Margaret Ebner was born to a wealthy Swabian family and entered the small Dominican convent of Maria Medingen near Dillingen in Bavaria at fifteen. Around 1312 she fell desperately ill with what she calls the 'great sickness' — a thirteen-year condition that left her bedridden for long periods and partially paralysed for the remainder of her life. The illness became the matrix of her mystical experience.
From 1332 to 1348 — under the spiritual direction of Henry of Nördlingen, the Bavarian priest and travelling spiritual master who was the linchpin of the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde) network across the Rhineland and the Bodensee — Margaret kept a detailed mystical diary, the Offenbarungen ('Revelations'), the longest and most personally direct of all medieval German vernacular mystical works.
She corresponded with Henry of Nördlingen, John Tauler, and the Strasbourg-area Friends of God circle that produced the Theologia Germanica a generation later. Her 'Pater Noster of the Heart' — a meditational expansion of the Lord's Prayer — was widely circulated. She died at Medingen in 1351 and was beatified by John Paul II in 1979.