Elisabeth was born in 1129 to a German Catholic noble family of the Rhineland. At age 12 (in 1141) she was given as a child oblate to the Benedictine double-monastery of Schönau im Taunus — under the governance of the Benedictine community of Schönau in the Rhineland mountains near St. Goarshausen.
She took the Benedictine vows at the age of 18 (1147) and became magistra of the women's community at Schönau around 1157. Her paternal half-brother Egbert would subsequently become Abbot of Schönau (1166–1184) — and the close spiritual-and-familial collaboration between Elisabeth and Egbert produced the principal literary collection of her mystical writings.
Beginning in 1152, Elisabeth experienced a series of ecstatic visions and angelic visitations — documented by her brother Egbert in three principal collections: the Liber Visionum (Book of Visions), the Liber Viarum Dei (Book of the Ways of God), and the Liber Revelationum de Sacro Exercitu Virginum Coloniensium (Book of Revelations on the Sacred Army of the Virgins of Cologne) — the principal hagiographical-elaboration of the legend of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne (a substantial late-12th-century development of the original 4th-century cult of Ursula).
Her visionary writings circulated widely in the medieval Catholic mystical-literary tradition — over 150 surviving medieval manuscripts of the Liber Visionum, one of the most widely-copied medieval women's mystical texts.
Most personally, Elisabeth maintained a substantial correspondence with St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179, her elder contemporary, the principal Rhineland visionary of the 12th century) — producing the deep spiritual-correspondence friendship between the two principal Rhineland women mystics of the High Medieval period. Hildegard counselled Elisabeth on the question of the extreme visionary-ecstatic experiences and the temptations of visionary self-importance.
Elisabeth died at Schönau on June 18, 1164, at the age of 36. Her name was entered into the Roman Martyrology under Pope Sixtus V in 1584, institutionally confirming her immemorial Rhineland Catholic cult.