ODILIA, saint. – Foundress and abbess of Hohenburg, patroness of Alsace. Daughter of Adalrico, duke of Alsace, according to legend she was rejected by her father because she had been born blind. Bereswinta, her mother, is said to have entrusted her to an old servant who lived at Scherwiller near Selestat, and then to the monastery of Baume-les-Dames, in the diocese of Besançon. O. is said to have recovered her sight at the Baptism conferred on her by St. Erard, bishop of Regensburg. Through the intervention of Ugo, her brother, she was supposedly admitted to Adalrico, who gave her the castle of Hohenburg, on the summit of the present Mount St. Odilia, so that she might transform it into a monastery (between 667 and 680); she was its first abbess and governed a community of approximately 130 nuns.
She is also credited with founding, at the foot of Hohenburg, the hospice and monastery of Niedermünster, of which her niece Gondelinda was the first abbess. She died around 717 and was buried in the chapel of St. John the Baptist, which she herself had built at Hohenburg. Removed to Ottrott during the French Revolution, the relics were definitively returned on 6 October 1800 to the chapel of the convent on Mount St. Odilia, now a center of frequent and numerous pilgrimages.
Popular devotion spread rapidly after the
(from J. Braun, Tracht und Attribute der Heiligen in der deutschen Kunst, Stuttgart 1911, fig. 119)