Catharina Amalia Dorothea von Schlegel

Catharina Amalia Dorothea von Schlegel was a German Lutheran hymn writer born in 1697 into a family of modest nobility, the daughter of Wolf Otto von Schlegel and Helene Dorothea von der Oelsnitz. Recent archival research has greatly clarified a life that older hymnological books described as almost unknown. She was probably connected with a women's foundation in Halle in the early 1720s, then served for a time as lady-in-waiting to Agnes Wilhelmine von Wuthenau in Köthen.

After 1725 Schlegel joined a Lutheran women's foundation near St. Agnus Church in Köthen and remained there for the rest of her life. A surviving autograph book contains both her signature and a prayer by her alongside material from figures in Pietist circles, including Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and Johann Jakob Rambach. She died on Christmas Eve, 1777.

Her best-known hymn was first printed anonymously at Wernigerode in 1752. Contemporary and later marked copies supplied the attribution to Schlegel. The original consisted of six stanzas and reflects the devotional world of eighteenth-century Lutheran Pietism, joining disciplined trust in God with honest awareness of grief, uncertainty, and death.