BEATRICE di NAZARETH, blessed. - Cistercian nun, b. at Tirlemont c. 1200, d. at Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, near Lier (Brabant), 28 Aug. 1268. She embraced religious life at the age of seventeen in the monastery of Bloemendael, founded by her father, whom she subsequently followed in the further foundations of Maagdendael and Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth (1236), where she was prioress.
Of refined culture and privileged with mystical graces, she was a forerunner of reparative devotion to the Sacred Heart. Her distinctive characteristic, indeed, was a great devotion to the Passion of the Lord, which she always kept present to her mind and which enabled her to enter into the Heart of the Master, who drew her to himself, enclosed her in his wound, and there she received spiritual admonitions, promises, and the desires of the Divine Reparative One.
There remains to us from her: Von seven Manieren van Minne (Louvain 1926), in which she describes the various stages of an ascent of the soul toward the love of mystical union with God, recalling the seven dwelling places of the soul of s. Teresa. B. also had the habit of writing down her spiritual experiences, interspersing them with short treatises on ascetic and mystical subjects; after her death these formed a kind of autobiography that served as the basis for W. von Afflighem, abbot of St-Trond, for a Life written in Latin and published, with various omissions and without a prologue, by C. Henriquez under the title: Quinque prudentes virgines (Antwerp 1700).