“‘The Most Beloved of All’: Love, the Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn, and the Monastery of Helfta”

Virtually every study of the monastery of Helfta remarks on the significance of its thirteenth-century Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (1223-92) to the extraordinary literary flourishing that took place during her forty-year tenure [N6:6:1, 205] when the  Helfta nuns collaboratively composed the largest body of women’s religious writing of the thirteenth century. When scholars have turned to the Helfta writings, their attention has for the most part alighted on the visionaries at the literature’s center, Mechtild of Hackeborn (the Abbess’ biological sister) and Gertrude of Helfta, her younger contemporary. My paper focuses on the Abbess Gertrude to argue that the Helfta literature presents her as embodying the piety the cloister sought to promote, with its focus on loving well.