Women of Other Faiths
Using common values contained in their respective teachings, women of all religious traditions can work together and collaborate in many areas especially peace building and women’s empowerment. Collectively women of all faiths can learn from each other’s struggles and histories, while showing support for women’s religious leadership roles worldwide. Please contribute to this archive by suggesting women of all faiths to be featured through our recommendation form.
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Hildegard of Bingen
Known For: First medical writer to write texts on female anatomy
Dates: 1098-1179
Faith: Judaism
Country: Germany
About
Hildegrad of Bingen was born in Germany and was the tenth child of a well-to-do family. She was sent by her parents to a 400-year-old Benedictine monastery where she learnt to read and to write and became interested in nature, which led her to become the first woman medical writers to describe female anatomy. She learned Latin, read the scriptures, and had access to many other books of religious and philosophical nature. She was elected unanimously as the new abbess.
She was not afraid to exercise authority and she celebrated feminine community and beauty in her spiritual writings. She used the metaphor of marriage to God, her visions have female figures in them: Ecclesia, Caritas (heavenly love), Sapientia, and others. In her texts on medicine, she included topics which male writers usually did not, such as how to deal with menstrual cramps. She also wrote a text just on what we’d today call gynecology. Clearly, she was a more prolific writer than most women of her era; more to the point, she was more prolific than most of the men of the time. She was not afraid to ask for church reform, challenged the pope to wake up to corruption and demanded to set high standards for the clergy.
