Hildegard von Bingen was highly intelligent, curious, inventive, and creative. She was accomplished in art and music and wrote an herbal manuscript that was more organized and informative than many of the herbals penned at the time. Her cosmological drawings are heads-and-tails above others, while still conforming sufficiently to traditional themes that they can, for the most part, be understood. They include creation themes, planets, winds, all the things one might expect, except they are artistically more like some of the best-illustrated Beatus manuscripts rather than other cosmology diagrams of the time in terms of style, while including a dose of originality in both color and form. The woman was probably a genius.
She was chosen by her peers to lead her religious community, so they evidently didn't consider her "madness" an impediment to being an administrator.
Some have postulated that her visions might be related to migraines. Since illness tended to accompany the "lights" that she saw in her earlier days (before the "lights" became full-blown visions), this is entirely possible. Migraines are full-body neuro-circulatory disorders that can manifest in numerous ways and visual effects, scintillating shimmering prisms, accompany certain kinds of migraines.
Her encryption glossary is very rational and organized. If you look at it, you will see logical patterns, like the use of endings to group similar characteristics. For example, I noticed that "bz" (similar to the Latin abbreviation), was used as an ending to indicate something was an herb. She clearly had a scientist's proclivity for categorizing.
Her alphabetic substitution system is not hard to learn, like many ciphers of the time it was basic one-to-one and some of the shapes were only slight modifications of the Latin letters for which they stood, although they were done more artistically than most. It wasn't strong encryption, it was probably just intended as a way to slow down outsiders and I'm guessing it was deliberately designed to be easy to learn and to write, as was true of many medieval cipher alphabets.
She was chosen by her peers to lead her religious community, so they evidently didn't consider her "madness" an impediment to being an administrator.
Some have postulated that her visions might be related to migraines. Since illness tended to accompany the "lights" that she saw in her earlier days (before the "lights" became full-blown visions), this is entirely possible. Migraines are full-body neuro-circulatory disorders that can manifest in numerous ways and visual effects, scintillating shimmering prisms, accompany certain kinds of migraines.
Her encryption glossary is very rational and organized. If you look at it, you will see logical patterns, like the use of endings to group similar characteristics. For example, I noticed that "bz" (similar to the Latin abbreviation), was used as an ending to indicate something was an herb. She clearly had a scientist's proclivity for categorizing.
Her alphabetic substitution system is not hard to learn, like many ciphers of the time it was basic one-to-one and some of the shapes were only slight modifications of the Latin letters for which they stood, although they were done more artistically than most. It wasn't strong encryption, it was probably just intended as a way to slow down outsiders and I'm guessing it was deliberately designed to be easy to learn and to write, as was true of many medieval cipher alphabets.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)