With a sweet, low singing of his soul, this worshipper approached the statue of the Queen of Heaven.  This is love of woman undisguised, it merely has a religious undertone.  Other secular merry-makings were adapted by Suso to his celestial mistress, as, for instance, the planting of the may-tree, and he repeatedly makes use of similes and metaphors borrowed from the chivalrous service of woman.  He frequently alludes to himself as “the servant of the Eternal Wisdom”; the meaning of this expression is apparently intentionally obscured, but it has a savour of the feminine.  Suso pictured himself, after the manner of lovers, with a chaplet of roses on his brow.  In his Life there is a passage unsurpassed by the best of the minnesingers:  “In the golden summer-time when all the tender little flowers had opened their buds, he gathered none until he had dedicated the first blossoms to his spiritual love, the gentle, flower-like, rosy maiden and Mother of God; when it seemed to him that the time had come, he culled the flowers with many loving thoughts, carried them into his cell and wove them into a garland; and after he had done so, he went into the choir, or into Our Lady’s Chapel, prostrated himself before his dear lady, and placed the sweet garland on her head, hoping that she would not scorn her servant’s offering, as she was the most wondrous flower herself, and the summer-joy of his heart.”

Doubtless we here have an analogy to the religious feeling of the mystics.  The metaphysical lover is still under the impression that he is worshipping the Mary of the Catholic Church; but as in the case of the mystic the Christ of dogma is transformed into the divine spark in his own soul, so the love of Mary has become undogmatic and pure woman-worship, the ideal of the great lovers of that age.

Another prominent Madonna-worshipper was Conrad of Wuerzburg (died 1278).  He began his career as a minnesinger, but later on entered a monastery.  He was the author of a very extensive, and in part, poetical collection of songs in praise of the Queen of Heaven.  “The Golden Smithy” is an interesting instance of the mingling of genuine metaphysical eroticism and traditional Church doctrines.  Conrad inextricably mingles all the Biblical allegories more or less applicable to Mary, the stories of the Gospels, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, etc., with his own emotions, and thus creates a world of feeling which, though in many respects exaggerated, still represents in its quaint unity something entirely novel and unique: 

     Thy glorious form,
     Though by beauty all envested,
     Never passion has suggested
     Nor has lit unholy fire
     In man’s heart, that gross desire
     From thy purity should spring.

He, too, describes the celestial Paradise as a lovely garden, in which Mary walks as queen, and he says of her celestial maidens, (perhaps a reminiscence of the mythological German swan-maidens):