MATILDA (MECHTHILD) OF MAGDEBURG. - Cistercian mystic, born of a noble family in 1212, died in the monastery of Helfta in 1283. Favored, from the age of 12, with extraordinary mystical graces, she left her family and lived, as a beguine, in Magdeburg, a life of assiduous prayer and heroic mortification under the guidance of the Dominicans.
There, in the period 1250-60, she composed the marvelous book of her visions and revelations, to which the Lord ordered her to give the title Vliesende licht miner gotheit in allu dieherzen, die da lebent ane volscheit, commonly known by the title Das fliesende Licht, and she handed its separate sheets to the Dominican Henry of Halle, who arranged them, forming 6 books from them; a seventh M. added at Helfta, where she withdrew in 1270 after the many misunderstandings and contradictions she had suffered. At Helfta she found Matilda of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, younger than she, on whom she certainly had an influence through her work, especially regarding devotion to the Sacred Heart, particularly with the vision she had at Magdeburg, ca. 1290, in which the wounded Heart of Jesus had appeared to her, as a symbol of the Redeemer's love for men.
The work of M., which comprises prose, interrupted from time to time by poems, demonstrates in her an exquisite taste and a marvelous and flourishing poetic talent; but it is above all notable as a forerunner of the intense devotion to the Sacred Heart, whose treasures of goodness and mercy she depicted. Called a saint by several authors, M. of M. was never canonized, nor is it established that she enjoyed any public cult.
Bibliography2 works
Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mechtildianae, II, Paris 1877, pp. 435-707. Studies: J. W. Preger, Gesch. der deutsch. Mystik im Mittelalter, I, Leipzig 1874, pp. 91-112; E. Michael, Gesch. des deutsch. Volkes, III, Freiburg im Br. 1903, pp. 187-99; H. Stierling, Studien zu M. v. M., Göttingen 1909; C. Richstaetter, Herz-Jesu-Verehrung des deutsch. Mittelalter, 2nd ed., Paderborn 1924, pp. 77-82; O. Karrer, Die grosse Glut, Freiburg im Br. 1926, pp. 185-203; F. W. Wentzel-Segebert, Deutsche Mystik zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit, Tübingen 1947, p. 47 ff. (with previous bibl.).
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