Agnes Blannbekin

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Agnes Blannbekin (* around 1250; † May 10, 1315 in Vienna ) was an Austrian Beguine , Franciscan of the Third Order and a mystic .

Life

Agnes Blannbekin was a farmer's daughter who was probably born around 1250 in Plambach, today the cadastral parish of Hofstetten-Grünau . She learned to read but could not write. She felt a religious vocation early on and lived an ascetic life . In Vienna she joined the Beguines, but it is not known whether she lived in a community. Later she was a Franciscan Tertiary .

Her mortifications included extreme fasting (since childhood) and self-flagellation. She scourged herself bloody with a branch of gorse. She also drained because she experienced her blood as hot and boiling. She told her confessor , a Franciscan Minorite , who was not known by name , of visions and ecstasies , which he wrote down beginning in 1290. During her "divine visitations" she experienced heat feelings in her chest, which spread over the whole body and burned her "not painful, but sweet". Depressive moods are indicated. Often she varied the theme of the "evil priest":

She said at the time that all those communicating felt this sweetness. And when she heard that some priests were indulging in the lust of the flesh, she wondered how they could ever despise such a great sweetness and enjoy such filth.

In these notes it is also said that the sanctum praeputium - the foreskin of Jesus Christ - appeared on her tongue during communion :

And see, immediately she felt a tiny membrane on her tongue, like an egg membrane, with the greatest sweetness, which she swallowed. After swallowing it, she felt the membrane on her tongue again with sweetness, as before, and swallowed it again. And this happened to her a hundred times. (...) And she was told that the foreskin rose with the Lord on the day of the resurrection. The sweetness of tasting this skin was so great that she felt a sweet change in all the limbs and parts of the limbs.

Because of such fantasies and visions, the Vita et Revelationes were later placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum .

Their lives were determined by the church year and prayers . She tried to take part in as many masses as possible during the day and visited church after church in Vienna. After masses she used to approach the altar and kiss it, which was understood as a provocation because women were not allowed to stay at the altar. In one of her visions she saw herself as a young woman dancing around an altar.

The monk Ermenrich copied her confessor's manuscript in 1318. When Bernhard Pez published the Vita et Revelationes in 1731 , they were placed on the index. It was not until 1994 that the Life and Revelations of the Viennese Beguines Agnes Blannbekin († 1315) was published again with a translation.

While Blannbekin is remembered today for her visions, during her lifetime she was best known as the pastor of the poor and serf subjects.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Blannbekin (1994), pp. 185, 189.. 149 u. 191 u. 195 ff.
  2. ↑ See for example Blannbekin (1994), p. 191 and 195 ff.
  3. ↑ Blannbekin (1994), p. 125 f.
  4. ↑ Blannbekin (1994), p. 117 f.
  5. ^ Perrin, David B .: Women Christian Mystics . Speak to Our Times. Sheed & Ward, Franklin (Wisconsin) 2001, ISBN 1-58051-095-7 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
personal data
SURNAME Blannbekin, Agnes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian beguine and mystic
DATE OF BIRTH around 1250
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1315
Place of death Vienna