OF SIX MEDIEVAL WOMEN 



darkness, knowledge without fruition, the very 

 pain of Hell. Fruition can be reached only 

 through Death." In one of her visions she, 

 in an exquisite simile, describes how love flows 

 from the Godhead to mankind, penetrating both 

 body and soul. " It goes without effort," she 

 says, " as does a bird in the air when it does not 

 move its wings." In the same vision she sees 

 the Holy Mother, with uncovered breasts, 

 standing on God's left hand, and Christ on the 

 right, showing his still -open wounds, both 

 pleading for sinful humanity, and she adds that 

 as long as sin endures on earth, so long will 

 Christ's wounds remain open and bleeding, 

 though painless, but that after the Day of 

 Judgment they will heal, and it will be as though 

 there was a rose-leaf instead of the wounds. 1 

 Of Love, as she conceived it in relation to 



1 The first of these subjects the Holy Mother and Christ 

 pleading for sinners is to be found in a miniature in King Henry 

 VI. 's Psalter (Brit. Mus. Cotton MS. Domitian. A. xvii. circ. 

 1430, fol. 205), and the two intercessions separately form two of the 

 subjects in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (fourteenth century). 

 Though the S.H.S. is of later date than the time of Mechthild 

 the literary source of the subject appears to be a passage in the 

 De laudibus B.M.V. of Arnaud of Chartres, abbot of Bonneval 

 1138-1156 (J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, Spec. Hum. Sal. vol. i., 

 Mulhouse, 1907), which might quite well have been known to 

 her, especially if, as Messrs. Lutz and Perdrizet consider, the S.H.S. 

 was written by a Dominican, who would naturally make use of 

 Dominican teaching and tradition, and we know that Mechthild, 

 even if not, as has been suggested, a tertiary of that Order, was 

 in constant and close touch with it. The second subject, the 

 reference to rose-leaves and Christ's wounds, seems to be a purely 

 original thought, and one amongst the many fascinating ideas that 

 have centred round the rose ever since Aphrodite anointed the 

 dead body of Hector with rose-scented oil (Iliad, xxiii. 186). 



