Mechthild was born around 1207 as the daughter
of a noble family of lower rank; she lived near
Magdeburg and apparently received a good courtly
education. There in 1230, she moved into a house
of Beguines (a kind of voluntary convent for
women without the strict rules and the vows of a
traditional convent). As a 12-year-old Mechthild
had already experienced religious visions, but she
waited until 1250 before writing them down in response to a request from her confessor, Heinrich
von Halle. This huge collection of visions, her Licht
der fließenden Gottheit (Flowing Light of the Godhead), became one of the most important contributions to medieval mystical literature because of
the intricate combination of the erotic and the religious. In many visions Mechthild reports intimate encounters with Christ, who asks that her
soul come to bed with him to make love. During
the 1260s, Mechthild suffered from many setbacks,
caused both by severe illness and the public opposition against Beguines, especially by the church
authorities. In 1270, Mechthild joined the Cistercian women’s convent Helfta, near Eisleben. Helfta
was, at that time, a major center of women’s learning under the famous abbess Gertrud the Great.
Mechthild inspired Gertrud and also the nun
Mechthild von Hackeborn to write down their
own mystical visions. Mechthild von Magdeburg
died in 1282.
The original Middle Low German text of her
Licht der fließenden Gottheit is lost today. In its
place we have a Middle High German translation
written sometime between 1343 and 1345 in
Basel, probably by Heinrich von Nördlingen (extant in only one manuscript). Unusual for a
woman’s mystical text, Mechthild’s book was also
translated into Latin. Mechthild relied on many
different sources to express her visions, such as
texts by AUGUSTINE, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh
and Richard of St. Victor, Pseudo-Dionysius, and
Joachim of Fiore. Drawing from her literary education in her youth, she also utilized erotic
courtly poetry to formulate the religious experiences in her visions.
Bibliography
Andersen, Elizabeth A. The Voices of Mechthild of
Magdeburg. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000.
Mechthild von Magdeburg. ‘Das fließende Licht der
Gottheit’. Nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Überlieferung.
Edited by Hans Neumann. 2 vols. Munich:
Artemis, 1990.
———. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Translated
by Frank Tobin. With a preface by Margot
Schmidt. New York: Paulist Press, 1998.
Albrecht Classen