ABSTRACT
Born in 1291 in Donauwörth, near Regensburg, to a patrician family, Margaretha Ebner entered the Dominican cloister of Maria-Mödingen at an early age and was buried there in 1351. In 1332, Heinrich von Nördlingen, her Dominican confessor, convinced her to write a record of her spiritual journey. Without the aid of an amanuensis, she wrote her Offenbarungen (Revelations) herself in Alemannic, a dialect of Middle High German. A lengthy manuscript for the Middle Ages (over 100 folio pages) Margaretha’s Revelations follows a chronological description of her spiritual life from 1312 to 1348, the experiences arranged according to the liturgical calendar. The text belongs to a medieval religious genre referred to as autohagiography. In 1312 Margaretha became seriously ill and for three years endured a variety of afflictions described in the opening chapters of her book. Suffering a severe illness for an extended period of time is a feature commonly reported in medieval hagiography or autohagiography and figures prominently in the religious experiences of medieval women. Recovered, Margaretha undertook a rigorous program of asceticism, self-mortification, fasting, and flagellation. At one point she begged Mary to ask God that she be granted the miracle of stigmata. Quite in keeping with fourteenth-century piety, her devotions center on the humanity of Christ, primarily on his birth and death. Material images of both cradle and cross are, therefore, conspicuous in her devotional exercises. The religious experiences that Margaretha narrates in her writings typify those of ecstatic mystics described in a variety of texts in late medieval Europe, particularly prominent in late medieval Germany. It is also noteworthy that fifty-four letters from Heinrich von Nördlingen and other contemporaries are included in the nineteenth-century Strauch edition.
