Lidwina

Lidwina of Schiedam, also known as Lydwine, Liduina, or Lidwid, was born in 1380 in Schiedam in the County of Holland, in the Low Countries. Traditional accounts give her date of birth as 18 March, Palm Sunday of that year, and name her parents as Peter and Petronella; she was one of several children in a family of modest standing. In her mid-teens, commonly dated to the winter of 1395 or 1396, she fell while ice skating and suffered a serious injury to her side. The wound did not heal. An abscess developed, and over the following years she became progressively disabled, remaining bedridden for decades until her death.

Medieval vitae describe an extraordinary catalogue of physical sufferings: spreading sores, partial paralysis, loss of sight, and an inability to retain ordinary food. She was reported to have lived for long periods sustained chiefly by the Eucharist. Amid this illness she acquired a local reputation for patience, prayer, and generosity, receiving visitors who sought her counsel and intercession. Accounts of visions, ecstasies, and other mystical phenomena, including claims of stigmata, attached themselves to her during her lifetime. Later tradition associates her with the Third Order of Saint Francis.

The principal written sources for her life were composed in the fifteenth century. A relative, the priest Jan Gerlach, is credited with an early narrative; the Franciscan Johannes Brugman produced a well-known vita; and Thomas à Kempis, the Windesheim canon, also wrote a life of Lidwina. She died in Schiedam on 14 April 1433, Easter Tuesday that year, and was buried in the parish church of her native town. After the Reformation in the northern Netherlands, her relics were transferred to Brussels in the early seventeenth century; some were later returned to Schiedam.

Popular veneration of Lidwina persisted in the Low Countries. In 1890 Pope Leo XIII confirmed her cult, an act regarded as equivalent to canonization. She is commemorated on 14 April and is invoked as a patron of the chronically ill, of ice skaters, and of the town of Schiedam. Modern medical writers have sometimes suggested that her symptoms resemble multiple sclerosis, but that interpretation is retrospective and is not found in the medieval sources.