ELIZABETH OF SCHÖNAU, Saint. - Benedictine nun and visionary, born probably into a noble family in 1129 in the Rhineland, perhaps at Bonn or in its vicinity, died in the monastery of Schönau on 18 June 1165. At the age of twelve she was entrusted for her education to the double monastery of Schönau on the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, in which she received the veil around the year 1147 and toward the end of her life was mistress (superior) of the nuns, who were subject to the abbot, then Egbert, the saint's brother. In 1152, after a serious illness, her state of visionary and ecstatic experience began, in which she saw and conversed with celestial figures, for the most part the saints of the day, Jesus Christ and the Madonna.
By order of her brother she committed these visions to writing, and they received their definitive form from that same brother, who exercised an influence not always a happy one upon his sister, as in the question of the schism of Victor IV (antipope) and Alexander III (1159), provoked by Frederick Barbarossa, whose side Egbert took. The saint's death was very edifying and her body was visited by a great number of the faithful from the surrounding area. She did not, however, receive liturgical cult. Her name entered the Martyrologium Romanum only under Gregory XIII in 1584. In 1854 her liturgical office was inserted into the Proprium of the diocese of Limburg.
On the character of the saint all authors are agreed in recognizing in her a soul sincerely humble, pure and ingenuous, as well as a great zeal for souls and for the discipline of the Church. On this last point some of her letters insist, as does the Liber cianum Dei, in the redaction of which her brother very probably had a part. Well known is her vision concerning the bodily Assumption of Mary Most Holy into heaven, and her fantastic revelation concerning the 11,000 virgin martyrs, companions of St. Ursula, in the Liber revelationum s. Ursulæ et sociarum. All these writings, together with the three Libri visionum, very widely circulated in the Middle Ages, were published by F. W. E. Roth, Die Visionen der hl. Elisabeth... von Schönau (Brünn 1884). L. Oliger (in Antonianum, 1 [1926], pp. 24-85) has likewise attributed with probability to the saint of Schönau the Revelationes b. Elisabeth, which in the manuscripts generally go under the name of St. Elizabeth of Hungary.