, but a lot of it was accurate. Much later her work would be used as evidence that women should be admitted to medical school because HELLO, they’d been doing it for a long time.

*Hildegard was also responsible for the largest body of surviving medieval music we have from a single composer. Wrote both the music and the lyrics. Her compositions were preserved well enough that we can recreate them. (And you should think about that, because things don’t get saved by accident. Over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years, somebody, many somebodies, thought her music was worth safeguarding. There’s a process there that I think we take for granted these days but is actually deeply personal and human. In each generation after her someone read her music, or knew who she was, and made the choice to keep protecting her work.)

Anyway, you can listen to some on YouTube, which, isn’t that fucking cool? 900 years! It’s so beautiful, too. Even if church music isn’t your jam, I highly recommend you listen to just a little bit. Close your eyes and consider that what you’re hearing is almost exactly what someone just like you would have heard nearly a thousand years ago (and they would have found it a little odd or unfamiliar too, because Hildegard pushed boundaries with her music and blew people’s minds). It’s like time travel and immortality, all wrapped up in a song. She probably never imagined such a thing was possible, but here we are. Go Hildegard.

*Omg I almost forgot that she made up her own language and we don’t fucking know why, if it was to have secrets with her fellow nuns or just to fuck with people, I like to think it was the second one