St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1240/41–1298) was the younger sister of the abbess of Helfta and the chantress of the great Saxon Cistercian monastery. She had a beautiful singing voice and from her seventh year was preparing for the religious life. Throughout her adult years she received the same kind of visionary intimacy with Christ that Gertrude (her companion) did — though Mechtilde's were more particularly Eucharistic, focusing on the Sacred Heart as the locus of divine love.
Her revelations were collected by Gertrude and another sister into the Book of Special Grace (Liber specialis gratiae). The work was widely circulated in medieval Europe and is one of the sources Dante drew on for the figure of Matelda in the Earthly Paradise of the Divine Comedy (Purgatorio XXVIII). The Helfta tradition — Mechtilde, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Gertrude — represents the high point of medieval German women's mystical theology.