MATILDA (1046-1115), countess or margravine of Tuscany, popularly known as the Great Countess, was descended from a noble Lombard family. Her great-grandfather, Athone of Canossa, had been made count of Modena and Reggio by the emperor Otto I., and her grandfather had, in addition, acquired Mantua, Ferrara and Brescia. Her own father, Boniface II., the Pious, secured Tuscany, the duchy of Spoleto, the county of Parma, and probably that of Cremona; and was loyal to the emperor until Henry plotted against him. Through the murder of Count Boniface in 1052 and the death of her older brother and sister three years later, Matilda was left, at the age of nine, sole heiress to the richest estate in Italy. She received an excellent education under the care of her mother, Beatrice of Bar, the daughter of Frederick of Lorraine and aunt of Henry III., who, after a brief detention in Germany by the emperor, married Godfrey IV. of Lorraine, brother of Pope Stephen IX. (1057-1058). Thenceforth Matilda’s lot was cast against the emperor in the great struggle over investiture, and for over thirty years she maintained the cause of the successive pontiffs, Gregory VII., Victor III., Urban II., Paschal II., with varying fortune, but with undaunted resolution. She aided the pope against the Normans in 1074, and in 1075 attended the synod at which Guibert was condemned and deprived of the archbishopric of Ravenna. Her hereditary fief of Canossa was the scene (Jan. 28, 1077) of the celebrated penance of Henry IV. before Gregory VII. She provided an asylum for Henry’s second wife, Praxides, and urged his son Conrad to revolt against his father. In the course of the protracted struggle her villages were plundered, her fortresses demolished, and Pisa and Lucca temporarily lost, but she remained steadfast in her allegiance, and, before her death, had, by means of a league of Lombard cities which she formed, recovered all her possessions. The donation of her estates to the Holy See, originally made in 1077 and renewed on the 17th of November 1102, though never fully consummated on account of imperial opposition, constituted the greater part of the temporal dominion of the papacy. Matilda was twice married, first to Godfrey V. of Lorraine, surnamed the Humpbacked, who was the son of her step-father and was murdered on the 26th of February 1076; and secondly to the 17-year-old Welf V. of Bavaria, from whom she finally separated in 1095—both marriages of policy, which counted for little in her life. Matilda was an eager student: she spoke Italian, French and German fluently, and wrote many Latin letters; she collected a considerable library; she supervised an edition of the Pandects of Justinian; and Anselm of Canterbury sent her his Meditations. She combined her devotion to the papacy and her learning with very deep personal piety. She died after a long illness at Bodeno, near Modena, on the 24th of July 1115, and was buried in the Benedictine church at Polirone, whence her remains were taken to Rome by order of Urban VIII. in 1635 and interred in St Peter’s.
The contemporary record of Matilda’s life in rude Latin verse, by her chaplain Domnizone (Donizo or Domenico), is preserved in the Vatican Library. The best edition is that of Bethmann in the Monumenta germ. hist. scriptores, xii. 348-409. The text, with an Italian translation, was published by F. Davoli under the title Vita della granda contessa Matilda di Canossa (Reggio nell’ Emilia 1888 seq.).
See A. Overmann, Gräfin Mathilde von Tuscien; ihre Besitzungen ... u. ihre Regesten (Innsbruck, 1895); A. Colombo, Una Nuova vita delta contessa Matilda in R. accad. d. sci. Atti, vol. 39 (Turin, 1904); L. Tosti, La Contessa Matilda ed i romani pontefici (Florence, 1859); A. Pannenborg, Studien zur Geschichte der Herzogin Matilde von Canossa (Göttingen, 1872); F. M. Fiorentini, Memorie della Matilda (Lucca, 1756); and Nora Duff, Matilda of Tuscany (1910).
(C. H. Ha.)
MATINS (Fr. matines, med. Lat. matutinae, sc. possibly vigiliae, morning watches; from matutinus, “belonging to the morning”), a word now only used in an ecclesiastical sense for one of the canonical hours in the Roman Breviary, originally intended to be said at midnight, but sometimes said at dawn, after which “lauds” were recited or sung. In the modern Roman Catholic Church, outside monastic services, the office is usually said on the preceding afternoon or evening. The word is also used in the Roman Catholic Church for the public service held on Sunday mornings before the mass (see [Breviary]; and [Hours, Canonical]). In the Church of England since the Reformation matins is used for the order of public morning prayer.
MATLOCK, a market town in the western parliamentary division of Derbyshire, England, on the river Derwent, 17 m. N. by W. of Derby on the Midland railway. Pop. (1901), of urban district of Matlock, 5979; of Matlock Bath and Scarthin Nick, 1819. The entire township includes the old village of Matlock, the commercial and manufacturing district of Matlock Bridge, and the fashionable health resorts of Matlock Bath and Matlock Bank. The town possesses cotton, corn and paper mills, while in the vicinity there are stone-quarries and lead mines. A peculiar local industry is the manufacture of so-called “petrified” birds’ nests, plants, and other objects. These are steeped in water from the mineral springs until they become encrusted with a calcareous deposit which gives them the appearance of fossils. Ornaments fashioned out of spar and stalactites have also a considerable sale.
Matlock Bath, one and a half miles south of Matlock, having a separate railway station, overlooks the narrow and precipitous gorge of the Derwent, and stands in the midst of woods and cliffs, deriving its name from three medicinal springs, which first became celebrated towards the close of the 17th century. They were not known to the Romans, although lead-mining was carried on extensively in the district in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. The mean temperature of the springs is 68° F. Extensive grounds have been laid out for public use; and in the neighbourhood there are several fine stalactite caverns.
Sheltered under the high moorlands of Darley, Matlock Bank has grown up about a mile north-east of the old village, and has become celebrated for the number and excellence of its hydropathic establishments. A tramway, worked by a single cable, over a gradient said to be the steepest in the world, affords easy communication with Matlock Bridge.