Mary Sharratt’s mission is very closely aligned with the mission of Nasty Women Writers. Her website states that she is “on a mission to write women back into history.” With her many novels, she is doing just that.
I discovered Sharratt through Illuminations: a novel of Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century Benedictine abbess, songwriter, author, painter, and visionary prophetess.
I first encountered Hildegard in the 1990s when she was “rediscovered” and had a sort of renaissance with feminists and progressives. I knew her mostly through her monophonic chants now sung as choral music, of which I purchased several CDs. Sequentia, an Ensemble for Medieval Music, released recordings of her music including Canticles of Ecstasy in 1993 catapulting Hildegard into the limelight.
I understood her as a powerful woman who had, quite remarkably, managed to rise to the forefront of the Catholic Church in the High Middle Ages. But I had no idea how radical she actually was and how hard she fought to achieve her ambitions. If there is one thing that the novel Illuminations reveals, it is that Hildegard von Bingen was a very ambitious woman.
In an interview about the book, Sharratt writes:
“The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator. Hildegard’s re-visioning of religion celebrated women and nature and even perceived God as feminine, as Mother. Her vision of the universe was an egg inside the womb of God.Hildegard shows how visionary women might transform the most male-dominated faith traditions from within”(https://hookofabook.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/mary-sharratt-speaks-about-hildegard-von-bingen-one-of-the-most-famous-women-of-the-middle-ages/).
Who is Hildegard von Bingen?
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was born in Bermersheim vor der Höhe, in what is now Germany. She was sought out for her gifts of prophecy by prominent members of the church as well as lay-folk. Because of this she received the title Sibyl of the Rhine after the famous sibyls—seers and prophetesses— of Greek mythology and the Rhineland where she lived.
At the age of eight years old, her mother committed her to an anchorage in a monastery at Disibodenberg. (More about medieval anchorites and anchorages below). Hildegard spent thirty years of her life locked up in a cell with another anchorite named Jutta. When Jutta died, she found a way to be released from the cell.
Illumination by Hildegard von Bingen from Scivias
Finally accepting her visions and ecstatic trance channeling as the work of God the Mother, she understood that they were meant to be shared. Radical for a woman of the time, she began to write them down. She worked for ten years on Liber Scivias (Know the Ways of God) followed by Liber Divinorum Operum (The book of Divine Works). She wrote several other texts on medicine and science, among them “one of the earliest surviving scientific books by a woman”(Brooke 34). Her book Physica (The Book of Simples) describes over 300 medicinal plants.
“She described the circulation of the blood hundreds of years before William Harvey discovered it in the seventeenth century, realized the connection between diabetes and sugar, and understood the theory of contagion (not accepted by the medical profession until the nineteenth century)” (Brooke 35).
With her herbal knowledge she was also a healer.
The anchorites of Medieval Europe
The beginning of the novel Illuminations shocked and startled me.
I had no idea Hildegard von Bingen was an anchorite and lived in an anchorage. After a ritual where she was tossed into a makeshift grave, and considered dead to her previous life, she and another woman, Jutta von Sponheim, were literally locked into a cell which was sealed off with bricks, to live within that tiny space with little connection to the outside world for the rest of their days.
Hildegard von Bingen. Medieval depiction of a spherical earth with different seasons at the same time (from the book “Liber Divinorum Operum”). wikimedia. public domain.
In the novel, one reason to explain why Hildegard received such a fate was that she was the youngest girl of a large family who had no dowry money left for her. Another is that Hildegard began having visions at a young age which alarmed her mother who believed they may be the work of satan. Putting her in an anchorage would help protect Hildegard from satanic visions. Jutta, many years older than Hildegard had chosen the life of an anchorite, for Hildegard, it was chosen for her.
Anchorites were men and women who chose a life of asceticism and agreed to be isolated in a small cell attached to a church. From ancient Greek, anchorite means “to withdraw,” mimicking Christ and his disciples’ withdrawal and devotion to prayer. In the Benedictine order of the time, it was considered a high form of monasticism which became popular in the 11th and 12th centuries. The anchorites were brought small amounts of food by a servant of the monastery they were attached to. Often there was a window into the church through which they could attend masses. The cells were extremely sparse.
In the novel, Hildegard and many other young girls are sent to anchorages against their will, a few of them joining the anchorage of Hildegard and Jutta. Jutta is their assumed leader until she dies and Hildegard takes over. Except for invented scenes, conversations and imagined feelings, the novel is based on fact. Sharratt did copious research including living in Germany for many years and reading the life stories of both Jutta and Hildegard, as well as the diaries of Hildegard in which she herself cautions against the practice of committing young girls to anchorages.
Over the years, I had read small biographies about Hildegard von Bingen in books surveying powerful women from history. This fact, however, that Hildegard had been walled up into a small cell as a child against her will, remaining there for thirty years, had eluded me. Maybe it was Sharratt’s writing, providing such graphic illustration, that made me take notice. However, even if I had no idea what an anchorite was— possibly contributing to my missing this fact when stated—it is definitely downplayed in a lot of her biographies. It seems a fact that should not be buried. This was a great suffering that Hildegard overcame.
Either it was so horrible to be a woman at the time that this was an actual viable option for a girl child, or many families simply wanted to dispose of their dowry-less daughters. Though men were also anchorites, more women than men were anchorites at this period in time.
In Illuminations, Hildegard has the following vision after her mother tells her she will go to the anchorage.
“As if in answer to my desolation, a golden orb came floating down and I saw her in the midst of that pulsing sphere . . … A face bathed in tenderness, the Mother of my deepest longing, she who gave me all the love I craved and more. “Beloved , don’t give up hope. When the time is ripe, I will set you free. …You are the seed. The anchorage is the husk. Here you will grow and grow until you grow too large for this place and then it will burst and you will step forth”(26).
Until her imprisonment, Hildegard had grown up running through the wild forest. She misses it terribly in the cell.
Sharratt writes:
“Disibodenberg Monastery is now in ruins and it’s impossible to say precisely where the anchorage was, but the suggested location is two suffocatingly narrow rooms built on to the back of the church.
Hildegard spent thirty years interred in her prison, her release only coming with Jutta’s death. What amazed me was how she was able to liberate herself and her sisters from such appalling conditions. At the age of forty-two, she underwent a dramatic transformation, from a life of silence and submission to answering the divine call to speak and write about her visions she had kept secret all those years.
In the 12th century, it was a radical thing for a nun to set quill to paper and write about weighty theological matters. Her abbot panicked and had her examined for heresy. Yet miraculously this “poor weak figure of a woman,” as Hildegard called herself, triumphed against all odds to become one of the greatest voices of her age”(https://hookofabook.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/mary-sharratt-speaks-about-hildegard-von-bingen-one-of-the-most-famous-women-of-the-middle-ages/).
The fact that I could not stop reading a book about a woman living walled up in a cell in the Middle Ages for the first half of her life is a testament to the power of Sharratt’s writing and storytelling abilities. I was absolutely transfixed. I barreled through this book as though it were a murder mystery.
Freedom and Accomplishment
Hildegard von Bingen by Karlheinz Oswald, Eibingen. photo: wikimedia commons
“The most ancient and enduring power of women is prophecy, my gift and my curse. Once, centuries before my existence, there lived in these Rhineland forests a woman names Weleda, she who sees. She took no husband but lived in a tower. In those heathen times, her people revered her as a goddess, for she foretold their victory against the Romans. But the seeress’s might is not just a relic of pagan times. Female prophets crown the books of the Old testament—Deborah and Sarah, Miriam and Abigail, Hannah and Esther.
And so, in my own age, when learned men, quoting Saint Peter, call woman the weaker vessel, even they have to concede that a woman can be a font of truth, filled with vision, her voice moving like a feather on the breath of God”(prologue).
This is the opening of the novel Illuminations.
Through a small window, while celled in as an anchorite, Hildegard befriends a young monk named Volmar, modeled after an actual friend of Hildegard and Jutta in their time as anchorites in Disibodenberg. Noticing Hildegard’s suffering as well as intellectual curiosity, he brings her books to read, passing them through the small opening between the cell and the church.
“He also brought me tender young plants dug up from the forest floor, wet earth still clinging to their roots. In the spring of the year, he gifted me with seedlings of medicinal herbs. Woodruff that bloomed sweetly in a cloud of delicate white flowers. Lady’s mantle that gathered raindrops resembling liquid diamonds in her pleated leaves. Chamomile with its golden flowers that soothed the stomach. Motherwort that banished nightmares. Valerian that stank like something rotten yet had the power to quiet Jutta’s nerves when she was too overwrought to sleep.
Each plant I watered with care, shifting its pot by the hours to make the most of the sparse sunlight angling down into the anchorage courtyard”(Illuminations 51).
Hildegard continues to see the orbs and receive visions but hides them.
“Dancing around my garden sanctuary, I prayed to Mary, viridissima virga, the greenest branch, who made my plants grow so tall and beautiful. In the floating orbs I saw the shining maiden at the axis of the great wheel, sitting still and majestic at the center while the wheel spun around her”(Illuminations 52).
She is trapped in the cell with a small courtyard to the outdoors with Jutta who is torturing herself, starving herself. Hildegard does not share Jutta’s intensity and rather sees god as the goddess who is in life itself, who is life itself. Hildegard believes life is to be celebrated. That is how one worships Her.
Upon Jutta’s death, Hildegard takes the opportunity to release herself from the anchorage. Sharratt has her stage a public rebellion at Jutta’s funeral which proves effective. She and her acolytes who had joined her are now free within the monastery. They can go to the library and they can walk the grounds. Hildegard can be in nature again. It is then that she begins her life as an author and prophetess. She receives long messages and teachings from the divine Mother, which she collects into illuminated manuscripts. The songs she has been writing from the anchorage she and her fellow nuns perform. She becomes a well-known and respected leader. She forms her own abbey, school and clinic at Rupertsberg on the Rhine.
Sharratt’s Illuminations helped me understand the magnitude of what Hildegard von Bingen accomplished and her fighting spirit to do so. She was a warrior indeed. Sharratt writes about her struggles with the abbot of the Disibodenberg who doesn’t think a woman should be writing. She exposes the politics of the church at the time and the power plays, which Hildegard navigates with intelligence and strategy.
But she does not make Hildegard into a human who is above error or pride. In this depiction, she allows Hildegard the full range of human emotions, making her a character we can relate to as well as sympathize with.
Mary Sharratt (b.1964), born in Minneapolis, currently lives in Portugal. She is the author of many novels including Revelations, a novel of the intersecting lives of two female mystics who changed history—Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, and Ecstasy: a novel of Alma Mahler. Learn more about Sharratt here.When it was time to leave the Disibodenberg monastery and set out to start her own monastery at Rupertsberg, Hildegard assumes they will take a boat up the Rhine to arrive there, but her benefactor tells her, no. Not at all. They must ride horses in procession. They must pass villages so the villagers can see them and understand who they are.
“You and your nuns shall fare forth like victors,” she said, this noblewoman who was so adept at winning the worldly game. “Like knights who have just won an impossible battle. The villagers and farmers you pass on the way shall run out to see you” (Illuminations 206).
In this triumphant scene Sharratt creates, Hildegard and her nuns, along with Volmar, head out in valiant procession, hearkening back to the powerful Amazon women warriors, following their lead. Humbled at first by her own audacity and power, Hildegard remembers her mission:
“Then I took a deep breath and raised my voice in song, leading the others in a canticle of praise. The soul is symphonic. Such is the sweetness of music that it banishes human weakness and fear, and draws us back to our original state of grace, reuniting us with heaven. All creation seemed to share our joy, the sky a pure and cloudless arc above our heads, the rising sun filling the leaves with gold”(Illuminations 208).
Hildegard von Bingen and Mary Sharratt are Nasty Women Writers.
© Theresa C. Dintino 2025
Works Cited
Brooke, Elizabeth. Medicine Women: a Pictorial History of Women Healers. Quest Books. 1997.
Sharratt, Mary. Illuminations: a novel of Hildegard von Bingen. Mariner Books, 2013.
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