RUPERTSBERG

Hildegard received another vision in 1148 that ordered her and her nuns to establish a convent at Rupertsberg near Bingen. Saint Rupert of Bingen (712-732; feast day: May 15) was the son of a Christian mother, Bertha, and a pagan father, Robold. After a pilgrimage to Rome at age 15, Rupert lived with his mother on the hill at the point where the Nahe River meets the Rhine, and where he was buried after dying from a fever at the age of 20. It was the site of a small church, and later a chapel, but it had no long history of ecclesiastical use. This was the site that Hildegard chose for her new convent.

At first the abbot was reluctant to release her. Her fame had brought Disi-bodenberg to prominence, and the endowment of novices drawn to Hildegard had significantly increased the monastery’s wealth. The story goes that Hil-degard fell into a paralytic fit and stiffened to such an extent that the abbot could not raise her. After Kuno agreed to allow the Rupertsberg project to proceed, the trance departed and Hildegard’s health returned.

Establishing the convent was a difficult process. Hildegard records that there was grumbling among the nuns. They were accustomed to the relatively comfortable life at Disibodenberg and now had to deal with considerable poverty. However, the move gave Hildegard some degree of independence from the monastery, although she still remained under its jurisdiction. Her nuns were no longer part of a double house (male and female) under male supervision, and she was able to put into effect her ideas of the proper architecture for a monastic establishment. Archbishop Henry of Mainz consecrated the convent church in 1152, and many scholars believe that Hildegard’s Ordo virtutum was performed for this occasion, that the nuns acted and sang the roles of the virtues, and that Volmar performed the part of the devil.

In 1155, she reached an agreement with Kuno, shortly before his death, to transfer to the Rupertsberg convent the endowments brought by her nuns to Disibodenberg. She used these endowments, along with donations from royal families, to begin a building project at Rupertsberg: dormitory, refectory, and convent church. In 1158, Archbishop Arnold of Mainz officially recognized Rupertsberg convent as a Benedictine monastery, and Hildegard thus became de facto abbess of Rupertsberg, although she never held the title officially. In 1163 Emperor Frederick Barbarossa issued a letter of protection, ensuring the free election of an abbess for the convent and freedom from the requirement of a secular advocate. In short, it ensured the political independence of the community from external pressures.

An engraving by Daniel Meissner (1585-1625) in the Thesaurus philopolit-icus shows the state of the monastery in the early seventeenth century. The institution continued to function as a convent until the nuns were forced to flee to Eibingen during the Thirty Years’ War. Swedish troops destroyed the convent in 1632, and the remainder succumbed to railway construction in 1857. Nothing now remains of it. After 1148, when her letters begin, we have much more evidence about Hildegard’s life. Three events, recorded in the letters, show something of life at Rupertsberg.