MATILDE (MECHTILD) di MAGDEBURGO. – Cistercian mystic, born into 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, during the period 1250–60, she composed the marvelous book of her visions and revelations, to which the Lord commanded 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 entrusted its separate sheets to the Dominican Enrico di Halle, who arranged them into 6 books; M. added a seventh at Helfta, where she withdrew in 1270 after the many misunderstandings and contradictions she had suffered. At Helfta she found Matilde di Hackeborn and Gertrude la Grande, younger than herself, whom her work certainly influenced, especially with regard to devotion to the Sacred Heart, particularly through the vision she had in Magdeburg, ca. 1290, in which the Heart of Jesus appeared to her, wounded, as a symbol of the Redeemer’s love for mankind.
M.’s work, which comprises prose passages interrupted from time to time by poems, demonstrates in her an exquisite taste and a marvelous, flourishing poetic talent; but it is above all noteworthy as a precursor of intense devotion to the Sacred Heart, whose treasures of goodness and mercy she depicted. Called a saint by several authors, M. di M. was never canonized, nor is there any evidence that she enjoyed any public cult.
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 preceding bibliography). Celestino Testore