Blessed Beatrice of Nazareth

Beatrice of Nazareth (Dutch: Beatrijs van Nazareth; c. 1200 – 1268), also known as Beatrice of Tienen, was a Flemish Cistercian nun, visionary and mystic. Remembered chiefly through a medieval adaptation of her writings, of which the originals are now mostly lost, she is venerated as Blessed by the Catholic Church. Beatrice's treatise Seven Ways of Holy Love is an early example of bridal mysticism. Long surviving only in Latin adaptation, it was rediscovered in 1926, making it the earliest surviving work of mystical prose in Middle Dutch. Beatrice was born in Tienen in the Duchy of Brabant, part of the Holy Roman Empire, located in today's Belgium. She was the youngest of six children in a wealthy bourgeois family. When Beatrice was seven, her mother, Gertrudis, died; her father, Barthelomeus Lanio, sent her to the Beguines in nearby Zoutleeuw, where she attended the local school. Beatrice remained there for a little over a year before her father brought her home. Not long after, he sent her to become an oblate at a Cistercian convent he had founded called Bloemendael in Eerken, where she received an education in the liberal arts, as well as Latin and calligraphy. At the age of fifteen, Beatrice asked to be allowed to enter the novitiate; after being put off for a year due to her young age and delicate health, she was admitted as a novice in 1216. From 1216 to 1218, Beatrice studied manuscript production at La Ramée Abbey. There she met Ida of Nivelles, who became her close friend and spiritual advisor; the two may have continued to correspond until Ida's death in 1231. In 1218, Beatrice became one of the founding members of Maagdendaal Abbey, where she remained for three years. She returned in 1221 to Bloemendaal, where her father and her brother Wickbert had meanwhile become lay brothers. Beatrice took her permanent vows in 1225. In 1235, she left to join the Abbey of Our Lady of Nazareth, also founded by her father.