Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich: Visionary Theology

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess who, after early life as an oblate at the hermitage of Disibodenberg under the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim, eventually founded her own independent monastery at Rupertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, around 1150, and later a second house at Eibingen. She reported experiencing visions from early childhood, but did not begin systematically recording them until her forties, prompted, according to her own account, by an unmistakable divine command; her chief visionary work, Scivias (short for "Scito vias Domini," "Know the Ways of the Lord"), composed between 1141 and 1151, presents twenty-six visions covering creation, redemption, and the Church, each rendered first in vivid symbolic description and then followed by extended theological interpretation.