Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary theologian, composer, and natural philosopher whose breadth of output made her the first major female theological voice in the Western Latin tradition. From her monastery at Rupertsberg on the Rhine she produced three major prophetic works recording and interpreting her mystical visions, an extensive corpus of liturgical music, and pioneering encyclopedic writings on natural science and medicine. She conducted preaching tours of the Rhineland and beyond — a remarkable public role for any abbess of the era — and engaged in a vast correspondence with popes, emperors, and abbots. Declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, she is one of only four women to hold that title. Her thought unites Augustinian theology, Neoplatonic cosmology, and a distinctive theology of viriditas ("greenness") as the animating force of creation.