Around 1141, Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess in the Rhineland, received what she described as a divine command to record her visions. The resulting work, Scivias (Know the Ways), was completed around 1151 and presented to Pope Eugenius III at the Synod of Trier, who authorised its circulation. Hildegard went on to compose original music, poetry, natural history, and medicine, becoming one of the most prolific women writers of the Middle Ages. Her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum contains seventy-seven original musical compositions with poetic texts of extraordinary imagery.

Hildegard is among the first identifiable female poets in the Western tradition to have a substantial surviving body of work. Her visionary imagery — blazing lights, cosmic personifications, music as divine geometry — influenced later mystical poetry in German and Latin. Her use of a feminine voice authorised by divine vision created a template that later women writers, including Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich, would adapt for their own spiritual writing.