Hildegard von Bingen’s Herbalism

From Charlemagne to the 12th Century — and What Was Lost Between

Hildegard von Bingen’s herbalism is perhaps the most frequently cited and least accurately understood figure in the contemporary Western herbalism revival.

She appears on tea tins and wellness websites, her name attached to adaptogenic blends and ‘medieval wisdom’ skincare. She is claimed by naturopaths, by Catholic traditionalists, by New Age practitioners, and by historians of science, each group finding something different in her work and usually misrepresenting the rest. She is called a mystic who healed with plants, a visionary who wrote about nutrition, a feminist before her time, a proto-scientist working in the dark ages. None of these framings is precisely wrong. None of them is adequate.

What Hildegard actually was — what her work actually represents in the history of Western plant medicine — is something more specific, more historically situated, and more clinically interesting than any of these framings allows. She was a bridge. More precisely, she was three bridges built simultaneously in the same remarkable mind, at a moment in European history when the transmission of medical knowledge was genuinely fragile, and when what she was doing mattered in ways that extended far beyond her own monastery.

This post traces those three bridges: the one she built between Charlemagne’s Carolingian pharmacy and the 12th-century monastic medical synthesis; the one she built between the ancient Galenic tradition and the vernacular folk medicine of the Germanic north; and the one she built between the clinical medical canon and the Christian theological framework that gave her work its organizing cosmological logic.

Understanding all three simultaneously is what allows you to read the Physica correctly — and to understand why, three and a half centuries after Charlemagne issued the Capitulare de Villis, the same plants were still being prescribed for the same conditions, in the same Galenic framework, in a Benedictine monastery on the Rhine.

She was not working outside the tradition. She was the tradition — at the moment the tradition most needed a keeper.

I. The World Hildegard Inherited

The Galenic Foundation of Hildegard von Bingen’s Herbalism

To understand what Hildegard was transmitting, you have to understand what she received. The medical world that formed her was not the dark age of popular imagination — a blank gap between Roman civilization and the Renaissance. It was a specific, structured, and technically sophisticated tradition with a clear intellectual lineage that ran from Hippocrates through Galen, from Galen through Dioscorides, from Dioscorides through the Arabic commentators, and from all of them through the Latin translations that arrived in northern Europe via the Schola Medica Salernitana in the 11th and early 12th centuries.

The organizing principle of that tradition was the Galenic four-quality system: hot, cold, moist, dry. Every plant, every food, every patient had a temperament expressed in these four qualities. Clinical medicine was the art of reading the patient’s constitutional terrain and applying the medicine of contrary quality to correct the imbalance.

Cold-damp phlegmatic excess required warm-dry medicine. Hot-dry choleric excess required cool-moist medicine. The principle of contraries was not a metaphor or a spiritual intuition; it was the operational framework of Western clinical practice from the 2nd century CE through at least the 17th.

Hildegard knew this system. The Physica is organized by it. Every plant entry in her herbal assigns a quality — warm, cold, moist, dry, and their degrees — and every therapeutic recommendation follows from that assignment. She did not invent the framework. She received it, worked within it, extended it, and in some places departed from it in ways that are diagnostically interesting precisely because she was a sufficiently sophisticated practitioner to know when the received tradition did not match her clinical observation.

The Monastic Transmission

The vehicle through which Hildegard received this tradition was the Benedictine monastery. This is not incidental. The Rule of Saint Benedict, established in the 6th century, assigned to monasteries a triple responsibility that shaped the next seven centuries of European intellectual life: the care of the sick (the monastery as hospital), the hospitality of travelers (the monastery as inn and clinic), and the copying and preservation of manuscripts (the monastery as library and scriptorium).

These three duties, taken together, made the Benedictine monastery the primary institution in medieval Europe for the preservation and practice of medical knowledge. The monastery garden — the hortus medicus — was not decorative. It was the pharmacy. The monastery library contained the medical texts. The infirmary was the clinical setting. The monks and nuns who tended the garden, copied the manuscripts, and treated the sick were doing all three simultaneously, in a physical space where the theoretical, the practical, and the cultivated were inseparable.

When Charlemagne issued the Capitulare de Villis in approximately 812 CE, he was not inventing a new pharmacy. He was mandating the standardization of the existing monastic one. The plants on his list — sage, wormwood, fennel, lovage, hyssop, and the rest — were already in the monastery gardens.

The Capitulare was an imperial attempt to ensure that every estate garden, not only the monastic ones, had them. It was the centralization and systematization of a distributed network that the Benedictines had been maintaining for nearly three centuries before Charlemagne was born.

II. The Gap: What Was Lost Between Charlemagne and Hildegard

Between the Capitulare de Villis (c. 812 CE) and Hildegard’s Physica (c. 1150–1158 CE) lies roughly three and a half centuries. Contemporary popular accounts of medieval herbalism tend to treat this period as a steady, if slow, preservation of classical knowledge — monks copying manuscripts, gardens maintained, the tradition ticking along. The reality is considerably more unstable.

The Post-Carolingian Fracture

Charlemagne died in 814 CE. His empire did not survive him intact. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 CE divided the Frankish empire among his grandsons, and the political fragmentation that followed disrupted the administrative networks that had made the Capitulare de Villis effective.

The centrally mandated herb gardens remained, in theory, requirements on royal estates. In practice, without the Carolingian administrative apparatus to enforce and inspect them, standardization dissolved back into local variation.

The 9th and 10th centuries were also the period of maximum Viking pressure on northern and western Europe, and of Magyar raids from the east. Monasteries — the primary repositories of medical knowledge — were targets. Lindisfarne was sacked in 793 CE. Iona was raided repeatedly. The monastery at Luxeuil, one of the great centers of Columbanian monasticism and manuscript culture, was destroyed.

The physical destruction of monastery libraries and the disruption of the networks through which manuscripts were copied and shared represent a genuine, if geographically uneven, loss in the transmission chain.

What this means clinically is that by the 10th century, the standardized Carolingian pharmacy — the consistent set of plants, preparations, and Galenic indications that the Capitulare had attempted to mandate — had fragmented into regional variations. The knowledge survived, but unevenly, in scattered manuscripts, in the persistent memory of individual monastery gardens, and in the folk medical traditions of communities whose connection to the written Latin tradition was tenuous or nonexistent.

The Arabic Interruption and the Salernitan Restoration

The 11th century brought a development that fundamentally altered the intellectual landscape of Latin European medicine: the transmission of Arabic medical scholarship into the Latin West, primarily through the translation work of Constantine the African at Monte Cassino (died c. 1087 CE).

Constantine translated into Latin the major Arabic medical texts — works by Avicenna, Isaac Israeli, and others — that had themselves been built on Greek foundations, particularly on Galen and Hippocrates, translated into Arabic during the great translation movement of the 8th and 9th centuries in Baghdad.

The effect was paradoxical: classical Greek medicine, which had never entirely disappeared from the Latin West, returned to it in a more complete and systematized form than had been available since late antiquity — but it returned through an Arabic intermediary that had added its own layers of commentary, systematization, and sometimes contradiction.

The Schola Medica Salernitana in southern Italy, which became the primary center of this new synthesis, produced the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum — a versified compendium of Galenic dietary and clinical medicine that became the most widely copied medical text of the high Middle Ages.

Hildegard was writing in the immediate wake of this Salernitan restoration. She had access, through the monastery’s manuscript holdings, to a more complete Galenic framework than had been available to northern European practitioners two centuries earlier.

But she was also working in a specifically northern European, specifically Benedictine, and specifically Rhineland context that differed significantly from the Mediterranean world in which both the Greek originals and the Arabic commentaries had been produced. The plants available to her, the climate she was treating in, the constitution of the patients who came to her monastery, and the theological framework within which she understood her work were all distinctly northern and distinctly her own.

The Transmission Gap: A Summary

Date	Event	Significance
c. 50–70 CE	Dioscorides writes De Materia Medica	The foundational clinical text of Western plant medicine; copied, translated, and transmitted across 1,500 years
2nd century CE	Galen systematizes humoral medicine	The four-quality, four-humor constitutional framework becomes the organizing principle of Western clinical practice
c. 512 CE	Vienna Dioscorides produced	The most significant late-antique illustrated manuscript of De Materia Medica; exemplifies the survival of classical botanical knowledge through manuscript culture
529 CE	Benedict of Nursia founds Monte Cassino	The Benedictine Rule establishes hospitality and care of the sick as monastic duties; monastery gardens and manuscript libraries become the primary vehicles of medical knowledge transmission in the Latin West
c. 650–800 CE	The transmission gap	Viking raids, political instability, and fragmentation of the Carolingian predecessor states disrupt the monastic networks. Medical knowledge survives but practice becomes inconsistent and geographically fragmented
c. 795–812 CE	Charlemagne’s palace school and the Capitulare de Villis	Alcuin of York at the palace school; the Capitulare de Villis issued, mandating medicinal herb cultivation across the Frankish empire. A conscious, centrally administered attempt to restore and standardize the classical pharmacy.
9th century	The post-Carolingian fragmentation	After Charlemagne’s death (814 CE), the empire fractures. Medical standardization weakens. The monastic network continues but without central administrative support.
11th century	Schola Medica Salernitana rises	The School of Salerno in southern Italy synthesizes Galenic, Arabic (Avicenna, Averroes), and Hippocratic traditions. The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum codifies practical Galenic medicine for a Latin-literate audience. Arabic translations of Greek texts re-enter the Latin West.
1098–1179 CE	Hildegard von Bingen’s lifetime	Hildegard enters the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg as a child oblate; rises to abbess; founds her own monastery at Rupertsberg; writes Physica and Causae et Curae. She is working within the monastic medical tradition, the Galenic framework as transmitted through Salerno and Benedict, AND drawing on her own clinical observation and theological vision simultaneously.
c. 1150–1158 CE	Physica composed	The most comprehensive northern European herbal of the 12th century; 230 plant entries; organized by the Galenic quality system; deeply embedded in the Christian cosmological framework.

What was lost in the gap between Charlemagne and Hildegard was not primarily the texts. The Galenic manuscripts survived, imperfectly and unevenly, in monastery libraries across Europe. What was lost was the consistency of practice — the living clinical tradition in which the texts were embedded, the practitioners who knew not only what the books said but what the herbs smelled like, how they grew, what the patients who needed them looked like, and how to adjust the received doctrine to the realities of a northern European clinical encounter.

Hildegard’s work is significant partly because she had both: the texts and the practice, the theoretical framework and the observational acuity of a woman who had been treating patients in a Rhineland monastery for decades.

III. Bridge One: Carolingian Pharmacy to 12th-Century Monastic Synthesis

The first and most historically concrete of Hildegard’s three bridges is between the Capitulare de Villis and the high medieval monastic medical tradition. The connection is not incidental or metaphorical; it is institutional, botanical, and clinical.

The Shared Plant List

The most direct evidence for the bridge is the overlap between the Capitulare de Villis plant list and the plants Hildegard treats in the Physica. Of the medicinal plants mandated by Charlemagne in approximately 812 CE, the majority appear in Hildegard’s herbal three and a half centuries later, assigned the same Galenic qualities, recommended for the same primary indications, and prepared in the same basic ways. This is not coincidence. It is the living proof of transmission.

Consider the plants at the core of the ACB series:

• Salvia officinalis (sage): listed in the Capitulare as salvia; treated by Hildegard in the Physica as warming, drying, and indicated for the stomach and for conditions of cold-damp constitution. The Galenic profile is identical across three centuries.
• Artemisia absinthium (wormwood): listed in the Capitulare as absinthium; treated by Hildegard as a Saturn herb (though she does not use the astrological terminology directly) with bitter, cleansing, antiparasitic action. The clinical indications are continuous.
• Foeniculum vulgare (fennel): listed in the Capitulare as feniculum; treated by Hildegard as warm and digestive, with carminative and galactagogue action. The core uses are unchanged.
• Marrubium vulgare (horehound): listed in the Capitulare; treated by Hildegard as a lung herb for cold, damp, phlegmatic respiratory conditions. Continuous from Dioscorides through Charlemagne through Hildegard.
• Iris germanica (iris/orris root): listed in the Capitulare; treated by Hildegard for lymphatic and chest conditions. The therapeutic thread holds.

This is not a complete list. But the pattern it illustrates is unambiguous: the Carolingian pharmacy, as encoded in the Capitulare de Villis, flows directly into the Physica. Hildegard did not rediscover these plants; she received them, confirmed them against her own clinical experience, and extended the record.

The Institutional Bridge: The Benedictine Garden

The mechanism of transmission was the Benedictine monastery garden. This is the most underappreciated structural element in the history of Western herbalism, and it is what makes the continuity between Charlemagne and Hildegard possible.

When Charlemagne mandated his herb gardens in 812 CE, he was mandating them partly because the Benedictine monasteries already had them and the Capitulare was an attempt to extend that model. The monastery gardens that maintained sage, wormwood, fennel, and horehound through the 9th and 10th centuries — through the Viking disruptions, the post-Carolingian fragmentation, and the uneven survival of manuscripts — were the same institutional tradition that produced Hildegard. She was not an outsider looking at the tradition; she grew up in it, literally, as a child oblate at Disibodenberg from the age of eight.

The monastery garden was her first classroom. The plants she describes in the Physica with such clinical confidence are plants she had grown, harvested, prepared, and administered for decades before she wrote a word about them. The bridge between Charlemagne and Hildegard is not only textual; it is horticultural. The same plants, in the same garden tradition, maintained by the same institutional structure, tended by women and men whose lives were organized around the Rule of Benedict and its mandate to care for the sick.

IV. Bridge Two: Galenic Canon to Northern European Folk Medicine

The second bridge Hildegard builds is harder to see precisely because it is so thoroughly integrated into the fabric of the Physica. She does not announce it. She does not say: here is where the classical tradition ends and the Rhineland folk tradition begins. She simply writes about plants, and the attentive reader notices that some of what she writes maps cleanly onto Dioscorides and Galen, and some of it does not — and that the departures are almost always in the direction of her own clinical observation and the northern European plant knowledge that she carried alongside the Latin texts.

The Plants Dioscorides Did Not Know

The Physica contains a substantial number of plants that do not appear in Dioscorides or Galen — plants that are native to or primarily cultivated in northern Europe and that entered the materia medica through the vernacular folk traditions of the Germanic, Frankish, and Rhineland regions. Hildegard treats these plants with the same Galenic quality framework she applies to the classical herbs, extending the system to cover a botanical world that the Mediterranean authors had not encountered.

This is not a trivial achievement. Applying the Galenic quality system to unfamiliar plants requires genuine clinical reasoning: the practitioner must observe the plant’s morphological signatures, taste it, test its effects, and assign qualities that are consistent with both the theoretical framework and the observed clinical reality. When Hildegard assigns a quality to a plant that Dioscorides never saw, she is doing original clinical work within a received theoretical framework — exactly what a sophisticated practitioner in any tradition does.

The Vernacular Terminology

The Physica is written in Latin, but Hildegard includes the vernacular German names for plants throughout — a detail that is often overlooked but is clinically and historically significant. The German plant names she records are among the earliest documented in the written record, and they represent the bridge between the Latin scholarly tradition and the German-speaking communities whose plant knowledge was primarily oral. By recording both the Latin and the vernacular names, Hildegard was building a bilingual bridge between the learned medical tradition and the folk medical knowledge that her patients’ communities carried.

This bilingual practice also tells us something about her clinical context. The patients who came to the monastery at Rupertsberg were not, for the most part, Latin-literate scholars. They were German-speaking farmers, craftspeople, and nobility whose first-language plant knowledge was organized around the vernacular names and folk uses of the herbs they grew and gathered. Hildegard’s recording of vernacular names was not antiquarian; it was clinically necessary. To communicate with her patients about their medicines, she needed to speak both languages.

Where She Departs from Galen ~ Hildegard von Bingen’s Herbalism

Some of Hildegard’s most interesting clinical writing occurs in the places where she quietly departs from the received Galenic tradition. These departures are not radical rejections — she never argues explicitly against Galen — but they are visible to the attentive reader as the marks of a clinician whose first loyalty is to observed reality rather than to received authority.

The most consistent pattern of departure is in the direction of greater specificity and greater gentleness than the Galenic tradition suggested. Where Galen recommends a 3rd-degree medicine, Hildegard sometimes recommends a 2nd-degree preparation.

Where Galen’s framework suggests a single primary indication, Hildegard’s clinical observation has identified secondary and tertiary applications that extend the plant’s usefulness. These are the adjustments of a practitioner who has tested the received knowledge against clinical reality and modified it where the reality and the theory diverged.

They are also the marks of a northern European clinician working with a northern European population in a northern European climate. The Galenic tradition was developed in the Mediterranean world, for patients whose constitutional baseline and seasonal environment were significantly different from those of a Rhineland patient in January. Hildegard’s modifications of the Galenic framework are, in many cases, the reasonable clinical adaptations of a practitioner who understood that received knowledge requires interpretation in a new context.

V. Bridge Three: Clinical Medicine to Christian Cosmology

The third bridge is the one most frequently misunderstood, and the one that most requires careful framing for a contemporary reader. Hildegard does not separate her clinical medicine from her theological vision. For her, they are not separable. The plants grow in the world that God created; their qualities are expressions of divine order; their healing action is participation in the restorative work that the Christian theological tradition understood as the purpose of medicine.

This is not mysticism in the sense of vagueness or irrationality. It is a coherent cosmological framework in which the Galenic quality system and the Christian theology of creation are not competing explanations but complementary descriptions of the same ordered reality. Understanding this is essential for reading the Physica accurately.

Viriditas: The Greening Power

The central theological concept in Hildegard’s medical thinking is viriditas — usually translated as ‘greenness’ or ‘the greening power’. For Hildegard, viriditas is the animating, life-giving force that God has placed in creation: it is the vitality that makes plants grow, that sustains health in the human body, and that is restored by right medicine and right living when illness has depleted it.

The concept has an obvious theological dimension — viriditas is, for Hildegard, ultimately a participation in divine creative energy — but it also has a precise clinical application. A patient with insufficient viriditas presents with the signs of vitality depletion: pallor, weakness, cold extremities, poor digestion, slow recovery from illness. The therapeutic goal is to restore viriditas — and the means of restoration are the warming, nourishing, tonifying herbs of the Galenic tradition. Jupiter’s herbs, in the astro-herbalism framework, are the primary viriditas medicines: fennel, sage (in its warming aspect), lovage, fenugreek.

Viriditas is not a replacement for the Galenic quality system. It is an additional layer of meaning that sits on top of it, giving the clinical observations a theological interpretation without contradicting them. A plant that is warm and moist in the Galenic system is, for Hildegard, also viriditas-rich: its warmth and moisture are expressions of the divine generative energy that it carries. The clinical and the theological descriptions refer to the same observed reality.

The Cosmological Organization of the Physica

The Physica is organized into nine books: plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals. This organization is not arbitrary. It is a cosmological map of the created world as medieval Christian theology understood it, from the most intimately human (plants, the primary medicines) through the elemental and the bestiary to the mineral. The medical book — the plant herbal — is the first and largest because plants are the primary vehicle through which God has provided for human health in the created world.

This cosmological organization reflects a theological conviction that is Hildegard’s most fundamental departure from the purely clinical Galenic tradition: the conviction that medicine is not simply a technical practice but a participation in the order of creation. The physician who treats the sick is not merely applying pharmacological principles; she is participating in the restoration of the divine order that illness has disrupted. This is not a small difference from Galen, and it is not incidental to how Hildegard thinks about her plants.

Why This Matters for Reading the Physica Clinically

Contemporary herbalists who approach Hildegard’s work as a clinical resource — looking for plant indications they can apply to modern patients — sometimes find her theological framework either irrelevant or an obstacle. It is neither. The theological framework is the organizing logic that gives the clinical observations their structure and their confidence.

When Hildegard writes about a plant with the authority and specificity that makes the Physica clinically useful, she is writing from a position of certainty grounded not only in her clinical experience but in her conviction that she is describing the order of a world that has been created for human healing.

The practically useful implication for the contemporary reader is this: where Hildegard’s theological convictions and her clinical observations align — which is most of the time, in most of the Physica — her clinical observations are reliable. She is describing plants she has used, in a framework she has tested against reality. The theology and the clinical observation point in the same direction because, for Hildegard, the created order and the order of healing were the same thing. You do not have to share her theology to benefit from her clinical accuracy.

VI. Reading Hildegard Correctly: What She Is and Is Not

Given the scope of the misrepresentation that surrounds Hildegard’s name in contemporary wellness culture, a direct summary is warranted.

What Hildegard Is

• A Benedictine abbess working in the full stream of the Galenic medical tradition as transmitted through the monastic network and the Salernitan restoration
• A clinical practitioner with decades of firsthand experience treating patients in a northern European monastic infirmary
• A genuine original thinker within the tradition: she extends the Galenic framework, applies it to plants the Mediterranean sources did not know, and modifies it where her clinical observation diverges from received doctrine
• A bilingual bridge between the Latin scholarly tradition and the vernacular German folk plant knowledge of the Rhineland
• A theologian whose clinical medicine is inseparable from her cosmological vision without being reducible to it — the theology gives the clinical work its organizing logic, not the other way around
• The single most important northern European voice in the transmission of the Galenic plant medicine tradition between the Capitulare de Villis and the 16th-century herbalists

What Hildegard Is Not

• A proto-naturopath working outside the mainstream of her tradition: she is the mainstream of her tradition
• A mystic who healed primarily through spiritual means: her healing was primarily botanical and dietary, organized by the Galenic quality system
• A feminist icon in any contemporary sense: she was a woman of exceptional intelligence working within the constraints and opportunities of 12th-century Benedictine monasticism, using the authority available to her — her prophetic voice and her abbatial office — to do work that was genuinely significant
• A source of ‘alternative’ medicine in the contemporary sense: her medicine was the conventional medicine of her time and place, rigorously grounded in the best theoretical and empirical resources available to her
• Someone whose plant recommendations can be lifted out of their clinical and cosmological context and applied without understanding that context: her indications make most sense when read within the Galenic quality framework that organized them

To read Hildegard well is to read the entire tradition she carried — from Hippocrates through Galen, through the Benedictine garden, through the Salernitan synthesis, and into the specific clinical encounter of a Rhineland abbess in the 12th century.

VII. The Living Relevance: Why This History Matters Now

The history of how medical knowledge is transmitted, lost, partially recovered, and reinterpreted is not merely antiquarian. It is directly relevant to how contemporary practitioners evaluate the herbal tradition they have inherited and how they use it clinically.

The plants in Hildegard’s Physica are the same plants in Charlemagne’s Capitulare de Villis. They are the same plants that Dioscorides described in the 1st century CE. They are the same plants that grow in the medicinal garden in Clugnat, Creuse, France, in the 21st century. The continuity is not accidental. These plants have been in continuous cultivation and clinical use for between one and three thousand years because they work — because the clinical observations that Dioscorides made, that Galen systematized, that the Benedictines preserved, that the Capitulare mandated, and that Hildegard extended and confirmed are accurate observations about what these plants do in the human body.

The Galenic framework in which those observations are embedded is not a superstition or a pre-scientific placeholder waiting to be replaced by pharmacology. It is a clinical observation system that has been refined over fifteen centuries of practice, that is internally consistent, and that aligns in most of its major conclusions with what contemporary phytochemistry and pharmacology have found. The mechanistic explanation for why wormwood’s sesquiterpene lactones activate T2R bitter taste receptors and stimulate bile production is new. The observation that wormwood is a powerful digestive bitter indicated for liver congestion and intestinal parasites is not new. Dioscorides knew it. Galen confirmed it. Hildegard used it. The Capitulare mandated it.

Understanding Hildegard’s place in that transmission chain — understanding that she is three bridges simultaneously, and that the bridges she built were genuine acts of preservation and extension at a moment when the tradition genuinely needed both — is what allows a contemporary practitioner to read her work with the combination of critical intelligence and clinical respect it deserves.

In This Series

• EP. 1 — The Capitulare de Villis and the Galenic Garden: An Introduction [pillar post]
• EP. 2 — Salvia officinalis: The Quintessential Phlegmatic Corrective
• EP. 3 — Wormwood: Saturn’s Great Regulator
• EP. 4 — The Phlegmatic Constitution: A Complete Diagnostic Guide
• EP. 5 — Fennel: A Jupiter Herb in a Saturn World
• EP. 6 — Hildegard’s Bridge: From Charlemagne to the 12th Century [this post]

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Sources

Anonymous. (c. 11th century). Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum. [Trans. Ordronaux, J., 1870. J.B. Lippincott.]

Charlemagne. (c. 812 CE). Capitulare de Villis vel Curtis Imperialibus. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges, Sectio II, Capitularia Regum Francorum, Vol. 1. [Boretius, A., Ed., 1883. Hannover: Hahn.]

Dioscorides, P. (c. 50–70 CE). De Materia Medica. [Trans. Goodyer, J., 1655; facsimile ed. Gunther, R.T., 1934. Oxford University Press.]

Hildegard von Bingen. (c. 1150–1158 CE). Physica. [Trans. Throop, P., 1998. Healing Arts Press.]

Hildegard von Bingen. (c. 1150–1163 CE). Causae et Curae. [Trans. Berger, M., 1999. Brepols.]

Secondary Sources

Adamson, M.W. (Ed.). (1995). Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays. Garland.

Baird, J.L., & Ehrman, R.K. (Trans.). (1994). The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (3 vols.). Oxford University Press.

Clifton, C. (2006). She Who Bears the Light: A History of Women Herbalists. Crossed Crow Books.

Hannam, J. (2009). God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Icon Books.

Maddocks, F. (2001). Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age. Doubleday.

Moulinier, L. (1995). Le manuscrit perdu à Strasbourg: enquête sur l’oeuvre scientifique de Hildegarde. Publications de la Sorbonne.

Riddle, J.M. (1992). Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Harvard University Press.

Strehlow, W., & Hertzka, G. (1988). Hildegard of Bingen’s Medicine. Bear & Company.

Van Arsdall, A. (2002). Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine. Routledge.