Beatrice of Nazareth

Beatrice of Nazareth (; 1200 – 1268), also known as Beatrice of Tienen, was a Flemish Cistercian nun, visionary and mystic. Remembered chiefly through a medieval adaptation of her writings, of which the originals are now mostly lost, she is venerated as Blessed by the Catholic Church.

Beatrice's treatise Seven Ways of Holy Love is an early example of bridal mysticism. Long surviving only in Latin adaptation, it was rediscovered in 1926, making it the earliest surviving work of mystical prose in Middle Dutch.

Biography Beatrice was born in Tienen in the Duchy of Brabant, part of the Holy Roman Empire, located in today's Belgium. She was the youngest of six children in a wealthy bourgeois family. Beatrice remained there for a little over a year before her father brought her home. Not long after, he sent her to become an oblate at a Cistercian convent he had founded called Bloemendael in Eerken, where she received an education in the liberal arts, as well as Latin and calligraphy.

At the age of fifteen, Beatrice asked to be allowed to enter the novitiate; after being put off for a year due to her young age and delicate health, she was admitted as a novice in 1216. the two may have continued to correspond until Ida's death in 1231. A number of other nuns accompanied her, including her sisters Christina and Sybilla. Beatrice is known as Blessed within the Catholic church, with a feast day on 29 July. His accounts of her childhood may be particularly suspect, since the autobiographical notes on which he based the biography do not begin until age fifteen. Her first vision, experienced in 1217 while meditating on her psalter, was of the Trinity. but others reject this identification as based on a misinterpretation. The Vita, written in Latin, is based on a combination of these writings and eyewitness testimony, including that of Beatrice's sister Christina.

Unusual among spiritual texts of the day for being written in the vernacular instead of Latin, the Seven Ways has been the focus of much of the modern scholarship on Beatrice. lyrical, and experiential. In turn, Beatrice's writings contributed to the emerging "bridal mysticism" movement; her influence on later mystics in that tradition is visible in Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls, which parallels and draws from the Seven Ways.

Lost works In addition to the Seven Ways of Holy Love, Beatrice wrote a number of other spiritual treatises. These are now lost; some references to them survive in her biography. They included:

("On the intensive use of time") ("On the threefold exercise of spiritual affections") ("On the two cells which she constructed in her heart") ("On the five mirrors of her own heart") ("On the spiritual convent") ("On the fruitful garden of her own heart") ("On her aspiration to achieve self-knowledge") ("On a certain rule of spiritual life which she kept for some time")

Beatrice additionally composed two prayers: "" (Oh, righteous Lord) and "" (Oh, most righteous and almighty God).