BEATRICE of NAZARETH, Blessed. — Cistercian nun, b. at Tirlemont c. 1200, d. at Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth near Lier (Brabant) 28 Aug. 1268. She embraced the religious life at 17 in the monastery of Bloemendael, founded by her father, whom she later followed in the further foundations of Maagendael and Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth (1236), where she became prioress.
Of refined culture and privileged with mystical graces, she was a forerunner of reparation devotion to the Sacred Heart. Her characteristic trait was a profound devotion to the Passion of the Lord, which she ever kept present to her mind and which led her to penetrate into the Heart of the Master, who drew her to Himself, enclosed her within His wound, and there she heard the spiritual warnings, promises, and desires of the Divine Reparer.
Of her there remains: Von seven Manieren van Mime (Louvain 1926), in which she describes the different degrees of ascent of a soul toward the union of mystical love with God, recalling the seven mansions of the soul of St Teresa. She also had the habit of writing down her spiritual experiences, interspersing them with short treatises on ascetical and mystical subjects, which after her death 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).