On this day in 1179, Hildegard of Bingen died at Rupertsberg, the house she had founded above the Rhine. She was about eighty-one, born in 1098. The date has been kept as her feast ever since.
The visions are what people remember, and she described them herself. But what interests me is the working arrangement behind the books. Hildegard dictated; Volmar, the monk who had known her since she was young, sat with the wax and took it down, and the sisters of the house copied and corrected. When Volmar died, some years before she did, she had to find someone else to hold the pen. Scivias took roughly a decade of that patient back-and-forth. Alongside it came the songs, the morality play, and the volumes on plants, stones and remedies that later scholars would argue over as early natural history — arguing being, as ever, what scholars do with an inheritance.
She also wrote letters: to abbots, to bishops, to Pope Eugene III, to the Emperor Frederick. Not because the position came to her, but because someone had to make the case for her community, and she was the one who could. The Wikipedia article is below, for anyone who wants the full range of her work.
Miriam, the Ordo Virtutum is the one I'd put on: a sung morality play written for the sisters to perform themselves, and the melodies leap far wider than most chant of the twelfth century — voices asked to reach, not just to keep the line.
Miriam, I love that she described the lights so precisely: shimmering points, a fortification-shaped brightness, and afterwards days of prostration. Neurologists have long noted it reads remarkably like migraine aura — one of the earliest first-person accounts we have, written by someone who kept working through it.