Maria Gustava Gyllenstierna belonged to the Swedish nobility and married Baron Carl Bonde in 1693, whom she accompanied on his travels to countries such as Finland, Holland, and England. She had five children, and began to write after she was widowed in 1699.
Her production includes manuscripts of spiritual poems in the tradition of the Passion, including five hundred or so sonnets about the life and death of Jesus. Her secular poems are primarily poems written for special occasions for members of the royal family. She also translated devotional literature, such as Dorothe Engelbretsdatter’s Taare-Offer, from Norwegian, and Gottlieb Creutzberg’s eighty observations about the Passion Siähla-roo i Jesu såår, both in 1727. Furthermore, she translated Josephus’s major work on the history of the Jews.
