Thousands and Thousands of Lovers

In Thousands and Thousands of Lovers, Anna Harrison homes in on the most engaging aspect of Helfta's spirituality: the nuns' powerful sense of community. In a period of just fifteen years, these nuns produced a treasure trove of Latin mystical literature, creating a utopian vision of their monastic life as an icon of the kingdom of heaven. Exploring the sisters' loving relationships with one another, with clergy and laity, with the dead in purgatory and the saints in heaven, Harrison shows that mysticism is not just a pursuit for the lonely soul in its solitude. It can be--and at Helfta it is--the most profoundly social of all human activities. Barbara Newman, Northwestern University In this thoughtful study of the writings of the thirteenth-century nuns at Helfta, Anna Harrison highlights the fundamental importance of community. For the medieval nuns at Helfta, community united both individual and group. Community included the known authors Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtild of Hackeborn, just as it included the anonymous nuns who collaborated in the creation of the Helfta writings and who also read them, and just as it included saints, laity, clergy, and more. And community also meant the reader and Christ reading together, as if they were one. Alive with vivid and well-chosen examples drawn from Harrison's deep familiarity with the large textual oeuvre, Thousands and Thousands of Lovers will inspire its readers-whether already familiar with the Helfta writings, or encountering them for the first time-to appreciate the 'fervent optimism' of the women of Helfta as well as the interconnectedness of self and other. Elizabeth Freeman, Senior Lecturer in Medieval European History, University of Tasmania The nuns of medieval Helfta occupy a special place in the history of spirituality, both as individuals and as members of their community. Anna Harrison has given us a much needed book on the writings associated with Mechtild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great. She shows how these nuns flourished in their monastic community. Her work is deeply grounded in scholarship, thoughtful, gracefully formulated, and accessible. It will be read for many years to come as a landmark in the study of spirituality. Richard Kieckhefer, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies and History, Northwestern University This book offers an astonishingly rich reconstruction of the visionary, communal, personal, and literary lives of the nuns of Helfta. It rests on a rich knowledge of their teachings and writings but understands these as born as much from communal experience and insight as the visions or writings of unusually graced individuals. Amidst a larger interpretive literature, much of it not in English, this book follows upon Caroline Walker Bynum's pioneering introduction of these materials to English-speaking readers a generation ago. It is an attractive and compelling general reflection on the lives and writings of these women, yet thoughtfully focused. Readers will find themselves immersed in its narrative flow as well as its host of illuming and learned notes. John H. Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Medieval History, Emeritus, University of Notre Dame