The Abbess Who Filed a Complaint

Hildegard of Bingen, who died in 1179, produced a body of work that is difficult to summarise because of its range. Three major theological volumes reporting and interpreting visions. A substantial corpus of liturgical music, unusual in melodic range for the period. Two works on natural history and medicine. A morality play with music. A correspondence with popes, emperors and abbots. And a constructed language of around a thousand invented words with its own alphabet, the purpose of which is still argued about.

The medical writings, Physica and Causae et Curae, are the ones this archive is most interested in. They are practical: plants, minerals, animals, their properties and their application to specific complaints. The framework is humoral and the causal theory is of its period. The observations about particular plants are frequently accurate and were being made by someone running an infirmary.

How she was able to write any of it is the institutional question, and it is more instructive than the content. Hildegard's authority rested on her visions, which she reported having had from childhood and did not write down for decades. When she did, she sought and obtained approval, ultimately including from Pope Eugenius III at the synod of Trier around 1147.

That approval is what made everything else possible. A woman in the twelfth century had no standing to write theology on her own authority. A woman transmitting what she had been shown was a different case, and the church had a category for it. She used the category, and she used it deliberately.

The letters make the deliberateness visible. She writes to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in terms of reproof. She conducts preaching tours, which was extraordinary. She fights her own abbot for years to move her nuns to an independent house at Rupertsberg and wins. She places an interdict on her own convent rather than exhume a man buried in her ground whom the authorities had declared excommunicate, and she argues the case in writing and prevails.

None of that is the behaviour of a passive vessel, and the vessel language in her own prologues, where she describes herself as a poor little figure of a woman, is the price of admission rather than a self-assessment.

That is the finding worth extracting. The rhetorical self-deprecation in medieval women's religious writing is routinely read as internalised inferiority. Read alongside the actions, it reads better as a negotiated formula: the required disclaimer that purchased the standing to write at all.

It also indicates the shape of the constraint. Hildegard was not prevented from producing knowledge. She was required to route it through a specific channel and to attribute it elsewhere, and within that constraint she produced more than most of her contemporaries of either sex.

The channel closed for others. Later medieval women writing in the same visionary mode faced increasingly hostile scrutiny, and by the fifteenth century the category that had legitimated her was one of the routes to a trial.

She got in through a door that was open for about two centuries, and she used the whole of it.