Medicine, Music, and a Fight Over a Grave

The visionary is only part of the output. She wrote two works on the natural world and on healing, cataloguing plants, stones, animals and their properties and describing the causes and cures of illness in terms of the balance of humours, in a register with almost no visionary content at all. She composed some seventy seven liturgical songs of a distinctive kind, with enormous melodic leaps and long melismas, and a sung morality play, the Ordo Virtutum, in which the Virtues and the Devil contend for a soul and the Devil, who cannot sing, can only shout. She also invented a private language of about a thousand words, with its own alphabet, whose purpose has never been satisfactorily explained.

She fought her abbot to move her community to a new house at Rupertsberg and won. In her sixties she undertook four preaching tours, addressing clergy and laity publicly, which was not something women did. And at the very end of her life she and her nuns were placed under interdict, cut off from communion and from singing the office, because they had buried a man in their churchyard whom the authorities said had been excommunicated. She refused to have the body dug up, argued that he had been reconciled before death, and endured the silence until the interdict was lifted a few months before she died. She was named a Doctor of the Church in 2012.