St. Hildegard spoke a book out loud for ten years

DISIBODENBERG, Rhineland, 1141 AD — Ten years of talking. One book at the end of it. And the woman who made that book never wrote a word of it with her own hand.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen was forty-two in 1141 AD. That was the year she started. She lived on a hill in Germany where two rivers, the Nahe and the Glan, run together. Her home was a monastery — a house of monks. A small group of women lived inside it too, and they looked to her.

That year she began a book about what she saw and heard in her visions. She called it the Scivias. She could read. Nobody had ever taught her to write. So she said the book out loud, and a monk named Volmar wrote it down.

The only lessons she ever got

She was taught to read and sing the psalms in Latin. That was enough to join in the singing in church, which went on all day. That was the whole of her schooling.

She said so herself. “I had scarcely any knowledge of letters. An uneducated woman had taught me.” The woman she meant was Jutta. She was the nun who brought St. Hildegard up in the monastery and taught her to read. Later, in a letter, St. Hildegard put it even more plainly. She had no training at all, and could read only at the most basic level.

Her mouth, his pen

So here is how a book gets made that way. St. Hildegard talked. Volmar, a monk of the same house, was her scribe. He sat with a pen and wrote down whatever she said. Some of the sisters wrote her words down as well. One of them, Richardis von Stade, worked on the book alongside Volmar.

Volmar’s job was not only holding the pen. St. Hildegard’s Latin came out plain and rough, and Volmar tidied it into better style. But he could not change what she said. She wrote that she never set down any words except the ones she heard.

A language she had only sung

The book came out in Latin. Latin was the language of the church services. St. Hildegard had been taught just enough of it to sing the psalms. In her letter she also said that what she knew did not come to her in German.

So she was making a long book out loud. And she was doing it in a language she could barely read and could not write at all.

Six years in, the book was still not finished. Archbishop Henry of Mainz carried part of it to Pope Eugene III. The Pope was at Trier for a meeting of bishops. He read it, and he sent her a letter telling her to keep writing.

The work took ten years. The old accounts do not agree on the year it was finished: 1150 or 1151 AD. By then the Scivias had grown into three books and twenty-six visions. The third book on its own was as long as the first two put together.