1. Of the birthplace and birth of the Virgin Lydwine, and the probity of her parents

On the western coast of Holland is situated a certain city called from a neighbouring stream1 Schiedam, which God, Who is mighty and wonderful in His saints, adorned with the wondrous and unexampled patience of a certain holy virgin. This virgin was rightly called in effect and name from her much suffering Lydwine;2 because, scourged by divers sicknesses, she became most pleasing to her heavenly Spouse Christ. By the lovers of the world, while she lived, she was deemed poor and mean ; but by the Creator of Heaven she was chosen as a most precious pearl out of the waves of the sea, and in the heavenly kingdom placed most high with the holy virgins. Her origin was noble from a military family ; but it was made more 1 The Schie. 2 Lydcn, to suffer.

ST. LYDWINE of SCHIEDAM noble and illustrious by the grace of the Holy Ghost coming upon her. Her father was called Peter ; who, although he was noble of lineage according to the dignity of the world, nevertheless by the permission of God he had come down to such poverty that in the time of Duke William, the son of Albert Duke in the County of Holland, he sought food and the necessaries of life by keeping the night watches of the city; whereby to support himself and his family decently. This Peter, when after the manner usual with men in the world he had earned his livelihood in simplicity in much toil for some years, took to wife one Petronilla, a woman of great probity and virtue, befitting his name and nobility; who by the gift of God flourished with the seed of many children, and, fearing God, .strove to rule her house religiously. She begot eight sons, and one daughter named Lydwine, whom certain Latinists call Lydia, con cerning whom the present discourse intends to relate the many marvels which God wrought by her before many witnesses. Although, therefore, being the mother of so many children she had suffered the greatest labour in the ST. LYDWINE of SCHIEDAM birth of each, nevertheless in the bring ing forth of this daughter she felt almost no pain. For having entered the Church on Palm Sunday, feeling that the time of her childbirth was at hand, with speed she returned home; and almost without any great pain she brought forth this child of election during the reading of the Lord's Passion, in the year of the Lord's Incarnation, one thousand three hundred and eighty,1 on the fifteenth of the Kalends of April2 on the morrow of Gertrude Virgin,3 in the time of Pope Urban the Sixth, the third year of his pontificate, the reverend prelate Florentius, dear both to the clergy and the whole people, sitting in the See of lower Utrecht. This daughter then, having been born in the fifth place in the order of children, and re generated in the baptism of Christ, received the name of Lydwine, or Lydia, 1 The year which also witnessed the birth of the Venerable a Kempis himself.

2 March i8th.

3 St. Gertrude of Nivelles, daughter of Pepin of Landen, Duke of Brabant and ancestor of Charle magne. Her feast is kept in the Lowlands on March i8th. This Saint must not be confounded with the Benedictine St. Gertrude, whose feast falls ST. LYDWINE of SCHIEDAM given her by her parents. She was truly an ornament among the daughters of men and a mirror of modesty; but by the ordinance of God from eternity she soon became a devout contemplator of the Lord's Passion and con formed to the crucified by many wounds of bodily sickness.