The crag above the meeting of the Nahe and the Rhine at Bingen where Hildegard of Bingen founded her own convent about 1150, won its independence from Disibodenberg in 1158, wrote most of her work, defied the clergy of Mainz over a burial, and died on 17 September 1179.
The Rupertsberg is a crag at the confluence of the Nahe and the Rhine, in what is now Bingen am Rhein. It takes its name from Saint Rupert of Bingen, who lived about 712 to 732 and who with his mother Bertha is said to have founded hospices on the hill — an older sanctity that Hildegard was consciously claiming when she chose the site.
The place matters because of what was written there. Hildegard produced the bulk of her theology, her natural and medical writing, her songs and the sung morality play Ordo Virtutum from this house, and conducted from it a correspondence with popes, emperors, abbots and ordinary petitioners across Latin Europe.
Hildegard had been given as a child to the anchoress Jutta at the monastery of Disibodenberg, and became magistra of the women’s community there when Jutta died in 1136. As her visionary writing brought the community fame and recruits, she decided to move her nuns to a house of their own. Abbot Kuno refused: the women were an ornament and an income to Disibodenberg, and letting them go meant losing both.
She went over his head to Archbishop Henry I of Mainz, who approved the move, and when Kuno still would not release her she fell into a paralysing illness which she understood as a sign of divine displeasure at the obstruction. By her own account the abbot relented only when he found he could not raise her from her sickbed. About 1150 she moved to the Rupertsberg with some twenty nuns, having acquired the land from Hermann, dean of Mainz, and Count Bernhard of Hildesheim, with other gifts. The chapel was consecrated in 1152 by Archbishop Henry.
The early years were hard. The site had to be built from nothing, some of the nuns regretted the comfort of Disibodenberg, and the dispute over the endowments the women had brought with them dragged on. It was settled by a charter of 1158 which gave the Rupertsberg its property and the free election of its own magistra, while leaving the provost to be supplied by Disibodenberg — the arrangement Hildegard had wanted from the start. Further privileges followed, including tax concessions in 1171, and Frederick I Barbarossa granted the house his protection.
Hildegard built well. The convent was laid out with workshops and with water piped to the buildings, an unusual provision that later writers noted, and it took in women of noble family in numbers large enough for her to found a daughter house across the Rhine at Eibingen in 1165, which she visited twice a week. Her monk Volmar served as provost, confessor and secretary, writing to her dictation until his death in 1173.
Hildegard’s last public act was a defiance. A nobleman who had been excommunicated was buried in the convent’s cemetery, and the cathedral clergy of Mainz, the archbishop being away in Rome, ordered the body exhumed and thrown out. Hildegard refused, insisting that the man had been reconciled to the Church and had received the sacraments before he died, and — by the account she gives — went out herself and obliterated all trace of the grave so that it could not be found.
The clergy laid the convent under interdict: no Mass, no communion, and no singing of the office. For a community whose magistra had spent her life composing music, the silence was the sharpest possible punishment, and she wrote to Mainz that those who silence the praise of God in this life will go where there is no music at all. The interdict was lifted the following year, shortly before her death on 17 September 1179. She was buried under the high altar of her own church.
The house survived Hildegard by more than four centuries. In 1632, during the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops destroyed it; the nuns fled across the Rhine to Eibingen, taking the shrine with Hildegard’s relics with them, and the Rupertsberg community never returned. The relics of Rupert and Bertha went the same way, and others were brought back to Bingen in 1814 and are kept in the chapel on the Rochusberg.
The ruins were then quarried and finally cut through by the railway built along the Nahe in the nineteenth century, which destroyed most of what stood. Six piers of the south nave wall of the convent church survive inside a house on the site, the Villa Rupertsberg, where they were uncovered and restored in 1976; a richly carved portal of the late fifteenth century now serves the house as a cellar door. It is a very small remnant of the place from which one of the great voices of the twelfth century wrote.