The Spiritual Dialogue Schwester Katrei

A Testimony of the Close Relation between Beguines and Dominicans in Fourteenth-Century Strasbourg

Abstract

This contribution discusses the historical background of the dialogue-text, Schwester Katrei, written in Middle High German in the early fourteenth century in Strasbourg. The fictive dialogue presents a long conversation between the two central characters―a lay woman who is probably a beguine, and a Dominican priest who gives her spiritual direction―and their spiritual growth until their arrival at the union with God. Due to its bold mystical character, this text has been studied mainly within the scholarship on medieval heretics (especially the so-called “Free Spirits”) and on Meister Eckhart's reception in folk religious literature. However, given that this anonymous text makes almost no reference to any proper names nor historical events, little is known about the origins of this text. This paper analyzes the descriptions of the two figures in the dialogue, and, by looking at a number of historical sources, attempts to discover a link between those descriptions and the beguine movement in fourteenth-century Strasbourg under the persecution by the church authorities of the city. It is within this context that the paper also examines how the Dominicans tried to defend the legitimacy of this lay spiritual movement and, by so doing, to retrieve the founding ideals of their own order.