On this day in 1179, a giant of medieval culture died. Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 in the Rhineland, part of modern Germany. She was a prolific writer on science and medicine, a renowned composer and a Christian visionary who ruled over religious houses. Her sacred songs and poems are still regularly performed.
Hildegard had visions as a child and entered a monastery before she was fourteen. She became a great monastic leader, founding several communities in Germany. She conducted preaching tours, was consulted by European religious thinkers and wrote three major books on her theology and visions.
An authority on botany and medicine, she drew on classical and contemporary texts as well as her experience in a monastic hospital and its herb gardens. Listing healing substances, Hildegard advised on diagnosis and treatment in people and animals; she made the first reference to hops in beer. Her writings – including 400 letters to popes, emperors and scholars, 70 musical pieces and a morality play, Ordo Virtutum – probably comprise the largest surviving body of work by a medieval author.
When she died, witnesses claimed that two streams of light appeared in the sky above the room. In 2012, she was declared a saint. Hildegard is one of only four female Doctors of the Catholic Church – scholars who have made a significant contribution to its theology.