Pars Prima

Hildegard of Bingen was a genius who wrote a guide to the use of herbs, a second medical text, composed liturgical music, and received and wrote letters of which hundreds survive. She wrote down a "lingua ignota" (unknown language) via a partial dictionary, and an alphabet.

She also wrote:

• a vision of purgatory that is 426 pages in its Latin critical edition (Liber vite meritorum - Book of the Rewards of Life)
• a book of systematic theology comparable to that of monk and theologian Hugh of St.-Victor (Scivias - Know the Ways)
• a second book of integrated theology/philosophy/the natural world that has its own vision of purgatory and hell (Liber divinorum operum - Book of Divine Works)
• music for the liturgy (prayer services)
• the first morality play starring the Virtues in which the bad guy is Satan as the fight is for the human Soul (Ordo Virtutum)
• a series of homilies on the Gospels
• multiple visionary sermons that prophesied the Christian apocalypse
• letters that extensively criticized popes, emperors, other abbesses' interpretations of the Bible
• an interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict, upon request by a men's convent
• invented letters to her from high authorities
• numerous letters of religious support to abbesses, abbots, bishops, priests, empresses, high politicians, parents worrying about whether their deceased children's souls were in heaven, purgatory, or hell
• advice to another woman whose writing was similarly based on an assertion of divine visions

and absolutely some things that I'm forgetting at the moment.

Her writing--especially the Scivias, Liber vite meritorum,Liber divinorum operum, and Gospel homilies--demonstrates extensive knowledge of scripture and of Christian theology, both contemporary and ancient.

Her medical texts were read at her convent. Her religious music was played at the schools that eventually became the University of Paris. Her theological texts survive in numerous copies and were read well beyond the Rupertsberg and Eibingen. (Oh, yeah--Hildegard also founded not one but two monasteries.) She preached her apocalyptic sermons in public, in churches, to Churchmen and probably also laypeople, on preaching tours that took her up and down the Rhine.

If Hildegard was claiming divine visions in order to write down herbal cures for her fellow nuns...I'm sorry, but, holy shit did she ever pull off history's most comprehensive and successful cover-up job.

Pars Secunda

As to the matter of migraines and visions.

The primary question that historians ask is, Does it even matter?

This term has a different meaning sometimes, but in this case: historians approach the matter through a perspective called functionalism. That is: how did her visions function--for herself, and for those who heard or read them?

We will never know whether Hildegard's visions were migraines, meditation, the result of contemporary memory and prayer techniques (see Mary Carruthers' excellent works, The Craft of Thought and The Book of Memory), or messages from God. We can't know.

What we can know is the overwhelming evidence that she believed her visions and auditions came from God, and her readers and listeners likewise believed it. They believed it enough that a century later, scholars at the University of Paris wrote an apocalyptic prophecy that they attributed to Hildegard in order to gain it a better reputation. (Insurgent gentes--"The nations will rise").

By the fifteenth century, male writers unhappy with women visionaries' popularity and potential power would be keen to distinguish between visions from natural causes, visions from God, and visions from Satan. (See especially Johannes Nider's Formicarius.) In Hildegard's day? Not so much. What mattered were the visions.

Sacks' claims have their own function. They serve the modern-day tendencies towards skepticism of religion, mystical trains of thought or otherworldly phenonema, our belief that we can understand everything with science (which had some disastrous results in the 19th and 20th centuries). And most importantly, the feeling of belonging, and of a purpose to human suffering that we have forgotten how to believe.

In the end, what matters is that Hildegard was awesome.

My parents used to listen to music she composed. I remember her name. Thx for the information!