Sacred Energy

Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess, composed music, theology, and natural science from within the walls of her celibate community

A twelfth-century abbess used the freedom of celibate monastic life to become a composer, theologian, and natural scientist all at once, in an era when almost no woman could be any of the three.

Hildegard of Bingen entered religious life as a child oblate and eventually became abbess of her own community at Rupertsberg, a position of real administrative authority that she used to build and govern the monastery on her own terms. From within its walls she composed an entire body of liturgical music, the Symphonia, wrote visionary theological works such as Scivias, and produced treatises on natural science and medicine, including the Physica and Causae et Curae. She corresponded with popes, emperors, and other prominent clergy of her day, a scope of influence almost unimaginable for a laywoman in twelfth-century Europe. Her celibacy was not incidental to this output but structurally connected to it: the stability, education, and institutional standing of the abbacy gave her years and resources a married life of the period would not have afforded.