ABSTRACT
Mechthild von Magdeburg was a Beguine (a member of a medieval lay religious order for women) at Magdeburg, whose loosely structured book of mystical revelations, The Flowing Light of the Divinity, serves as one of the rare extant examples of women's writing in medieval Germany. Originally written in Low German between 1250 and 1285, her revelations are retained in Latin and Middle High German translations and consist of seven parts, first gathered by her Magdeburg Dominican confessor, Heinrich von Halle (parts 1-6), and subsequently by the sisters at the convent of Helfte (part 7), which she entered ca. 1270. Her writings were translated first into Latin by Heinrich and then ca. 1344 into Middle High German by Heinrich von Nòrdlingen, a member of the Friends of God sect, and it is this manuscript (Einsiedeln Nr. 277) upon which the bulk of subsequent complete and fragmentary translations into German and English, as well as Middle High German text editions, have been based.
