Elizabeth of Reute

Elizabeth of Reute, known in her own region as Elisabeth Achler and popularly as Gute Beth (Good Beth), was born on 25 November 1386 at Waldsee in Upper Swabia, within the Holy Roman Empire. She was the daughter of Hans Achler, a weaver of modest means, and his wife Anna. Near-contemporary accounts, above all the vita composed by her confessor Konrad Kügelin, present her as a child of unusual piety who practiced fasting and other austerities from an early age. Her father at first resisted her desire for a consecrated life and hoped to see her married, a conflict of a kind often recorded in the lives of late medieval holy women of the region.

In the opening years of the fifteenth century she was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis. Together with several other tertiaries she took up residence at Reute, a village near Waldsee, where the women formed a small enclosed community living according to the tertiary rule under Kügelin’s spiritual direction. Their manner of life combined poverty, manual work, and contemplative prayer and resembled that of recluses more than that of a fully canonical monastery. Elizabeth remained in this community for the rest of her life and never married.

She acquired a wide local reputation for extreme fasting, and witnesses claimed that for long periods she took little or no ordinary food, living principally on the Eucharist. She was also reported to have received the stigmata and to have undergone visions, raptures, and periods of prophetic insight. At the same time she was remembered for practical charity toward the poor and the sick, which earned her the affectionate title Gute Beth. Chronic illness marked her later years. She died at Reute on 25 November 1420, the day of her thirty-fourth birthday.

Kügelin composed her biography soon after her death, and a local cult developed around her tomb in the church of the Reute community. Veneration remained largely confined to Swabia until the eighteenth century. In 1766 Pope Clement XIII confirmed her immemorial cult, an act of equivalent beatification. She has not been canonized. In the Catholic Church she is commemorated as Blessed Elizabeth of Reute on 25 November, and her relics continue to be venerated at Reute.