The Library
1774 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
1101–1200
14 works
1141–1151
Latin
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Twenty-six visions of creation, redemption, and the church, each described and then explained by a voice from heaven, and illustrated under her direction.
c. 1140–1160
Latin
Anonymous
A young Englishwoman refuses the marriage her parents arranged, escapes disguised as a man, and lives hidden in a tiny cell for years before founding her own community.
c. 1150–1158
Latin
Physica
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Nine books on plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, and metals, giving the properties and medicinal uses of each.
c. 1150–1160
Latin
Causae et Curae
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
A medical handbook on the humours, digestion, sleep, conception, and remedies, including frank descriptions of sexual physiology from a woman's viewpoint.
c. 1150–1170
Latin
Symphonia
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Seventy-seven liturgical songs with soaring melodies of her own composition, in a Latin full of invented images — greenness, viridity, the fiery breath of the Spirit.
c. 1152–1164
Latin
Elisabeth of Schönau · c. 1129–1164
Visions received in ecstasy and dictated to her brother, including revelations about the company of Saint Ursula that helped authenticate a vast relic discovery at Cologne.
c. 1160–1162
Latin
Aelred of Rievaulx · 1110–1167
Written for his sister, enclosed as an anchoress: practical advice on visitors and servants, then a long meditation on entering the gospel scenes in imagination.
1158–1163
Latin
Liber Vitae Meritorum
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Thirty-five vices appear and speak in their own defence, each answered by the corresponding virtue, followed by a description of the punishments awaiting each.
c. 1146–1179
Latin
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Nearly four hundred letters to popes, emperors, abbots, and ordinary people, rebuking Frederick Barbarossa and defending her nuns' right to bury an excommunicate.
1163–1174
Latin
Liber Divinorum Operum
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Ten visions on the cosmos and the human body as mirrors of each other, opening with a figure of Love holding the wheel of the world.
c. 1167–1185
Latin
Hortus Deliciarum
Herrad of Landsberg · c. 1130–1195
An illustrated compendium of theology, history, and natural science compiled by an abbess for the education of her nuns, with over three hundred miniatures.
1201–1300
13 works
c. 1213–1215
Latin
James of Vitry · c. 1160/70–1240
A married woman who persuaded her husband to live in continence, gave away their goods, and lived a life of extreme penance and eucharistic devotion outside any religious order.
c. 1225–1240
Middle English
Ancrene Wisse
Anonymous
A rule for three enclosed sisters covering prayer, temptation, confession, and daily arrangements — including whether to keep a cat and what to say to visitors at the window.
c. 1222–1236
Latin
Jordan of Saxony · c. 1190–1237
Letters from the head of an order to a nun he loved, unembarrassed about affection, missing her, and apologising for how rarely he can write.
1234–1253
Latin
Clare of Assisi · 1194–1253
Four letters to a king's daughter who left the court for a convent, urging her to gaze into the mirror of the cross and to refuse any endowment offered to her house.
c. 1230–1250
Middle Dutch
Beatrice of Nazareth · c. 1200–1268
Seven ways in which love seizes the soul, from a desire to serve purely, through a love that wounds and maddens, to a longing that cannot rest short of eternity.
c. 1240–1260
Middle Dutch
Hadewijch of Brabant · 13th century
Fourteen visions of overwhelming intensity, in which Love appears as a demanding lady and the seer is drawn into the abyss of the Trinity and sent back unsatisfied.
c. 1240–1260
Middle Dutch
Hadewijch of Brabant · 13th century
Stanzaic poems in the forms of troubadour song, and letters of spiritual direction to younger women, on the cost of loving God without consolation.
approved 1253
Latin
Clare of Assisi · 1194–1253
A rule for her own community insisting on the privilege of poverty — the right to own nothing at all — approved two days before she died.
c. 1250–1282
Middle Low German
Das fließende Licht der Gottheit
Mechthild of Magdeburg · c. 1207–c. 1282
Visions, dialogues, and love songs between the soul and God, moving between erotic longing, fierce criticism of corrupt clergy, and a tour of purgatory.
c. 1289–1302
Latin
Legatus Divinae Pietatis
Gertrude the Great · 1256–c. 1302
Visions received at Helfta, centred on the heart of Christ opened to the soul, and told with an unusual note of confidence rather than penitential dread.
c. 1291–1298
Latin
Mechthild of Hackeborn · 1241–1298
Visions recorded, at first without her knowledge, by two sisters at Helfta, structured around the liturgical year and full of images of Christ's heart and voice.
c. 1290–1300
Old French
Le Mirouer des simples ames
Marguerite Porete · d. 1310
A dialogue among Love, Reason, and the Soul describing a soul so annihilated in God that it no longer needs the virtues, having become what it loves.
c. 1292–1298
Latin
Angela of Foligno · c. 1248–1309
A widow's account of thirty steps of conversion, dictated to a scribe who repeatedly admits he cannot render what she says and is frightened by it.
1301–1400
6 works
c. 1344–1373
Latin
Revelaciones
Birgitta of Sweden · c. 1303–1373
Seven books of visions from a widowed noblewoman who moved to Rome, rebuking popes for staying in Avignon and describing the nativity in a scene that changed European painting.
c. 1370–1380
Italian
Catherine of Siena · 1347–1380
Nearly four hundred letters to popes, queens, mercenaries, and prisoners — including one telling the pope to be a man and come back to Rome.
1377–1378
Italian
Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza
Catherine of Siena · 1347–1380
A conversation between a soul and God the Father, built on the image of Christ as a bridge over the flood, and unsparing about corrupt clergy.
1385–1395
Latin
Legenda Maior
Raymond of Capua · c. 1330–1399
The life of Catherine by her confessor, including her mystical marriage, her fasting, and her interventions in papal politics.
c. 1382–1408
Middle English
Anonymous
Counsel for religious women on temptations, the withdrawal of consolation, and how to tell genuine revelations from delusion or illness.
c. 1396–1404
Latin
John of Marienwerder · 1343–1417
The life of a Prussian wife and mother of nine who, after her husband's death, was enclosed as an anchoress and reported constant conversations with Christ.
1401–1500
11 works
1401
Latin
Jean Gerson · 1363–1429
Tests for visionary claims — the visionary's humility, obedience, physical health, and whether the revelation serves anything beyond the visionary's own standing.
1405
Old French
Christine de Pizan · c. 1364–c. 1430
Reason, Rectitude, and Justice help the author build a walled city peopled by virtuous women from scripture, history, and legend, in answer to misogynist authorities.
1429–1430
Old French
Joan of Arc · c. 1412–1431
Dictated letters to the English commanders, to the citizens of towns, and to the Hussites of Bohemia, opening in the name of Jesus and Mary and signed with a cross.
1431; nullification trial 1456
Latin
The court of Rouen
The verbatim record of the interrogation of an illiterate peasant girl by university theologians, including her answers about her voices and about whether she was in God's grace.
c. 1436–1438
Middle English
Margery Kempe · c. 1373–after 1438
A brewer and mother of fourteen from Lynn dictates her life: a breakdown after childbirth, a vow of chastity negotiated with her husband, pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, and the loud weeping that made people want her burned.
c. 1438; published 1475
Italian
Catherine of Bologna · 1413–1463
Seven weapons against temptation, written by an abbess who also describes her own long assault by doubts about whether anything she believed was true.
1486–1487
Latin
Malleus Maleficarum
Heinrich Kramer · c. 1430–1505
A manual arguing that witchcraft is real, that it is chiefly a crime of women, and setting out how to identify, interrogate under torture, and execute the accused.
c. 1490–1510; recorded by disciples
Italian
Catherine of Genoa · 1447–1510
Purgatory described not as punishment but as the soul's own joyful burning away of what keeps it from a love it can already see.
c. 1480–1490
Catalan
Vita Christi
Isabel de Villena · 1430–1490
A life of Christ written by an abbess for her nuns, giving unusual prominence to the women of the gospels and to Mary's own perspective throughout.
printed 1492
Latin
Birgitta of Sweden · c. 1303–1373
The first printed edition of Birgitta's revelations, produced at Lübeck with woodcuts, which carried her visions to a European readership.
41–80 of 108 matching · 1774 in the Library