Lingua ignota

She simply invents new words.

Her Lingua Ignota, literally her unknown language, contains hundreds of words that she created herself.

We also have her Litterae ignotae, an alphabet of her own that has survived.

Why exactly did she do it? We don't really know, and if I'm honest, I rather hope we never solve that completely, because there is something irresistible about the idea of a 12th-century woman looking at the languages around her and apparently thinking, "No, still not enough." Meanwhile, she keeps writing about God and the cosmos, about, uh, the natural world, plants, the human body, illness, and health, not as a modern scientist or physician, because that would mean pulling her out of her own time and forcing her into ours, but as someone convinced that body, nature, and spirit are all part of a larger whole.

She wrote about women's bodies too, including menstruation, which for the 12th century was quite extraordinary [chuckles].

Um, she invented her own language and she called it-- I have no idea how to say this, but Lingua Ignota.

The-- It's, um, I think translates to the unknown language, and around 1,000 words with her own alphabet to write it in.

Now, um, to be really clear, there's no link between Hildegard and the Voynich Manuscript.