This paper traces the special notions of time and temporality prevalent in the late-medieval Dominican convent of Engelthal in Bavaria. In the fourteenth century, the convent was an unparalleled centre of mystical literature. Its inhabitants produced a large body of vernacular texts concerned with their experience of God. Visions and other spiritual gifts were either recorded in the form of first-person accounts or as vitae of now-renowned figures such as the nuns Christine Ebner (1277–1356) and Adelheid Langmann (1306–1375) as well as the convent's chaplain, Friedrich Sunder (1254–1328). Emerging from a monastic community, these texts not only reflect on a life structured around liturgical time models, but also on the medieval ideas of salvation history and the fundamental distinction between time and eternity.

In 1980, Siegfried Ringler put Engelthal on the map of literary studies, followed by Leonard P. Hindsley, who introduced the convent and its writings to English-speaking scholars in 1998. The most comprehensive study of the convent's literary production and its particular spirituality was published by Johanna Thali in 2003. Recently, Daniela Fuhrmann has suggested time as a crucial narratological category with regard to the literary works written by Dominican nuns, including those of Engelthal. Focusing on time as a structural element of storytelling, she makes important narratological observations about narrated time in such texts. However, by doing so she had to leave aside how time is treated as a subject of narration itself. She suggests that there is a certain notion of temporality at work: ‘Glaubt man den Offenbarungen, so kann sich innerhalb des Klosterraums Lebenszeit in Gnadenzeit verwandeln’ [If one believes the revelations, life-time can change into time of grace within the convent space]. Yet it is never explained what ‘Gnadenzeit’ [time of grace] might mean. This gap is the point of departure for the following deliberations about temporality in Engelthal literature. Whereas Fuhrmann focuses on a corpus of similar texts by different authors, the aim of this paper is to look at different types of devotional literature that are associated with the same person, namely Christine Ebner.

Born in 1277 as the tenth child of a patrician family in Nuremberg, Christine Ebner took her vows and entered Engelthal at the age of twelve.