Sometime in the years before she finished writing her monumental Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) received a pointed letter from Tengswich, Abbess of Andernach. Infused with the sickly sweetness of false praise, Tengswich's letter took Hildegard, whose star was then rising, to task for the ‘uncustomary’ (insolitum) way in which she permitted her virgins to dress and comport themselves: Tengswich had heard that ‘on feast days your virgins stand in the church with unbound hair when singing the psalms and that as part of their dress [pro ornamento] they wear white, silk veils [velaminibus], so long that they touch the floor’. And, as if this were not sufficiently ostentatious, Hildegard's virgins also wore ‘crowns of gold filigree, into which are inserted crosses on both sides and the back, with a figure of the Lamb on the front, and […] they adorn their fingers with golden rings’. For Abbess Tengswich, this habit clearly violated the modesty that both scripture and the Church fathers so clearly wished women to practice.

Hildegard was not one to back down from a challenge. Rather than concede any point to Tengswich, she thundered in reply with the authoritative voice of the fons vivens, the ‘living fountain’. She does concede that a ‘married woman ought not to raise herself up or adorn herself by means of her hair, nor ought she to lift herself up by any loftiness of a crown or something golden [in ulla sublimitate corone et auri ullius rei], except by the will of her husband’.