Saint Hildegard of Bingen Medal - Mystic, Composer, Healer

About Saint Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen entered a Benedictine monastery at age 8 and never really left. She died there in 1179 at age 81, having spent those 73 years producing one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in medieval history.

She composed over 70 liturgical songs - the largest surviving collection of medieval music by a single composer. She wrote Physica and Causae et Curae, two scientific works documenting the medicinal properties of hundreds of plants, animals, and stones that are still referenced by historians of natural medicine. She recorded her visions in three major theological works, the most famous of which, Scivias, took her ten years to complete and contains 35 illuminations she supervised personally. She invented a constructed language called Lingua Ignota. She wrote a morality play. She corresponded with four popes, two emperors, and Bernard of Clairvaux. She founded two convents.

She did all of this while running a religious community, managing its practical affairs, and traveling to preach - something women were not supposed to do in 12th century Europe.
Pope Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church in 2012, making her the fourth woman to receive that title alongside Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux. She had been effectively functioning as one for nine centuries before the declaration was made official.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen's feast day is September 17. She was 42 years old when she finally began writing. Everything she is known for came after that.

Her Patronage

Hildegard of Bingen is the patron saint of musicians, composers, writers, healers, and herbalists. She is also invoked by people who suffer from migraines - she documented her own severe neurological episodes in detail, and modern physicians have analyzed her descriptions as among the earliest recorded accounts of migraine with aura. She understood that kind of pain from the inside and wrote about it with clinical precision eight centuries before the condition had a name.

People seek her intercession for creative work that feels impossible to complete, for healing that conventional medicine hasn't resolved, and for the courage to produce serious work in an environment that underestimates what you are capable of. That last intention is historically appropriate. She was 42 years old before she received permission to begin writing down her visions.

The Saint Hildegard of Bingen Medal

This medal depicts her in profile, bent over an open book, writing with a quill feather. She is caught mid-sentence. The composition is unusual among saint medals precisely because it shows her doing the thing she actually did - not standing in a devotional pose, not holding a symbol of her patronage, but working. The quill and book together reference her entire output: the music, the medicine, the theology, the prophecy, all of it produced by this woman bent over a page in a 12th century monastery. The natural gold or silver of the metal forms the illustration itself - black ink is applied to the pendant surface and the metal shows through as the image. A shatterproof liquid glass coating seals the surface.

Personalization and Engraving

The optional engraving on the reverse is rendered in Tangerine cursive. Two lines, up to 20 characters each. Hildegard left behind more quotable lines than almost any saint in the catalog. Two that fit:
Line 1: "I am a feather" Line 2: "on God's breath."
For a confirmation gift or a gift to a writer, musician, or healer, most people engrave the recipient's name and a significant date.