Katharinenthal on the southern banks of the Rhine River near Diessenhofen, Switzerland. In the seemingly eternal dilemma of many students, she had trouble with her studies.
In this particular case, she was trying to learn the Latin liturgy that would be her life's work once she successfully became a nun. She struggled, and in a last ditch attempt to conquer the complexities of the liturgy, she offered up prayers to John the Evangelist, imploring him for assistance. That night Kathrin had a dream:.
In the elements of Kathrin's dream we can find much that tells us about her spirituality and the connection between that and her environment. The place in which her dream transpired, the sequence she learned, the dream book she learned it from, and the saint who taught it to her, all these come together in her vita to illustrate the complex web of relationships between belief and religious practice on the one hand, and environment on the other.
For medieval Christians, spirituality was culturally constructed, influenced by their understanding of their surroundings and the items around them, expressed physically within the spaces they inhabited, coached in the language of their everyday experiences, and tied to their senses, especially those of sight and sound.
A traditional environmental history that examined monastic women would look for the intersections between the women and nature. Such a traditional environmental history might consider the geography of women's monasteries, their influence upon the local landscape through agriculture and building projects, and how their lives were influenced by their place in that landscape.
