Who is hildegard bingen

Although the history of her formal consideration is complicated, she has been recognized as a saint by branches of the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. Several manuscripts of her works were produced during her lifetime, including the illustrated Rupertsberg manuscript of her first major work, Scivias lost since ; the Dendermonde Codex, which contains one version of her musical works; and the Ghent manuscript, which was the first fair-copy made for editing of her final theological work, the Liber Divinorum Operum.

At the end of her life, and probably under her initial guidance, all of her works were edited and gathered into the single Riesenkodex manuscript. Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval Church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard's music. In addition to the Ordo Virtutum, sixty-nine musical compositions, each with its own original poetic text, survive, and at least four other texts are known, though their musical notation has been lost.

This is one of the largest repertoires among medieval composers. One of her better known works, Ordo Virtutum Play of the Virtues , is a morality play. The morality play consists of monophonic melodies for the Anima human soul and 16 Virtues.

There is also one speaking part for the Devil. Scholars assert that the role of the Devil would have been played by Volmar, while Hildegard's nuns would have played the parts of Anima and the Virtues. How could I not want to write about her?

Today some people still use her music in church services, but most often it appears in concert performances. I like to use the term tabula rasa , blank slate, for her music.

People then hang their own musical ideas on this blank slate. I gave a lecture once where I played 14 different recordings of Hildegard, and the audience assumed they were all separate pieces. But they were really the same composition, in wildly different performances.

One the things I love about her is that she was 42 before she started writing anything down. She wrote her books, and created a new language, and, in a male-dominated church, she went on preaching tours at a time when women were not supposed to preach, especially in public. She refused to behave in a certain way.

She wrote at a time when, if the church authorities had not thought she was divinely inspired, she could easily have been put to death as a heretic.

She wrote two books that are connected with healing. As the illustrator of Scivias Hildegard is one of the few identifiable artists of the Middle Ages. It contains one of the earliest descriptions of Purgatory.

Hildegard considered music to be the point where heaven and earth meet. She viewed music as the interconnectivity between humans and the universe. Her book of songs Symphoniae includes the morality play and opera, Ordo Virtutum Play of Virtues , which was the first morality play and opera written, preceding others by more than years.

Hildegard of Bingen was ahead of her time. Her work helped usher in many new and creative ways of thinking. She demonstrated a new way of thinking and living during a time when little was expected of women. Her historical impact stems as much from her role in diligently recording the culmination of beliefs and practices over centuries of human experience as it does from her unique thinking.

Her body of work touches on virtually every part of our beliefs and practices. Why is Hildegard of Bingen Important? Hildegard of Bingen produced major works of theology, music and medicine.