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Biography

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Notburga of Rattenberg, also called Notburga of Eben, was a Christian laywoman of the County of Tyrol whose memory was preserved in late medieval and early modern Alpine devotion. Tradition dates her life to the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and places her birth at Rattenberg on the Inn River, in the region that is now the Austrian state of Tyrol. She is described as coming from a poor family and as having entered service while still young as a cook or kitchen maid in the castle of Count Henry of Rattenberg (Heinrich von Rottenburg). In that household she became known for distributing leftover food to the needy of the neighbourhood, a practice that later legend made the foundation of her reputation for mercy toward the poor.

Hagiographical accounts relate that her mistress forbade her to give food away from the castle stores. Notburga continued her almsgiving in secret. When she was stopped on the road and commanded to show what she carried in her apron, the food is said to have been miraculously changed into wood shavings or chips, so that her charity was hidden from her accusers. Whether because of this incident or a related quarrel, she was dismissed from the count's service. She then found work with a peasant at Eben, near Lake Achen (Achensee). There the second of her two principal miracles is located. While she was harvesting grain, the time came to cease work for Sunday rest. Her employer ordered her to keep cutting. Notburga threw her sickle into the air; according to the legend it remained suspended on a sunbeam until the holy day was over, a sign taken to mean that God upheld her observance of Sunday against the demands of the harvest.

Later versions of the life add that after the death of the countess the count's affairs declined, that he recalled Notburga, and that she served him faithfully until his death, after which she returned to Eben. She died in the early fourteenth century; the year 1313 is the date transmitted by the cult. She is said to have asked burial at Eben. When her body was placed on a wagon drawn by oxen, the animals, left without a driver, went of their own accord to the church of Saint Rupert at Eben, where she was interred. Her relics have remained there, and the parish church of Eben am Achensee became the centre of a regional pilgrimage. Images of Notburga typically show her with a sickle, sometimes hanging on a ray of light, and with an apron or a bunch of keys, the attributes of a servant.

Historical documentation for her biography is late and legendary in character; no contemporary charter or chronicle gives an independent outline of her career. What can be said with confidence is that by the later Middle Ages a servant woman associated with Rattenberg and Eben was honoured in Tyrol as a model of charity and of Sunday observance, and that her cult was especially strong among peasants and domestic workers. Pope Pius IX confirmed the public ecclesiastical cult in 1862. Her feast is celebrated on 14 September. She is invoked as a patron of servants, peasants, farmers and agricultural labour, of the poor, and of the Tyrol.

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