Mechthild was a Beguine, a member of the lay women’s spiritual movement that spread across the Low Countries and Germany in the thirteenth century. The Beguines lived in voluntary community, took no permanent vows, supported themselves by manual work, and pursued contemplation outside the formal structures of the established religious orders. Their movement was eventually suppressed.
Mechthild began having mystical experiences in her early teens. At her confessor’s urging she started recording them around 1250 and continued for the next thirty years. The result is The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende Licht der Gottheit), a sequence of visions, dialogues, prose poems, and theological reflections written in Middle Low German. It is the earliest substantial mystical work in any German vernacular and prefigures by half a century the work of Eckhart and Tauler.
Her mysticism is bridal and erotic in the medieval sense: the soul as bride, God as bridegroom, their union as a love affair conducted in courtly imagery. She is also bold. She speaks back to God, complains, demands, plays. She criticised the corruption of the clergy of her time so directly that she had to spend her last years in protective custody at the Cistercian convent of Helfta.
There is no public-domain English translation of The Flowing Light in print. The Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality edition translated by Frank Tobin (1998) is the standard scholarly version. Selections appear in Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism (Crossroad, 1998), the third volume of his magisterial history of Western mysticism.
