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The monasteries and convents were as important to the intellectual life of
twelfth-century Europe as were the developing universities. Those religious
houses contained both scholars seeking the reconciliation of faith and reason and
contemplatives who emphasized the nonrational and mystical elements of
Christianity. For example, both the academic Peter Abelard and the mystic
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, his adversary, were monks. The cloister was also one of
the few places where women could get an education, write, and assume positions
of intellectual leadership. Among the leading nuns who wrote during this period
was the mystic, Hildegard of Bingen.
Hildegard was born in Bermersheim, near Mainz, Germany. As their tenth
and last child, her parents gave her as a “tithe” (literally a “tenth”) to the
church when she was eight years old. She took the vows of the Order of
St. Benedict at around fifteen and spent her next two decades as a devoted
Benedictine nun at Disibodenberg. In 1137, Hildegard became the abbess of
her convent and soon thereafter began her writing career. Over the next forty-
two years, Hildegard not only wrote, she also founded two new convents,
worked for social and church reform, and preached throughout the Rhine River
basin. Sought out for advice by kings and popes as well as by common people,
she wrote numerous letters of counsel and warning. Hildegard was fearlessly
direct in these letters, as the opening lines of her letter to Pope Anastasius IV
indicate:So it is, O man, that you who sit in the chief seat of the Lord, hold him in contempt
when you embrace evil, since you do not reject [evil] but kiss it, by silently toleratingHILDEGARD OF BINGEN
1098–1179