Around 1150, Hildegard of Bingen along with 20 sisters left the nun’s convent at the monastery on the Disibodenberg, after her first work „Liber Scivias“ had become well known from 1147. She founded her first monastery on the Rupertsberg near Bingen. Here, the Abbess who gave up her secluded life in the convent for public work and influence, was connected to the most important traffic and communication routes on the river Rhine. Initially, a rebuilt chapel, which was dedicated to St. Rupert who had once lived in this place (†around 700), served as a church for the new convent. Presumably between 1155/58 and 1165, the new monastery complex was built, with the representative church with three naves in the centre. Most of Hildegard’s works were composed during the almost 30 years she spent on the Rupertsberg; in its scriptorium they were also copied and from there they made their way all over the world. However, it is still debatable whether the famous miniatures of Hildegard’s visionary works were also designed and painted in the Rupertsberg scriptorium. In 1632, during the Thirty Years’ War, the monastery was destroyed. The nuns, parts of the monastery’s inventory and the relics of Hildegard were all taken to Hildegard’s second monastery in Eibingen near Rüdesheim. The ruins of the Rupertsberg were from then on used by the convent as an agricultural estate, before most parts of the existing structure had to make way for the construction of the Nahe railway track in the middle of the 19th century.

Six pillars of the southern wall of the central nave of the monastery church on the Rupertsberg have been preserved and were restored and made available to the public in 1976. The eastern cellar entrance of the house is a richly ornamented portal of the monastery from the late 15th century, whose origin is not known. Several historical vaults have also been preserved. A reconstruction model of the entire monastery complex can be visited and viewed in the Historical Museum on the River – Hildegard of Bingen.