Hildegard was the tenth child of a noble Rhineland family. From the age of three she experienced what she called the visio — visions of light, of figures, of cosmic patterns — that she kept secret for forty years. Offered as a tithe to God, she was placed at eight in the care of the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, and there she remained, taking the habit, until Jutta's death made her superior of the community in 1136.
In 1141, at forty-two, she received an interior command: 'Speak and write what you see and hear.' For three years she resisted; then, in obedience and after consultation with St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugene III, she began. Her Scivias ('Know the Ways of the Lord,' 1141–51) was the first of three great visionary works, each painstakingly illustrated under her direction. Her authority was such that Frederick Barbarossa and the kings of England, France, and Greece wrote to her for counsel.
She composed seventy-seven liturgical songs (the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum) — among the largest surviving bodies of music by any medieval composer — and a morality play (Ordo virtutum). She wrote treatises on medicine (Physica) and natural science (Causae et curae), made the first European description of the female orgasm in writing, and was the first woman to preach publicly to mixed audiences of clergy and laity. She died at eighty-one and was declared a saint and a Doctor of the Church by Benedict XVI in 2012 — the first medieval Marian visionary so recognised and the fourth woman Doctor.