Things You Didn't Know About Hitler That Will Blow Your Mind

Abbess Hildegard of Bingen

To be fair all we have on the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen is speculation. But then that's all we have on anyone who didn't do something so outrageous that the church forgot its “lesbians don't exist” policy in order to punish them. With that in mind, if you look at her life and her work, there's a great deal of evidence suggesting some not-very-platonic feelings about ladies.

When not experiencing visions, cheeking the pope and bossing around the Holy Roman Emperor, Hildegard wrote everything from music to plays to a piece of theology actively condemning women who fornicated with each other. I know that seems counterintuitive, but bear with me. Remember that this was a period where the official position was that this was something women could not actually do. For Hildegard to even be aware of it as a possibility suggests she was thinking about it, and may even be a case where “the lady doth protest too much.”

Hildegard also wrote a groundbreaking medical text that relied more on Galen than Aristotle. Radical for suggesting that the birth parent might actually contribute genetic material (“matter”) to their offspring instead of being merely an incubator, Hildegard’s book was rather more sensitive than the average text of the time. She still included such terrible advice as regular bleeding or blistering to relieve the body of ill humors (think toxins), but on the whole her advice was less likely to kill you than much of contemporary Western medicine. Oh, and she also included a lovingly detailed categorization of what it was that made women sexy or not according to their humors.