Secondary Reading on Mechthild of Madgeburg

I keep wanting to write Badgerburg. Or Fudgeburg. Mmm. I have to read secondary material for the class that I pick out myself. I struck gold on one, and only got glancing references in the other. I'll let you guess which is which.

Rosalynn Voaden. "All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta." Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Wyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 72-91. 

Pretty basic. Helfta is a community of (practicing Cistercian) nuns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century who were a focal point for a few strong mystics, among them Gertrude, Mechthild of Madgeburg, and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Madgeburg features in this historical narrative as the figure that comes to the community late in life (she was a Beguine before), briefly discovers the virtue of community (she was isolated before and more bound to her church fathers), and then dies. Before doing so, however, she does write one book and impart onto Gertrude and Mechthild of Hackeborn the mystic tradition, in which they bind up  community and womanness. (The Sacred Heart, the resulting cult, articulated divine authority with an awareness and attention to feminine experience, which is then explored and expanded upon in the repeated feminine and communal images.)


David Neville. "The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Madgeburg." Mystics Quarterly 34.1-2: 2008, 1-34. 

Daaaamn. I was fairly impressed here.

First there's a brief, polemical, but useful survey of materials that previous scholars have brought to the study of body and sexuality in Mechthild. Neville makes his eventual point clear here, that there is not a simple division of body/low and spirit/high. While those registers are true, there is also a way in which Mechthild appropriates an idea of a more divine body, unified with the spirit, which is at once furthest away from God and closest to God. From the start, the bodily pain is the point of greatest distance (because it reminds one of the immediacy of the body) and of greatest closeness with God (in the metaphor of longing, the intermediary longing that communicates between the spirit and the Trinity) (2).

A lot of medieval authors avoided the association of the sexual and this relation with God, though they did use metaphors of marriage (10-11). Mechthild does not avoid the subject, marking desire - even erotic desire - as a divine characteristic (8). However, this desire must be divine, that is, associated with a renunciation of earthly sexual desire and the strictly earthly postlapsarian body. Instead, through such renunciation, she must attain, not only the prelapsarian body of perfect intactness, but the body of Mary through which all things can pass through without being impurified.

Finally, to justify her point, she distinguishes the appearance of wholeness, which many corrupt people in the church have, from the actual wholeness which she gains through the figure of the bride of Christ.

I would've preferred Neville write more about how Mechthild's desire is not only precipitated on immediate satisfaction, but is also tied to a denial of that satisfaction. That is, in a way, her earthly body also matters, because it is the crude material which must behurt to be healed. Her fallen nature is the very thing that allows God to reconcile her desire, a drink that would not be as sweet if she did not also have the distance from which she would reconcile.