St. Hildegard of Bingen

Who they were

Hildegard was given to a Rhineland monastery as a child, and for four decades was outwardly nothing remarkable: a nun, then an abbess, who had experienced luminous visions since childhood and told almost no one.

At forty two, ordered by what she described as an inner command she could no longer refuse, and validated after examination by Bernard of Clairvaux's endorsement and papal approval, she began to write. The second half of her life produced one of the most astonishing bodies of work of the entire Middle Ages: Scivias and its visionary theology with her own supervised illuminations; medical and natural science texts cataloguing plants, remedies, and the workings of the body; an invented language; letters advising emperors and popes with startling bluntness; four preaching tours through Germany, undertaken by a woman, publicly, in the twelfth century; and above all the music, some seventy seven chants whose soaring, unconventional lines make her today the most recorded composer of the medieval world. Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church in 2012.

Why people turn to St. Hildegard of Bingen

Musicians and composers, with St. Cecilia. Scientists and healers, especially women in those fields. And her deepest claim: everyone whose real work began at forty two, the late permission finally taken.

How to ask their intercession

With music, fittingly. Praying one decade over her chant suits her better than words about her. And for the gift you have been sitting on past forty, ask her prayers for the command to begin.