Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard was given by her family to the church at about eight, enclosed with the anchoress Jutta at the monastery of Disibodenberg, and elected to lead the women's community when Jutta died. She had seen what she called the reflection of the living Light since early childhood, and had told almost nobody.

In 1141 she reports being commanded to write down what she saw, and refusing, and falling ill, and recovering only when she began. That sequence is a convention of the genre and it is also what she says happened. The result is Scivias, know the ways, twenty six visions with her own interpretations attached, composed over ten years. She was careful about authorisation: she wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux for an opinion, the matter reached Pope Eugenius III at the synod of Trier, and he read from the book publicly and told her to continue.

That approval is what made everything else possible. A woman writing theology in the twelfth century needed a warrant, and she had the best one available, granted in public by a pope. She used it for the next forty years, and her surviving correspondence runs to some four hundred letters, addressed to abbots, bishops, an emperor and a pope, in a tone that is respectful, entirely unintimidated, and frequently furious.

The visionary is only part of the output. She wrote two works on the natural world and on healing, cataloguing plants, stones, animals and their properties and describing the causes and cures of illness in terms of the balance of humours, in a register with almost no visionary content at all. She composed some seventy seven liturgical songs of a distinctive kind, with enormous melodic leaps and long melismas, and a sung morality play, the Ordo Virtutum, in which the Virtues and the Devil contend for a soul and the Devil, who cannot sing, can only shout. She also invented a private language of about a thousand words, with its own alphabet, whose purpose has never been satisfactorily explained.

She fought her abbot to move her community to a new house at Rupertsberg and won. In her sixties she undertook four preaching tours, addressing clergy and laity publicly, which was not something women did. And at the very end of her life she and her nuns were placed under interdict, cut off from communion and from singing the office, because they had buried a man in their churchyard whom the authorities said had been excommunicated. She refused to have the body dug up, argued that he had been reconciled before death, and endured the silence until the interdict was lifted a few months before she died. She was named a Doctor of the Church in 2012.