All kinds of people wrote to her on all kinds of subjects, and she solved their difficulties, advised them in their perplexities, illumined their ignorance.
She has had imitators in all after ages—Antoinette Bourgignon, Joanna Southcott, Krüdner, and Madame Blavatski—but none achieved such success, exercised so wide an influence, was treated with so much submission.
The Emperor, the princes, the nobility, the clergy, the people all believed in her prophetic power, and accepted her commands without a murmur. Her warnings and promises were received as divine revelations, although she spared no one in her denunciations.
The cause for this unbounded respect has been a matter of dispute, but is still inexplicable. That she was a coarse deceiver, who imposed herself on the people as inspired, by a long-continued course of deception, cannot for a moment be allowed by such as without prejudice examine her writings and her conduct. She was made a tool of, and a willing tool, by S. Bernard, to further the crusade he had at heart. But when, in spite of prophecy and promise, that crusade ended in hideous disaster and in dishonour as well, her influence with the people was not in the least shaken.
At the court of Count Meginhard of Spanheim lived the knight Hildebert of Böckelheim, his kinsman. Hildebert’s wife Mathilda bore him in 1098 a daughter, who was named Hildegarde, on their estate a little above Kreuznach on the Rhine. She was the tenth child, and her parents were no little concerned how to provide for such a fry. The simple expedient in those days was to send some of the family into monasteries and convents. From an early date Hildegarde was destined to be a nun. She, together with her kinswoman Chiltrude, the daughter of the count, were sent to be reared by Jutta, the abbess of S. Disibod, a sister of Count Meginhard. Jutta was an uneducated woman; learning was of no account in her convent, and Hildegarde was brought up in ignorance of nearly everything that a young woman of good family ought to have acquired even in the twelfth century.
That Hildegarde was hysterical cannot be doubted, but hysteria is precisely the most mysterious of all ailments. The phenomena connected with it are the perplexity of physicians even at this day. Many and ponderous works have been written upon it in England, France especially, and Germany, but it remains still an unsolved puzzle.
From a very early age she saw visions, and when she spoke of them to her playfellows, and they stared at her and did not appear to comprehend what she said, she shrank into herself and refrained from communicating to others the things that she saw and heard, or fancied she saw and heard. Even at the age of five, this singular gift was noticed by her parents, who could not understand it. Jutta made the girl learn the Psalms in Latin, and she obtained some glimmer of an idea what the words meant, but she did not even acquire a knowledge of the alphabet, nor that of reading music.
Hildegarde was constantly unwell, but her aches and pains were apparently due to hysteria and nothing else, and the suppressed desire to be doing something, making her personality felt, which was impossible as she was situated. When, finally, she was bidden write down her visions, at once all her maladies left her.
“When, on one occasion, I was very much exhausted by my sickness,” says she in her own biography of herself, “I asked the nurse who attended me whether she saw things in any other way than with her eyes; she made me no answer. Then I was frightened, and I dared say no more about it to any one. But sometimes, inadvertently, when I was talking, I let slip prophetic sentences. And when I was, so to say, full of this inner vision, then I spoke much which was quite unintelligible to those about me. And when the force of the ecstasy grew, and I spoke something about it, more after the manner of a child than of a girl of my years, then I blushed and cried, and wished heartily that I had held my tongue. But out of dread of what would be said, I never dared to speak out openly as to what I saw. However (Jutta) the noble lady with whom I was had cognisance of this and consulted a monk of her acquaintance.”
To one in this condition, plenty of exercise, wholesome food, and hard work, and her head under the pump if she gave way to her fancies, would have been proper treatment. But in the twelfth century no one had any conception that hysteria was a physical disorder.