Magdalena Heymair

Magdalena Heymair (about 1535 to after 1586) was a teacher and Lutheran poet from Regensburg who wrote in the Middle Bavarian dialect. Born a Roman Catholic, she converted to Lutheranism and later had to leave Straubing because of the public reaction. She worked as a schoolmistress at a girls' school in Cham from 1566 to 1570, where she wrote poems, set them to music and used them in her lessons. Her educational songs for children often stressed the role of women in the Bible. She is the first and only woman before the eighteenth century to publish pedagogical writings for elementary teaching, and the first woman whose works were listed as heretical in the Index of 1569.