You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Revelations of St. Gertrude the Great form one of the classics of Catholic writing. And although they would have to be classified as mystical literature, their message is clear and obvious, for this book states many of the secrets of Heaven in terms that all can understand.
The remarkable monastery of Helfta was a 'place where learning and art, courtesy and holiness flowered in a dark season' of interregnal warfare.* The nuns drew their inspiration from the twin roots of Citeaux: the Rule of Saint Benedict and the constitutions of Citeaux; their spirituality, liturgy, customs, and habits were modelled on those of the White Monks, even though juridically they were not part of the Cistercian Order. Under the guidance of the thirteenth-century abbess Gertrud of Hackeborn, the nuns of Helfta steadfastly pursued learning and holiness. Among them were three outstanding women whose works have come down through the centuries: Mechtilde of Hackeborn, Mechtilde of Magdeb...
Examining correlations between the material and the mystical, this books investigates collective writing and devotional culture in late medieval piety.
Introduces an English translation of the Book of Special Grace, a Latin mystical work composed by Mechthild of Hackeborn and her sisters at the convent of Helfta in the 1290s.
A brief life of this 12th century German Benedictine nun, the only female saint titled "The Great." Discusses her method of prayer, some sample prayers, and covers some of her revelations. Shows the depth and sublimity of Our Lord's love for souls who give themselves completely to Him. Contains many actual words of Our Lord from His conversations with Gertrude. Beautiful and inspiring to see how much Jesus loves us and wants to be loved! Here is a soul that never denied Him anything, who kept her baptismal innocence and so was extremely pleasing to her Divine Spouse.
Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the...
As distinct from the many recent collections and studies of medieval literature and culture that have focused on gender and sexuality as their major themes, this collection considers and serves to re-think and re-situate religion and sexuality together. Including 'traditional' works such as Chaucer and the Pearl-poet, as well as less well known and studied texts - such as alchemical texts and the Wohunge group - the contributors here focus on the meeting point of these two often-examined concepts. They seek an understanding of where sex and religion distinguish themselves from one another, and where they do not. This volume locates the Divine and the Erotic within the continuum of experience and devotion that characterize the paradox of the medieval world. Not merely original in their approaches, these authors seek a new vision of how these two inter-connected themes - sexuality and the Divine - meet, connect, distinguish themselves, and merge within medieval life, language, and literature.
This book is a translation, the only one from the Latin, of the Preces Gertrudianae, a manual of devotions compiled in the seventeenth century from the Suggestions of Divine Piety of St. Gertrude and St. Mechtilde, nllns of the Order of St. Benedict. Of this work Alban Butler says, in his life of St. Gertrude, that it is perhaps the most useful production, next to the writings of St. Teresa, with which any female saint ever enriched the Church."Care has been taken to preserve, not only the substance, but, as far as might be, the form, of the original prayers; and a few others, well known and much valued, have been added as an Appendix.Let us consider this advice: “When you are distracted i...