St Gertrude the Great
St Gertrude the Great Formative years St. Gertrude the Great was born in Eisleben, Thuringia, in the Holy Roman Empire (the hometown of Martin Luther c.1 483-1546, in present-day Germany) on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, 1256, to a Saxon family of nobility, during the Golden Century of the Medieval Age, when the Church was rich in both scholars and mystics including St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1189-1226), St. Clare of Assisi (c. 1194-1253), St. Dominic (c. 1170-1221), St. Albert the Great (c. late 1190s - 1280) and St. Bonaventure (c. 1221-1274). At the tender age of five, she began to attend a Cistercian monastery school in Helfta in Saxony under the governance of Abbess Gertrude of Hackerborn. She was described as a lovable, quick-witted child by the nuns. A gifted student she studied the sciences of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music), the foundation of Western ed...