August 13

BD GERTRUDE OF ALTENBERG, VIRGIN (A.D. 1297)

Two weeks after the death in September 1227 of her husband Louis at Otranto, on his way to the crusade in the Holy Land, St Elizabeth of Hungary gave birth to their third daughter, who was christened Gertrude. Before his departure Bd Louis had agreed with his wife that their coming child should be dedicated to the service of God as a thank-offering for their years of happiness together: if a girl, with the Premonstratensian canonesses at Altenberg, near Wetzlar. Friar Conrad of Marburg, under whose direction the landgravine had put herself and who ruled her rigorously, insisted that this should be done when the child was still short of two years old, and to Altenberg the baby Gertrude was taken. When she grew up she elected to ratify the wish of her parents, by then both dead; she was received into the community, and by the age of twenty-two was abbess. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she expended the inheritance she received from her uncle on building a new church for her monastery and an almshouse for the poor; the conduct of the last she made her own personal business and, at a time when abbesses, especially royal abbesses, tended to be very great ladies indeed, she was in her works and mortifications indistinguishable from the other nuns.

During the seventh crusade Bd Gertrude, in memory of her father's chivalry, "took the cross", on behalf of herself and her community: not indeed with the obligation of going to the Holy Land, but binding themselves to support it unwearyingly by their prayers and penances. She also obtained permission for the celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in her monastery; this was in 1270 and she was in consequence one of the first to introduce it into Germany. When Dietrich the Dominican was writing his vita of St Elizabeth of Hungary in 1289 he noted that her daughter the Abbess Gertrude was still living, and she lived on for another eight years, dying in the fiftieth year of her abbacy.

See the Acta Sanctorum, August, vol. iii, and cf. the Stimmen aus Maria Laach (1893), vol. ii, pp. 415 seq. Most lives of St Elizabeth of Hungary contain some notice of Bd Gertrude.

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(Butler's Lives of the Saints, Christian Classics, 1995) wmaster@hcbc.hu