St. Hildegard
Hildegard of Bingen (German:
Hildegard von Bingen;
Latin:
Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as
Saint Hildegard and the
Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German
Benedictine abbess and
polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher,
mystic and
visionary during the
High Middle Ages.
[1][2] She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history.
[3] She has been considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific
natural history in Germany.
[4]
Hildegard's convent elected her as
magistra in 1136; she founded the monasteries of
Rupertsberg in 1150 and
Eibingen in 1165. She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, hymns and antiphons for the liturgy
[2] and poems, while supervising miniature
illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work,
Scivias.
[5] There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words.
[6] One of her works, the
Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving
morality play.
[7] She is also noted for the invention of a
constructed language known as
Lingua Ignota.
Although the history of her formal
canonization is complicated, regional calendars of the
Roman Catholic Church have listed her as a saint for centuries. On 10 May 2012,
Pope Benedict XVI extended the liturgical cult of Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church in a process known as "equivalent canonization". On 7 October 2012, he named her a
Doctor of the Church, in recognition of "her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching."
[8]
Find more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen