Many people know Hildegard of Bingen for her musical compositions, which were highly innovative for the 12th century and are still being performed today. In fact in the 1990s, an electronic version of them by Richard Souther, Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen, reached number one in the charts.

But Hildegard also did a bit of everything: botany, medicine, theology, philosophy—she even wrote a play. It’s an allegorical drama, where a Soul gets tempted by the Devil on one side and encouraged by a host of Virtues on the other. There's something delightfully subtle about this, because the Devil is of course a man, whereas the Soul and the Virtues, true to their Latin etymology, are all women. The Virtues sing beautifully, but the Devil only gets to yell. 

And that’s not the only time Hildegard takes the side of women. In the 12th century, the dominant position was that women were inferior, designed by God to serve men, and definitely not allowed to preach. But Hildegard went on speaking tours; she said that men were also designed to serve women; and she insisted on the equal importance of both genders. What's more, she claimed that God spoke to her: she said she started getting powerful visions at a very young age, and didn’t know what to make of them until finally, in her 40s, she realized they must be from God.

Over the intervening centuries, not everyone has taken her at her word. Some have suggested she never had unusual experiences of any kind, and just claimed to in order to get a hearing: in the crushingly patriarchal world of the 12th century, there were vanishingly few ways for brilliant women to be taken seriously. Others have said that Hildegard did have unusual experiences, but they were maybe just a medical condition which she misinterpreted as mystical. (Oliver Sacks said her visions sounded a bit like “scintillating scotoma,” a kind of migraine.) So what made her believe they weren't hallucinations—or, for that matter, deceptions by an evil demon? And how does the belief that God is speaking to you square with the Christian virtue of humility?

Well, like many around her, Hildegard believed in the possibility of divine revelation, and had a picture of truth according to which it comes as a sudden flash of inspiration. She also felt she had important things to tell her community—things about morality, society, gender, and religion—and the visions seemed to back those ideas up.

As for the arrogance, Hildegard was careful to insist that she wasn’t that special; she even called herself, on one occasion, “a foolish and uneducated woman.” She herself was just an unimportant vessel for God to speak through, she suggested; it was all about God, not about her. Then again, she also says that anyone who doubts her revelations is going straight to hell. “Let no man be so bold as to add anything to the words of this book… nor to delete anything… lest he be deleted from the book of life.” Ouch!

Hopefully our guest can address that apparent contradiction, and more: it’s Jennifer Bain from Dalhousie University, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen.