Mechthild, a name like a crocheted doily: probably born over eight hundred years ago, died in Helfta, heard the voice of God shortly before her twelfth birthday and allowed it to guide her over all obstacles. The only thing that remains of Mechthild of Magdeburg is what is perhaps the “most daring erotic poetry” of the Middle Ages, her seven-volume book The Flowing Light of Divinity, a work that shimmers between genres, in which song and counter-song alternate with dialogues, visions, autobiographical passages and criticism of monastic life and the Church. But not even this book has survived in its original form. So someone else could have written her texts. She could have been someone else entirely, could never have written. Or much earlier. Even now. The only thing that is certain is her love for courtly love, the combative love of a strong woman. In search of this distant sister, a woman of today sets out to piece together Mechthild's life story where her tracks are lost – with her own.
In her sparkling novel The Book of Mechthild, Julia Koll reflects the story of two female lovers across the ages, thus giving the world a new touch of mysticism.
Novel
Julia Koll, born in Göttingen in 1975, is a Protestant theologian and director of the Protestant Academy Loccum. Since completing her doctoral thesis on the relationship between bodily experience and religious experience, she has been working at the intersection of science and practice, spirituality and culture, and most recently studied literary writing in Hildesheim. She lives in Hanover. The Book of Mechthild is her first novel.
