Everything about Matilda Of Ringelheim totally explained
Saint Mathilda or
Saint Matilda (c. 895 –
March 14,
968) was the wife of
Henry I, King of the
East Franks and the first ruler of the Ottonian or
Liudolfing dynasty. Their son, Otto, succeeded his father as
King (and later Emperor) Otto I.
Our knowledge of St. Mathilda's life comes largely from brief mentions in the
Res Gestae Saxonicae (
Deeds of the Saxons) of the monastic historian
Widukind of Corvey, and from two sacred biographies (the
vita antiquior and
vita posterior) written, respectively, c. 974 and c. 1003.
St. Mathilda was the daughter of the
Westphalian count Dietrich and his wife Reinhild, and her biographers traced her ancestry back to the famed Saxon hero,
Blessed Widukind (c. 730 - 807). As a young girl, she was sent to the convent of Herford, where her reputation for beauty and virtue is said to have attracted the attention of
Duke Otto of Saxony, who betrothed her to his son,
Henry the Fowler. They were married in
909 and had three sons and two daughters:
- Hadwig, wife of the West Frankish duke Hugh the Great
- King (and later Emperor) Otto I
- Gerberga, wife of (1) Duke Giselbert of Lotharingia and (2) King Louis IV of France
- Henry I, Duke of Bavaria
- Archbishop Brun of Cologne
After Henry the Fowler's death in 936, St. Mathilda remained at the court of her son Otto, until a cabal of royal advisors is reported to have accused her of weakening the royal treasury in order to pay for her charitable activities. After a brief exile at the Westphalian monastery of
Enger, St. Mathilda was brought back to court at the urging of Otto I's first wife, the Anglo-Saxon princess
Queen Edith.
St. Mathilda was celebrated for her devotion to prayer and almsgiving; her first biographer depicted her (in a passage indebted to the sixth-century
vita of the Frankish queen
Radegund by
Venantius Fortunatus) leaving her husband's side in the middle of the night and sneaking off to church to pray. St. Mathilda founded many
religious institutions, including the canonry of
Quedlinburg,
Saxony-Anhalt, a center of
Ottonian ecclesiastical and secular life and the burial place of St. Mathilda and her husband, and the convent of
Nordhausen,
Thuringia, likely the source of at least one of her
vitae. She was later
canonized, with her cult largely confined to
Saxony and
Bavaria. St. Mathilda's
feast day is on
March 14.
Sources
Bernd Schütte, ed., Die Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilda (MGH SSRG 66) (Hahn, 1994)
Sean Gilsdorf, Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid
(Catholic University of America Press, 2004)
Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens. Sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté féminine autour de l'an mil (Thorbecke, 1986).
Winfrid Glocker, Die Verwandten der Ottonen und ihre Bedeutung in der Politik (Böhlau Verlag, 1989), 7-18.
Karl Schmid, "Die Nachfahren Widukinds," Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 20 (1964): 1-47.
Bernd Schütte, Untersuchungen zu den Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilde (Hahn, 1994).
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