Inventing a Male Writer in Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Booke of Gostlye Grace

The translator of The Booke of Gostlye Grace, a Middle English translation of Mechtild of Hackeborn’s mystical text, presents his readers with a familiar narrative of how the mystic composed her text with the assistance of a male confessor. In the original Latin Liber Specialis Gratiae, however, two nuns act as scribes for Mechtild, composing the book in secret before permitting her to read and approve the work. The Middle English translator, I argue, deliberately changes the gender and number of nouns and pronouns and highlights this false narrative of a single male scribe in order to make the mystic’s revelations more appealing to a fifteenth-century English audience. This systematic rewriting of the text emphasizes Helfta’s role as a worshiping and reading community, rather than a writing one, with implications for the reception of Mechtild’s visions then and now.