A Dictionary of Saintly Women/Hildegard (1)
St. Hildegard (1), April 30. + 783. Queen of the Franks. Founder of Kempten, and patron of that abbey and against pestilence. Represented giving bread to the poor, or giving a silver chalice to a poor priest (Guénebault). She was born about 704, of a noble and powerful family in Suabia,and became the second wife of Charlemagne, 771. She was the best of wives, kind to every one, and beloved by the court and people.
Charlemagne frequently moved from one residence to another, and wherever he went he liked to be accompanied by his mother, the famous Queen Bertha, by his wife and children, and by learned men, who instructed him and all his family, so that the court became the nucleus of a great school.
Hildegard built a magnificent abbey on her own beautiful property at Kempten, on the slope of the Tyrolese Alps. Stengel, in his Description of the most Famous Benedictine Cloisters in Germany, gives twenty-two pictures of Kempten, which he says is almost the grandest house of God in Germany. The Abbot was one of the four prince-abbots of the Roman Empire.
Hildegard died at Thionville, April 30, 783, and was buried in St. Arnold's Church at Metz, where her husband built a magnificent tomb over her.
Besides other children, she was the mother of Louis, who succeeded his father, and Rotrude, who died while affianced to Constantine, emperor of the East, son of St. Irene, empress. Charlemagne survived his wife thirty-one years. He was crowned emperor in 800, and died 814.
Both Charlemagne and Hildegard were honoured as saints from the time of their death. Nearly a hundred years after Hildegard's death, some of her relics were sent to Kempten as those of a saint; and near the great abbey she had built, a new monastery was founded under her invocation, and called by her name. Some opposition was made by the Church to the recognition of Charlemagne as a saint, for, despite his many great virtues, there were points in his private life that fell below the highest standard, but the people adored him so fervently and so persistently that eventually the worship had to be sanctioned.
The Lives of St Charlemagne and St. Hildegard are in the AA.SS., Jan. 28 and April 30. Charlemagne's Capitularies are in Migne, Cursus Completus. He is the outstanding figure in all histories of Western Europe, in the second half of the 8th and early part of the 9th century, and the hero of many pretty fictions. Eginhard, his secretary, wrote his Life, which is in sundry collections of Monumenta; it was published in English a few years ago, and is eminently readable and interesting. Capefigue's Charlemagne is a delightful French book, full of romantic fact and legend.