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Women religious virtuosae from the middle ages: a case pattern and analytic model of types
Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Barbara R. Walters
Gertrude of Helfta
Gertrude of Helfta was born in 1256, most likely to parents of the nobility. At the age of four she was placed in a Benedictine convent, Heifta, a monastic setting in Saxony renowned during the second half of the thirteenth century as an intellectual and mystical center. The Heifta nuns followed Cistercian practices, but no evidence suggests a formal incorporation into the order. Bynum (1982:184-185) describes the distinctive environment of the Helfta community as shaped by eucharistic piety, a direct and unmediated contact with God, support for the clergy, a view of Christ as comforter as well as judge, and the positive sense of self typical of those placed as children in monastic settings. The empowering sense of self contrasts sharply with the anxiety manifest in the writings of vagae, beguines, converts, and women who entered the cloistered life in their teens. Gertrude's life at Helfta cut across a chaotic time in Germany following the deposition of the excommunicated Frederick II in 1245. However, the H elfta monastery was large and prosperous, even though subject to pillage by the local nobility in 1285 and interdiction by local ecclesiastic authority in 1295 (Barratt 1991:8; Bynum 1982:175).
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Gertrude received a solid education at Helfta, studying grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and probably music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. She excelled in Latin and her writings demonstrate an acquaintance with Augustine, Gregory, Bernard, and the Victorines. She quotes frequently from the Vulgate and the liturgy. Unlike other women who were writing in the vernacular, Gertrude wrote in Latin -- not the awkward Latin of a translator, like Juliana's, but high Latin. She wrote in the tradition of her monastery and its religious vision. She was trained in it and developed her own vision through intimate interactions in small groups of friends with whom she shared the mystical tradition. Nonetheless, during a historical time of significant intellectual developments that suggest cracks in the culture of the ecclesia, "Gertrude seems at least superficially to be a throw-back to the previous century with Bernard, Aelred of Rievaulx, and William of St. Thierry" (Barrart 1991:13). William James (1985) dismissed Gertrude as "puerile."
The following is taken from the Barratt translation (1991:150) of The Herald of God's Loving Kindness. She does not usurp the clergy or criticize their role as much as she projects herself onto it (cf. Bynum 1982).
"May my heart and my soul, together with the whole substance of my flesh and all the powers and faculties of my body and spirit along with the whole created world, give praise and thanksgiving unto you, sweetest God, most faithful lover of human salvation, for your most generous mercy! Your loving-kindness was not content merely to ignore the fact that I had the temerity to approach so many times the most excellent feast of your holy body and blood improperly prepared. Your inexhaustible superabundance toward me, the most worthless and useless of your instruments, condescended to tinge your gift with added beauty: from your grace I received an assurance that if anyone who longs to approach the blessed sacrament but has a fearful conscience is prompted by humility to seek support and strength from me... for your loving kindness... will count them worthy of so great a sacrament..."
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