Authorship is a central problem not only for Mechthild of Magdeburg, the author of Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead, hereafter referred to as The Flowing Light), but also for most of her readers, translators, and editors. Anxiety about her earthly authorship permeates the text itself. The editors of the medieval manuscripts present the book as a message from God sent to a holy maiden. Modern scholars debate the connection between the literary representation of Mechthild as author and a “real” historical Mechthild. Modern feminists champion her authorship as a moment of patriarchal resistance. All...

Mechthild of Magdeburg began writing down her revelations in the midst of a new spiritual age. Whereas twelfth-century religiosity was characterized by an increased fervor for an austere, monastic life led by a select elite who had escaped the “shipwreck of the world,” thirteenth-century religiosity embraced the world as a place where anyone could strive to achieve religious perfection, whether in a religious order, begging in the town square, or in the home.¹ Both the Dominican and the Franciscan orders, also known as mendicant orders because they took vows of poverty and often lived from itinerant begging, were founded in...

This passage marks the culmination of an extraordinary vision of a mass performed for a poor girl or maid (die arme dirne) who was not well enough to go to church in person. During the course of the vision, the weak and úbel gekleidet (wretchedly dressed) maid is recast as a beautiful, noble, and angelic maiden wearing a cloak and a garland, each adorned with lyrics from other chapters of The Flowing Light. This fascinating and self-reflexive image of female authorship points to the centrality of the concept to Mechthild’s book. Indeed, Elizabeth Andersen has argued most recently that Mechthild’s...

Mechthild’s striking and conflicted visions of authority and authorship in The Flowing Light lead us to ask: What measure of authority and authorship did medieval audiences actually grant Mechthild and her writings? The Prologue clearly admonishes all religious people to read and learn from the book. But how many did read it and for what purposes? Did they read it as God’s book, as it is presented, or as Mechthild’s? Authority derives after all not merely from a claim or an assertion of authority but also from an external acknowledgment of that claim. We can assert authority ad infinitum, but...

The eleven manuscripts examined in this chapter (K, S, Ha, M₁, M₂, Ka, Mü, Mü₂, Mü₃ , Mü₄, and H) anthologize between one and four of Mechthild’s chapters, usually in abbreviated form.² None of these manuscripts names Mechthild as an author or authority. Many of them lack attributions of authorship completely, although authorities such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, and Gregory are cited frequently. This part of the transmission thus directs our attention even further away from The Flowing Light as a coherent set of writings with a single author. Instead, we must consider the relationship between the production of...

What has happened to Mechthild of Magdeburg’s book in the modern era? Although the late medieval mystical handbooks leave us with the receding of Mechthild’s name and authorship into a complex textual culture shaped by observant readers and their nervous spiritual guides, the story of her “cultural capital” does not end there.³ Since sixteen extant Middle High German manuscripts all descend from copies of Heinrich of Nördlingen’s 1345 translation, the “loss” of Mechthild’s named authority in these books leads to a break in Heinrich’s legacy. However, the history of the Latin Lux divinitatis continues into the seventeenth century and provides...