The Discourse of Heaven in Mechtild of Hackeborn's Booke of Gostlye Grace

Mechtild of Hackeborn, often cited in English texts as “Maud” or “Moll,” dictated her Liber specialis gratiae between 1291 and 1298; this text was translated into Middle English as The Booke of Gostlye Grace. A close reading of her Booke reveals that Mechtild had a strong sense of her own function in a community of nuns at Helfta abbey in Thuringia. Growing up as an oblate within a community of women, Mechtild was not constrained by male views of the female as inferior. ¹ In light of this freedom, Mechtild’s narrative of the community in heaven is not only a description of her theology and spiritual journey as a mystic, but also a reflection of her own earthly experience and the ethos of the community of women at Helfta. This environment, with a strong cornmitment to teaching, provided an important and unique context for her visions of heaven. She was not only in charge of the singing at Helfta but also supervised the education of novices. She was both teacher and music director or chantress: domna cantri. Mechtild’s position in the abbey imbued her writing with a self-confidence absent in other, especially later, women mystics. As chantress, Mechtild’s voice was well known; she was called the “Nightingale of God.” ² Her position in the abbey profoundly affects her narrative which often takes on the form of antiphonal singing, exemplified in her dialogues with Christ and in the movement between visual and auditory imagery. Her vision of heaven recorded in book 1, chapters 26–31, of her Booke is the best example of the influence her role as chantress had upon her literary expression. ³ Mechtild writes a double dialogue of the spiritual and bodily senses; her narrative moves back and forth between auditory and visual sensations, creating a “sensory antiphony.”