When William James long ago characterized the God of the thirteenth-century Cistercian cloister of Helfta, in Saxony, as “full of partiality for his individual favorites,”Footnote ² he might have illustrated his claim with any number of passages from three of the surviving works composed by the nuns of Helfta, the Book of Special Grace, associated with Mechtild of Hackeborn (1241–ca. 1298/99), the Herald of Divine Love, associated with Gertrude of Helfta (1256–ca. 1301/02), and the Spiritual Exercises, written by Gertrude.Footnote ³ James drew his readers' attention to the following account from the Herald:

James declared this passage one in a relentless series of “paltry-minded” “proofs” the Herald offers in evidence of Christ's predilection for Gertrude.Footnote ⁵ He dismissed the whole of this book as the musings of a personality so absorbed in love of God and so narrowly fixed on securing demonstrations of his love for her as to push from her purview “all human loves” and all “practical human interests.”Footnote ⁶ A range of writers has since James been struck by the ardent assertions of the mutual love between the Helfta visionaries, Gertrude and Mechtild, and Christ that the convent literature records.Footnote ⁷ Scholars have also noticed, however, an interest in society and pronounced expressions of sociability in the Helfta writings. Indeed, virtually no major account of the nuns' piety neglects to remark on the women's preoccupation with community.Footnote ⁸ In this article, I examine more deliberately than have previous studies the relationship between the Helfta nuns' sense of self in relation to God and their sense of community. Because nowhere is the nuns' sense of community felt more intensely than in their liturgical practices,Footnote ⁹ and because nowhere do Mechtild and Gertrude experience more frequently the divine revelations and union with God that highlight their focus on the self than during liturgical observances,Footnote ¹⁰ I do so through an examination of Mechtild's and Gertrude's reported experiences during liturgy.

Though it is now much contested, there has long been a tendency to see late medieval spirituality as centering increasingly on individual, inner experience rather than on group practice or on communal religious response, even when the context is religious or monastic community. Some scholars have argued that the surge during the late Middle Ages in subjective spirituality—characterized, in part, by a deliberate curling inward of attention to the self in relation to God—drained enthusiasm for the common life and compromised a coherent sense of liturgical community.Footnote ¹¹ Theologians and historians alike have pronounced non-clerical participants in Mass and the divine office both marginalized spectators and frankly self-preoccupied.Footnote ¹² A growing body of research has demonstrated, nonetheless, that medieval women and men, lay and religious, perceived themselves as thoroughly engaged in liturgical observances and taken up with their corporate implications as well as purposefully promoting others' active participation in the liturgy.Footnote ¹³ Scholars such as Cyprian Vagaggini and Jean Leclercq as well as, more recently, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Hamburger, Bruce Holsinger, and Anne Bagnall Yardley have, furthermore, told us much about the spiritual significance to religious women of the Mass and the office.Footnote ¹⁴ There has, however, been little sustained examination of the sense of community among nuns as it relates to the liturgy. If we want to know more about religious women's attitudes about community in the context of the liturgy, we would do well to turn to the works produced at Helfta, which constitute the largest body of female-authored writings of the thirteenth century.

In the first section of this article, I situate the monastery's liturgical life in relation to broader aspects of the Helfta piety, I illustrate the prominence of the liturgy in Mechtild's and Gertrude's spirituality, and I consider the nuns' understanding of the relationship between an individual's subjective religious experience and formal prescribed communal worship—a topic that preoccupied medieval nuns more generally and the men who had responsibilities for their spiritual care.Footnote ¹⁵ The convent's literature is flooded with accounts of its principal visionaries' experiences while in office and Mass, and in this article's second section, I examine such accounts for what they can tell us about the visionaries' sense of relatedness to the sisters with whom they worshiped—and their sense of separateness and difference from them. My interest is thus in the sisters' attitudes during liturgical observances toward community among themselves, although the women's understanding of who comprised their liturgical community was more expansive than this focus suggests. My concern throughout is not, therefore, on the liturgy per se or liturgy as practice. It is, instead, about liturgy as context, as place and moment where experience occurs.

The Book of Special Grace and the Herald offer a wealth of information about what was on the Helfta nuns' minds during the liturgical observances that structured their daily life, information that is available to us primarily in the content of visions attributed to Mechtild and Gertrude. Both works consist largely in accounts of revelations, ecstasies, and spiritual teachings ascribed to Gertrude and Mechtild, the monastery's spiritual luminaries, and in their prayers. They contain, in addition, a variety of testimonies to the exemplary devotion of these two women as well as to the piety of the cloister's female inhabitants considered collectively. The centrality of community to the nuns' religiosity is exemplified by the endeavor that produced the Herald and the Book of Special Grace, which was a communal and collaborative one, calling on the collective resources of the female members of the household, and one with almost no discernible male involvement.Footnote ¹⁶

Mechtild and Gertrude are the central figures of the work with which each is associated. According to the Book of Special Grace and the Herald, both women were revered by the nuns of their monastery as well as by clergy and laypeople. Each was counted a beneficiary of Christ's tender solicitude, his loyal oversight, and his indulgent correction; each was estimated a member of his close circle of friends, the saints and the angels, and a confidant of his mother, with all of whom, moreover, each woman had frequent dealings. In addition, both Mechtild and Gertrude exercised spiritual authority that accrued to them in large measure through the visions and ecstasies of which they were reckoned recipients. They served their sisters and others as intercessors and spiritual counselors and were valued as interpreters of the religious life, which they (as the works with which they are associated recount) embodied in their devoted observance of monastic rule and custom, their lavish love of Christ, and their reverent (if not always ready) obedience to his biddings.

The Helfta literature offers insight into the attitudes, ideas, and experiences of two remarkable women and their monastic family, and it is directed primarily to contemporary and future religious of the household. Mechtild joined in crafting the Book of Special Grace, and Gertrude participated in the production of the Herald. We should be wary, however, of identifying any particular devotion, teaching, or revelation with either person: recent work has shown that neither book is accurately characterized as a raw account of Mechtild's and Gertrude's self-disclosures or a simple recording of their sisters' observations of the two women. Composing this literature was a decades-long process that called on the varied contributions of an indeterminate number of nuns, whose own perceptions and concerns inform the style and color the content of the Herald and the Book of Special Grace, and the nature of whose contributions to these works is impossible to determine with precision. Each book tells us about Mechtild and Gertrude as their thoughts and experiences were refracted through multiple collaborators for the well-being of their cloistered community.Footnote ¹⁷

I. “Come and Read, for I Will Help You”: Liturgy and the Helfta Spirituality

Daily Mass and the divine office were the sisters' primary activities and the pivot around which other matters of the monastery turned. The sisters sometimes attended Mass twice in one day, and they may have spent the majority of their waking moments chanting the eight canonical hours. Supplementary liturgical observances, such as the office of the dead, and quasi-liturgical gatherings, including chapter—the daily meeting in which business of the monastery was conducted—further filled their schedule.Footnote ¹⁸ The liturgy was, to the nuns, marked off as an occasion for concentrated praise of God; it was shot through with opportunity to move closer to Christ, especially when he was received in communion. In the revelations they received regularly during liturgical observance, Christ often came all by himself to Gertrude and Mechtild; as the Book of Special Grace and the Herald relate, he frequently came with others. Visions interspersed throughout both books indicate that the nuns' liturgical piety, in keeping with broader trends in late medieval religiosity, was undergirded by the conviction that the living and the saints regard one another as confederates who all together offer praise to God. As Gertrude is said to have related about a vision that came to her on the Feast of All Saints in which she beheld a multitude of saints assembled in the monastery's chapel, it is as if God the Father were a powerful paterfamilias who gathered into one great banquet all his chosen companions in a festival of praise.Footnote ¹⁹ In office and in Mass, the nuns perceived that their voices raised in praise of God were frequently joined by a chorus of saints.Footnote ²⁰ The sisters not only praised God with the saints, they also praised the saints themselves, and the saints responded with solicitude to the pleadings and needs of the nuns. When an interdict prohibited the nuns from receiving communion, and Mechtild was sad to be deprived of the opportunity to receive, Christ appeared to her, wiped the tears from her eyes, and promised: “Today you shall see miracles.”Footnote ²¹ She did. From the procession through the monastery and into the chapel that announced the beginning of the Mass to the final priestly blessing, Christ, Mary, and the saints joined with the sisters in a Mass in which the women were offered communion that would otherwise have been denied them. Christ was the celebrating priest; John the Evangelist and John the Baptist both assumed the role of lector; Luke and John the Baptist officiated with Christ; and the numerous saints gathered in the chapel chanted the psalms. When the sisters came before the altar, Christ offered to each the host, and the Virgin Mary held a gold straw [fistula aurea] to Christ's side from which the sisters drank.Footnote ²² Ensconced in their choir stalls, the nuns were thus not remote from a larger liturgical community, and the monastery's chapel was far more crowded than might be supposed.

As the Helfta literature tells it, public common worship was the arena in which the nuns experienced vividly, celebrated, and solidified the bonds linking in one association all the living and the dead, with the exception of those in hell. Theirs was a liturgical sensibility buoyed by confidence in human beings' capacity to provide to one another mutual assistance that made porous death's divide.Footnote ²³ Liturgical observances were flush with possibility for the sisters to participate in lessening the penalties of souls in purgatory, to facilitate the washing of God's grace over all the living, and even to augment the joy of the saints themselves.Footnote ²⁴ On one occasion, so we read, Gertrude received the host and then saw her soul in the form of a tree, whose root was affixed to the wound in Christ's side. She felt Christ's humanity and divinity infuse her, and she prayed that Christ would give to others the favor he thus bestowed on her. Then seeing herself, she saw:

In a variety of ways, therefore, the Helfta literature attests to a generous and coherent sense of the liturgical community.Footnote ²⁶ This was a community characterized, in great part, by an almost continuous offering of praise to God and by the busy productivity associated with joining Christ in the work of salvation. It was one in which members cultivated the sharing with one another of the spiritual benefits associated with any one group or individual.

Virtually the whole of the nuns' life appears to have been permeated by the liturgy.Footnote ²⁷ The annual cycles of feasts and seasons, together with the hours of the office, provided the basic chronological structure by which the nuns ordered and measured their days and the shifting seasons.Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, the mark of the liturgy is evident everywhere in verbal communication within the cloister.Footnote ²⁹ When Christ and the nuns express their longing and love, and when they rejoice in the satisfaction that they bring one another, they call upon the familiar and pliant language of the liturgy. For example, Christ on one occasion addressed Gertrude and avowed his love for her using words associated with the legend of St. Agnes, which the sisters may have known as an antiphon sung during the ceremony of a nun's consecration.Footnote ³⁰ “Behold,” Christ declared, “I see the person whom I have already desired; I have that person for whom I have hoped; I am joined with her whom I loved with complete devotion while on earth.”Footnote ³¹ The language of the liturgy furnished the means by which the nuns eavesdropped on God's conversations with his friends, the saints and angels, and listened to tales the holy dead told them about earthly exploits and eternal bliss. It was the language of quiet conversation, of homey and erotic intimacy, of awesome reverence, and of joyous worship that ran throughout the cosmos. It is not surprising that the liturgy helped to organize the sisters' thought and provided a governing framework for the convent's literary creations. The Spiritual Exercises, the only surviving composition of which Gertrude appears to have been sole author, is a series of loosely organized prayers, chants, and litanies that are saturated with the language of the liturgy and whose basic organization depends on liturgical ritual.Footnote ³² The depth and breadth of the liturgy's impress on the form and content of the Book of Special Grace and the Herald are conspicuous.Footnote ³³ Indeed, it may be that the nuns' confidence in the fluency with which they spoke what they believed to be the language of the universal church contributed to the authority and significance with which they invested the Herald and the Book of Special Grace.Footnote ³⁴ They wrote in a language that was, to them, intelligible, personal, and universal; it was the language in which God revealed himself in his scriptures to the world and spoke in plain and caring conversation with them.Footnote ³⁵

Just as the women's creative engagement with the liturgy colored the larger life of the cloister, so, too, did a nun's more obviously personal piety come with her when she entered into communal public worship and inform her experience of it, as Jean Leclercq argued over half a century ago and as Jeffrey Hamburger has more recently observed.Footnote ³⁶ The Herald describes a vision of Christ's side pierced by an arrow of light that appeared to Gertrude in the chapel as one element in an extended process of supplication, desire, and fulfillment.Footnote ³⁷ A few days earlier, Gertrude had asked someone to pray before a crucifix that her heart be wounded with the arrow of God's love. Gertrude subsequently received the wound of God's love. We know the wounding took place after Gertrude attended Mass; it may have been stimulated by it. The chapter in which Gertrude describes this interrelated series of events concludes with Gertrude's admission that she has not been sufficiently grateful for the wound, and she explains that, since she has profited little from this and other gifts from God, she must write about them for the benefit of others. She had in mind the composition of the Herald. As the Herald itself tells it, God's condescension toward her drove Gertrude's participation in the whole of the literary venture. Although Christ's merciful gifts are unmerited, he did demand something in return: Gertrude was constrained to share her gifts with others.Footnote ³⁸ Her role in the making of the Herald was crucial to her endeavor to do so. The brief chapter charting Gertrude's wounding and her response to this gift and to others is, therefore, about much more than the satisfaction of one woman's want. It indicates that multiple discrete expressions of piety—a conversation between sisters, the prayer of a fellow nun—as well as other communal spiritual practices (in this case, the creation of the Herald) were tightly interwoven with the routine of corporate worship. There was easy congress and continuity between the religiosity that thrived inside and outside the confines of the liturgy.

However permeable the boundary between the spirituality of corporate religious worship and that which was alive outside the context of the liturgy, there seems to have been something about the liturgy that encouraged intellectual creativity, focused reflection on the self, induced vision, and provided a spur to ecstasy.Footnote ³⁹ Gertrude herself locates Mass, the elevation of the host, and reception of communion as those occasions on which she received extraordinary gifts from God, including his visible presence and union with him. After Mechtild received communion, Christ pressed her heart to his heart so that they became one mass, and about Gertrude we read that:

Objects associated with corporate worship sparked visions and became integrated into their content. One Sunday, Gertrude was in her choir stall when, gazing at a painted image of Christ in a book, she saw a ray of light like an arrow entering and withdrawing from the wound in Christ's side.Footnote ⁴¹ The particular words the nuns heard or chanted during liturgical observances also triggered visions. Such revelations are sometimes vivid visual manifestations of the nuns' verbal declamations of devotion, and they are illustrations (and confirmations)Footnote ⁴² of the efficacy of communal song. As the sisters processed to chapel singing the responsory Vidi Dominum facie ad faciem, the Lord showed his face to Gertrude.Footnote ⁴³ When Mechtild sang the verse Ora pro populo, Mary got up from her throne, genuflected, and prayed for the congregation, and as the sisters made mention of each choir of saints, each did as Mary had done, offering on bended knee a prayer to Christ on behalf of the nuns.Footnote ⁴⁴ To the holiest sisters—as the Herald and the Book of Special Grace relate—the language of the liturgy was an object of limitless fascination and a regular source of thought about the saints, the self, and even the institutional history of religious orders and their place in salvation history. Thus, for example, we read that, on the Feast of St. Bernard, Mechtild reflected on the words In medio Ecclesia, and Christ instructed her in the Benedictine Order's many salutary contributions to the universal church.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Helfta literature suggests that the nuns were quick to embellish liturgical celebrations with questions peculiar to each and to delve into details of an observance that especially intrigued them. When Mechtild at Mass heard the priest recite the collect Infirmitatem nostram respice, quaesumus and wished to understand it more fully, Christ obliged her, pausing to tease out the meaning of each word and fashioning something like a gloss that might have been lifted from a written document or fitted into one.Footnote ⁴⁶ Liturgical observance offered individual nuns the opportunity for intellectual productivity, perhaps paralleling, supplementing, or fueling the work a contemporary monastic reader might associate with the scriptorium.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gertrude and Mechtild emerge as lively and engaged participants in the liturgy, sensitive to the intricacy of the individual components that comprised each observance. The physical objects Mechtild and Gertrude saw and touched, the words they chanted and to which they listened, seeped into their imagination. They give rise to and became the stuff of visions, suffusing communal song, reception, or a gospel reading with tangled layers of meaning, charging everyday routine with sometimes exalted, sometimes elaborate, and often weighty intellectual meaning, as well as deeply personal significance. As the literature relates, prescribed communal observances were, for Mechtild and Gertrude, vibrantly supple: both women were prepared to seek and to find in Mass and in office a response to shifting needs and to experience, during the liturgy, the quickening of intellectual curiosities and of desires as well as their satisfaction.

The Helfta nuns did not discount the practical difficulties of reconciling the inclination to tarry in meditative or mystical delights with the obligation to hold fast to behavior appropriate to liturgical observances.Footnote ⁴⁸ They certainly did not perceive the extravagant spiritual proclivities of an individual sister and her commitment to rigorous observance of common worship as in opposition to each other; scholars such as Hilda Graef and Cyprian Vagaggini are right to assert that the literature of Helfta provides relatively little evidence of the visionary's exploits disrupting common religious observances.Footnote ⁴⁹ The nuns knew, nevertheless, that an active inner life might draw a sister's concentration from communal worship.Footnote ⁵⁰ They were conscious that an individual's spiritual ardor might drain her of the strength necessary to keep the rigorous schedule of Mass, office, and supplemental liturgical observances, that physical fortitude was essential to meet the taxing demands that chant exacted on the body.Footnote ⁵¹ The visionaries did not always manage to balance the pull of revelation and ecstasy with the maintenance of public communal worship. Once, while the sisters were in choir, the Lord rushed from heaven with arms extended to embrace Mechtild, who became so wholly absorbed in God that members of the congregation were obliged to carry her as if lifeless from her stall.Footnote ⁵²

Revelations also readied their recipient for her liturgical labors and shook her free of thoughts that vied with liturgical services for her attention. When during vespers, Mechtild's clothes were sprinkled with dust—a sign of a preoccupation that took over her mind—Mary appeared and with her hand wiped away the dust.Footnote ⁵³ The Book of Special Grace thus indicates that the content of the vision swept away the remnants of what prevented its recipient from fully engaging in the office and not that the vision itself was a source of Mechtild's distraction. In addition, her revelations supported the visionary when her attention was divided.Footnote ⁵⁴ During Mass on the Feast of St. John before the Latin Gate, Gertrude was reflecting on writings about the special gifts John received from God; when she determined to shift her attention to what was being chanted, the saint himself appeared before her, and, “in a wondrous way” (mirabilis modus), enabled her to continue to attend to the writings about him and at the same time to understand each verse of the sequence sung in his honor.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Helfta literature, furthermore, documents the markedly practical assistance that Christ at times lent the sisters when their minds wandered from the business of the office during the canonical hours as well as when fatigue or weakness overwhelmed them. When Gertrude fixed her attention on the Baby Jesus at each note she chanted in office, she found she could sing more carefully.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the time for communion approached on the Feast of All Saints, Gertrude worried because she had asked no one to help her; as the text relates, she had for a long time been unable to walk without assistance. Christ brushed away her concerns as he came to her side. Bracing her with the “arm” [ulna] of divine grace, he ensured that she was able to receive communion.Footnote ⁵⁷ During the course of liturgical observances, Mechtild's union with God fortified her: as she sang, each breath she drew, she drew from the heart of God.Footnote ⁵⁸ A passage from the Book of Special Grace illustrates both that Mechtild's intense commerce with God tired her, compromising her capacity to join in the office, and that Christ's presence provided the enervated visionary with the support she needed to assume her liturgical duties. It suggests, furthermore, that coincidence of this sort formed a common pattern in Mechtild's routine:

Elsewhere we learn that as Mechtild read the Gospel during matins, the Lord so fully filled her with the sweetness of his grace that she was carried out of the choir onto a couch. Resting here, she asked Christ to wake her at the appropriate time; at prime (so we read) she beheld standing before her a beautiful young man, whose presence charged her with energy.Footnote ⁶⁰

The nuns of Helfta regarded a finely focused concentration on the self in relation to God as sometimes compromising an individual's ability to join in liturgical practices conceived of as beneficial to others. They developed no elaborate or formal rationale reconciling individual religious experience and communal worship. The Herald and the Book of Special Grace provide evidence of the relative ease with which the nuns harmonized a bustling interior life with the demands of corporate worship. For much of her adult life, Mechtild was the convent's chantress, in charge of liturgical celebration and responsible for leading the nuns' chant in the divine office. Yet there is no indication in the Book of Special Grace that her visionary life undermined her in this role. In the nuns' own depiction of their daily life, they claim to have worked out among themselves such challenges as exceptional individuals among them brought to communal religious observances. Even as the Helfta literature acknowledges interruptions to communal observances that visions, ecstasies, and idiosyncratic physical manifestations of piety might bring about, it gives no indication that Mechtild's and Gertrude's sisters or their abbess regarded them as irksome. When disruptions did occur, the literature urges its cloistered readers to interpret them not as signs of laxity in observance but as testimonies to holiness: the picture Special Grace offers of Mechtild slipping from her liturgical duties and carried as if dead from the choir evokes Mary's assumption as related in a vision that comes to Mechtild—the Book of Special Grace describes both women as “wholly absorbed in God.”Footnote ⁶¹ Private, intimate encounters with Christ, Mary, and the saints sometimes hindered Gertrude and Mechtild from playing an active role in communal worship; frequently, as Vagaggini observed, they provided support that furthered the commitments associated with Mass and office.Footnote ⁶²Special Grace and the Herald are sanguine about reconciling fervent individual piety with conformity to exacting communal standards of behavior. This seems to have been the case at least in part because the nuns detected that advantages redounded both to the individual visionary and to her sisters in consequence of such devotion.

II. “Enjoy Me, Each of You”: Self and Other in Liturgical Observances

For the visionaries among the nuns, chanting with and to Mary and the saints in liturgy moved seamlessly to talking with them. The revelations and ecstasies that came to Gertrude and Mechtild while they were in the chapel or in chapter involved them in casual encounters and emotionally charged meetings with Christ's mother as well as the saints and angels. Complex discussions with Mary and the saints and consequential exchanges with them sometimes occurred within discrete assignations and lingered over a single antiphon, sequence, or alleluia, for example; they sometimes took place over the course of several meetings, extending through many days and a number of liturgical events. Thus, for example, the solicitousness and sternness Mary exhibits toward Gertrude, the stance, at once placating and demanding, that Gertrude assumes before Mary, and the sometimes fraught tenor of their relationship are evoked in a series of visions of the Virgin that came to Gertrude in Mass on successive feast days.Footnote ⁶³ On the Feast of Christ's Nativity, Gertrude received the Baby Jesus, fresh from his mother's womb, and clasped him to her breast; some days later, on the Feast of the Purification, Gertrude's own desires were at cross-purposes with the mother's determination to wrest her Son from Gertrude.Footnote ⁶⁴ Addressing herself to Christ, Gertrude writes:

There is not a hint in the Helfta literature that heaven's inhabitants are cocooned by the joy of eternity in serene indifference to the little victories, the trials, the impetrations of the living, or to their queries, anxieties, and devotions.Footnote ⁶⁶ During her conversations at matins with John the Evangelist on his feast day, Gertrude put to John questions about his earthly life and the content of his writings. The author of the fourth Gospel responded by relating to Gertrude his experience of the Last Supper, explaining to her his mission, and divulging to her aspects of his experience about which he had until then kept silent.Footnote ⁶⁷ At matins on Benedict's feast day, Gertrude asked the saint what reward he received for his death; Benedict informed her that because he breathed his last while at prayer, his breath—more delicious than that of all the other saints—charms heaven's inhabitants with its sweetness.Footnote ⁶⁸ When, singing with her sisters on the Feast of St. Elisabeth of Hungary, Gertrude worried that her attention to God diminished the praise counted as Elisabeth's own, Elisabeth assured Gertrude that she accepted the nun's song with infinite gratitude.Footnote ⁶⁹

The nuns believed that to enter into a fellowship with the saints was to approximate the closeness with Christ that belonged to his heavenly friends. Thus, we read, for example, that during matins John the Evangelist appeared to Gertrude and led her before Christ. John took Gertrude and placed her on the Lord's right side, where Christ's open wound lay—the wound that provided her with access to Christ's heart, source of all sweetness and the gateway to his divinity.Footnote ⁷⁰ John subsequently granted Gertrude a vision by which she saw enclosed in Christ's heart “the immense ocean of the divinity,” and in that ocean John swam, with delight and freedom.Footnote ⁷¹ Surely this vision is something like a pledge and a beckoning toward like heavenly delights that Gertrude may hope will be her own. Through the accumulated weight of engagements such as this, Mechtild's and Gertrude's relationships with Mary and with a few of the saints—including John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, and Catherine of Alexandria—come to form distinctive patterns and to acquire the patina of a shared history.Footnote ⁷²

Christ fostered the women's engagement with the saints, talking with the nuns about the saints' exemplary lives, holy writings, and celestial joys as well as about the women's devotion to the saints. During Mass on the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, Christ recounted to Mechtild the laudable emotions Mary Magdalene directed toward him;Footnote ⁷³ during Mass on the Feast of Pope Gregory, Christ and Gertrude spoke about Gregory's writings and about the honor he received from his fellow saints because his literary labors excited others to devotion;Footnote ⁷⁴ on Bernard's feast day, Christ related to Mechtild the glory that now belonged to Bernard, who because he was so filled with love of God enkindled this love in others.Footnote ⁷⁵

During liturgical observances, Christ himself showered Mechtild and Gertrude with his attentions.Footnote ⁷⁶ In such instances, the visionaries fixed their sight on God, who showed them who they were and ought to be. When Mechtild received Christ in communion, she heard him say: “I am in you and you are in me, and I will not leave you for eternity.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Gertrude relates that Christ on occasion kissed her ten times or more as she chanted a single psalm.Footnote ⁷⁸ Gertrude's and Mechtild's visions witness the mutuality of emotion that bound each woman with Christ, who repeatedly singled out each with a fierce proprietary love: “Your soul is mine,” Christ made known to Mechtild in the middle of Mass.Footnote ⁷⁹ Revelations received during liturgy were characterized by the visionary's candid and potent preoccupation with herself in relation to God—cowering before God the Father, luxuriating in Christ's embrace, or comforted by his approbation. On the Feast of St. Matthew, Gertrude reclined on Christ's breast and, as the priest elevated the chalice, she determined that she had contributed little to the offering since she suffered insufficiently for Christ; she then cast herself on God's mercy as she threw herself on the floor at his feet. Christ immediately lay on the ground by her side and soothed her, saying that he could not live happily without her. In this moment, Gertrude knew Christ had selected her from among all souls, in heaven and on earth, as uniquely compelling his love.Footnote ⁸⁰

Visions such as those I have discussed display Mechtild's and Gertrude's steady fascination with their own internal state—with their feelings of remorse, shame, or gratitude. Gertrude and Mechtild, so the Herald and Book of Special Grace relate, were convinced that Christ—as well as Mary and the saints—spoke directly to them during the liturgy. They were sure that Christ was desirous of their presence in the liturgy and that he was attentive to their contributions to it: “Lord, what do you do when I pray or recite psalms?” Mechtild asked Christ. “I listen,” he replied.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, the visionaries routinely placed themselves virtually at the center of the liturgy's significance. A sense of the self as singular in the sight of God—as singularly adored and singularly unworthy of such adoration—flourished in a corporate setting. Exactly because it promoted encounter with Christ and brought with it a bevy of social relationships with the saints, the liturgy sharpened a sense of self, offering the nuns opportunities to plumb with delicacy and deliberation their own varying inner states and to wonder about self in relation to God and his heavenly friends.Footnote ⁸² Within this context, Mechtild and Gertrude reveled in the sense that they were special—in their peculiar needs and wants and devotions, different from those of others and worthy of their own (and God's) consideration—and they indulged in a relationship with Christ that they believed was marked off for him among his many relationships as precious, necessary, and vitalizing.

Although often stimulated by moments in the office or Mass, her revelations frequently cast members of the congregation outside the visionary's consideration and left her without recognition that she was in the choir. Such revelations suggest that Gertrude and Mechtild sometimes longed for distance between themselves and their sisters as well as for privacy and that they found both in abundance within corporate worship. Neither the Herald nor the Book of Special Grace describes the individual nun yearning to tear away from the routine rounds of common worship to sequester herself from her sisters so as to better search out God and savor him. It may be that the nuns' intensely corporate life both created the hunger in an individual nun to carve out for herself a world apart from that of her sisters and provided her with numerous occasions to become skilled at obtaining that for which she longed—of attaining, that is, to an arena in which the self, insulated from fellow nuns, might enter into reverie and ecstasy as well as into conversation with Christ and his holy friends and family. Visions may have offered a welcome and delicious respite from the hubbub of communal life. They may have been a retreat from its humdrumness, providing entry into a larger community, crowded with chatty and diverse companions, with whom the visionaries cultivated complex one-on-one relationships. Their brushes with Christ, his friends, and his mother were sometimes winsome and welcoming, and they were at other times strained; over and over again (so the Helfta literature insists), God and the saints during the liturgy trained their reserves on moving Mechtild and Gertrude toward salvation.Footnote ⁸³ They encouraged both women's cultivation of private relationships with them during liturgical observances, and they abetted the visionaries' attention to their internal state.

Christ and the saints also strove against the women's sometimes inward focus, and the visionaries of their own accord liberally incorporated their sisters into their thoughts and actions. When, during a liturgical service, Gertrude or Mechtild brought into their exchanges with God a forceful focus on the self—on their feelings of unworthiness before his majesty, their fears about the public exposure of their revelations, their anxieties about not having sufficiently praised Mary—Christ, Mary, and the saints from time to time obliged the visionaries to expand the horizon of their concern, so that a reflection or revelation that begins with a starkly individualistic focus pans out to include other people. A movement from concentrated consideration of the self to a broader perspective that includes others is evident in the following vision, which Gertrude received during Mass. Gertrude was stung with a feeling of unworthiness, so that she dared not look up at the elevation of the host. Christ acknowledged Gertrude's lowliness, but he did not permit her to remain in self-referential reflection, however accurate her self-assessment. He urged Gertrude to participate in the Mass rather than burrow into her humility, insisting that Gertrude further the salvation of others by gazing at the elevated host:

Gertrude would have refused to raise her eyes to the host. Christ had other plans for her. He did not countenance in Gertrude a sinking into the self that would disassociate her from productive devotions by which each member of the liturgical community might help Christ in his work on behalf of all Christians.Footnote ⁸⁵

The revelations and reflections that came to Gertrude and Mechtild within Mass, office, and chapter contain numerous incidental remarks that indicate that a keen sensitivity to the needs and desires of other individuals as well as to the well-being of the nuns as a collective was an integral (if not always welcome) component of their liturgical life. They underscore the visionary's attention to the piety of her sisters, as when the Herald relates that Gertrude noticed during chapter that, in the person of the prioress, the convent acknowledged its faults before the abbess and perceived subsequently that Christ offered absolution.Footnote ⁸⁶ And they draw attention to the benefits to herself of the visionary's attentiveness: Gertrude on one occasion became aware of Christ's presence in chapter exactly by the devotion she observed in her sisters.Footnote ⁸⁷ They convey, in addition, the visionaries' consciousness (or the ascription by their sisters to the visionaries) of God's gratification in their sympathy for their sisters and in pious practices in which the nuns engaged in common. When, at the introit of Christmas Mass, Gertrude held the delicate Baby in her arms, she linked her reception of this gift to prayers she had offered before the feast for someone in trouble.Footnote ⁸⁸ An awareness of God's delight in the small favors she performed to further her sisters' liturgical practices intruded into Gertrude's thought: during Mass on another occasion, Gertrude noticed that her soul had been adorned with a garment encrusted with precious stones because at matins, although illness made her weak, she soldiered on to read a second time a nocturne with another sister.Footnote ⁸⁹ The nuns' revelations often indicate Christ's (or the saints') approbatory recognition of the prayers the nuns recited together, and they sometimes contain his (or their) commentaries on such prayers. Thus, for instance, Mary appeared during Mass to Mechtild, and she conveyed to her the excellence of the prayer Ave Maria, explained to Mechtild the meaning of its component words, and related to her the sweetness that she, Mary, received from this prayer.Footnote ⁹⁰ In a pattern we find again and again, Mechtild and Gertrude include in their visions prayers for others and routinely bring back to individual sisters the messages, pledges, and prayers they collect in the course of their excursions.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus, for example, when Mechtild prayed to St. Catherine on behalf of a particular sister, Catherine urged the sister, through Mechtild, to recite an antiphon for the saint.Footnote ⁹² When Mechtild proferred to John the Evangelist the prayers of another sister, John instructed Mechtild to tell her, “I shall prepare a feast for all the saints out of all she has offered to me.”Footnote ⁹³ Mechtild's and Gertrude's revelations frequently concern the whole of the cloister, living and dead: Gertrude at Mass saw Mary sheltering under her mantle those who had commended themselves to her protection;Footnote ⁹⁴ Mechtild beheld the provost's soul, which, in heaven, had assumed the form of a cloister and in whose beautiful windows sat souls in the form of statues—representations of deceased, holy members of the household.Footnote ⁹⁵ Visions that highlight Mechtild's or Gertrude's intimacy with Christ in the liturgy sometimes express simultaneously a sense of service. When, during Mass on the Feast of All Saints, Christ came to Mechtild and pressed his mouth to the mouth of her soul, his kisses were more than a mark of love, desire, or union. They were a granting to Mechtild of the power to praise and to pray—and to preach.Footnote ⁹⁶

The Herald and the Book of Special Grace insist that even while in the midst of spiritual exploits in which the visionary and Christ are wrapped in familiarity, a concern for the welfare of others might enter into the visionary's reverie. When Gertrude kissed the wound in Christ's side at each verse that she, together with her sisters, intoned in chapel, Christ expressed how welcome these kisses were to him. The modern reader may be struck by the graphic nature of the image and miss what comes next: Gertrude asked that Christ teach her a short prayer that others might recite and that would be equally pleasing to him as were her kisses.Footnote ⁹⁷ Christ complied with Gertrude's request, impressing on her mind three brief verses, which, if uttered “in honor of the five wounds and kissing devoutly the same rosy wounds of the Lord,” would honor him as greatly as did her kisses.Footnote ⁹⁸ As this example illustrates, the Helfta literature attests to the fluidity with which the visionaries sometimes moved between engagement with Christ and purposeful attention to others. As the source of innovative meditation, this vision speaks to Gertrude's desire to help her sisters bring pleasure to Christ, and it gives value to the day-to-day practices in which all the sisters might engage. From God's vantage point—so the Herald conveys—there is no clear divide between Gertrude's vision and the visualizing meditation Gertrude offers her sisters; if the point is to gratify God, they are analogous.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thus, even as the Herald does not shirk from documenting difference among the sisters—the Lord, “beautiful and delightful,” placed his “sweet wounds” within Gertrude's immediate reach, and expressed to her the satisfaction he took in her ministrations—it forebears a rigid distinction between the anonymous sisters, who are the intended recipients of the meditation, and the holy woman at its center.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It bears witness to an ease in coupling and comparing the visionary forays of one respected sister with meditative prayers of a collective of anonymous nuns. Emphasizing (potential) commonality among all the nuns, the Herald calls attention to Gertrude's exemplary familiarity with Christ, signals her preoccupation with her sisters in a moment of striking intimacy with him, and offers fellow nuns a means by which to approximate the quality of Gertrude's relationship with Christ.

The visions that came to the nuns in public communal worship sometimes highlight a remarkable coincidence between sublime introversion and conscientious sociability. During Mass and before communion, Mechtild peered at her own heart, which had assumed the shape of a house, and she saw this house cupped inside another, larger house, which was Christ's heart. Mechtild entered her house—that is, she entered into her heart—and there she found Christ, who invited her to enter his divine heart. Mechtild did so, and right away:

Although the larger passage from which I quote contains among the most vivid and beautiful of descriptions in the Helfta literature of mutual assimilation, there is, from a certain perspective, nothing extraordinary about it. Images of melting and merging appear frequently in the pages of the Book of Special Grace and the Herald, and both works emphasize a correspondence between the visionaries' hearts and Christ's heart, the exchange of hearts, and the incorporation of the heart of one into the heart of the other.Footnote ¹⁰² What is noteworthy for my purposes is that sandwiched between the three-fold nest of hearts and a classical image of mystical union is an expression of concern for others. Twice enclosed and enclosing Christ's heart, Mechtild engulfs and is engulfed by the divinity, two hearts become one mass, and Mechtild's limbs emit rays of light to those for whom she has previously prayed. Even as Mechtild is nestled in Christ, the ties that bind her to others do not dissolve. Those whose needs have at other times pulled her into prayer on their behalf do not fall away from her consciousness. As Giovanna della Croce has observed, Mechtild, when she is absorbed into God, dispenses to others the riches she receives.Footnote ¹⁰³ At the most intimate part of the self, where God and self meet and seem to merge, others have access to the concerns of the visionary, who holds herself responsible for her sisters and whose desire to share with others the fruits of her experience is alive.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus drawn to others, the visionary draws God to them. Indeed, the Herald tells us that God sometimes seeks union with select sisters precisely in order to bring other people to him.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Mechtild and Gertrude were thus sometimes acutely aware of their sisters in choir and sensitive to their needs exactly during moments of intimacy with Christ and union with him. In such situations, there is no indication that the concern for others or activity on their behalf distracted from, diminished, or otherwise undermined the enjoyment of such experiences for them or detracted from them as intimate and unitive.

An attitude of accountability for the other who is sister may be at play in the numerous visions in which their fellow nuns are folded into the revelations Gertrude and Mechtild receive, and through which they claim the ability not only to discern phenomena surrounding their sisters, but, in addition, to uncover their sisters' response to such phenomena. As the Herald and the Book of Special Grace depict them, Gertrude and Mechtild are eager that others should share in exactly the kinds of contact with God and his holy companions from which they themselves benefit, and they strive to bring experiences such as their own to their sisters. During Christmas Mass, Mechtild cradled the Baby Jesus in her arms, offered the Infant to each of her sisters in turn, and saw him recline on the breast of each nun and kiss each woman.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Now and then, so their visions tell them, the prayers they offered precipitated Christ's presence among those for whom they prayed. Thus we read that, during Ember Week in Advent, the season in which the nuns readied themselves for Christ's coming and in which images of light figure prominently,

Mechtild and Gertrude regularly witnessed Christ moving among their sisters. Within the visions that the Helfta literature ascribes to both women, Christ, Mary, and the saints are over and over said to have come before an individual sister other than Mechtild or Gertrude as well as to the congregation as a whole, or they are said to have approached each person in choir.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ That is, a vision that comes to one person claims to lay bare events that incorporate another woman, or many women. Such revelations reveal God's solicitous presence in the workaday doings of the monastery: Christ, so Mechtild perceived, walked alongside and approached each of her sisters as they processed from the chapel after terce, and when Mechtild asked why Christ was clothed as deacon, he replied: “No deacon in his ministry was ever as zealous in ministering as I am in serving the faithful soul.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It is often scarcely possible to distinguish a vision from the setting in which it takes place; the contents of a vision seem to overlay like an elaborate transparency the events and people that swirl around the visionary as she receives a revelation, or to draw them into a vision that is something like a tableaux vivant in the midst of chapel or chapter. In chapter on the Feast of the Annunciation, Gertrude beheld Christ and Mary seated in the abbess' chair. As the community recited the Miserere, the Lord placed in his mother's hand each word the sisters uttered under the form of a pearl; Mary mixed these with perfume, thereby sweetening the prayers of the sisters with the troubles each had endured previously and committed to Mary.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Gertrude once beheld Christ feeding spiritually her liturgical community at the moment each member received the host from the priest:

The phenomena attributed to sisters who figure in Mechtild's or Gertrude's revelations often parallel the phenomena associated with the visionaries themselves. Thus, for example, Jesus appeared as a boy of about ten years old during matins on the Feast of John the Evangelist, and each sister was filled with joy.Footnote ¹¹² On the Feast of St. Lawrence, Gertrude saw Christ draw into himself the desire of all those present at Mass and flow into them.Footnote ¹¹³ As the congregation was communicating on another occasion, Christ stood in the middle of the choir; rays of light from his face illuminated the faces of Gertrude's sisters, and Christ's love for them caused the women's hearts to liquefy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ All the sisters interact with the saints; all receive the kinds of favors to which Mechtild and Gertrude are accustomed. The sisters—as they are reported to have done in the vision accounts—respond to Christ when they are in his company. When we read of Christ flowing into the sisters and of the melting of their hearts when they are bathed in the light of his love, or of Mary moving among the nuns and offering her Son to each, we might be reading one of the many similar phenomena associated with Gertrude or Mechtild. Gertrude's and Mechtild's experience of liturgy—so the Herald and the Book of Special Grace relate—thus underscores God's nearness and accessibility to the whole community of women with whom they worshiped. In their revelations, the visionaries often perceived their sisters as equal beneficiaries with them of God's presence, even while the sisters remained ignorant of this gift.

In the many visions in which one woman claims to disclose events that incorporate another woman, or many women, the boundary between self and other blurs. I have found no unambiguous indication that Mechtild or Gertrude, or the anonymous contributors to the Book of Special Grace and the Herald, believed that the sisters who figure in Mechtild's and Gertrude's visions were themselves conscious of the content of these visions—either of the events Mechtild and Gertrude saw surrounding them or of the events in which they took part (or which took place within them!)—as the visions unfolded.Footnote ¹¹⁵ And yet, when Gertrude sees Christ flowing into each of those present at Mass and hears him address the congregation and say, “I am wholly your own. Then enjoy me, each according to your desire,” Christ really is offering himself to all those gathered in chapel and all receive him—so the Herald insists.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This matters. Exactly a central concern of the Helfta literature is to foster in its reader sensitivity to her liturgical environment so as to awaken in her awareness of the circumstances the visions claim to break open. The very effort to document Mechtild's and Gertrude's visions indicates a wish on the part of the authors to make palpable to their monastic community Christ's proximity in the liturgy—as well as that of Mary and the saints. Such awareness, the literature makes clear, is pregnant with possibility: all the nuns may aspire to have for themselves the kind of mutually gratifying relationship with Christ that belongs to Mechtild and Gertrude.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Herald and Book of Special Grace summon the sisters to reach after productive pleasures such as seem to have come regularly to Gertrude and Mechtild.

Revelations that introduce the visionary's regard for her fellow nuns do not unreservedly document her sympathy for them or her relatedness to them in a common march toward God. Remarks scattered throughout the Book of Special Grace and the Herald and a number of revelations call attention, in addition, to tensions and animosities among the sisters, which sometimes come to the surface during liturgical observances.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Thus, for example, Gertrude on one occasion prayed during Mass for a sister whom she found troublesome, and she and Christ spoke about why he appeared not to heed Gertrude's repeated entreaties to reform the woman's unruly temperament.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In particular, the opportunity to receive communion seems not infrequently to have prompted unkind murmurings and spiritual one-upmanship and to have given rise to disagreement and to strife.Footnote ¹²⁰

The spiritual power associated with communion and the weight of the worry about reception that pressed on the sisters combined to make reception an especially compelling topic of conversation at Helfta.Footnote ¹²¹ The nuns were mindful that God would measure the strength of their desire and assess their worthiness to receive him, and they were cognizant that members of the congregation were primed to arrive at their own estimations. They were conscious of the care they needed to take to ready themselves for reception and sometimes expressed reluctance about communicating, believing they were unworthy to do so.Footnote ¹²² Some sisters, aware that they communicated under the watchful eyes of others, confessed that they were scared of causing scandal when they approached the altar.Footnote ¹²³

Although Gertrude sometimes entertained scruples about communicating, she nonetheless expressed little patience for the trepidations of others.

This vision both acknowledges and helps to resolve tension at the heart of the Mass.Footnote ¹²⁵ It portrays Gertrude as fomenting rifts in the liturgical community and, through the medium of revelations that came to her in the context of the liturgy, as helping to solder these fractures. Christ's response to Gertrude's dismissal of her sisters' anxieties seems calculated to calm nervous souls, asserting that to approach communion in love and to approach in fear are both courses agreeable to God; it appears intended to temper a tendency to compare and to compete in assuming the one right attitude toward reception. This vision contains more than an instruction in tolerance. God is due both fear, which accompanies reverent acknowledgment of his honor, and love, born (the overall context of the Helfta literature suggests) of the sort of familiarity with him to which Gertrude and Mechtild are privy. Because human nature is defective, one emotion cannot encapsulate the reverence and love to which God is entitled. God places the onus on the community to address the frailties of human nature that come to the fore when each person communicates. The different attitudes with which the sisters approach communion are complementary: the sisters supply for one another what each lacks. Right worship requires exactly the diversity of attitude that is troubling to the nuns. God uses a cause of conflict in community to create a body of worshipers whose devotion is, from his perspective, necessarily more complete than that of any one individual.

This vision thus suggests that Gertrude found theological justification for varying attitudes toward communicating and that she made an effort to rejoice in exactly that which rankled her. Behind the notion that a variety of attitudes are complementary lies an insistence on the fragility of human nature. The nuns do not elaborate on expressions of such fragility evident in any one individual. They were more interested in diagnosing frailty as inherent in each individual, in recognizing it as a challenge to contentment in the common life, and in offering a remedy. From the perspective of the nuns, the fragility of each woman cries out for its corrective via community.Footnote ¹²⁶ As illustrated in the person of Gertrude, perception of the failings of one member of the community rouses recognition—with Christ's intervention—of one's own weakness and the importance of mutual reliance and assistance. Acknowledgement of individual vulnerability is bound up with optimism about the opportunities the liturgical community holds out to each of its members.

*****

James was surely right to emphasize that the God of the Helfta writings inclined with preferential prejudice toward those who captured his affection. Passage upon passage in the Helfta writings calls attention to Mechtild's and Gertrude's heady confidence in themselves as occupying a distinguished place in the ensemble of Christ's cherished friends. At Helfta, particular ties of affection bind the visionaries with Christ. James did not notice, however, that Gertrude and Mechtild perceived Christ as seeking out all their sisters, presenting himself as their just inheritance. When, in the middle of Mass, Gertrude heard Christ proclaim “I am wholly your own,” he offered himself not to her alone but to the whole assembled community of sisters.