Quoted below is from Catholic Saints [1]:
... Gertrude was born in the year 1263, of a noble Saxon family, and placed at the age of five for education in the Benedictine abbey of Rodelsdorf. Her strong mind was carefully cultivated, and she wrote Latin with unusual elegance and force; above all, she was perfect in humility and mortification, in obedience, and in all monastic observances. Her life was crowded with wonders. She has in obedience recorded some of her visions, in which she traces in words of indescribable beauty the intimate converse of her soul with Jesus and Mary. She was gentle to all, most gentle to sinners; filled with devotion to the Saints of God, to the souls in purgatory, and above all to the Passion of Our Lord and to His Sacred Heart. She ruled her abbey with perfect wisdom and love for forty years. Her life was one of great and almost continual suffering, and her longing to be with Jesus was not granted till 1334, when she had reached her seventy-second year.
An essay, using words that appear to be somewhat disturbing, depending on one's viewpoint, in describing Saint Gertrude, was published by Harvard Magazine in 2012, quoted in part without the defunct "Page Not Found" hyperlink [2]:
... To early twentieth-century students of the psychology of religion, Gertrude’s “absurd and puerile” visions were an example of what William James called “theopathic saintliness.” Protestant historians and some recent feminists have either condemned her for the implausibility of such visionary experiences as her alleged exchange of hearts with Jesus, or lauded her for an individualism that claimed direct access to divine grace, bypassing the clergy....None of this bears much relation to the historical figure of the Helfta nun. The Gertrude we know from the important work associated with her, the Herald of Divine Love, was not a lone individual, languishing in sickly and sexually sublimated ecstasy. Indeed, as the scholar Anna Harrison has recently emphasized, Gertrude was not so much an individual as a community....The fact that an entire community “authored” Gertrude’s works undercuts the picture of her as a lone, childishly needy mystic and forms the basis for a necessary reinterpretation of the spiritual teaching of Helfta....
No one is perfect nor are saints for none of them was immaculately conceived, unlike the Blessed Virgin Mary. Saints have done more for God, directly and/or indirectly by their influence, to bring God to people and people to God, than the average person. They ought to be respected.
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