Saint Gertrude the Great

Virgin

Feast Day

November 16

Life

1256–1302

Order

Cistercian / Benedictine (Helfta)

Born

Eisleben, Thuringia (modern Germany)

Gertrude was born on January 6, 1256, in Eisleben in Thuringia. Orphaned in early childhood, she was given at the age of five to the monastery of Helfta in Saxony, a community of nuns following the Benedictine Rule with strong Cistercian influence (the precise canonical designation has been disputed). She received an exceptional education there in the seven liberal arts under the abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn and the monastery's two great mistresses of mystical life, Saint Mechtilde of Hackeborn and Saint Mechtilde of Magdeburg.

On January 27, 1281, at age twenty-five, Gertrude experienced the conversion that turned her decisively from secular learning to the science of love; the visions and divine communications that followed she recorded, partly herself and partly through fellow nuns, in the Legatus divinae pietatis (Herald of Divine Love) and the Exercitia spiritualia (Spiritual Exercises). Her writings are among the earliest sustained witnesses to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Eucharistic mysticism in the Latin tradition. She is also one of the earliest Western mystics to leave a substantial written corpus from a woman's hand. She died at Helfta on November 17, 1302. She was never formally canonized but Pope Clement XII added her name to the Roman Martyrology in 1738 with the equipollent honor of universal veneration; her memorial was assigned to November 16 in the 1969 reform.