HELFTA (HELPEDE). – Benedictine monastery (with the usages and Cistercian habit), founded in 1258 near Eisleben (Saxony) by Gertrude of Hackeborn (v.), the great abbess. H. is the moral continuation of the monastery of Mansfeld (founded in 1228) and subsequently transferred (1234) to Rossdorf. In 1248, St. Matilda of Hackeborn, the founder’s sister, entered this community, and in 1261 there was admitted the woman who was to become its purest glory: St. Gertrude the Great (v.).
At H., as in the other monasteries of Benedictine women, the young girls received a refined moral and literary education (cf. Ch. Jourdain, Excursions historiques et philosophiques, Paris 1888, pp. 469 and 599). Matilda and Gertrude became very close. Around 1270, a “beguine” endowed with exceptional gifts, St. Matilda of Magdeburg, arrived at H. These great souls understood and loved one another: around them there developed an atmosphere of heartfelt piety inspired by St. Bernard and the emerging Dominican school. The notable works left by the three Saints contain in germ the theory and practice of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
In 1340 H. was destroyed by the soldiers of Prince-Bishop Alberto of Braunschweig, and the nuns took refuge in the city of Eisleben, in a place called New H. In the sixteenth century Luther did everything possible to secularize the devout religious women. The law of 1874 definitively suppressed the monastery (which had only just reopened in 1848), which since the fourteenth century had returned to exclusively Benedictine traditions.