Finally, a note on the title. Hildegard’s creative spirit is perhaps most visible in the dozens of chants she composed, many of which contain at least some reference to nature, which she deeply loved and championed. “The Greenest Branch” is the title of one of her better-known chants (O Viridissima virga). It conjures an image of something new, fresh, and prolific . . . much like Hildegard herself.
1
Bermersheim, Rhineland
September 1115
The night I learned that I would be leaving my family home, the sounds of talk and laughter took a long time to die down. Finally, a growing chorus of snores from the hall told me that the guests from Sponheim were asleep. But there was a murmur of voices close by, and a faint light was coming from behind the partition that separated my parents’ bedchamber from ours. Despite the late hour and the warmth of the bed I shared with my two sisters and a brother, curiosity got the best of me and I slipped out of it, stepping silently across the rush-covered floor. I pulled my nightgown closer about me, for the autumn night was chilly, and put my eye to a chink through which the light was seeping.
On the other side, the hearth was burning low, the reflection of its flames dancing sluggishly on the walls. My parents, Mechtild and Hidelbert, sat facing each other across it. Their voices were low too, but they came clear and distinct through the crack in the wood.
“She is still a child, husband, only ten winters old.” My mother’s voice was sad.
“Almost eleven,” my father countered.
With sharp strokes, my mother pulled a comb through the long strands of her graying hair. Normally, during her nightly combing ritual, those strokes were slow and deliberate.
After a lengthy silence, my father spoke again. “Oblates enter monasteries at all ages. Some spend years there before they are old enough to begin their novitiate.”
“You know as well as I do that it is not a common practice.”
“The count’s offer to recommend Hildegard to his daughter’s convent is not to be passed over lightly.” Count Stephan von Sponheim and his wife, Sophia, in whose honor our feast had been held, were old family friends visiting Bermersheim on their way back from Speier, where the count had had a landholding dispute to settle. I had never met their daughter Jutta, but, like everybody in the Rhineland, I knew of the famous beauty whose abrupt decision to take monastic vows had dashed the hopes of eligible bachelors from Trier to Mainz.
Silence descended on the chamber, during which my mother gazed straight at her husband with her big blue eyes—like mine, everyone said. This often had an unnerving effect on him, and the clipped tone of his next words indicated that it was so this time too. “Hildegard was pledged to the Church on her birth.”
“I know,” she replied impatiently. As their tenth offspring, I belonged to the Church in accordance with a custom known as the tithe, a time-honored tradition that was a source of pride and prestige for families. So the question they disagreed on was not if I should enter the cloistered life but rather when. “The count’s offer is generous indeed, and there is no doubt that Jutta von Sponheim would be a fitting teacher to Hildegard. But you heard what Countess Sophia said—their daughter founded the convent and took the veil when she was eighteen years old, a grown woman.”
“That is because she had not shown signs of a deeper sensibility of spirit before then, but Hildegard—”
“Shouldn’t she be allowed to reach womanhood and take this step with full awareness?” my mother interjected in a tone that showed she did not care to hear that argument again. “We have been preparing her for it since she was born; she knows her destiny and will follow that path like the dutiful daughter she is. But to cut short her carefree days seems so harsh.”
My father ignored the interruption. “Hildegard has shown signs of a holy vocation since that day in the chapel—”
I knew the story well; in fact, I remembered it vividly, although it had happened when I was only three years old. One day I wandered into the family chapel out by the orchard and was dazed by the sunshine streaming through the narrow windows on both sides of the altar like two swords of light. It illuminated the wooden figures of the Apostles that my grandfather had ordered at Worms many years before in honor of Pope Gregorius’s reforming efforts. The brightness of that light caused my head to ache, but it also made me feel weightless as if I were lifted off my feet like a feather in the wind. Apparently, I stayed there for hours as the entire household searched for me frantically. It was my father who finally found me, and it was to him that I described my strange sensations in my tremulous, childish voice.
But there was one thing my family did not know about—a remembrance of a command the meaning of which I did not understand at that time.
Such reveries happened to me on several occasions after that, especially when sunlight flooded the dim interior of the chapel during Mass, and always ended in strong headaches that would send me to bed for days.
“It’s a manifestation of the touch of the Holy Spirit!” My father’s voice rose enthusiastically, prompting my mother to bid him keep it down.
“They are just spells.” She rolled her eyes wearily.
“It is a gift.”
“Another two or three years would prepare her better for the rigors of the cloister.”
“The best way to prepare for it is to leave this world behind and devote herself to the duties of
