KIECKHEFER - The Christ Child in German Sister Books XVI Century

7
Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the

German Sister Books
richard kieckhefer
When the lay sister Elizabet von Rouffach was a novice at Unterlinden
in Colmar, she once suffered a fever and wanted a drink of water, but
there was no one to bring it to her. She wept, and suddenly Christ was
with her in the form of a beautiful child. He touched her lips, stroked
her face, and consoled her through the night with childlike gestures,
taking her fever and her thirst from her with his gracious presence (sua
presencia graciosa). Not recognizing him, she asked how he was able to
enter the monastery. His reply was surely not one she would have an-
ticipated: although he was great and sublime, he had become humble
and small on earth for her sake. At this point the sisters were called for
matins, and the child told Elizabet they would now come and help her.
She would not see him any further, although he would remain with her
forever by grace. Then the mistress of novices came in, and Elizabet
told her in detail what she had experienced that night.1
This poignant narrative contains themes that recur in the late-me-
dieval German sister books: Christ appearing privately, as a child of
exceptional beauty and wisdom, to a sister afflicted with suffering and
loneliness. But only at the end of the story do we see the sister as a
member of a community, at the moment when the matins bell brings
the community back into its life of liturgical vitality, and the mistress
of novices breaks into Elizabet’s lonely vigil. At this point the bubble
breaks: Christ is just as much present to her, but his presence is no long-
er manifest in this extraordinary way. This last point, I wish to argue,
is not a mere concession or afterthought; it is, rather, the very heart of
the story. The visionary experiences of sisters like Elizabet von Rouf-
fach are the private and exceptional privileges of specially favoured
individuals, yet they are given to us as doubly embedded, first within
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168 Richard Kieckhefer
all the devotional conventions of a community’s culture, and, second,

as moments that may challenge but are just as likely to reinforce the
values of life in community.
Singularity and Community: Strategies of Integration
Wherever intensity of devotion is cherished and cultivated, singularity

is inevitable. Certain members of the community will stand out as vir-
tuosic, whether they advertise their gifts or modestly conceal them. In
convents as in other communities, singularity may be seen first of all as
an eccentricity or anomaly that bars admission to membership. Second-
ly, it may be viewed as deviance that must be suppressed by exercise of
authority. A third possibility, available in a more tolerant community, is
to embrace the difference and welcome a pluralism of spiritual inclina-
tions. But the most interesting and surely the most important response
is a fourth: the effort to accommodate, integrate, and absorb singularity
through strategies of interpretation. Among these strategies is the liter-
ary exercise of depicting a largely imagined community, and the sister
books are exercises of that sort. Imagining community is the first step
toward achieving community. Imagining and giving literary form to
the integration of singularity within the monastery walls is the most
important function of the sister books.
The Unterlinden sister book by Katharina von Gueberschwihr is
the earliest of these documents. Like other writings by and for the Do-
minican nuns of late-medieval Germany, it stresses the importance of
community and of avoiding singularity.2 Vitally important witnesses to
late-medieval women’s religious culture, the sister books were written
(at least as they come down to us) in the fourteenth century, even when
they tell about nuns of the thirteenth.3 The religious women who figure
in these books often experience Christ as an infant or child who com-
bines childlike playfulness with exceptional wisdom; these apparitions
often come in connection with illness or depression; they are frequently
keyed to liturgical observances; and there is a sense of interplay, some-
times explicit, between the exceptional presence of Christ and his ordi-
nary presence by grace or in the Eucharist.
That Christ should be depicted as present to his adherents should
hardly be surprising. The theme of Christ’s presence pervades the his-
tory of Christianity. Between his historical life and his apocalyptic re-
turn, Christ is in one sense absent, in several other senses present. His
absence is presupposed by the plea maranatha, ‘come, our Lord.’ With-
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The Christ Child in the German Sister Books 169
out some mode of absence, expectation of a second coming is pointless.

And yet he is constantly and paradoxically present in the Eucharist, in
the liturgy, in those hungry and naked ones tended by the saved and
neglected by the reprobate, in the Church that is his body. Indeed, the
person who became incarnate was bound in his humanity to specific
times and places, but in his divinity he is present at all times and places,
and in Christian doctrine it is the same person who is both human and
divine, both bound and unbounded. If he is or seems absent, that is
because the mode of his presence is multiple and variable, and while
present in one mode he may seem or be absent in another.
A first important corollary to this perennial theme is that in various
ways Christian communities tend to recognize the presence of Christ as
not only spiritual but also embodied: Christ is present in the Eucharistic
elements, in the Church as his mystical body, in the bodily limbs of the
morally accountable Christian, in the individual who is suffering bod-
ily need, to cite only the forms of embodied presence for which there
is direct scriptural warrant. A second is that ordinary and extraordi-
nary manifestations of this presence stand in a fluid relationship. The
bleeding host is exceptional, but Christ is no less present – and no less
physically present – in any consecrated host. A miracle-working statue is
extraordinary, but any sacred statue gives concrete physical manifesta-
tion to the spiritual presence of the sacred person.
Tracing how the presence of Christ was conceived in any era is one
of the most fundamental charges to the historian of Christian culture.
In the Late Middle Ages, Christ’s presence was often experienced and
recounted in mystical terms: he was specially manifested to individu-
als of singular piety, whether to their bodily or to their spiritual vi-
sion. Yet we cannot make simple assumptions about precisely how
exceptional these manifestations were understood to be. The language
of mystical presence could serve as one way of articulating Christ’s
ordinary presence; indeed, at times this was explicitly how the accounts
functioned. Meister Eckhart was able to use highly charged language,
normally reserved for the experience of unio mystica, with reference to
the union of Christ with any person who had received him in com-
munion.4 Accounts of visions also could and sometimes did serve as
ways of talking about the ordinary presence of Christ. To say this is not
to downplay the significance of these accounts; rather, the accounts call
to the reader’s attention that Christ actually is present, fully and liter-
ally, in various ways, to ordinary Christians and under unexceptional
circumstances.
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The point is important for an understanding of the ways mystical

experience both reinforced and challenged communal solidarity. The
woman to whom Christ appeared was distinctive and privileged. Even
in a community where such experiences were widespread, they were
not universal. Still, the apparitions were in at least four senses also com-
munal: first, they were largely scripted occurrences, conforming to a
generally shared culture, integrated into the routine devotional exer-
cises of that culture, and thus recognized and valued by the community
as shared cultural goods; second, they often reinforced the value of life
in community by highlighting the importance of service and obedience;
third, even more frequently they were linked to the liturgical services
that lay at the heart of common monastic life; and fourth, they were
modes of experiencing and articulating a reality – the presence of Christ
– that was in other modes equally accessible to everyone, even if it was
not equally manifest. This article, then, will explore the ways German
nuns’ experience of the Child Christ display this dialectic of individual-
ity and community.
When Mezzi Sidwibrin of Töß experienced an apparition of the Child
Christ, she went about crying to the sisters, ‘Children, children! Jesus
is ours!’, meaning something close to ‘Jesus is among us!’ (Ihesus ist un
ser!).5 This formulation suggests something important about the Christ
Child apparitions: that in one sense or another Christ is typically ‘ours’
rather than ‘mine,’ and that visions and apparitions are important for
the community even when they are experienced by one individual.
While apparitions of the infant Christ occur in all the sister books, the
treatment of the theme differs importantly from one text to another. As
we shall see, the Katharinental sister book accentuates more than others
the tension between absorption in private revelations and responsibil-
ity to the community and the demands of obedience. Christina Ebner’s
sister book for Engeltal focuses to an exceptional degree on apparitions
of the Christ Child shortly before death, a time that might be thought
fundamentally private but was actually the occasion for concentrated
attention to the moribund nun by others within the community. The
Unterlinden book has a strong emphasis on the connection between
these apparitions and contemplation on the one hand, and liturgy on
the other. I have argued elsewhere that devotionalism serves as a kind
of link mediating between the very public celebration of liturgy and
the quintessentially private experience of contemplation,6 and this in-
termediate function of Christ Child devotion is paramount in the Un-
terlinden sister book. In these and other ways, the sister books provide
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a useful basis for exploring the relationship between the private and
the communal, between privileged and shared experience of Christ’s
presence.
While certain of the motifs regarding the Christ Child were wide-
spread, sometimes even commonplace, the ways they became inte-
grated into the culture of the community differed from one sister book
to another. In some cases the emphasis was the greater importance of
active service. In other cases other strategies were used for integrating
private experience into communal culture. This point is crucially im-
portant, because it reveals the site of innovation: the stuff of the stories
may have been largely conventional by the time the sister books were
written, but we can see different writers exerting themselves in differ-
ent ways, each making an effort to bring the material of personal piety
into alignment with a communal ethos and ethic. If the sister books
were more similar to each other in the ways they bring about this align-
ment, that process too might seem conventional. Because it differs from
case to case, it is easier to perceive it as a consciously creative process.
Many of the themes found in the sister books can be traced to ear-
lier sources: the thirteenth-century nuns Mechthild of Hackeborn and
Gertrude of Helfta, but also literature by men such as Caesarius of
Heisterbach and Thomas of Cantimpré. Rosemarie Rode traced the
history of the medieval Christ Child in a dissertation of 1957. Focus-
ing on the ways such visions are narrated in the convent literature of
the fourteenth century, Rode concludes by emphasizing the transition
these narratives undergo: legends that arise out of genuinely mystical
experience, leading away from particular places and concrete devotion-
al objects, tend later to become sagas associated with specific convents,
at times focusing on objects such as miraculous statues.7 The mystical
element thus yields to a devotional concreteness and materiality.
Ulinka Rublack, in an article entitled ‘Female Spirituality and the
Infant Jesus in Late Medieval Dominican Convents,’ also perceives a
shift in emphasis between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but
she approaches the matter differently. She emphasizes that by the four-
teenth century, the women in Dominican convents were committed to
an ‘experiential’ spirituality, to ‘physical, visionary, and intimate inter-
actions with the infant Jesus.’8 Particularly important in this develop-
ment was Margaret Ebner, a nun at Medingen convent from 1305 to
1351.9 Contact with the infant Jesus plays an especially prominent role
in Ebner’s religious experience, in three forms: first in the spontaneous
physical contact of embracing, kissing, suckling, and rocking; secondly
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in dialogue, which on one occasion centred on the precise details of the

Nativity, and at other times on matters such as people’s status in the af-
terlife; thirdly in meditation, which meant pondering in some detail the
events of Christ’s childhood, particularly the circumcision.10 Rublack
traces the diffusion of such piety in Dominican convents, emphasiz-
ing its immediate physical quality. To be sure, experience of the infant
Jesus was not limited to women. Men such as Heinrich Seuse, Heinrich
von Nördlingen, and Friedrich Sunder might also be devoted to the
infant and might have visions of him, but their experience tended by
comparison to be ‘tied to an intellectualised spirituality,’ while nuns
‘somatised their spiritual experience, making it physical (for example,
by the giving of the breast). This led to less intellectually structured, but
not therefore less complex, experiences with the infant Jesus.’11
Rublack points to elements in women’s devotion to the Christ Child
that occur frequently in the sister books, although by no means consist-
ently. The somatic element in the narratives that she highlights could
be seen as another way in which the presence of Christ tends to be
perceived as embodied, alongside the others we have touched upon.
Within the sister books, however, the insistence on somatic contact
with Jesus is among the factors that mark certain sisters as exceptional.
While acknowledging the importance of this factor, I would suggest
that it is at least as important to explore how the writers of the sister
book found a place for such singularity by subordinating it to com-
munal life and bringing it into connection with shared culture. Without
denying Rublack’s argument or its importance, therefore, I wish to sug-
gest an alternative reading that finds different concerns at the heart of
this literature.
My argument may at first seem close to one that Lothar Zenetti has
proposed: that earlier nuns such as Mechthild of Hackeborn, Gertrude
of Helfta, and even Margaret Ebner had been exceptionally privileged
with their visionary experience of the Christ Child, while in the sister
books ‘wondrous experiences have become a kind of group phenome-
non.’ Zenetti goes on to suggest that life in the convents served to induce
such phenomena. The nuns, often exhausted and weakened by fasting,
experienced what they wished to experience. ‘In the flickering glow of
candles during choir prayer, or in the dusk of their cells between wak-
ing and sleeping, the images, the statues begin to come alive. The pious
stories they have heard in table reading turn for them into reality.’12
This seems to me a problematic reading, however. In the sister books,
as no doubt in the actual conduct of convent life, individuals who ex-
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perienced visions still stood out against a background of less dramatic

piety. They were still exceptional, and were seen as such. The exceptions
may have become more common than they had once been, but the sis-
ter books focus on a selection of particularly pious women. They do
not claim that these women are typical, or that their experiences were
group phenomena. To be sure, there may be portions of the sister books
(particularly the Latin sister book of Unterlinden) that do characterize
the community as a whole, but these portions are devoted chiefly to the
sisters’ strict adherence to the rule, and to their penitence, not to their
exceptional mystical experiences. And – most importantly – when the
exceptions do occur, their celebration tends to be accompanied by a
concern for the delicate process of absorption and integration, of relat-
ing privileged experience into the more ordinary fabric of community
life.
Mystical Experience and the Call to Service and Obedience
It is in the Katharinental sister book that we find most explicitly and

recurrently the theme that enjoying the manifest presence of the Christ
Child is all well and good, but it must be kept subordinate to the higher
ideals of service to the community, faithful execution of one’s duties,
and obedience to the rule and to one’s superiors.
The point is made positively in a story about one unnamed nun of
Katharinental. Christ appeared to her as a little child while she was
in the choir, but then she was summoned to table in the refectory. She
thought, ‘O Lord, which is dearer to you, that I should be obedient, or
that I should be here with you?’ Having read her mind, Christ said to
her, ‘With obedience you find me, and with obedience no one loses me.’
So she went as she was ordered, but as a reward for her obedience the
child came back: when she arrived at table she again found him sitting
by her, and he continued playing with her.13 A related point is made
negatively in the account of another unnamed sister, who was busy in
the workhouse when Christ came to her as a child. Another member of
the monastery came and asked her for her help, because she could not
move about by herself. Caught up in her delightful converse with the
child, the visionary waved the other sister away. At once she no longer
saw the child. Saddened, she wondered what she had done to incur
that withdrawal. Then she heard a voice saying, ‘It was because you
did not exercise love. Since you did not agree to do what the sister bade
you, on that account you can see me no longer.’14 The point seems not
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to be made with perfect consistency, since in one passage Ite von Hallau
is said to have become so absorbed in playing with the Christ Child that
she neglected the work she was supposed to be doing in the kitchen,
and when it was nearly time for the meal she became deeply anxious at
her unpreparedness, but an angel assured her that everything would be
ready, and somehow it indeed was.15 Presumably she was not punished
for her neglect because it was not intentional but accidental. Even so,
the text clearly recognizes that visionary absorption and monastic re-
sponsibility may clash, and a nun who neglects the latter on account of
the former should at least have the good grace to realize the difficulty.
The themes suggested in these stories are repeated elsewhere in the
Katharinental sister book. One sister had a vision of the Christ Child in
the elevated host, and it was revealed to her that the vision was given
her as a reward for her consoling a novice in her distress.16 Adelheit
von Spiegelberg tells the Christ Child she must leave him ‘in true obe-
dience’ when she is summoned to the refectory, precisely so that he
will never depart from her, and when she sits at table she finds him
sitting on it in front of her.17 The child could turn up anywhere in the
monastery, at the gate or in the schoolroom as well as in the chapel.18
Interwoven with the moral observation is a theological one about the
ubiquity of Christ as God and the compatibility of God and the soul to
each other.19 Augustine was eloquent on the point of God’s presence
and on the complex relationship between God’s constancy and human
inconstancy: ‘You never depart from us, yet it is hard for us to return to
you’; ‘You were with me, but I was not with you.’20 But the story of Sis-
ter Adelheit adds the twist that she must ensure the Christ Child’s con-
tinued presence precisely by her willingness to forego it. The theme of
divine presence is expressed in these stories with something of the teas-
ing playfulness associated with the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs:
the child runs about and hides at times under the nun’s mantle. When
the sisters show readiness to set aside such favours and turn to their
assigned work, Rode suggests the influence of a specifically Dominican
emphasis on the active life of service.21
The sequel is more unexpected in another story about Ite von Hallau:
when the nuns sang Christus natus at Christmas matins, she had a vi-
sion of the Nativity, with the child in the manger, accompanied by Mary
and Joseph and the ox and ass, but then she had to go into the kitchen,
and there she again saw the child, who followed her about wherever
she went, having evidently learned already to climb out of the manger
and walk.22 Usually the sister books make a clearer distinction between
visions in which the nun is projected
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Christ, in a vivid concretization of her meditation on the vita Christi,

and apparitions in which Christ is projected forward into the nun’s
own circumstances. Here the distinction is blurred, with a transition
from the one to the other.
The connection between Christ Child apparitions and service to the
community is given a different twist when the child himself is the serv-
ant: one Advent, Elsbeth von Riegel saw the Lord go about the refec-
tory as a child, and when they sat at table he gave a dish of stewed fruit
(müß) to each sister in her dish, and they all said this dish had never
been finer.23 In the Weiler sister book, the child appeared to a sister
who was having trouble finding her way in the unlighted dormitory at
night. He appeared with a star on his head, showed her the way to her
bed, and sat beneath her mantle on her lap, to their mutual delight.24
That Christ himself could be the recipient of the sisters’ service is a
theme perhaps less frequently stressed but not absent from the sister
books. Adelhait von Frowenberg at Töß wanted to take upon herself a
kind of passion out of devotion to Christ’s childhood: she prayed that
she might come to help him, yearning that all her body should be mar-
tyred in the service of the child: ‘She wished her skin stripped off to
make our Lord swaddling bands, and her veins spun into thread to
make him a jacket, and her marrow ground into flour to make him por-
ridge. She wished her blood poured out to make him a bath, and her
bones burnt to make him a fire.’25 But this quest for abjection is rare in
the sister books; the child typically comes as comforter in suffering, not
as an occasion for suffering.
The sister books thus envisage a network of service: the Christ Child
serves the sisters, the sisters serve the child, and the sisters serve each
other. The child’s presence is sometimes a form of service, sometimes a
reward for service. What we do not find is a literalization of the theme
articulated in Matthew 25: that the one served turns out to be Christ
made present incognito. There is no particular reason why the sister
books should not have evoked this theme. As in any other setting, the
beggar at the convent door might turn out to be Christ. Yet, as we shall
see, when Christ appears in these convents and is at first unrecognized,
other concerns are usually being addressed.
Apparitions of the Christ Child and Liturgical Contexts
In the sister books as elsewhere, the Christ Child is sometimes seen

at the elevation, when the priest holds up the consecrated host and it
changes into a baby, inBrought
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seen.’26 The motif occurs already in the early-thirteenth-century Dia

logue of Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach.27 It might be taken as a
counterpart to the Mass of Saint Gregory: taken together, they present
Christ as present liturgically in the two forms most often occurring in
later medieval devotion.28 The Mass of Saint Gregory has the obvious
advantage of being appropriate to the Mass conceived precisely as sac-
rifice, and specifically as an unbloody making-present of Christ’s sacri-
fice on Calvary. But the child-in-the-host miracle is fitting both for the
obvious practical reason that if Christ is to be elevated at the consecra-
tion he must be in a small enough form to be held aloft, and perhaps
more importantly for the theological reason that Christ’s becoming sac-
ramentally present in the Eucharist serves as a liturgical analogue to his
becoming historically present in the Incarnation.29
Like the Mass of Saint Gregory, the host miracle could be seen as a re-
sponse to doubt about the Real Presence of Christ, and when one sister
experienced this miracle she protested that it should have been sent to
someone else, less firm in the faith, who needed it as she did not.30 But
within the monastery, conscious doubt about the Eucharist was perhaps
less common than doubts regarding the monastic life and one’s place in
the community, and these two could be resolved through experience of
the host miracle. Jewt von Unzelhoven, a lay sister at Engeltal, was un-
certain about her commitment to the community, and was not receiving
communion with the other sisters, but went outside the church as the
others received. There she beheld a vision of a fiery wheel hovering
above the choir. Wondering if this vision was from God, she went into
the church and there saw a tube stretching from heaven into the chalice,
and the host transformed in the priest’s hands into a child, who showed
greater favour toward some of the sisters than toward others. This ex-
perience overcame her temptation to leave; the vision of a community
bonded with the divine, even though its members turned out to have
varying degrees of piety, brought Jewt herself to firmer commitment.31
Even apart from these host miracles, apparitions of the Child Christ
occur frequently in a liturgical context, perhaps indeed more than any
other. They may be correlated with lectionary readings, as when Berht
von Nürnberg heard the gospel about the Finding in the Temple and
had an apparition of Jesus at about the age of twelve – although eight
days later he appeared to her as when he was newly born, an appari-
tion that would not have been synchronized with the lectionary.32 More
commonly, we are told that Christ appeared in the chapel and during
services, not necessarily at a particular point in the liturgical year. He
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may be seen lying on the altar.33 Either or both of two liturgical spaces
may figure prominently: the infant often comes from the altar, as if his
presence there is a visionary echo of his Eucharistic presence, and he
often comes to the sisters in their stalls on either side of the choir, bless-
ing and embracing each of them in turn.34 In the sister book from Töß,
Christ follows one sister from the altar to her stall, but in another case
comes and embraces the nuns in their stalls seriatim.35 At Katharinental,
too, one sister saw Mary with Christ in her arms go through the choir
during matins, when an antiphon identified as Ave stella was sung; she
bowed to each sister, and she gave the child on her arm to each of the
choir nuns.36 The transition might have been easy and natural if the
nuns were in stalls at the east end of the chapel, in the so-called Lang
chor adjacent to the Chorhaupt (what in England would be called the
choir and the sanctuary), but often the nuns’ choir was in a gallery at
the west end of the chapel, and we know from Adelheid Langmann
that when the Virgin and Child came to the nuns they came ‘up’ into
their gallery.37
The embedding of these apparitions within the liturgy can be said
to integrate them into the communal prayer of the monastery, yet this
point should not be overstated. Even the choir stalls could become
semi-private spaces, stocked with paraphernalia for devotions that
were linked to the liturgy loosely if at all, as the fifteenth-century re-
formers noted to their dismay.38 And while the apparitions were some-
times of the Christ Child blessing or embracing the nuns generally, they
could just as well involve private devotional trysts. Elisabet Bechlin at
Töß once thought she saw Christ as a little child coming to her from the
altar and sitting by her. She snatched him and set him on her lap, and
she sat in the place where he had sat, and treated him as kindly as she
could, except that she did not dare to kiss him until she had asked if she
dared to do so and he replied, ‘Yes, as your heart desires, as much as
you wish.’39 And when Mechthilt von Trüllikon of Katharinental was at
Mass on the feast of Saint Michael, praying and weeping, Christ came
to her as a child, consoling her as though she were the child by placing
an apple in her hand.40
If we can view these apparitions in relationship to those of the Christ
Child in the elevated host, then the effect is to link liturgical action at
the altar with devotional absorption in the choir stalls. Anna von Weit-
erstorf saw the host changed into a child, and when it was offered to
one or another sister it behaved to her in a way corresponding to her
life, sometimes lovingly, sometimes not.41 This story cannot be inter-
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preted as implying that Christ received in communion blessed some

nuns more than others; even when the priest’s own larger host was per-
ceived as a baby, there is no corresponding tradition in the sister books
of the consecrated wafers given to the nuns taking on this miraculous
form. Rather, what we have here is a conflation of two narratives, one in
which Christ appears as a baby in the host at the high point of the Mass,
in the miracle of consecration, and another in which the Christ Child
comes up and down the choir stalls to the nuns individually, within
a liturgical space but with no clear reference to any liturgical action.
The fusion of narratives is unexpected, and for that reason powerful. It
makes for a strange but effective mediation between communal ritual
and individual experience.
Christ Child apparitions were not surprisingly frequent at the feast
of the Nativity. Gertrude of Helfta had enjoyed a vision of the child
during the night of the Nativity.42 Bernard of Clairvaux had a dream
vision of the infant’s birth when he himself was a boy: dozing off dur-
ing the night office for the Nativity, he beheld the child being born at
what he took to be the precise time of that event.43 So too in the sister
books, the feast of the Incarnation is a feast of manifestation. It was at
Christmas that Mezzi Sidwibrin saw a child sitting in the chapel by
the preacher, inspiring her to cry out, Ihesus ist unser!44 If there is any
surprise at all, it is that this pattern is less uniform than it might be:
while it is known elsewhere, it occurs most regularly at Unterlinden
and Adelhausen. It was at Unterlinden that Adelheid von Epfig asked
God for a revelation of the precise time of Christ’s birth, so on the eve
of the Nativity she was suddenly awakened by an angel, who knocked
loudly on her bed, then she heard a voice telling her to rise up quickly,
for this was the hour of the Nativity.45 Adelheid von Rheinfelden had
a vision of the Christ Child on the eve of the Nativity.46 Otherwise the
time at which the Unterlinden apparitions were most concentrated was
in the morning, at matins and Mass. Herburg von Herenkeim was to
read the lesson at matins, but she was so drunk on the spirit of God
(ebria Dei spiritu) that she could scarcely utter a single word regarding
the incarnate Word, and another sister had to assume her function.47
During matins and Mass, Agnes Waller prayed by herself, because she
was infirm and unable to keep up with the nuns’ chanting, but she sud-
denly saw Jesus as a glowing white infant surrounded by a kind of red
aura. She did not dare to touch him with her hands.48 During the eve of
the Nativity, Gertrude von Rheinfelden spent the night in prayer, then
she participated in matins. When the responsory for Mass began, she
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suddenly beheld a beautifully ornamented bed placed in the centre of

the choir, on which Christ’s mother lay gleaming, with such brightness
flowing from her face and her clothing that it illuminated the choir, and
on her lap she fondled her newborn child.49
Two narratives from Adelhausen are particularly striking. Metzi von
Waltershoven saw the Virgin going through the choir one Christmas
at compline, and she was as large as a woman about to give birth, but
the next morning she was again in the choir among the nuns of the
convent, and she was carrying her son in her arms, offering him to
each of the sisters. During the Salve Regina, she went through the stalls
on either side of the choir and bowed to each of the sisters according
to her merit.50 One Christmas Margreth Flastrerin had great desire to
see Christ as he was when first born, and as she was thinking of that
she saw Christ come from the altar as a newborn child wearing a silk
shirt. He went through the choir, among the sisters, and came to this
sister where she was sitting, and she held him all through the Mass, and
had great joy and love with him. When the Mass was over, the child
went back up on the altar, and she saw him no more.51 The exceptional
manifestation receded, folding back into the more ordinary miracle of
Christ’s Eucharistic presence on the altar.
Elsewhere in the sister books we find a nun who out of devotion
to Christ’s childhood feels great sweetness from Christmas onward,
which is replaced by bitterness at Candlemas (presumably because of
Simeon’s prophecy of the Passion in Luke 2:35); another who finds the
Child Christ hiding under her mantle all through Christmas matins; yet
another who goes to open the lectionary for the first lesson of Christ-
mas and sees the child lying in swaddling clothes on the open book.52
One Christmas, a sister of Katharinental had a great desire to see Christ
as a child. While she was in her devotions, she saw a small child go
up on the altar. Then another nun went up to the altar as sacristan,
and the child went to her, and wherever her office took her, the Jesusli
went along with her, all through the Mass.53 After Christmas matins,
a sister of Engeltal saw the Christ Child lying before the altar on stiff
hay, which pricked his tender body so that it had red furrows. But once
when she was at prayer she saw him again in his childhood, with pret-
ty garments, playing before her in a lovable way. Her heart welled up
with love, and she thought that if she could hold him she would lavish
love upon him, but he answered her thoughts, telling her he does not
let himself be enjoyed in that way. Then he opened her inner senses and
gave her to understand that he was making reference to the holiness of
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the sacraments, presumably meaning he is most truly possessed not in

visionary experience but in the Eucharist.54
These narratives of Christ Child apparitions within a liturgical con-
text can perhaps best be understood in terms of foreground and back-
ground. When the child moves away from the altar, or appears with no
explicit reference to the altar, the visionary and devotional experience
of the individual nun becomes foregrounded, yet the liturgical setting
of space, time, and sacrament typically remains in the background and
serves to ground this devotional experience in something broader and
more widely shared than itself.
Virgin and Child: Depiction, Salutation, and Manifestation
Roughly a third of the time in the sister books, apparitions of the child
are joint appearances of the Virgin together with her child. Here per-
haps most clearly visionary experience draws upon a devotional cul-
ture shared within and beyond the monastery. Alongside the crucifix,
the statue of the Virgin and Child would have been the most common
devotional image. It would routinely have been seen in the church and
in the dormitory, and greeted routinely at the beginning and ending
of the day and on occasions in between. Given that fact, Rode muses
how puzzling it is that miracles and revelations did not occur more
often in the context of image-centred devotion, perhaps in part (she
speculates) because the imagination is more easily stimulated by one’s
own images than by those provided for one, and perhaps because of
a mystical resistance to emphasis on concrete and local objects.55 Yet
there would have been nothing unusual, unorthodox, or even unso-
phisticated about the assumption that the sacred personages were in a
sense made present through these images – or, more precisely, that the
spiritual presence already assumed became more keenly felt through
devotional focus on images.56 One nun at Engeltal was accustomed to
entering the chapel gladly, day and night, because in it the Virgin and
Child appeared to her, an impression surely facilitated by the presence
of at least one image, perhaps several.57 Marian antiphons, like the An-
gelic Salutation, more often than not began with greetings: Ave regina
celorum is a concatenation of greetings, and Salve regina would have
been one of the most familiar antiphons in a monastic setting.58 These
prayers and hymns were based on the understanding that Christ and
the Virgin were literally present to the devotee, able to receive and re-
spond to the greeting. During the singing of the Salve regina, Else von
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Holczhausen sometimes saw the Virgin and Child hovering over the
assembly of nuns.59 Especially when said or sung in the presence of an
image of the Virgin and Child, these salutations would naturally have
enhanced a sense that the image concretely manifested what would in
any case have been taken for granted, that Christ and his mother were
spiritually alive and present. This sense of concentrated presence is ex-
pressed, for example, in the life of the early Premonstratensian Her-
mann Joseph, who was said to have been especially devoted to a statue
of the Virgin and Child at Saint Maria im Kapitol in Cologne when he
was young; once he offered the mother an apple for her child (which
she accepted), on another occasion she gave him money to buy shoes,
and yet another time she invited him to play along with her son and
John the Baptist.60 When the sister books tell of visionary nuns who
interacted with the Virgin and Child, these narratives must be under-
stood within the context of these widely shared devotions and the as-
sumptions that underlay them.
Three stories, two from Katharinental and one from Unterlinden,
give vivid testimony to the sense that an image could manifest the liv-
ing presence of the sacred personages. When one sister of Katharinental
went before an image of Mary with Christ in her arms, she took the
child’s foot in her hand with great devotion, and it turned into flesh
and blood in her hand. Another nun was distressed about her brother,
so she went before an image of the Virgin and Child for prayer. The
child offered her his foot, which she took in her hand, and it became
flesh and blood, then the child took his foot back. She prayed to the
Virgin, as one would under any circumstances before an image of the
Virgin, to give her consolation, and Mary assured her that her prayer
would be heard.61 More dramatic and surely better known is the story
of one sister at Unterlinden, who was once standing in the choir before
an image of the Virgin and Child, imploring the Virgin to ask her son
for her salvation, when suddenly with her bodily eyes she saw the child
extend his hand to her as a pledge of his favour. She grasped his hand,
and it came loose from the image and could not be reattached.62
A narrative from the community at Weiler gives vivid testimony to
the interaction of Marian antiphons, liturgical custom, and iconography
as sources for visionary experience. While the antiphon Salve regina was
being sung, the Virgin came into the sisters’ choir with the child on her
arm (as in standard Gothic statuary of the Virgin and Child) and placed
it down at the entrance to the choir stalls. As the sisters sang the words
et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui, the child went about embracing
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the nuns who were bowing sufficiently, but he could not reach those
who failed to bow as the liturgical customs of the order prescribed.63
Two accounts suggest that Mary could be perceived as the God-bear-
er in the sense that she played a functional role: the sisters were pleased
to see her, but it was the child they really wanted. Elisabet Bechlin of
Töß once was sick, and it seemed that Mary came to her but did not
bring her child. She said, ‘O lady, where is your child? Go right away
and bring him to me.’ Afterward, in Advent, Mary seemed to come
with her child and set it in Elisabet’s arms, and when he allowed her to
kiss him she did so. She described this as a dream – but the narrative
notes approvingly how she fell asleep ‘in God.’64 The other story shows
greater tension and anxiety. Els von Sehssencham of Engeltal once had
a spiritual vision in which she came to a wondrous place, where there
was a beautiful maiden, and Christ came along in the form of a little
child and played with the maiden. Els herself would have been very
pleased if the child had shown favour toward her, but he did not, which
left her deeply aggrieved. But the child appeared to her afterward and
said, ‘Should a child not show favour to his mother before giving graces
to you? She is my mother!’ Only then did her grief abate.65 Whether
poignant or amusing, the story conveys a sense that the bond between
mother and child evoked by the standard devotional image is a sacred
bond that takes precedence over any relationships either mother or
child can have with the sisters. Here more pointedly than in many oth-
er stories, the devotional piety of the sisters presupposes conceptions
more basic to the broader religious culture.
The tension and even rivalry with the Virgin is yet more poignant
in the case of Sister Irmgart, a nun at Gotteszell, who once lay on her
bed, sorrowing and without comfort, when the most beautiful child
ever seen came to her. He was not yet able to walk, so he crawled to the
infirmary on all fours until he came to her, then he sat on her bed. He
asked her what she wanted, and she asked for some firewood, because
the weather was bitterly cold. And while she was enjoying herself with
the child, along came the most beautiful woman ever seen and took
the child from her, saying she wanted to go up to the chapel where the
nuns were to receive communion. Deeply disturbed to have the child
taken away, Irmgart cried out repeatedly for the child’s return, like a
person without her senses. When the nuns passed by on their way to
their meal, she cried out in alarm, insisting these were the thieves who
had taken the child away from her. Afterward she asked her attendant
to put something special on her dish that the child might like to eat if
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he should come back to her. And whenever a beautiful woman with a

child came into the monastery, and was brought to her bed, they asked
her, ‘Irmengart, is this the woman, and is her child your child?’ ‘No, my
woman and her child are like none other.’66
More typically, the Virgin was generous with her child and his fa-
vours. She appeared often with her child to a ten-year-old girl living at
Adelhausen, and she beckoned with her hand for the girl to approach,
saying to her, ‘I want to give you my child.’67 She brought the new-
born child on Christmas to Adelheit von Hiltegarthausen and laid him
before her on her bed.68 And she gave a sister of Töß the privilege of
suckling from her breast, because with her great devotion to Christ’s
childhood she had figuratively helped her suckle the child.69
In an earlier generation, Richard of Saint Victor had argued that God
must be triune and not merely dual – there must be not just the Father
and the Son, but also the Spirit – because the love between two per-
sons is perfected only in their willingness to accommodate and share
that love with a third.70 It is unlikely that the sisters in these German
monasteries had Richard’s trinitology in mind, but there is something
analogous implicit in these stories. The love between mother and child
is what the ubiquitous imagery would have impressed upon the sisters,
but if that love was perfect it must be capable of extending itself, and
the sisters who cultivated intense devotion to both child and mother
clearly sought to claim their part in that sharing, even if at times they
recognized their claim as a daring one that might seem presumptuous.
Consolation in the Face of Sorrow, Sickness, and Imminent Death
One day Mechthilt von Trüllikon was so sick that she could not come
to table, but instead went to her bed in the dormitory. One of the sisters
went to her bed to see if she needed anything. The visitor saw a child
sitting by Mechthilt on the bed. Being deeply absorbed in this visita-
tion, Mechthilt said nothing to her and indeed did not even take notice
of her. That evening, the visitor asked if she wished to have some-
thing to eat, but Mechthilt said not to worry about her, because she
had already eaten well.71 This narrative from Katharinental illustrates
a theme not uncommon in the sister books: the Christ Child comes as
a source of comfort to the sister in a time of sorrow or sickness, and
brings her consolation that a gentle and affectionate child can afford
more effectively than the mature Christ who is himself mainly the Man
of Sorrows. Willbirch von Offeningen was once deeply disturbed and
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prayed to Mary, who came with her child and pressed him to the sis-
ter’s heart.72 Again, when Margaretha von Rosenstein was once deep
in grief, the most beautiful child ever seen came to her as a noble lad
(junckherr) of about twelve years and stood before her in the garden
outside her window, turning her sorrow to joy.73
These apparitions often occurred at or near death. The child might
come to announce a sister’s imminent death – as in a fourteenth-cen-
tury German legend of a twelve-year-old monk who was called to his
death on Christmas Eve after wishing to play with the Christ Child.
Even sisters who had not enjoyed visions during their lifetimes might
have such an apparition as a portent of imminent death.74 In a monas-
tic setting, the approach of death was meant to be a social occasion, a
time when the sisters of the community would increasingly focus their
attention on their dying fellow nun.75 When Berta von Rouffach was
dying at Unterlinden, she agreed with the sisters who clustered at her
deathbed that if Jesus came to meet her she would indicate his presence
by raising a thumb, and when Mary arrived she would hold out an in-
dex finger, but if a throng of angels and saints came she would extend
all her fingers, and in due course she had occasion to give all these sig-
nals as she lay dying.76 Death might seem the ultimate exclusion from
communal life, but the sister books insistently tell of community pre-
served in dying and indeed beyond death.
Apparitions of the Christ Child in anticipation of a sister’s death oc-
cur with special frequency in the Engeltal sister book, and more often
than not the apparition was meant to ensure the dying nun of her salva-
tion. It might come at a point when death was unexpected: a lay sister
named Elisabet was in the chapel when Christ appeared to her with a
crown in his hand, which he placed on each woman in the chapel, then
took it away, finally placing it and leaving it on her, by which she un-
derstood that he was about to take her from this world.77 But it might
also occur as the convent was gathering at the deathbed: when Alheid
von Grindlach was dying, the Virgin and Child went in procession with
the nuns of the convent, approaching her bed and telling her she would
enter into eternal joy, rewarded for all she had suffered.78 The assur-
ance of divine favour is usually explicit: Christ would be as favourable
toward these sisters as toward other holy virgins, their suffering would
be rewarded with great joy, or they would be ‘children of the eternal
kingdom.’79 One might have expected such reassurance to come from
the mature Christ, but when the dying nuns are promised they will be
children of the kingdom we can hear an echo of Matthew 18:3, in which
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being childlike is a condition for entering the kingdom of heaven. In

that context it is perhaps fitting that Christ himself is shown as childlike
and even playful. Thus, he came to Guet von Ditenhofen, playing in the
manner of a child, and promised to deal favourably with her.80
The theme is rare in other sister books, but not unknown. Willi von
Kostentz at Töß bore illness patiently, and one night before her death
she said to another sister, ‘A lovely little child is coming in.’ That sister
awoke and saw a light shining on her bed like a beautiful star, although
she could not see the child.81 And Elsbeth Hainburgin of Katharinental
was sick in bed one day when she saw a beautiful child come and sit by
her on the bed. He made a cross with his finger on her head, and said,
‘Much suffering will befall you, but I will make an end of it and will
take you to myself in my kingdom,’ as indeed happened.82
A sister of Töß lay sick for a long time before her death, and once she
said to another sister in the infirmary, ‘Sister Anna, a healer and a heal-
ing woman are coming to us [úns komet ain artzet und ain artzetin]!’ And
at once they both saw Mary coming on an ass, with the child on her lap,
as when Joseph led her into Egypt, and she came to each of them, laid
her hand on the head of each, and presently they were relieved of great
illness, at least temporarily.83
It would not be surprising for the Christ Child also to appear as the
Man of Sorrows, or to signal that he was destined to play that role;
adumbrations of the Passion in the context of the infancy were a devo-
tional commonplace, suggested already by Simeon’s prophecy. At least
once in the sister books this does occur: a sister at Adelhausen often saw
a child bearing a cross and telling her, ‘See, I suffered this for you.’84
In perhaps all these cases, the ideal held forward by the sister books
is that grief, sickness, and death should all be social experiences. Sis-
ters are meant to be tended and supported by other sisters. And even
the sharing of visionary experience, sometimes with the understanding
that it should not be revealed until after death,85 is itself a means of
bonding within the community of sisters.
Christ as Infans Effans
Mechthild of Magdeburg once had a revelation of the infant Christ ly-

ing in the manger on hard straw; she interceded for those who had
requested her prayer, and in response a voice spoke out from the child,
although he did not move his mouth, saying, ‘I have nothing to give
them but eternal life.’86 This is an extreme case of a phenomenon some-
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what more common in less striking form: apparitions of Christ as a child

demonstrating extraordinary wisdom. The motif of the preternaturally
wise child, the puer senex, is found in hagiography and elsewhere,87 and
these apparitions of the infant or boy Christ build on that tradition, but
with the further understanding that the child in the manger is, after all,
the Eternal Word made incarnate.
When Christ came to Margaretha von Rosenstein as a child of about
twelve years, he declared in Latin, Ego sum pontifex futurorum bonorum,
and all her sorrow was turned to joy.88 The least surprising element in
this story is the child’s age. He is sometimes described as at or around
seven, eight, ten, or thirteen years of age, but twelve is particularly ap-
propriate for a preternaturally wise and Latinate child, because it was
at that age that he instructed the teachers in the Temple (according to
Luke 2:39–52). An echo of that story is probably intended in the story
about a prioress at Katharinental who was once entering the chapter
house to hold chapter, when another sister saw that Christ was enter-
ing with her as a child and sitting with her, teaching her everything
she should say.89 That he is often a young boy rather than a baby is
consonant with the representations in art: the Virgin seldom holds a
child who appears exactly newborn. But whether he is preadolescent
or significantly younger – and even if he is the newly born babe in the
manger – he is able to speak.
Occasionally the books give narratives in which the sisters do not at
first recognize the child, and recognition comes from the extraordinary
things he says about himself. These stories are at times told of lay sis-
ters, perhaps suggesting that the visionary fails at first to identify the
child because of a certain naivety on her part. Elsbet Schefflin of Töß
was once sitting in the choir after compline, when a wondrous and lov-
able child came through the choir. He came up to her, and she asked, ‘O,
my dear child, who are you?’ He replied, ‘I and the Trinity are one thing
[Ich und die drivaltikait sind ain ding], and as much as that is true, so also
is it true that you will never be separated from me.’90 Once after Christ-
mas matins a lay sister of Engeltal was at prayer in the refectory, and a
beautiful little child ran round about her. She said, ‘Dear child, do you
have a mother?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you have a father?’ He said, ‘Yes, my
father is eternal.’ She said, ‘So you are our Lord Jesus Christ!’ Then he
disappeared.91 Similarly, a lay sister of Unterlinden was once serving at
the portal of the monastery when she saw a lovely little boy standing by
himself. She asked, ‘Dear little boy, where are you from? And who are
your father and your mother?’ He answered, ‘Pater Noster himself is
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my father, and Ave Maria is my mother.’ Then he disappeared. Rushing

about through the monastery, she called out his words, ‘Pater Noster is
my father, Ave Maria is my mother.’92
Adelheit von Hiltegarthausen, a sister of Gotteszell who was known
for exceptional compassion, once had occasion to babysit the Christ
Child. When another sister was dying, Mary came with the child in her
arms and laid him beside Adelheit, while she herself went off to attend
the dying sister – a further element in the social networking depicted
in these narratives. Adelheit was reading in her psalter, and the child
began reading along. She asked what he was reading, and he replied,
‘I am reading verbum dei.’ He read further, and she asked what he was
reading, to which he replied, ‘I am reading how I was born of my Fa-
ther.’ He continued, and again she asked what he was reading; this time
he said, ‘I am reading how I was born of my mother.’ She then com-
mented on his fine locks of hair; the child grabbed his head, saying,
‘I did not have hair in eternity!’ After the ailing sister had died, Mary
returned and took the child with her.93
One might see implicit in these narratives an effort to make sense of
traditional Chalcedonian Christology. The Council of Chalcedon had
decreed that Christ is fully divine and fully human, combining the two
natures without confusion in a single person.94 Imagining what that
combination might mean was perhaps most challenging in the context
of Christ’s infancy. If he was truly divine, he should have full divine
consciousness even while lying in the manger. But it seems virtually im-
possible to conceive that without verging on a Monophysite theology,
in which the humanity is compromised for the sake of the full divinity,
and indeed the infancy becomes something of a pretence. Mechthild of
Hackeborn had pondered the implications in her Book of Special Grace:
‘She also recognized how the fullness of the whole divinity dwelt in
such a tiny little baby, and how the almighty power of God fortified
that little body lest it be utterly shattered; and how the unsearchable
wisdom of God lay hidden in him, for his wisdom was as great when
he lay in the manger as it is now when he reigns in heaven; and how
all the sweetness and love of the Holy Spirit were infused into that tiny
infant.’95 Within the sister books, however, the narratives of the sisters’
visions are rarely conflated with the narrative of Christ’s life. When
Christ appears to them as a child, it is not his historical childhood that
is being revealed to them. He is the ever-present divine-human person
manifested to them, and if he chooses to manifest himself in the form
of a child, as under other circumstances he might present himself in the
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form of, say, an unleavened wafer of bread, that choice is not necessar-
ily relevant to the complexities of Chalcedonian Christology as they
apply to the historical infancy.
Contemplation and Devotion
There were sisters in probably all of the convents who cultivated devo-
tions involving the Christ Child: rocking him in his cradle, giving him
a bath, ‘going to Bethlehem’ to worship him, and so forth. These exer-
cises might at times be purely meditative, but more often they involved
the devotional use of actual images.96 Rosemarie Rode suggested that
devotional practices were more likely to avert than to promote mysti-
cal experiences, exhausting with material preoccupations the spiritual
powers that might otherwise be directed toward mystical union or vi-
sionary experience.97 Be that as it may, students of the history of mysti-
cism would see even the devout visions related in the sister books as
having very little in common with the higher contemplative experience
of mystical union. Yet some passages in the sister books explicitly raise
a comparison between the two forms of experience, and there is no sin-
gle or simple view of the matter. Devotional experience does at times
become linked with contemplative experience in one way or other.
Under such circumstances devotion to the Child Christ becomes most
specifically private, although even here we find expressed a theological
conviction about a presence of Christ that is accessible to all.
The Unterlinden sister book contains passages bearing directly on
this subject, and even within this book the topic is variously treated.
Mechtild von Wincenheim saw Jesus as an incomparably beautiful lit-
tle boy running about the altar and playing with little apples, but she
was so rapt in contemplation that she was unable to note or delight
much in this vision.98 For her, devotional and contemplative experi-
ence were so distinct that the one kept her from the other. But Adelheid
von Rheinfelden, who served as prioress, was praying on the eve of
the Nativity for the well-being of a certain lay brother about whom she
was concerned. As she prayed, she suddenly was raised into ecstasy,
and in her contemplation she beheld the highest of truths, had a fore-
taste of heavenly joy, and was made aware of heavenly secrets, in a
supercelestial vision of divinity. Then in the same rapture she beheld
Christ ‘in his most divine humanity’ (in humanitate sua diuinissima) as
a beautiful newborn infant, crying before her, and believed that in his
humanity he looked exactly as she saw him. From this experience she
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received great consolation, and in it she attained assurance that the lay
brother would be saved. The memory of this ‘union’ remained in her
mind for years, and when she told of it she was overwhelmed with
tears of piety.99 In this account there is no distinction: a vision of the
Christ Child is embedded within a contemplative, unitive experience,
and there is no sense that focus on Christ’s humanity was a distraction
from the ‘supercelestial’ beholding of divinity. In the case of Herburg
von Herenkeim, we find the two sorts of experience occurring one after
the other, but it is the devotional apparition of humanity that serves as
the terminus and has lasting effect. She was once rapt in spirit between
compline and the next dawn; the heavens were opened to her, and she
beheld the glory of the Lord unveiled (reuelata facie). When at last she
returned to herself, she went out to perform her duties at the portal of
the monastery, but there the Virgin appeared to her three times with the
child in her arms, causing Herburg to be overwhelmed with devotion
and joy, and even when the vision was taken away from her eyes, her
mind was from then on lastingly fixed on God.100
Another account in the Unterlinden sister book again juxtaposes the
two forms of experience, in this case beginning with a devotional nar-
rative inspired by scriptural precedents and proceeding to a narrative
of contemplative absorption that grows directly out of the former ex-
perience. On Christmas, Hedwig von Laufenburg sat praying in the
workhouse around the time of matins, and suddenly she saw with her
bodily eyes the host of Christ’s ancestors dancing with festive joy. The
sisters were beginning matins in the choir, and on hearing it she rose,
leaving this company of saints, and hastened to the choir. As she en-
tered the choir, she heard God saying to her, ‘This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am pleased,’ and then, ‘Open your heart and understand
with what affect of love I sent my beloved Son to be incarnate and to
save the world.’ Suddenly she was rapt in ecstasy and attained to the
contemplation of secret counsels ‘with intellectual eyes,’ and for a brief
time she contemplated the divine love that led to the Incarnation. Short
as the experience was, it left an indelible effect on her.101
If there is any clear theological presupposition behind these narra-
tives, it is the notion that had become a commonplace in later medieval
spirituality, that one gains access to the divinity of Christ through his
humanity.102 This formulation does not necessarily mean that devotion-
al meditation will blossom forth in mystical union, and that transition
is rare in the sister books, but at least the Unterlinden book seems to
have viewed it as unsurprising.
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The Adelhausen sister book has a story that makes the distinction
between the two forms of experience clear but emphatically challenges
the conventional rating of contemplative over devotional experience.
Bechte von Oberriet had a great desire that God might show her some
special favour, and in response to this desire she was filled with over-
flowing grace, so that she could not speak, but she thought her soul
was wider than the entire world. When this immense grace was in her,
she asked our Lord to let her see with her bodily eyes the wonder that
was in her soul, and she appeared to be like an overflowing vessel.
Then she beheld the most wonderful child ever seen, which for some
time brought her great delight, but she yearned for the far greater joy
of the earlier experience, and she asked God to return that to her. In
response, both experiences were withdrawn from her.103 On one level
this is a story about the consequences of presumption: if one is too par-
ticular about the favours one enjoys, one will be denied all favours. On
a deeper level, it could be seen as a tale of misunderstanding: the child
she beheld was the divinity resident within her soul, and if she had not
resisted she would have been favoured with a realization that her own
overflowing soul was the birthplace of God.
Again in the Kirchberg sister book we have the two forms of experi-
ence juxtaposed, with a sense that devotional experience may be safer
and less enervating than contemplation. Willbirch von Offeningen,
who once served as prioress, enjoyed the experience of jubilus and high
contemplation, but her absorption was a kind of affliction and loss of
her senses, and after some time she had to concern herself instead with
devotion to Christ’s childhood. She then often had apparitions of the
child, who came to her, took much pleasure in being with her, and also
brought her great pleasure. One Advent she was so full of grace that
it was as if she were pregnant with Christ; the text explains that this
means her heart and soul and mind were so filled with Christ’s grace
and presence that she could not bear for anyone to contact her.104
The Katharinental sister book has a fairly extensive narrative of Anne
von Ramschwag, who entered the monastery as a young girl and was
not at first amenable to studies, but developed into one of the most in-
terestingly mystical nuns in the book. Her aversion to her studies was
overcome when she opened her book once and saw a naked little child
lying on it, with foot in hand. The child told her he took delight in
(verricht mich wol mit) his heavenly Father and with her. After this she
learned gladly everything she was supposed to learn.105 She once went
into the choir to pray when she was depressed. Christ did not want to
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leave her without consolation, so he appeared to her as when he was

seven years old. His hair was gold, and he wore the most beautiful
flowers ever, and in his hand he bore three red roses. He said to her,
‘If you give me what is yours, I will give you what is mine.’ Laugh-
ing, she said, ‘Lord, I pray you to give me nothing but yourself [das dv
mich nit vermërest noch dich selber].’ Then he took one of the roses and
pressed it against her heart, seeming indeed to press it into her heart,
where she bore it until her death. The second rose was given to her
when she received the Lord, presumably in communion; with it she
knew God purely, and beheld in God everything she wished, and what
she wished to know was all revealed to her. She was in a kind of ecstasy
for fourteen days; then she came to herself.106 Once she was in the choir
and had a vision of a fiery globe, in which she saw Christ as a child of
thirteen years. The globe came near, so that she was inflamed by it, and
became as it were a flame of fire from this fire. Then Christ said to her, ‘I
was a small child and am the aged God [der alt got], whom you perceive
[meinest] in all things.’ With that, the vision ended.107 At Christmas she
sat in her stall in the choir and was drawn up into a divine light, and
it seemed to her that her body opened up so that she saw into her-
self. And within herself she saw two beautiful children embracing each
other: one was the Lord, and the other was her soul, which showed
how she and God were united (vereinet).108 Then her body closed back
together.109
It is in passages of this sort, where devotion blends into mystical
contemplation, that we might expect the singularity of the sisters to be
most highlighted and exalted. In one sense, that is surely the effect. Yet
the mysticism found here is closest to that of Meister Eckhart, who was
the most democratic of mystics, in the sense that he preached a form of
mystical consciousness that should in principle be accessible to all: the
birth of God takes place in every soul, and everyone is invited to share in
the stunningly transformative consciousness of that birthing.110 Even if
in fact few of the sisters attain this level of mystical awareness, readers
aware of Eckhart’s theology would have realized that the sisters who
did so were gaining not so much a privileged union with God but a
privileged consciousness of the union with God that is accessible to all.
Conclusion
The kinds of Christ Child visions narrated in the sister books came in
for harsh criticism from various quarters. When Albert the Great heard
Authenticated
of a woman who claimed she had suckled Jesus, he proclaimed that it

was folly rather than heresy but still worthy of punishment.111 The Fran-
ciscans Lamprecht von Regensburg and David von Augsburg warned
of women’s experiences that were hazardous and could easily be the
result of self-deception or demonic illusion.112 More specifically, in the
mystical dialogue called Schwester Katrei, the fictitious Sister Catherine
rails against those who beg for an external (meaning bodily) vision,
perceptible with the outer (or bodily) eyes, of Christ as he was when
he was a child or later. Wishing to boast and enjoy consolation, they
fast and pray and perform other works, appearing holy, and hoping
to be rewarded with such visions. But the devil deceives them, taking
elements from the air to fashion a simulacrum of a curly-haired child
in the consecrated host, or a youth of twelve years, or a man of thirty
years. Those who listen to him are ‘the most accursed folk ever born.’
What they claim to experience is impossible, because ever since the
Ascension no one has seen Christ with bodily perception. And when
people claim to have seen the Virgin with her child, this too is an error;
since her bodily assumption into heaven, she too has never been seen
with bodily eyes.113
This last point seems crucial: the sister books do speak of visions
seen with bodily eyes and locutions heard with bodily ears, and even
when this language is not used explicitly it is clearly implied.114 Since
Augustine, writers on visionary experience have distinguished bodily,
‘spiritual or imaginative,’ and intellectual visions, and it was bodily
visions – those actually perceived with the physical senses – that were
most suspect as prone to illusion and deception.115 Even in the face of
such criticism, the sister books take a more benign view of such visions.
Why?
What is distinctive in visionary experience is not the reality perceived
but its manifestation: not the reality of Christ’s presence, but the way
in which it is made known. It was a virtually unchallenged assumption
within late-medieval Christian culture that Christ actually was present
in the liturgy, in the Eucharist, and as someone a Christian might turn
to in prayer. Whether he was present in bodily form might be another
question, but for the sister books it was not necessarily the decisive
question. They often suggest that he was present to all the sisters as-
sembled in liturgy, although only one of them perceived his presence
in bodily form, and in such cases it seems clear that his spiritual pres-
ence to all the nuns is no less real than his visible manifestation to one
of them. The key distinction for this literature is not so much between
Authenticated
bodily and spiritual presence, but between real presence perceived

physically and equally real presence perceived spiritually. Those sisters
who are favoured with extraordinary visions are exceptional in their
perception, but the presence they perceive is accessible to the commu-
nity as a whole, and often the visionaries are the ones most conscious
of the grace bestowed upon the community as such. In this as in other
ways, the sister books represent the visionary sisters on the one hand
as singular, yet on the other as sharing in the monastic culture and the
communal life of their fellow sisters. Even when their experience is
most private, the conception and representation of the experience al-
ways remains communal.
NOTES
1 Ancelet-Hustache, ed., ‘Les Vitae sororum d’Unterlinden,’ 467–8.

2 I am indebted here to Victoria Nicole Prussing, who in an unpublished
paper has developed this point with special attention to the Unterlinden
sister book and to the work of Johannes Meyer.
3 On the sister books generally, see Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Wom
en, and relevant passages of Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles.
4 ‘Counsels on Discernment,’ Counsel 20, in Meister Eckhart, The Essential
Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. College and McGinn,
272.
5 Elsbet Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, ed. Vetter, 28–9; I am taking
a very slight liberty here with the orthography by deleting an accent. This
construction of the exclamation is borne out by the immediate sequel, in
which the sister would poke her head into a room and ask whether Jesus
was ‘here’; if not, she would move along to another place.
6 ‘Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion.’
7 Rode, ‘Studien zu den Mittelalterlichen Kind-Jesu-Visionen,’ esp. 85–6.
8 Rublack, ‘Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus,’ 17.
9 Ebner, Major Works, trans. and ed. Hindsley.
10 Rublack, ‘Female Spirituality and the Infant Jesus,’ 25.
11 Ibid., 22–3.
12 Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 64.
13 Meyer, ed., Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 109. Metze Tschelin of
Adelhausen asked for relief from her office as prioress and heard a divine
voice reminding her of Abraham’s obedience, but declaring that hers was
greater because it involved an inward renunciation, that of her own will;
Authenticated
see ‘Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen, nach der ältesten Abschrift
mit Einleitung und Beilagen,’ ed. König, 161; and Rode, ‘Studien,’ 64.
14 Meyer, ed., Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 110–11.
15 Ibid., 107–8.
16 Ibid., 104–5.
17 Ibid., 97–8. In another story (104), Adelheit die Huterin is reminded of her
duties, says to the child she is leaving him ‘out of true obedience,’ exits the
choir and goes to the kitchen, where she again sees the child.
18 On this point see Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 60.
19 See Rode, ‘Studien,’ 65: ‘Dieser Gedanke, daß Gott überall zu finden sei,
bei der Arbeit wie bei der Andacht, prügte einen großen Teil unserer
Legenden.’
20 Augustine, Confessions, bk. 8, ch. 3, and bk. 10, ch. 27, trans. Pine-Coffin,
163 and 231.
21 Rode, ‘Studien,’ 66: ‘Während in den vormystischen Legenden die bloße
Erscheinung des Jesusknaben als die Begnadung schlechthin betrachtet
wurde, ist das Gnadenleben der Mystikerinnen des 14. Jhs so dem Ge-
horsam verpflichtet, daß das besondere Verdienst des Begnadeten nicht
mehr darin besteht, daß er eine Vision hat, sondern darin, daß er auf sie
verzichtet. Diese Umkehrung kann wohl aus der besonderen Struktur do-
minikanischer Klosterfrömmigkeit ... verstanden werden.’
22 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 108. See also Die Offenbarung
en der Margaretha Ebner und der Adelheid Langmann, ed. Strauch, trans.
Prestel, 66–7, on the experiences of Adelheid Langmann.
23 ‘Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen,’ 163.
24 Bihlmeyer, ed., ‘Mystisches Leben in dem Dominikanerinnenkloster Weiler
bei Eßlingen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert,’ 72.
25 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 52; translation from Newman, From
Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 83.
26 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 104–5 and 117 (‘the most
beautiful child ever seen’); Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 81;
Christina Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal Büchlein von der Genaden Uber
last, ed. Schröder, 26. See, more generally, Browe, ‘Die eucharistischen
Verwandlungswunder des Mittelalter’; Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder
des Mittelalters; and Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 29–32. Adelheid of Dorlisheim
at Unterlinden reminisced near her death about how as a young girl she
had looked into a pyx and seen a lovely little child with curly golden hair
and priestly vestments; wishing to have the child for herself, she tried
snatching the pyx, but the priest who had brought it prevented her and
placed the child in the mouth of a sick person. The incident is in Ancelet-
Authenticated
Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 415–16; Rode, ‘Studien,’ 49–50, cites hagi-
ographic precedent.
27 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, dist. 9, chs. 2–3, ed.
Strange, 2.167–9; in the first case a monk sees an infant in a priest’s hands,
and in the second a priest sees the Virgin and Child in the host, then a
lamb, then the Crucified.
28 Westfehling, ed., Die Messe Gregors des Grossen; Bynum, ‘Seeing and
Beyond.’
29 One text that does have a vision of a fully grown figure, who weighs the
priest down so much that he seems about to fall, is The Quest of the Holy
Grail, trans. Matarasso, 262. This work also has a vision in which ‘a figure
like to a child’ enters the bread, ‘which quite distinctly took on human
form’ (275). I am grateful to Barbara Newman for these references. On the
host-miracle in this text, see further, in this volume, Gertsman’s essay and
Kenney, n. 4.
30 Bihlmeyer, ‘Mystisches Leben,’ 81. See the experience of Adelheid Lang-
mann, in Strauch, ed., Die Offenbarungen der Margaretha Ebner und der Adel
heid Langmann, 2; see also Rode, ‘Studien,’ 52–4.
31 Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal, 25; Rode, ‘Studien,’ 51–2.
32 Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal, 43. The editor of this sister book used the
older spelling with ‘-thal,’ but the more recent editor of the Katharinental
sister book used ‘-tal’; for the sake of consistency, I refer in the text of this
article to ‘Engeltal’ as well as ‘Katharinental.’
33 Christina von Retter saw the child lying on the altar during the liturgy for
the eve of the Nativity; see Köster, ‘Leben und Geschichte der Christina
von Retters (1269–1291),’ 255, and Rode, ‘Studien,’ 57, n. 1.
34 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 409–10; one of the sisters, who
turned out to be in sin, was denied this favor.
35 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 45, 21.
36 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 106. On the identification of
the antiphon, see the commentary, 212; Ave maris stella is probably meant.
37 Jäggi, Frauenklöster im Spätmittelalter, 193.
38 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 71–89.
39 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 88.x.
40 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 134.x.
41 Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal, 27.
42 Legatus divinae pietatis, bk. 2, ch. 6, in 2.256 and 258; Zenetti, Das Jesuskind,
42–3.
43 Webb and Walker, trans., St. Bernard of Clairvaux, ch. 2, 17.
44 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 28–9.
Authenticated
45 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 411.

46 Ibid., 403–4.
47 Ibid., 393–4.
48 Ibid., 413.
49 Ibid., 431–2.
51 Ibid., 170–1.
52 Ibid., 169 and 171; Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 125–6.
53 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 136.
55 Rode, ‘Studien,’ 85–6.
56 Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience’; Freedberg, The Power of Images,
examines in cross-cultural perspective the ways images are seen as em-
bodiments of personal presence, and the formal consecrations by which
images take on that function.
58 On the Marian antiphons, see Graef, Mary, 229–33, and Hiley, Western
Plainchant: A Handbook, 104–8.
59 Roth, ed., ‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben der Nonnen von
Kirchberg bei Sulz Predigerordens während des XIV. und XV. Jahrhun-
derts,’ 108. I have checked relevant passages in the manuscript at the Mar-
tinus-Bibliothek in Mainz (formerly called the library of the Bischöfliches
Priesterseminar), cod. 43, fols. 4v–28r, and found that Roth’s edition is gen-
erally reliable, although he takes considerable liberties with orthography.
60 AASS, Apr. 7, vol. 1, 685 (the hagiographer comments, ‘O vere beata pueri
innocentis infantia, quæ tam tempestivis revelationibus meruit consolari!’);
Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland während des Mittelal
ters, 211; Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 35.
61 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 107 and 139–40. Rode, in
‘Studien,’ 86, links the change of the child’s foot into flesh and blood with
the Mass of Saint Gregory.
63 Bihlmeyer, ‘Mystisches Leben,’ 84; see Rode, ‘Studien,’ 83, with parallel
cases.
64 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 88 (Dis sait sy fúr ainen trom; aber es
ist geloblich das sy in Got entschlaffen wer).
66 Roth, ‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben,’ 145–6.
68 Roth, ‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben,’ 124.
Authenticated
69 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 54.

70 Richard of Saint Victor, The Trinity, bk. 3, especially chs. 14–15, in Richard
of St Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, trans. Zinn, 387–9.
73 Ibid., 139.
74 Rode, ‘Studien,’ 59–60 and 76–7; Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 61; Kirchhofer, ed.,
Legende vom zwölfjärigen Mönchlein.
75 Avril, ‘La Pastorale des malades et des mourants aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,’
actually touches on fourteenth-century material, and deals with both
the private and the public dimensions of deathbed ritual. On the public
character of premodern death more generally, see Ariès, The Hour of Our
Death, trans. Weaver, 18–19. See also Boglioni, ‘La Scène de la mort dans les
premières hagiographies latines,’ for background.
76 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 382–4.
77 Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal, 40; cf. the experience of Sister Reichgart, 26.
78 Ibid., 22.
79 Ibid., 20, 24, 30, 32; cf. 43.
80 Ibid., 24.
82 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 127–8. For background on
the theme see Fichtner, ‘Christus als Arzt.’
83 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 80; the vision of the Virgin and
Child as on the Flight into Egypt occurs also at Gotteszell; see Roth,
‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben,’ 125.
84 ‘Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen,’ 172; Rode, ‘Studien,’ 46; Zenetti,
Das Jesuskind, 64.
85 For example, Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 358.
86 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, bk. 7, ch. 60,
trans. Tobin, 328–9; Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 41.
87 Carp, ‘Puer-senex in Roman and Medieval Thought.’
91 Ebner, Der Nonne von Engelthal, 39; cf. 32.
93 Roth, ‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben,’ c. 124–5. Zenetti, Das
Jesuskind, 61, reads the text as saying that Christ visited the dying sister,
but in context it is clear that there are two sisters, and that it is Mary who
visits the (unnamed) dying sister, while leaving Jesus with Adelheit.
Authenticated
94 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 1.82–7.

95 Mechthild of Hackeborn, Liber specialis gratiae, bk. 1, ch. 5, in Revelationes,
18 (unpublished translation by Barbara Newman).
96 Rode, ‘Studien,’ 87–8, 90–1; Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 57, 65.
97 Ibid., 93.
98 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 367–8. On parallels for the legend
of the boy on the altar playing with apples, see Rode, ‘Studien,’ 68–9.
99 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 403–4.
100 Ibid., 390.
101 Ibid., 440–1.
102 Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 107.
103 ‘Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen,’ 171–2.
104 Roth, ‘Aufzeichnung über das mystische Leben,’ 113. Zenetti, Das Jesus
kind, 56, mistakenly ascribes the story to Sister Eite von Holzhausen.
105 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 128–9.
106 Ibid., 130. For another story of the child Jesus playing among roses, see
Köster, ‘Leben und Geschichte,’ 241–69, and Zenetti, Das Jesuskind, 35–6.
108 See the similar account in Henry Suso, Life of the Servant, part 1, ch. 5, in
Henry Suso, The Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 73.
109 Meyer, Das St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, 131. See also the account of
an experience with the Virgin and Child, 130–1.
110 This may seem an odd claim to make about a preacher who at the end of
one sermon said he wished well to anyone who understood him, but if no
one had been there to listen he would have had to preach to the almsbox;
see Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke: Meister Eckharts Predigten, ed.
and trans. Steer and Klimanek, vol. 4, pt. 2, Predigt 109, 774. But the point
is about the content, not the manner of Eckhart’s preaching: the empha-
sis is on the importance of the active life, the possibility of finding God
anywhere and in any person, and the presupposition that God is already
present and needs only to be recognized within any soul.
111 Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, 176; Zenetti, Das
Jesuskind, 40.
112 Grundmann, Religious Movements, 169–70, citing David’s De exterioris et
interioris hominis compositione, II, 24, 110; and Lamprecht’s Sanct Francisken
Leben und Tochter Syon, ed. Weinhold, 430–1.
113 ‘The ‘Sister Catherine’ Treatise,’ trans. Borgstädt, in McGinn et al., trans.,
Meister Eckart, 374–5.
114 See, for example, Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 391–3, 399–400,
405, 409, and 414 (bodily eyes); 361, and 382 (bodily ears).
115 See especially Newman, ‘What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”?’ 6–7.
Authenticated

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7

Ihesus ist unser!: The Christ Child in the

all the devotional conventions of a community’s culture, and, second,

Singularity and Community: Strategies of Integration

Wherever intensity of devotion is cherished and cultivated, singularity

out some mode of absence, expectation of a second coming is pointless.

The point is important for an understanding of the ways mystical

in dialogue, which on one occasion centred on the precise details of the

perienced visions still stood out against a background of less dramatic

Mystical Experience and the Call to Service and Obedience

It is in the Katharinental sister book that we find most explicitly and

Christ, in a vivid concretization of her meditation on the vita Christi,

Apparitions of the Christ Child and Liturgical Contexts

In the sister books as elsewhere, the Christ Child is sometimes seen

seen.’26 The motif occurs already in the early-thirteenth-century Dia­

preted as implying that Christ received in communion blessed some

suddenly beheld a beautifully ornamented bed placed in the centre of

the sacraments, presumably meaning he is most truly possessed not in

Virgin and Child: Depiction, Salutation, and Manifestation

he should come back to her. And whenever a beautiful woman with a

Consolation in the Face of Sorrow, Sickness, and Imminent Death

being childlike is a condition for entering the kingdom of heaven. In

Christ as Infans Effans

Mechthild of Magdeburg once had a revelation of the infant Christ ly-

what more common in less striking form: apparitions of Christ as a child

my father, and Ave Maria is my mother.’ Then he disappeared. Rushing

Contemplation and Devotion

leave her without consolation, so he appeared to her as when he was

of a woman who claimed she had suckled Jesus, he proclaimed that it

bodily and spiritual presence, but between real presence perceived

1 Ancelet-Hustache, ed., ‘Les Vitae sororum d’Unterlinden,’ 467–8.

45 Ancelet-Hustache, ‘Les Vitae sororum,’ 411.

69 Stagel, Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töß, 54.

94 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 1.82–7.

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seen.’26 The motif occurs already in the early-thirteenth-century Dia