A Voice that Echoes through Centuries; Hildegard von Bingen

Who can truly be called a feminist when we look back at history? The question is not a simple one, because applying a modern term to pre-modern figures risks flattening the complexity of their world. And yet, to leave the question unasked is to overlook the ways in which women have carved out power, voice, and agency within systems that often sought to silence them. Few figures raise this question more vividly than Saint Hildegard von Bingen (also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine), the twelfth-century abbess whose astonishing life and work continue to resonate across the centuries.

Hildegard von Bingen from Hulton Archive

Born into German nobility in 1098, Hildegard entered a cloister at fifteen, and from within its walls she built an extraordinary legacy. She became a theologian and visionary whose writings on purgatory shaped Church doctrine, a composer of strikingly original music, and a playwright. She preached publicly—rare for a woman of her time—denouncing corruption in the Church with a boldness that unsettled her contemporaries. 

Her genius was not confined to theology or music. Hildegard’s work touched almost every domain of knowledge. She was a true polymath, engaging with religion, art, medicine, taxonomy, science, ecology, linguistics, and even architecture. She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. She was also a healer, particularly attentive to women’s health, and her medical texts reveal a keen observational mind. 

In her medical texts Causae et curae and Physica, Hildegard wrote about the workings of sleep, dreams, and waking, stressing how vital rest is for the human body. She saw sleep as both passive and active, a state that restored balance. She cautioned against too little or too much, traced the causes of insomnia and nightmares, and even suggested ways to treat them. 

Her pedagogical vision was strikingly holistic: she believed in teaching that opened both the mind and the heart, nurturing the spirit of the individual. She integrated ecology, activism, and the arts in a way that feels uncannily modern, emphasizing the environment, the importance of creativity, and the discovery of one’s authentic voice in service of others. "Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap” she said. For Hildegard, learning was not merely the acquisition of knowledge but a means of making the world better, of aligning the human spirit with the divine order.  She was canonized as a saint in 2012—an affirmation of the enduring power of her life and work.

Within the rigid structures of Hildegard's era, she found ways to carve out space for women’s leadership and intellectual presence. Her surviving works span three volumes of visionary theology, music for the liturgy including the morality play 'Ordo Virtutum', nearly 400 letters to popes, emperors, and abbots (many doubling as sermon records), two books on natural medicine, an invented language called 'lingua ignota', and other texts such as a gospel commentary and hagiographies. Together, they reveal a woman who claimed intellectual authority in her own age and whose voice continues to resonate across centuries.

She did not argue for women’s equality in the way we understand it today, and her authority rested not on open defiance but on visions she believed were divinely inspired. However, her very act of contributing so richly to theology, science, and the arts, in a time when women were largely excluded from such domains, can be read as a feminist gesture, if we understand feminism in its broadest sense—as the assertion of women’s voices, intellect, and authority against the constraints of their age.

References:

1. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1257&context=mff
2. https://www.europeana.eu/en/stories/hildegard-von-bingen-celebrating-an-early-ecofeminist
3. https://sciencenetwork.uk/think/hildegard-of-bingen
4. https://scientificwomen.net/women/bingen-hildegarde-15
5. Sakalauskaitė–Juodeikienė, E., & Eling, P. (2021). Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179) on sleep and dreams in her Causae et curae and Physica: a historical perspective. Sleep Medicine, 88, 7-12.