Tea at Trianon: Meet Hildegard of Bingen, the German Mystic Who Destigmatized Women’s Health

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Meet Hildegard of Bingen, the German Mystic Who Destigmatized Women’s Health

From Literary Hub:

For Hildegard of Bingen, the German mystic, scientist, composer, and philosopher, women’s maternal bodies were not corrupting and degrading, but strong, nurturing, and creative. Hildegard, who was born at the end of the eleventh century, is the first known female medical writer in Europe during the High Middle Ages. Most of the era’s discourse about human generation came from monks and theologians who vowed never to have any contact with women’s bodies. But Hildegard introduced into the Christian medical tradition compassionate and celebratory theories about physical maternity that were inspired by her own bodily experiences and those of the women she cared for.

Hildegard was a Catholic abbess of the Benedictine Order. The tenth child of a noble family, Hildegard was tithed to the Disibodenberg, a monastery nestled between two rivers in Germany’s Rhineland‑Palatinate region, when she was born. After being cloistered when she was eight, she took her vows at fourteen and became a nun. Hildegard prized virginity as the highest state of womanhood, and she never experienced biological motherhood. But her commitment to spiritual motherhood did not stop her from thinking seriously about conceiving, bearing, and birthing. (Read more.)