ABSTRACT
Thus begins the account of the spiritual formation of Elsbeth Stagel (c.1300-c.1360), a nun in the Dominican convent of Töß (part of the presentday Swiss canton of Zürich), bound closely through correspondence and confession to the Dominican friar Henry Suso (1300-1366). Suso attributes to Stagel the transcription of his auto-hagiography, the Vita or Life of the Servant, explaining that she furtively recorded the contents of their conversations over a long period. When he discovers this, he demands out of humility that the papers be destroyed. A sudden divine command, however, prevents him from burning the entire Vita, thus providing us with this account of his spiritual development in the fourteenth-century Rhineland.
