Born Matilda von Hackeborn-Wippra, in 1240 or 1241, she belonged to one of the noblest and most powerful Thuringian families; her sister was the illustrious Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn.

Mechtilde considered so fragile at birth, that the attendants, fearing she might die unbaptized, hurried her off to the priest who was preparing to say Mass.

This child most certainly will not die, but she will become a saintly religious in whom God will work many wonders, and she will end her days in a good old age.

"[1] When Mechtilde was seven years old, having been taken by her mother on a visit to her elder sister Gertrude, at that time a nun in the Cistercian monastery in Rodersdorf, she became so enamoured of the cloister that her parents yielded to her requests and allowed her to enter the alumnate.

[1] Ten years later (1258) she followed her sister, who, now abbess, had transferred the monastery to an estate at Helfta given her by her brothers Louis and Albert.

[1] She held the office of domina cantrix until her death, presiding over the sacred music in her convent and training the choir.

"[4] While Julian of Norwich (1342–about 1416) is the most famous English author to employ the idea of God as mother, the concept did not originate with her.

"[8] One of the visions recounted by Mechtilde states that Jesus, having appeared to her, commanded her to love him ardently, and to honor his Sacred Heart in the Blessed Sacrament as much as possible.

He gave her his Sacred Heart as a pledge of his love, as a place of refuge during her life and as her consolation at the hour of her death.

Pope Francis pays tribute to Mechtilde as one of a number of "holy women" who have "spoken of resting in the heart of the Lord as the source of life and interior peace".

[2] Immediately after her death it was made public, and copies were rapidly multiplied, owing chiefly to the widespread influence of the Friars Preachers.

Giovanni Boccaccio tells how, a few years after the death of Mechtilde, the book of her revelations was brought to Florence and popularized under the title of La Laude di donna Matelda, promoting the devotion to the divine mercy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Four centuries later, printed chapbooks in the emblem style had made the devotion so widespread in Europe,[12] even in lands where the Protestant reformed churches were in the ascendency, that it was elevated under this name to a universal feast on the liturgical calendar with Mass and Office proper composed by the French cleric John Eudes.

(Another female religious, Mary Margaret Alacoque, spread the devotion among urban illiterate lay faithful of France with numerous testimonies of her supernatural visions of Christ's passion imagined as an inflamed pierced heart, encircled with thorns.)

After ascending seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, on each of which the process of purification is carried on, Dante, in Canto xxvii, hears a voice singing: "Venite, benedicti patris mei"; then later, in Canto xxviii, there appears to him on the opposite bank of the mysterious stream a lady, solitary, beautiful, and gracious.

Mechtilde's model of the soul's ascent provided the inspiration for his poetic treatment of the Mountain of Purgatory's seven terraces, one for each virtue (or more accurately one each for the purging—or detachment from—each of the seven vices)[14] at the top of which she appears in his closing cantos of the second book of his Divine Comedy.

For another among many points of resemblance between the two writers compare Purgatorio, Canto xxxi, where Dante is drawn by Matelda through the mysterious stream with pt.

There is a gilded wooden statue of Mechtilde of Hackborn at the side chapel dedicated to St. Scholastica in the Benedictine Abbey church at Tyniec, Poland.