Hildegard was a woman of extraordinarily active and independent mind. She was not only gifted with a thoroughly efficient intellect, but was possessed of great energy and considerable literary power, and her writings cover a wide range, betraying the most varied activities and remarkable imaginative faculty. The best known, and in a literary sense the most valuable of her works, are the books of visions. She was before all things an ecstatic, and both her _Scivias_ (1141-50) and her _Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis_ (1163-70) contain passages of real power and beauty. Less valuable, perhaps, is her third long mystical work (the second in point of time), the _Liber vitae meritorum_ (1158-62). She is credited with the authorship of an interesting mystery-play and of a collection of musical compositions, while her life of St. Disibode, the Irish missionary (594-674) to whom her part of the Rhineland owes its Christianity, and her account of St. Rupert, a local saint commemorated in the name ‘Rupertsberg’, both bear witness alike to her narrative powers, her capacity for systematic arrangement, and her historical interests. Her extensive correspondence demonstrates the influence that she wielded in her own day and country, while her _Quaestionum solutiones triginta octo_, her _Explanatio regulae sancti Benedicti_, and her _Explanatio symboli sancti Athanasii ad congregationem sororum suorum_ give us glimpses of her activities as head of a religious house. Her biographer, the monk Theodoric, records that she also busied herself with the treatment of the sick, and credits her with miraculous powers of healing.[1] Some of the cited instances of this faculty, as the curing of a love-sick maid,[2] are, however, but manifestations of personal ascendancy over weaker minds; notwithstanding her undoubted acquaintance with the science of her day, and the claims made for her as a pioneer of the hospital system, there is no serious evidence that her treatment extended beyond exorcism and prayer. For her time and circumstance Hildegard had seen a fair amount of the world. Living on the Rhine, the highway of Western Germany, she was well placed for observing the traffic and activities of men. She had journeyed at least as far north as Cologne, and had traversed the eastern tributary of the great river to Frankfort on the Main and to Rothenburg on Taube.[3] Her own country, the basin of the Nahe and the Glan, she knew intimately. She was, moreover, in constant communication with Mayence, the seat of the archbishopric in which Bingen was situated, and there has survived an extensive correspondence with the ecclesiastics of Cologne, Speyer, Hildesheim, Trèves, Bamberg, Prague, Nürnberg, Utrecht, and numerous other towns of Germany, the Low Countries, and Central Europe. [Illustration: Folio 17 r col. b Folio 32 v col. b Folio 205 r col. b Plate II. THE THREE SCRIPTS OF THE WIESBADEN CODEX B]