Note from the Translator's Introduction

Although today virtually unknown, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary circulated in two Latin and two Middle English versions, as well as in French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. Elsewhere I have discussed the problems of their authorship, date, and original language and have argued that the original text was written in Middle High German, probably by the Dominican nun Elsbet Stagel, Suso's spiritual daughter and biographer, and then translated (twice) into Latin. Further, I have suggested that the "Elizabeth of Hungary" with whom it claims to originate is not the popular St. Elizabeth of Thuringia (d. 1231) but her obscure great-niece, Elizabeth of Tob (d. 1336), like her aunt the daughter of a king of Hungary, who spent her short life as an enclosed Dominican nun in the convent of Tob, near Wintertur in Switzerland.