are
the great leaders of the mystic movement which, seizing especially the
minds and souls of women, transfers the nature of earthly minne to
heavenly minne.

In this connection, we must mention a princely woman whose
self-abnegating virtue rises well-nigh to the superhuman: Elizabeth of
Thuringia. She was a daughter of King Andrew of Hungary, and in 1218 was
married to Ludwig of Thuringia, after whose death she was treated most
brutally by her brothers-in-law. Her confessor, the monk Konrad of
Marburg, a dark fanatic, who tried to introduce the Inquisition the
horrible Spanish institution into Germany, and who was killed in 1233 by
a band of robber knights, tortured the pious princess with his gloomy
ascetics. This princess devoted her life to charity and noble deeds for
the poor and sick, whom she nursed and tended with her own hands. She
died at the age of twenty-six, after having rejected the suit of the
great and romantic Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II.; she is said to
have earned her living during her last years by spinning wool. The saga
has illumined the fame of that saintly royal woman with the aureole of
glory and affection.

Pious women nursed the entire mystic movement. Mathilda of Magdeburg
(1277) describes in her fragmentary and profoundly passionate
revelations the mingling of the soul with God. Many ecstatic women
followed her. Visions became a fashion in the fourteenth century. The
ecstatic state of passionate love for the divine which shook her frame
was considered the union with God, and the blissful rapture of one nun
wrought a holy contagion among all her sisters. All the cloisters were
drawn into the nervous whirlpool of religio-sensuous emotions. Ladies
who formerly found satisfaction in the charms of the minnesong retired
to the cloisters and passed through all the stages of the emotions of
love toward the divinity, the Creator of all life.

Such was the period of the Minnesingers, and such the reaction against
them. The cultural forces of the epoch can be expressed only by
describing the literary trend of the events of life. They are
correlative and interdependent. If, therefore, this chapter should
appear to the reader to be unduly literary rather than historical, we
can defend it by stating the fact that this was an era of song, and that
this literature bears everywhere the stamp of truth. It is the faithful
reflection of an infinitely rich time from which only the brilliant
melodies o