Helfta, and a Text That Survives at One Remove

Mechthild lived most of her adult life as a Beguine in Magdeburg, under the direction of Dominicans, and moved late in life to the Cistercian convent at Helfta, where she died. Helfta at that moment was extraordinary: a house of unusually educated nuns which within one generation produced Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn as well as sheltering Mechthild of Magdeburg, so that three substantial bodies of mystical writing come out of a single small community. The convent supported her, and the final book of the Flowing Light was written there.

The transmission of the text is the complication. The original Middle Low German has not survived. What survives complete is a translation into Alemannic German made within a few decades at Basel, together with a Latin translation of the first six books produced by Dominicans. Everything read today therefore passes through at least one other hand, and the Latin version reorders and tidies its material.

The consequence is that arguments about her precise wording, and about how far the surviving text represents what she dictated, cannot be fully settled. What is not in doubt is the priority: a woman writing mystical theology in a German vernacular in the thirteenth century, before Eckhart preached in German and before any comparable body of work existed in the language.