Gertrude the Great
January 6, 1256 AD — c. 1302 AD · Feast day: November 16
Gertrude the Great entered the Benedictine Monastery of Helfta at age five and never left — yet from that cloister she produced some of the most theologically precise mystical writing of medieval Germany. At twenty-five, a vision of Christ shattered her pride in learning and turned her entirely toward the Sacred Heart, making her its first great systematic theologian and the only woman saint to bear the title 'the Great.'