They spent most of their time in prayer and contemplation with a few solitary pursuits like sewing. They were essentially “dead” to the outside world, and as so, received their last rights from the bishop before their confinement in the anchorage in a morbid ritual complete with a mock burial ceremony in which the anchor was laid out on a bier. Jutta’s cell was such an anchorage, and there was a door through which Hildegard entered with a couple of other girls from noble families, attracted by Jutta’s fame. When Hildegard was 14, she and one or two others were enclosed in the church as anchorites, and soon Jutta’s anchorhold grew connected to the male monastery of Disibodenberg. Hildegard began having remarkable visions which she shared only with Jutta.

Hildegard was chosen magistra of the community when Jutta died in 1136, and Hildegard confided to Volmar, another monk who would become her lifelong secretary, the story of her extraordinary visions and he suggested she write them down. Later, the local Archbishop requested that Hildegard continue writing. This resulted in the ‘Scivias,’ a report of 26 visions that would sum up the Christian doctrine on the history of salvation.

By 1147, Hildegard was wondering whether the accounts of her visions should be published, so she wrote to Bernard, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux. He responded favorably, and when Hildegard’s archbishop showed part of Scivias to Pope Eugenius, he suggested approving them for publication after first creating a commission which came to visit Hildegard. They declared her to be a genuine mystic and not insane, and with this encouragement, Hildegard was able to finish her Scivias and her fame began to spread through the Holy Roman Empire and beyond.

She was still working on Scivias and writing hymns when she decided to leave St. Disibod with her nuns and establish themselves separately at a new monastery on the Rupertsberg at Bingen on the Rhine. In 1151, she completed Scivias. Her visions were summarized and interpreted with assistance provided by Volmar, with pictures of the visions in three books: Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum and De operatione Dei. The books were printed for the first time in Paris in 1513.

She traveled widely giving public speeches, a rarity for a woman of the time, and she communicated with popes, bishops and even Barbarossa. Starting in 1158, Hildegard’s travels over the next 13 years took her to male and female monasteries and to cathedrals to preach to religious and secular clergy. She was slowly able to enlarge and consolidate the new Bingen monastery’s holdings. She also wrote non-visionary works such as plays, geological treatises, a detailed medical encyclopedia, and notes for a medical handbook. She felt that natural objects had curative powers, and wrote about natural history and medicinal uses of plants, animals, trees and stones.

She is the first composer whose biography is known. Her own musical plays were performed in the lively convent she founded. As a child in the monastery, Hildegard had listened to the musical interplay of words and tones of the monastics’ voices and the nuns’ everyday chants for almost 4 hours a day and she absorbed the essence of their music. She wrote a collection of her songs from her written music. She finished her final tour in 1171, at age 73.

The Romans were the first to discover Bingen’s strategic value of the confluence area of the Rhine and the Nahe, and Drusus had the Castellum Bingen built as part of the Rhine border fortification in 11 B.C. The fortress remained solid until seized in 355 A.D. by the Alemannies who then reigned a short time until the Frankonians declared Bingen as theirs. Otto 11 gave the “Bingen Country” to Willigis in 983, and Mainz Cathedral received Bingen in the middle of the I5th century, with which it would remain united for centuries.

The Counts von Sponheim also played a role in the history of neighboring Bad Kreuznach. It was once a Celtic settlement named Crucinacum, but early settlements date as far back as the stone age. Starting in 50 B.C., Bad Kreuznach witnessed 400 years of Roman occupation, and this gave the local people their monetary system, laws, progress in agriculture, trade, administration and business. The Germanic tribes next occupied the area, followed by the Franks who made the fortress a Royal Palace and reigned over the Nahe region, making it part of the Frankish Empire which ultimately encompassed much of what is now France, Switzerland, western Germany and northern Italy. The fortress along with the city of Kreuznach, was given to the Bishop of Speyer. By the year 900, the existing town was reeling under the feudal era.

The Count von Sponheim built a castle on Kauzenburg along the opposite bank of the Nahe River to care for the needs of his nobles. This formed the medieval Neustadt. The inhabitants of Kreuznach began building in this direction for protection and the two towns were united by a bridge in 1241. The Sponheims built their castle, Kauzenbergon, atop of the hill overlooking the town and it remained the seat of the Sponheim dynasty until 1437 when the family died out. The plague struck in 1666, not long after the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, followed by wars of bloody conquest initiated by King Louis XIV of France which laid waste to the entire Rhineland area from 1667 to 1689 and again in 1697 when the French troops looted and burned down the town and castle. The population decreased by one-third.

The small town of Bingen was all once enclosed within the walls around Klopp Hill where a castle was first recorded in 1282. The Basilica of St. Martin was built on the grounds of a Roman temple which was partly ruined in 883 but later redesigned and reopened as a church in 1220. It went through much destruction and rebuilding until about 1505 when it was enlarged as a basilica. During the Thirty Years’ War Bingen was plundered, and again ruined later by French troops during their occupation in 1797.

Napoleon annexed Bingen in 1804 and, when he was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, the Rhineland was returned to the German Association of States. In 1816, it was added to the Greater Duchy of Hessia. After the Second World War in 1946, the victors carved up Hesse, with the right side of the Rhine remaining partly Hessian, and the left and part of the right side becoming the new state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The monastery in Eibingen that Hildegard of Bingen founded isn’t there anymore, but there is a small parish church in Eibingen with a shrine holding her remains and containing some of her symbols and images. Nothing is left of the Rupertsberg convent, the French having destroyed its last remains in 1689. The monastery where young Hildegard learned from Jutta and where she began writing Scivias is now in ruins, but it once stood with banks on the sides falling steeply to the Rhine, which was then rockier and more turbulent.