Feast day: June 18
St. Elizabeth of Schönau
A German Benedictine nun and visionary whose recorded experiences, edited by her brother, circulated widely and who corresponded with the great mystic Hildegard of Bingen.
Elizabeth was a German nun and mystic of the twelfth century, born about 1129 and given as a child to the Benedictine double monastery of Schönau in the Rhineland, where she made her profession and eventually became superior of the nuns.
From about the age of twenty-three she began to experience a long series of visions and ecstasies, often accompanied by physical suffering and bouts of severe illness. With the help of her brother Eckbert, a learned monk who became abbot of Schönau, she recorded these experiences in several books of 'Visions' and a 'Book of the Ways of God.'
She was a friend and correspondent of the greater visionary of the age, St. Hildegard of Bingen, whose example encouraged her, and like Hildegard her writings ranged over the spiritual life, the reform of the Church, and warnings against the corruption of the clergy. The Church has never formally pronounced upon the visions themselves.
Frail in health all her life, Elizabeth died young, in 1165, at about thirty-six. Though never formally canonized, her name was entered in the Roman Martyrology, and she is honoured as one of the notable mystics of the medieval Rhineland.
A friend and correspondent of Hildegard of Bingen, she was one of the most read of the medieval women visionaries in her own century.
Image: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek - Austrian National Library (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05392a.htm
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