BERNARD of LIPPE. — Cistercian, lived in the 12th–13th centuries. He was a canon of the cathedral of Hildesheim when, upon his brother’s death, he was called to military service; and he served with great loyalty and honor as a vassal to Henry the Lion. His intense longing for the religious life led him to become a monk in the Cistercian abbey of Marienfeld, to whose foundation he had greatly contributed. He then went to Livonia, where we find him in 1211 as abbot of Dünamünde; in 1218 he became bishop of Selburg; he died in 1224. Of this singular figure of monk and prelate, the master Justin of Lippe composed, around the mid-1200s, a life notable for its understanding of the man and his times.
BIBL.: Magistri Iustini, Lippiflorium..., ed. G. Laubmann and P. Scheffer-Boichorst, Detmold 1872; W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, II, Berlin 1874, pp. 256–57.