Abbess hildegard biography of barack
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Death of a Medieval Polymath
The visions began when Hildegard of Bingen was ung – perhaps just three. The visions did not come in dreams or ecstatic states; ecstasy, she thought, was a defect. They came like a cloud of light inre her, on which forms and shadows moved while her eyes were open and all her senses routinely engaged.
Born in 1098, the tenth child of a wealthy family, Hildegard was given to the monastic life by her parents as an oblate when she was eight. But even in the religious fervour of 12th-century Europe, she kept her visions secret until she was 42 and an abbess. visionär women were suspect. When she later founded her own kloster, many wondered, according to a contemporary life, why ‘a foolish and unlearned woman’ should receive such mysteries when there were ‘so many strong and wise men’.
After her death, Hildegard’s prophetic writings remained well known; Pope Gregory XIII added her to the list of Catholic saints in the 1580s, although she has neve
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Hildegard of Bingen: Get to Know a Medieval Polymath’s Life
Also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine and canonized as Saint Hildegard, Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine Abbess and medieval polymath, exercising her various talents as a composer, mystic, philosopher, writer, medical practitioner, and botanist, with some scholars crediting her as the founder of the scientific study of natural history in Germany. Here, we will take a closer look at the woman behind all of these remarkable achievements and explore the life of Hildegard of Bingen.
Hildegard of Bingen: Early Life
Born sometime around the year 1098, Hildegard’s parents were Mechtild of Merxheim-Nahet and Hildebert of Bermersheim, placing her in the social ranks of the free lower nobility. A sickly child, Hildegard later claimed in her Vita that she experienced visions from an early age, including visions of what she termed the umbra viventis lucis (the reflection of the living light). In a letter she wrot
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Abstract
Charles Singer’s retrospective diagnosis of Hildegard of Bingen as a migraine sufferer, first made in 1913, has become commonly accepted. This article uses Hildegard as a case study to shift our focus from a polarised debate about the merits or otherwise of retrospective diagnosis, to examine instead what happens when diagnoses take on lives of their own. It argues that simply championing or rejecting retrospective diagnosis is not enough; that we need instead to appreciate how, at the moment of creation, a diagnosis reflects the significance of particular medical signs and theories in historical context and how, when and why such diagnoses can come to do meaningful work when subsequently mobilised as scientific ‘fact’. This article first traces the emergence of a new formulation of migraine in the nineteenth century, then shows how this context enabled Singer to retrospectively diagnose Hildegard’s migraine and finally examines some of the ways in which this idea has gain