Kloster Rupertsberg

And of course, there is resistance, but Hildegard persists.

Around 1150, her community moves to Rupertsberg near Bingen.

Later, another community follows at Eibingen, and from this point onwards, it becomes almost difficult to keep up with Hildegard, because she doesn't only write about her visions, she composes, and her music sounds different from what you might expect from someone who lived almost nine centuries ago.

It can be expansive, soaring, almost restless, as though the human voice is constantly trying to reach somewhere that words alone cannot quite go.

I think the person who we assume it was is Volmar, who had been at Dizzybodenberg and was Hildegard's closest confidant.

At Rupertsberg, they would have had to have a priest there to perform mass.

And so that was, we think, Volmar, and he would have played the devil.

He would have done all the shouting.

And the way she describes it is that those writings are.

are probably summarized and synthesized after Hildegard's lifetime or maybe towards later in her life, but that they weren't dictated by her, but that they represent a kind of a practice.

So, especially when she's running her own monastic institution at Rupertsberg, having monastic gardens, they would have had to have gardens and animals and all sorts of other things for obviously for food that they needed for everybody at Rupertsberg.

And clearly in her writings, like in the visionary writings, too, I mean, you just see these connections between, you know, the sort of the the earthly and the heavenly.