The purpose of this paper is to examine several related topics concerned with women mystics of the Middle Ages, focusing especially on Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Sch"nau. One key issue is whether these women mystics were using their experiences as a way to claim authority and power that would otherwise have been denied to them during this era of European history.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was many things: abbess, preacher, prophet, poet, composer, playwright, cosmologist. Long forgotten, her works have in recent decades been rediscovered and republished. Her music has been transcribed, performed, and recorded since about the early 1980s. Her mystical writings have been published in modern editions, and are regarded as being among the most important such writings ever produced in the Western world. And yet, like St. Teresa of Avila, she belonged to the even smaller minority of women who managed to be both imaginative writers and loyal, respected members of the Catholic Church. One may wonder how she achieved this balance.
Hildegard carried on active correspondence with both political and religious figures. These included Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II of England, Bernard of Clairvaux, four popes (Eugenius III, Anastasius IV, Adrian IV, and Alexander III), and the emperors Conrad III and Frederick Barbarossa. When the latter endorsed one pope and Hildegard backed another, she sent him a scathing, even threatening, letter, saying, "Listen to this, O King, if you wish to live, or else my sword will strike you!" (ThiTbaux 315). It may reasonably be asked how an abbess could have enough personal authority and power to confront the Holy Roman Emperor in this way; that she was on the side of, and so under the protection of, Gregory VII does not adequately explain the situation.
As an example of the kind of spiritual, and therefore temporal, power Hildegard had, one can consider the time when Beatrice, heire...