A Renaissance woman long before the Renaissance, the visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) corresponded with Europe's elite, founded and led a noted women's religious community, and wrote on topics ranging from theology to natural history. Yet we know her best as Western music's most accomplished early composer, responsible for a wealth of musical creations for her fellow monastics.

Honey Meconi draws on her own experience as a scholar and performer of Hildegard's music to explore the life and work of this foundational figure. Combining historical detail with musical analysis, Meconi delves into Hildegard's mastery of plainchant, her innovative musical drama, and her voluminous writings. Hildegard's distinctive musical style still excites modern listeners through wide-ranging, sinuous melodies set to her own evocative poetry. Together with her passionate religious texts, her music reveals a holistic understanding of the medieval world still relevant to today's readers.

This study of the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen examines her understanding of the womb through her medical work Cause et cure and visionary work Scivias. Medieval tradition viewed female bodies negatively, seeing their porous nature as easily polluted. Women were considered weaker and more vulnerable to spiritual invasion. This volume shows how Hildegard’s revolutionary understanding of the female reproductive body reversed these assumptions. She connected female bodily flows not to pollution but to purification, presenting menstruation and reproductive fluids as vital components in natural cleansing and healing processes. The book concludes with a chapter showing how Hildegard's concept of beneficial bodily flow remains relevant in modern Western and non-Western alternative medicine, in which female bodily porosity and fluid exchange continue to be understood as sources of regenerative power.