Margareta Ebner

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Margaretha Ebner (1291 - 1351) was a German mystic and visionary.

Born of rich parents at Donauwörth, in 1291, she received a thorough classical education in her home, and later entered the Dominican order convent at Maria-Medingen near Dillingen, where she was received in 1306. From 1312 she was dangerously ill for three years; subsequently, for a period of nearly seven years, she was most of the time at the point of death. Hence she could exercise her desire for penance only by abstinence from wine, fruit, and the bath. On her return from home, whither she had gone during the campaign of Louis the Bavarian, her nurse died, and Margaretha grieved inconsolably until Henry of Nördlingen assumed her spiritual direction in 1332. The correspondence that passed between them is the first collection of this kind in the German language. At his command she wrote with her own hand a full account of all her revelations and intercourse with the Infant Christ, as well as all answers she had received from Him, even in her sleep. This diary is preserved in a manuscript of the year 1353 at Medingen. She also had extensive correspondence with Johannes Tauler. From her letters and diary we learn that she never abandoned her loyalty to Louis the Bavarian, whose soul she learned in a vision had been saved.