"This volume, containing the Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles and other medieval Cistercian saints, makes a major contribution to our understanding of monastic life and thought in the High Middle Ages. I am certain that it will be welcomed in the scholarly world and will be used by generations of professors, graduate students, and others interested in medieval spirituality." —Brian Patrick McGuire, author of Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation

“ The Lives stemming from the thirteenth-century southern Low Countries, an area corresponding roughly to modern Belgium or the medieval diocese of Liège, form a canon probably unique in the annals of hagiography. . . . These saints were collectively celebrated not for their outstanding leadership, brilliant preaching or stupendous miracles, but for the intensity of their inner lives. . . . Whether we find this canon of saints’ Lives attractive or alien, annoying or enticing, will depend very much on our own sensibilities. But the cantor of Villers confronts us with a distinctive, hitherto little known voice that deserves at last to be heard.” —from the Preface by Barbara Newman

In the early thirteenth century the diocese of Liège witnessed an extraordinary religious revival, known to us largely through the abundant corpus of saints’ lives from that region. Cistercian monks and nuns, along with beguines and recluses, formed close-knit networks of spiritual friendship that easily crossed the boundaries of gender, religious status, and even language. Holy women such as Mary of Oignies and Christina the Astonishing were held up by their biographers as models of orthodoxy and miraculous powers. Less familiar but no less fascinating are the male saints of the region. In this volume Martinus Cawley has translated a trilogy of Cistercian lives composed by the same hagiographer, Goswin, who was a monk and cantor at the celebrated abbey of Villers in Brabant. Although all three of these saints were connected with the same order, their versions of holiness represent a study in contrasts, from the compassionate nun Ida of Nivelles, remarkable for her Eucharistic raptures, to the fiercely ascetic lay brother Arnulf, to the gentle monk Abundus, renowned for his deep liturgical and Marian piety. The title Send Me God derives from a revealing catch-phrase that devout men and women used to request prayers from their spiritual friends.

Send Me God is published as part of the Brepols Medieval Women Series.