Clare Kirchberger

Clare Kirchberger (born Clara Kirchberger; 22 September 1889 – 6 November 1960) was an Anglican nun, medievalist and librarian, who edited and translated several works of Christian mysticism.

Life

Kirchberger was born in in 1889 in London,[1] the daughter of German emigrants Karl Kirchberger and Emma Reis Kirchberger. Her father was a merchant with the East India Company.[2] She was educated at South Hampstead High School and Somerville College, Oxford. In 1912, she was baptised into the Anglican faith.[3] That same year, she was the only woman to obtain a first class in Modern Languages in the Oxford final examinations.[4] She was Assistant Lecturer in Modern Languages at Girton College in 1913–14. Around 1914, she joined the All Saints' Anglican Sisterhood at St Albans.[5]

Kirchberger's 1927 adaptation to modern English of The Mirror of Simple Souls was published in the Orchard Spiritual Classics series, "part of the rediscovery by a newly reinvigorated English Roman Catholic intelligentsia of what they saw as their own pre-Reformation heritage".[6] Like Evelyn Underhill before her, Kirchberger assumed its French author was male. She tentatively identified its Middle English translator as Michael of Northburgh.[6]

Works
  • (ed.) A Mirror of Simple Souls. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1927.
  • 'A Link with Little Gidding', Theology, Vol. 52, Issue 350 (1949), pp. 294–298
  • 'The Cleansing of Man's Soul', Life of the Spirit, Vol. 4, No. 43 (January 1950), pp. 290–295.
  • (ed.) The goad of love: an unpublished translation of the Stimulus amoris, formerly attributed to St. Bonaventura , tr. by Walter Hilton. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.
  • (ed.) The coasts of the country; an anthology of prayer drawn from the early English spiritual writers. London: Harvill Press, 1952.
  • 'Some Notes on the Ancrene Riwle', Dominican Studies, Vol. 7 (1954), pp. 215–38
  • (tr., with introduction and notes) Selected writings on contemplation by Richard of Saint Victor. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
  • (ed.) Spiritual exercises by William Perin, O.P.. With a foreword by Vincent McNabb. London: Blackfriars, 1957.

References
  1. 1939 England and Wales Register
  2. 1891 England Census
  3. Oxfordshire, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813–1915
  4. 'University Intelligence', The Times, 26 June 1912, p.12; 'University Intelligence', The Times, 27 June 1912, p.6.
  5. Girton College Register: 1869-1946, p.646.
  6. Nicholas Watson (1996). "Melting into God the English Way: Deification in the Middle English Version of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples âmes anienties". In Rosalynn Voaden (ed.). Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-medieval England. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 23–. ISBN 978-0-85991-425-3.


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