The combination of expanded audiences with an increasingly widespread engagement with theological ideas in the vernacular led to innovation. The custom of using the language of love to describe the individual’s experience of God, promoted among monastics in the twelfth century chiefly by Bernard of Clairvaux, was both embraced and transformed in the thirteenth century. Mechthild’s book, for example, takes up Bernard’s interpretations of the Song of Songs—the book of erotic poetry in the Bible interpreted as an allegory for the relationship between the soul and God—and interweaves them with the secular and vernacular literary forms and ideas of courtly literature to produce new forms of vernacular mysticism and theology.³ Both men and women were drawn in great numbers to the patterns of religious life that accompanied these innovations, coming together in religious communities both within and outside of church institutions. In the thirteenth century, women’s participation in shaping these new ideas was especially significant.⁴ As Bernard McGinn argues, “it is fair to say that the great age of women’s theology begins in 1200.”⁵ Mechthild’s life spans this age and her writings represent some of the first vernacular writings to articulate the developments in theology and religious life that we have come to know as the new mysticism or vernacular theology.⁶

The composition of The Flowing Light in German is thus historically significant. This chapter explores this significance for an understanding of Mechthild’s authorship and agency. In contextualizing Mechthild’s linguistic situation in the light of contemporary male and female mystics and her association with the Dominican order and its mission to correct and instruct erring Christians, I make the following two claims: first, that writing in Middle Low German is, in a complex way, an attempt to reach out to a different kind of universal audience (“all religious people” named in the text’s prologue, that is, clergy, monks, nuns, and laity) and therefore a sign of authorial agency insofar as it represents a choice; and second, that the convergence of Mechthild’s political sympathies for the Dominicans, her adoption of their mission, an engagement with current debates about the role of mendicants in pastoral care, and her particular literary abilities produces a new kind of poetic prose in German.

The significance of the vernacular for thirteenth-century religious innovations is now undisputed. As McGinn has argued from the perspective of the history of religion, so the Germanist Susanne Köbele, following Kurt Ruh, argues that the key to vernacular mysticism is the language itself, and that the newness of the ideas required the metaphorical expression available in the vernacular.⁷ Nicholas Watson in the field of English medieval studies has made a case for the theological conceptualization of the vernacular in terms of the new emphasis in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the life of Christ.⁸ That is, the gesture that God made in taking material form as a poor and humble carpenter’s son is mimicked in his choice to inspire various writers, both women and men, in their mother tongue. As Watson explains: “In some contexts, discussions of the status of the vernacular and the implications of using it for written expression became so involved with theological questions whose roots were in the doctrine of incarnation that language politics and incarnational theology became coterminous. Under these conditions, the very act of writing in the vernacular had theological implications, while the symbol of the ‘mother tongue’ could be linked to quite specific theological positions and controversies.”⁹ These broad discussions of the significance of the vernacular contest previously held explanations for its appearance in the German context: In the case of Mechthild, because of a statement made in the book, it is generally assumed that she did not write in Latin simply because she could not. Similarly, early historians of mysticism in Germany attributed the emergence of vernacular mysticism by men (most notably, Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse, and Johannes Tauler) to the demands made on the mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to care for the unlearned semireligious women, tertiaries, or nuns in their midst, demands which resulted in what these scholars regarded as a simple transposition of scholastic thought into German.¹⁰ Even as recently as 1983, Walter Haug argues that “. . . im Prinzip könnte man sich seine [Eckharts] Predigten genausogut lateinisch wie deutsch denken” (in principle, one could imagine Eckhart’s sermons just as easily in Latin as in German).¹¹ However, the work of McGinn, Ruh, Köbele, and Watson on the cultural meaning of the vernacular suggests that even in cases like Mechthild’s text, in which we find a first person statement lamenting her lack of Latin ability, we must nevertheless investigate the significance of the vernacular as the language of composition. Although the association of women religious and the vernacular may seem straightforward, closer scrutiny of specific situations reveals this to be a complex issue.¹² Indeed, here is an instance where heeding Ursula Peters’s warning not to take Mechthild’s statements about herself at face value produces much more information about Mechthild’s active choices as an author;¹³ evidence emerges not only for Mechthild’s choice of the vernacular but also for the strategic understanding of that choice in terms of the mission of the mendicant preachers with whom Mechthild claims to be associated in the writings. My aim, then, is to examine the context of thirteenth-century religious practices and the related politics of language in order to demonstrate that these historical conditions can be understood only in terms of the ways they have been negotiated by an agent.

The first part of this chapter will explore the broader claims of Mechthild’s book in the context of her religious peers and the Dominican mission to correct and instruct erring Christians. Sent by God to “all religious people, both the bad and the good,” Mechthild’s book claims a wide and general audience.¹⁴ Endowed by God “with the power and voice of all creatures,” Mechthild’s soul claims to represent that audience in her dealings with the divine.¹⁵ As these two passages suggest, Mechthild’s book is meant to be read by more than her confessor. The tone of the address in much of her book implies a claim to speak to all, and in that sense, marks a claim on a universal voice. However, as we shall see, rather than have her revelations written down in Latin in the tradition of Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau, Mechthild’s twelfth-century predecessors, Mechthild writes in her native tongue—Middle Low German, the dialect spoken in northern Germany (from the lower Rhein to Prussia). German, like its Germanic relative, English, is a language made up of a number of regional dialects. The Low German used by Mechthild exists in relation not only to official and clerical Latin but also to the language of the southern courts, Middle High German. It has often been noted that the revelations and visions concerning the mystical relationship with the divine (which dominate Books I and II of The Flowing Light) display prominently the imagery and inflections of courtly literature, most of which was composed and performed in Middle High German.¹⁶ Understanding the significance of the use of Middle Low German is complicated by the book’s invocations of Middle High German literary forms and traditions. An exploration of this unusual situation will thus reveal that we must view the choice of the vernacular not only in terms of the relation between German and Latin but also in terms of other linguistic, literary, religious and political tensions: specifically, those between High and Low German, divine and courtly love, court and town, center and frontier.

Frontier is a relative term in this context. Magdeburg lies on the banks of the Elbe. The area to the east and north across the river was a border region that was heavily contested by Slavs and Germans as far back as the eighth century.¹⁷ Although Magdeburg had been an archbishopric since the tenth century and by the thirteenth century was a thriving Christian urban center, from the perspective of the recently established Dominican order of the 1250s, it was still in need of missionizing aid.¹⁸ These missionizing efforts would have been focused less on converting Slavs than on bringing erring Christians back to the fold and would have involved a program of traveling to different parishes, preaching to congregations as well as in public, and providing spiritual guidance through confession. Placing Mechthild’s book in the context of this mission enables us to see her negotiations of the tensions it produced (exemplified in the use of Middle Low German) as central to the book’s simultaneously universal and local appeal. Aligning herself with the Dominicans, Mechthild takes up their mission to reform erring members of the Church, itself perceived as a universal or global entity. From the perspective of Rome, this is a mission reaching out universally to all and from the center to the margins. From the perspective of Magdeburg, reaching out universally means using the language of the hometown.

The second part of this chapter takes a closer look at the implications of making universal claims in the vernacular rhythms of courtly literature. Understanding Mechthild’s project as both defying social hierarchies and claiming a universal audience might suggest to modern readers that her book should be considered radical, perhaps belonging to a tradition of Christian dissenters or even heretics. However, in her anthology of medieval women writers, Katharina Wilson attributes Mechthild’s and other women mystics’ absence from literary canons to the fact that their writing is not unorthodox or radical enough.¹⁹ This ambiguity cries out for closer scrutiny. Indeed, exploring the question of Mechthild’s orthodoxy, as we shall see, reveals a complicated situation in which the easy opposition at work in the traditions to which Wilson refers—radicality is good, conformity bad—proves inappropriate for understanding Mechthild’s situation. For Mechthild’s often unabashed critique of corrupt priests, taken together with her praise of Dominican preachers, illustrates that dissent and orthodoxy often go hand in hand, while a determination of heresy depends on a judgment of a higher authority. If some parish priests found her words critical, then the Dominicans were likely to claim the righteousness of those same words. She embraces positions held by authorities to be potentially challenging or heretical only in obedience to her Dominican advisors. Similarly, her vehement critiques of errant priests never question priestly authority. Further, Mechthild’s engagement with contemporary issues surrounding clerical jurisdiction reveals her agency as she negotiates the competing interests in a debate about clerical authority.

The careful analysis of Mechthild’s book in relation to the question of her orthodoxy thus forces us to acknowledge and reconfigure the conceptual categories with which we tend to evaluate literary achievement. It also provides further evidence of Mechthild’s agency as a writer, thinker, and composer of text. Dissent is not radical in this context but rather conventional. Heresy is not a fixed set of ideas but rather a label or a judgment by those in power over their subordinates. Mechthild’s literary originality lies not in any potentially heretical content, I suggest, but rather in the way she obeys an orthodoxy promoted by the Dominicans. For in advocating for the Dominican mission, she uses a new poetic vernacular prose. As we shall see, what initially looks like dissent—the critique of corrupt priests—is not new. However, Mechthild’s lyrical German prose clearly is. Mechthild uses poetic language both to soften and to reinforce her critiques of the clergy, providing further evidence of her active role in composing the text. The result is often beautiful in a startling, evocative, and compelling way, and it contributes to the distinctive aesthetic enchantment of her writing. Mechthild’s agency, her active “transmission” of God’s message, underscores the point not only that dissent is a relative term, but also that religious devotion can be an art.