Henry of Nördlingen

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Henry of Nördlingen — Heinrich von Nördlingen — was a fourteenth-century German secular priest and mystic, active in the Rhineland, southern Germany, and Basel, and one of the most visible figures in the loose devotional network known as the Friends of God. He held no chair and founded no order; what survives of him is mostly a voice in letters, and through them the shape of a spiritual friendship. He was a priest who carried other people’s words — his own counsel from city to city, and at least two bodies of writing not his own into the language where they could be read — and it is by that carrying, rather than by any system, that he is known.

Nördlingen, the Bavarian town from which Henry took his name, seen from the air: its round, fully preserved medieval wall encircles the old town around St. George’s church. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A secular priest among the Friends of God

The Friends of God (Gottesfreunde) were not an institution but a current — clergy, nuns, and devout laypeople across the upper-German lands and the Rhine valley who pursued an inward, affective piety and corresponded with one another about it. The name was drawn from the Gospel of John, where Christ tells the disciples he no longer calls them servants but friends; the circle took the word as a description of the bond it cultivated, person to person, without rule, vows, or membership. The current cohered through the crisis decades of the mid-fourteenth century — the Avignon papacy, the quarrel of pope and emperor, the Black Death — and centered loosely on Strasbourg, Basel, and Cologne. It is better imagined as a web of one-to-one spiritual friendships than as a brotherhood; the romantic picture of an organized secret society, and the reading of the Friends as a proto-Reformation, are nineteenth-century constructions that later scholarship (decisively the work of Heinrich Denifle) has set aside. What was real was the traffic of letters, books, and counsel — and in that traffic Henry was a principal node.

A Weltpriester, a secular priest rather than a member of a religious order, he moved at the edge of the great Rhineland preaching. He knew the Dominican Johannes Tauler and the affective writer Henry Suso, encountering both at Basel; and the world he worked in carried forward, in the vernacular, something of the speculative mysticism that Meister Eckhart had taught in the same lands a generation earlier — the doctrine of the ground of the soul and the birth of God within it, reframed for the cure of souls. Henry himself was a preacher, confessor, and director of souls, not a builder of doctrine. His importance lies in the connections he sustained: among the laity and nobility, from the Low Countries across the Rhenish provinces and Bavaria to northern Italy, he was, in the words of the older biographical tradition, often the connecting link among the mystics. This is the work Rhineland mysticism needed and rarely records — the messenger who keeps a dispersed circle in touch with itself.

The correspondence with Margaret Ebner

The central relationship of his life was with Margaret Ebner, a Dominican nun at the convent of Maria Medingen near Dillingen in Bavaria. They met around 1332, when Henry was the beloved director of a group of devout people gathered about him at Nördlingen — among them his own mother — and the acquaintance opened into a correspondence and a spiritual friendship that ran for the rest of Margaret’s life, until her death in 1351. Henry guided and consoled; Margaret, who suffered prolonged illness and experienced visions and bodily raptures, recorded her inner life in a book of Offenbarungen (Revelations) that she composed, from 1344, at his urging. The pattern is one the period repeats — a priest as spiritual director to a cloistered visionary woman — and Henry’s side of it is unusually legible because his letters survive while most such exchanges are lost. The letters are warm to the point of ardor; he addresses her with great tenderness and writes of grace, of suffering as a school, of his fears and his hopes, of his longing to see her and of the difficulty of the roads between them.

The survival is lopsided and precise. Fifty-six of Henry’s letters to Margaret are extant — the older Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913 counted fifty-eight and located the single witness in the British Museum, but the figure of fifty-six is the one modern editions carry — while only one of Margaret’s letters to him has come down. They survive together because the community at Medingen kept them, not because Henry preserved his own work. That accident of keeping made the collection something its writer never set out to make: it is generally described as the earliest body of personal letters in the German language. The qualification matters and is itself part of the claim. Henry Suso’s letters, gathered into his Briefbüchlein, are an earlier composition but are practically sermons — addresses dressed as letters; Henry of Nördlingen’s are letters proper, written to one person about the actual conduct of a shared life. They offer an unusually direct window into how fourteenth-century mystical life was conducted in practice — the counsel, the longing, the talk of grace and suffering exchanged between a priest often on the move and a woman who did not leave her cloister. Historians have read the friendship both as a model of the medieval bond between male director and female visionary and as a document in its own right of how that bond actually felt from the inside.

The convent church of Maria Medingen near Dillingen, where the Dominican nun Margaret Ebner lived until her death in 1351; the present Rococo church (1717–1719) stands on the site of the medieval Dominican convent. — GFreihalter, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The transmitter of Mechthild of Magdeburg

Henry is also remembered as a transmitter of a different and larger kind. The great thirteenth-century book of the Beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg — Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, The Flowing Light of the Godhead — had been written in Middle Low German, the original of which is lost. It survived complete only because Henry’s circle at Basel rendered it into the Alemannic, or Upper German, of the Rhineland: the manuscript that carries this version, the Einsiedeln Codex 277, was produced in his orbit in the 1340s and remains at the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln. Without that line of transmission the Flowing Light would have been preserved only in a Latin translation, the Lux divinitatis, made in the Dominican milieu of Basel a generation earlier and itself inaccurate and incomplete. Henry circulated the book among the Friends of God and pressed it on Margaret Ebner; scholarship (Patricia Zimmerman Beckman among others) has read the way he and Margaret used Mechthild’s text — as a thing to be copied, sent, read aloud, and lived by — as a small case study in how a mystical book actually functioned within the network, less a closed work than an instrument of shared practice. The transmission is the more striking because Mechthild belongs to the Beguine and Helfta world of women’s vernacular theology; a secular priest of the next century became, by carrying her book across a dialect boundary, the reason it endures. She should not be confused with the other Helfta writers — Mechthild of Hackeborn, or Gertrude the Great — nor Margaret Ebner with the unrelated Christina Ebner of Engelthal; the fourteenth century is dense with similar names, and the careful keeping of who-was-who is part of what the record demands.

The Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln in Switzerland, whose library holds Codex 277 — the Upper German manuscript of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s “Flowing Light of the Godhead” produced in Henry’s circle at Basel in the 1340s. — Roland Fischer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Exile and the politics of the age

His own life was unsettled by the politics of the age. The long quarrel between the papacy and the emperor Louis the Bavarian set city against pope and put whole regions under interdict; clergy loyal to Avignon could not function where the emperor’s writ held, and where the pope’s interdict was obeyed the Mass fell silent. Henry, a papal man, left his usual haunts under that pressure — the older accounts have him set out around 1335, and after the emperor’s decree of 1338 against the interdict he made his way, early in 1339, to Basel, a city where the interdict was kept and the clergy therefore unmolested. There he preached with great effect and entered the circle of the Basel Friends of God, where Tauler — who had left Strasbourg for much the same reason — and Suso were also to be found. For years afterward his letters track a man frequently on the road, carrying his devotion and his correspondence from one city to another, his geography set as much by the interdict map as by his own choosing.

What survives of him

Little can be said with confidence about his beginning or his end; the dates that frame other lives are, for him, largely blank — the year of his birth unknown, the year of his death unrecorded, his life legible only across the two decades, roughly 1332 to 1351, that the letters and the Ebner writings illuminate. The modern recovery of him rests on a single nineteenth-century achievement: Philipp Strauch’s Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen (Freiburg and Tübingen, 1882), the first edition of Margaret’s revelations together with the correspondence, which made the whole exchange available to scholarship and remains its documentary base. He survives instead as a particular kind of medieval figure — not the author of a system but the keeper of a friendship, known because the words he sent to one woman were kept.

Scholarship and editions

The documentary foundation is Philipp Strauch, Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen: Mohr, 1882), the critical edition of Margaret Ebner’s Offenbarungen and of Henry’s letters; its publication facts and manuscript basis are cataloged at Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters. Strauch (1852–1934) was long out of copyright and the edition is the source from which nearly all later treatment derives. A complete English rendering of the Ebner side, Margaret Ebner: Major Works, was prepared by Leonard P. Hindsley for the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality (1993), with the correspondence translated and introduced there. The standard biographical sketch in English long remained the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry by J. de Ghellinck, which is the source of the often-repeated judgment that the letters are the first true collection of letters in German literature, the earlier letters of Suso being in substance sermons; its figure of fifty-eight letters and its location of the manuscript should be read against the fifty-six-letter count of the critical tradition. The function of the correspondence and of Mechthild’s book within the Friends-of-God network is the subject of Patricia Zimmerman Beckman’s “The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century”, Church History 76 (2007), 61–83. For the wider current, Bernard McGinn’s The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Crossroad, 2005) is the modern synthetic account, placing Henry and the Ebner correspondence within the post-Eckhart Rhineland milieu of Tauler, Suso, and the Gottesfreunde; the Alemannic transmission of Mechthild’s Flowing Light in the Einsiedeln Codex 277 is treated within the manuscript scholarship on that work and on the Basel circle.

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