Hildegard of Bingen was a Germanic thinker and is probably the most prolific woman writer of the Middle Ages. Her corpus is formed of a wide variety of topics, discursive forms and ways of transmission which include visionary literature, exegetic commentaries, theology, letters, hagiography, lyrical and musical compositions, and medical-naturalistic writings. Her creative and intellectual biography can be divided into two periods.

The first period begins in 1141, when Hildegard started her literary activity. She lived in the Abbey of Disibodenberg (where she entered as a child) until, in 1511, she moved together with her filiae to the first monastery she founded, located in Ruperstsberg-Bingen. Between 1141 and 1151 she wrote her first work of “visions”, titled Scivias. Immediately after, she began a prolific and varied creative and intellectual activity, which is made up of pieces such as the musical drama Ordo Virtutum, a compilation of 75 musical pieces with the title Symphonia aromnie celestium revelationum, her writings on medicine—Liber Subtiliatum—and the litterae ignotae, an “unkown” alphabet with which she made a lingua ignota built on more than a thousand words. Finally, between the years 1158 and 1163 she wrote her second work on visions, Liber vite meritorum, from more of a moral perspective.

The second period begins in 1163, short before the foundation of the second monastery, located in Eibingen. She wrote her last work on visions, Liber divinorum operum, extensively dedicated to describing the universe, the cycles that rule nature and the interactions between natural phenomena and human beings. During her last years she dedicated herself to exegesis and wrote letters into which she inserted small treatises. Among them are De Regula sancti Benedicti, two hagiographical works, the Solutiones quaestionum XXXVIII, of scholastic format, and the Explanatio symboli sancti Athanasii, which is made up of two letters Hildargard wrote to the nuns in her monastery before she died in 1179.