SEE ALSO POPE BENEDICT XVI on MECHTILD of HACKEBORN and GERTRUDE the GREAT
The Following is adapted from: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Cross, Livingstone; (OUP, 1983).
MECHTILD of Magdeburg (c.1207–c.1282), author of a book of mystical Revelations. Descended from a noble family in Saxony, she experienced visions from the age of 12 and left her family home c.1230 to become a Beguine at Magdeburg under the spiritual guidance of the Dominicans. Books 1–5 of her visions, entitled ‘Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit’ and containing dialogues with the Lord, bridal mysticism, as well as trinitarian theology and eschatology, were written down c.1250–9, a sixth book c.1260–70/1 (books 1–6 were posthumously rendered into Latin by the Dominicans at Halle, before 1298), and a final book c.1271–82. From the Revelations, which are the only document of her life, it emerges that in addition to the tribulations of illness she suffered personal threats and much disapproval from official sources, including the threat to burn her writings.
During the 1260s, when opposition to the Beguines became intense, she may have returned for a time to her family, and around 1270 she joined the community of Benedictine nuns at Helfta, where she had contact with younger visionary women, St Mechthild of Hackeborn (with whom she has sometimes been confused) and St Gertrude the Great. The Revelations, which number among the most forceful and poetic examples of women’s writing to have survived from the Middle Ages, are no longer extant in the original Low German, but only in the Latin translation mentioned above, written before 1298 and] a High German translation made c.1343–5 in the circle of Henry of Nördlingen at Basle. In CW, feast day, 19 Nov.
Her work, discovered in 1860, was first ed. by G. Morel (Regensburg, 1869); crit. edn. by H. Neumann and G. Vollmann-Profe (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 100–101; 1990–93); also by G. Vollmann-Profe (Bibliothek des Mittelalters, 19; 2003); the Lat.tr. ed. by the monks of Solesmes, Revelationes Gertrudianae ac Mechtildianae, 2 (Poitiers and Paris, 1877), pp. 435–643; Eng. tr. by F. Tobin (Classics of Western Spirituality, New York [1998]). H. Neumann, ‘Beiträge zur Textgeschichte des “Fliessenden Lichts der Gottheit” und zur Lebensgeschichte Mechthilds von Magdeburg’, Nachr. (Gött.), 1954, pp. 27–80, repr. in K. Ruh (ed.), Altdeutsche und altniederländische Mystik (Wege der Forschung, 23; Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 175–239. A. M. Haas, Sermo mysticus (Fribourg, 1979), pp. 67–135. W. Haug, ‘Das Gespräch mit dem unvergleichlichen Partner’, in K. Stierle and R. Warning (eds.), Das Gespräch (Munich, 1984), pp. 251–79. N. F. Palmer, ‘Das Buch als Bedeutungsträger bei Mechtild von Magdeburg’, in W. Harms and others (eds.), Bildhafte Rede in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 217–35. E. A. Andersen, The Voices of Mechthild of Magdeburg (Bern, etc., 2000). K. Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, 2 (Munich [1993]), pp. 245–95. B. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism (New York, 1998), pp. 222–44, with notes pp. 426–36. G. J. Lewis, Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters (Bibliographien zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 10; 1989), pp. 164–83 (nos. 1339–502/1). M. Schmidt in Dict. Sp. 10 (1980), cols. 877–85; H. Neumann in Verfasserlexikon (2nd edn.), 6 (1987), cols. 260–70, s.v.
Nachr. Nachrichten von der (königlichen) Gesellschaft (Academic) der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philolog.-hist. Kl. (Göttingen, 1894 ff ).
Dict. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, ed. M. Viller, SJ, and others (16 vols. + index, 1937–95).
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