Christina von Stommeln

Christina von Stommeln, born Christina Bruso (also given as Bruzo) in 1242, was a peasant’s daughter from the village of Stommeln, a short distance northwest of Cologne in the Rhineland. Her father was named Heinrich and her mother Hilla. The principal source for her life is the Dominican Peter of Dacia (Petrus de Dacia), who knew her personally and compiled a vita together with letters describing her experiences. According to that tradition she was devout from childhood and received visions of Christ from an early age, sometimes placed in her fifth or tenth year. Around the age of thirteen, about 1255, she left home for Cologne in order to live among the Beguines, communities of laywomen who pursued poverty, chastity, and prayer without entering a canonical religious order.

While in Cologne she underwent a long period of spiritual trial. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts attribute to her diabolical persecutions, bodily sufferings, and mystical phenomena such as ecstasy, alleged stigmata, and a sense of mystical marriage with Christ. These episodes made her both an object of local attention and a figure of controversy. In the later 1260s she met Peter of Dacia, a Dominican from Gotland then studying theology in Cologne. He became her confessor and interpreter, visiting her, corresponding with her, and recording what he believed to be her supernatural experiences. Their association, which continued after he left the Rhineland, is unusually well documented for a thirteenth-century holy woman of modest social rank.

Christina left the Cologne beguinage and returned to Stommeln around 1269. She lived again under her parents’ roof and, after their deaths, in other village households, remaining a Beguine in manner of life rather than becoming a cloistered nun. She refused marriage and lived in celibacy and austerity. Peter of Dacia returned to visit her on later journeys and last saw her in the 1280s; he died in 1289. In Stommeln she continued to be credited with visions, combats with demons, and other extraordinary signs, witnessed in part by local clergy. She died in the village on 6 November 1312.

She was buried at Stommeln. Regional devotion developed around her tomb, and in later centuries her relics were translated for safekeeping, eventually being placed in Jülich, where they have remained. The Catholic Church confirmed her immemorial cult, and she was beatified by Pope Pius X in 1908. Her feast day is 6 November. Historians value the dossier assembled by Peter of Dacia as an important witness to Beguine spirituality, female mysticism, and the pastoral world of the thirteenth-century Rhineland, even while treating the more spectacular miracle claims with the caution due to hagiographic sources.