(Ebook) Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace by Bernard McGinn (Editor in Chief Emeritus) ISBN 9781587686313, 1587686317, B07PCV8DKH

(Ebook) Mechthild of Hackeborn: The Book of Special Grace by Bernard McGinn (Editor in Chief Emeritus) ISBN 9781587686313, 1587686317, B07PCV8DKH

The Book of Special Graceassociated with Mechthild of Hackeborn is afine example of a book that was widely read in its day but then lost much ofits popularity and remained influential only indirectly, throughabridgements and imitations. Barbara Newman’s presentation of Mechthildand her work helps us to understand some reasons why her star might havewaned. Unlike The Herald of God’s Loving Kindness, which it so closely resembled,it lacked an explicit seal of approval for its orthodoxy. And itsrelentlessly cheerful mood might have marked it as sentimental orsuperficial among readers expecting to be led through the valley of theshadow of death. If one looks at the smiling, rosy cheeked figures in the artof Sibilla von Bondorf, it is easy to imagine them as the nuns at Helftadepicted by Mechthild. What Newman makes more abundantly clear is whythe book deserves a renewed audience: the convent at Helfta may have hada precarious existence, the nuns may easily have fallen victim to diseasesthat shortened their years, and after Mechthild and the early members of thecommunity passed from the scene, the house may have entered a crisis inleadership, but for all that, the book represents the flowering of a radiantspirituality that brought personal experience and the life of a worshipingcommunity into vivid contact with the transcendent.