Bingen

The Rhineland town where Hildegard founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg, recorded her visions, composed her music, and died at eighty-one.

Bingen stands where the Nahe joins the Rhine, at the head of the gorge the river cuts through the hills. Hildegard moved her nuns here from Disibodenberg around 1150, against the wishes of the monks who profited from housing them, and built a house with its own water supply. From Rupertsberg she wrote her visionary trilogy, a medical and botanical compendium, seventy-seven songs and a morality play, and sent letters correcting popes and emperors.