SOURCE: Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. “Gender, Knowledge, and Power in Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten.” In Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, pp. 182-203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Petroff studies Hadewijch's representation of desire and gender reconciled through love in her Strofische Gedichten.]

Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten¹ is a collection of poems on the theme of Minne, or Lady Love. In these sophisticated and confident lyrics, the great Dutch mystic and poet re-creates some of the themes, images, and metrical forms of the Provençal love lyric to explore the experience of Minne. She is a very great poet:

[T]he gift for poetry she displays in the Poems in Stanzas can only be termed lyrical genius. … Her poems themselves are proof that she had mastered the troubadours' art. It has been said that just as Bernard of Clairvaux used the Song of Songs to express his own intimate and personal experience of God, Hadewijch used the poetry of courtly love to express the emotional tensions of the longing for God, showing an unfailing mastery of all its techniques: stanza structure, the tornada, meter, rhyme, assonance, concatenation, and figures of speech.²

Hadewijch wrote in Dutch and is thought to have lived in Antwerp, where she participated in a rich culture based on both Romance and Germanic roots.³ She had read widely in Latin, Old French, and Provençal, as well as Dutch, and she was obviously sensitive to poetic technique in all those literatures, since her own technique now suggests the forms of the Latin sequence, now the chansons de geste, and again, the Provençal lyric. She was a beguine, a member of a new spiritual movement for women, and this quite possibly allowed her to reach her full potential both as a writer and as a spiritual leader. She wrote for other beguines, often as their spiritual director. The beguines strove to live in the world without being of it, and Hadewijch's poetry demonstrates the same intention. She was a mystic, writing to illuminate her own experience of the deepest reality in order to share it with others. To this love in which she sought the fullest fruition, she gave the name of Minne.

The Strophische Gedichten form only one part of her collected works; she also wrote Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets),⁴ a collection of prose letters (“Letters to a Young Beguine”),⁵ and Visions.⁶ Each of these collections exhibits its own particular way of viewing the experience of love. Although courtly elements may be seen in all her works, it is in the Strophische Gedichten that she especially highlights the rhetoric of the courtly tradition as a framework for exploring and presenting her experience.

Hadewijch wrote with the mentality of a knight. The qualities which she praised and aspired to—courage, loyalty, honour, and also cheerfulness, generosity, self-control—fit into the pattern of the courtly chivalric atmosphere. Although they were transplanted by her into a mystic-religious context, they are still recognizable as the old worldly ideals. The descriptions of the effect minne has on her are often couched in remarkably sensual terms.⁷

Like that in troubadour poetry, Hadewijch's rhetoric valorizes desire, her orewoet (literally, “stormy longing,” but often translated as “madness”) for Minne. (According to Jozef van Mierlo, the Dutch orewoet translates into the Latin aestus, insania amoris, or furor amoris.)⁸ Like troubadour lyric, her poems depict a lover's role in relation to a distant and powerful beloved; in this depiction, her use of the first person creates a poetic self with a sublimely personal voice, often heard uttering complaints about the lack of attention from the beloved and claiming a right to better treatment. This personal voice also embodies meditations on the nature of love and on the inevitability and the meaningfulness of suffering and longing in the total experience of love. In these poems we nowhere find the poet taking refuge in the modesty topos or apologizing for being a woman and daring to write.⁹

Her affinities with Provençal lyric, with the stil novisti, and even with Dante, are not only formal ones:

Hadewijch ranks with the earlier Dante and the other poets of the dolce stil nuovo as one of the great masters who, towards the close of the era of courtly chivalry, transformed the troubadour lyric with its rigidly circumscribed conventions into a form capable of expressing the highest aspirations of the human soul. Already in the finest songs of Jaufre Rudel and Bernart de Ventadorn one feels the breath of a passion too great for its terrestrial object. … Hadewijch freed her soul and immeasurably widened the scope of her song by directing an inborn genius for love trained and ennobled by the troubadours towards the Love which was embodied in Christ and is the sovereign power which controls God himself and hence all creation. … [Her works] convey with amazing clarity the image of a powerful, dominant personality, in fact of a woman of regal stature.¹⁰

It is in her representation of the lived experience of Minne that Hadewijch explodes the boundaries of the troubadour tradition. Minne, for Hadewijch, is a Being, Lady Love, not the personification of an abstract idea and not the forbidden wife of the vassal's lord. At the same time, Minne is love, the total experience of love. As such, she is all-powerful and all-knowing. She is not God; she may contain God.¹¹ She is A-mor, “delivered from death” (Hare[n] name amor es: vander doot [2.5.4]). Minne stands in the position of the Beloved, the midons or dompna, of the Provençal tradition, as the object of the poet's desire, and only she can satisfy that desire. Like the troubadour's lady, she may at times seem capricious, arbitrary, fickle, but for Hadewijch her capriciousness is merely the way she appears when seen from the limited human point of view. Capriciousness is not in her character; although the lover may perceive her as capricious, this is his failure of fidelity, not hers. She is free, and she grants her lovers freedom if they will surrender to her. In addressing her and speaking about her, the lover-poet finds his or her own voice and nature and points the reader in the direction of that same nature.

At the same time, Hadewijch is a mystic who believes that “the soul, created by God after his own image, strives to be reunited with God, through ascetic concentration and complete surrender to divine love.”¹² As a mystic, writing to illuminate her own experience of the divine and draw from it lessons for others, she was breaking new ground, just as she was breaking new ground as a Dutch poet in her use of the courtly tradition and the poetic forms of the troubadours. All mystics are seeking union with the divine; for Hadewijch particularly the divine was love, both as process and as goal:

This love … and the desire with which it is sought, take up a central position in her work. Minne escapes sharp definition: sometimes it seems to mean love of God, in other cases God himself, or the Holy Ghost, or even the soul. The fact that minne has so many connotations is not a symptom of unclear thinking, but evidence that to Hadewijch these connotations were all aspects of the same thing: the relation between God and man.¹³

Mother Columba Hart observes of Hadewijch that “[h]er descriptions of experiencing the in-being in God belong to the most convincing and daring that mystical literature has to offer. God is such that he allows himself to be possessed in an incredibly intimate manner.”¹⁴ But Hadewijch's Minne (for it is Minne that Hart refers to as God or as the Beloved) is completely Other, and in relation with this unfathomable Other, the mystic becomes more and more deeply her own being. Both partners in this relationship mirror each other, and both are infinite:

When the soul preserves its excellence, it is an abyss in which God is sufficient to Himself, in which always he tastes the joy which He has in himself and which the soul has in Him. “Soul” is the road on which God travels from His depths into His freedom, and God is the road that the soul travels into its freedom, that is, into its depths, which cannot be attained except by sinking down deep. And so long as God does not belong in His totality to the soul, He cannot be enough to it.¹⁵

The abyss of the soul is not a non-knowing, although a deliberate unknowing will help one to reach these depths. Intelligence is discovered in this depth, for “in the union with the Beloved, his incomparable being-Other must now be known. Reason therefore is going to play a part in the highest mystical experience. … Through its intervention the mystic learns to love him in his independence and wholly being-Other.”¹⁶

It is desire that exposes the abyss of the soul, revealing to her the abyss of the Other, the Beloved. In the Strophische Gedichten the desire for Love [orewoet van minnen] is rhetorically constituted by paradox, for Minne is beyond all systems of binary opposition and contains all opposites. The language of paradox forces the poet to abandon ordinary truth, to move mentally into a new space where real truth dwells. In “Poem 28,” Hadewijch provides a number of metaphors to display the paradox inherent in this passion for Minne:

Orewoet van minnen
Dats een rike leen …
Die tiersten waren twee
Die doetse wesen een.
Dies ic die waerheit toghe:
Si maect dat soete es soer.

(28.4.1-2, 4-8)

[The madness [passion] of love
Is a rich fief …
Those who at first were two
She can make into one:
Which truth I do attest.
She makes bitter what was sweet …]
Si maect den onbekinder
Die wide weghe cont
Daer menich in moet dolen …
In hogher minnen scolen
Leert men orewoet,
Want si brenghet dien in dolen
Die hem wel verstoet.

(28.5.5-7; 6.1-4)

[To those who know them not
She shows great broad roads
Where many go astray …
In the school of noble love
One learns the passion for her.
For she brings him in confusion
Who once had understood.]

Love or Minne as a country, a land [die lant minnen], is a recurring trope in Hadewijch's poetry, and in “Poem 28” passion or desire [orewoet] is a rich fief in that land; here Minne has the power to defeat the laws of mathematics by making two into one. Personified as a guide, she leads men astray, and as a teacher she confounds those who thought they were wise.

In “Poem 17,” stanza 3, a spatialized Love is seen to be both confining and immense, as are its griefs:

Wat mach hem bliscap ommevaen,
Die minne in hachten heeft inghe ghedaen
Ende die de wijdde van minnen woude ommegaen
          Ende vri ghebruken in trouwen.

(17.3.1-6)

[What joy can surround
Him whom Love has thrown into close confinement,
When he wishes to journey through Love's immensity
                    And enjoy it as a free man in all security?]

The paradox of confinement that is expansive is suggested again in “Poem 26,” stanza 6: Love, Hadewijch says,

Dats ene die aire scoenste hacht
Ende ene onverwonne nuwe macht.

(26.6.4-5)

[is one of the most beautiful imprisonments
And an unconquered new power.]

In Dutch, the rhyme “hacht” [imprisonment] / “macht” [power] supports the paradoxical equation between captivity and power. Another paradox is expressed in a martial metaphor, the hand-to-hand struggle of two champions:

Want die minne nie en vervacht,
Hine leefde nie vrie daghe.

(21.5.8-9)

[For he who has never fought against Love
Has never lived a free day.]
Die minne verwint dat hise verwinne.

(40.5.1)

[Love conquers him so that he may conquer her.]
Die ghenoech der minnen rike wijet,
Ic segge dat hi bi wike rijet.

(23.4.1-2)

[If someone submits enough to the power of Love
I say that he is empowered by submission.]

The fact that in Dutch the verbs, and the nouns associated with them, rhyme—“rike wijet, … bi wike rijet”—supports the grammatical parallelism that in turn reinforces the equation between submission and empowerment. Love is unknowable, yet can be experienced:

En heeft forme, sake noch figuere;
          Doch eest inden smake alse createure;
                              Hets materie miere bliscape …

(22.3.3-5)

[The thing has no form, no manner, no outward appearance.
          It can only be tasted as something actual:
                                        It is the substance of my joy …]

Scholars know nothing of this force that strengthens and annihilates:

So segghic dat en merke clerc
                    Hoe scone het den ghenen stoede
Die in minnen wrachte sterc werc;
Hi soude in minnen oerewoede
Verbernen in hare diepste vloede
Ende versmelten alse caden …

(23.11.2-4, 7-9)

[I say no scholar is able to consider
                              How fortunate will be the state
Of him who has wrought deeds of strength in Love;
Then, in the madness of Love,
He will burn in her deepest flood
And melt away like tallow.]

The expression “burning in the madness of love” [in minnen oerewoede … Verbernen] may seem to be a convention of love poetry, but when Hadewijch links that prepositional phrase to another, “in her deepest flood” [in hare diepste vloede], she brings her audience to an unthinkable yet experiential realm where opposites are united; there the lover's nature is consumed like tallow. But consciousness is not lost in this consuming; in fact, consciousness is ever greater, and the self that is lost is also found:

Mijns selves en es mi bleven niet …
Ere ende raste hebbic begheven,
Omdat ic wille leven
Vri ende in minnen ontfaen …
                                        Ic en machs niet ontberen,
Ic en hebbe el niet: ic moet op minne teren.

(24.5.8; 24.6.4-6, 9-10)

[Nothing of myself remains to me:
                                        I have given up honor and repose,
                                        Because I wish to live
                                        Free, and receive in love
Great riches and knowledge.
                              I cannot do without this gift.
I have nothing else: I must live on Love.]

Although no one poem can illustrate all of Hadewijch's skill, “Poem 6” illustrates many of Hadewijch's techniques. Like the majority of the poems in the Strophische Gedichten, the poem opens with a seasonal description; just as all life quickens in March, so the lover's longing is intensified, and he wishes to conquer Love so that “she will give herself wholly in love” [Dat sie hare al in minnen gheve] and he will “live wholly as Love with love” [Ende minne met minnen leve]. A relationship is being defined here, one that at first seems to be a matter of domination and conquest but that in fact is characterized by specularity, to use Luce Irigaray's term for a kind of mirroring that leads to a full acceptance and merging of difference, of the other.¹⁷ The terms, the rules, for this relationship are known to the poet and spelled out. If “he” (the representative lover) maintains his zeal and hope,

Minne sainew wel ghessterken:
Hi sal sijn lief ghewinnen;
                              Want minne niene can
                              Hare selve ontsegghen nieman,
Sine gheve hem dat si hem an
Ende meer dan daer sine selve toe spane.

(6.2.7-12)

[Love will indeed strengthen him:
He shall conquer his Beloved;
                    For Love can never
                    Refuse herself to anyone;
Rather she gives him what she is willing he possess,
And more than she herself promised him.]

But March can be a cold month, too, and doubt, if it arises, will blight the lover's growth, as frost blights the leaves of trees. Only the sun (equated with Minne) can “call forth / flowers and fruit from the mind” [Die bloyen doet die sinne]. Love's promises are reiterated: if the lover demonstrates submission, strength, and understanding,

Hi sal al vri ontfaen
Dier onghehoerde macht: …
He sal noch die minne dwingen
Ende wesen al hare voghet.

(6.4.7-12)

([He] shall receive in full freedom
Love's unheard-of power. …
He shall yet subdue Love
And be her lord and master.)

Now suddenly, surprisingly, in the fifth stanza of a seven stanza poem, Hadewijch speaks in the first person, revealing the differences between her experience and what she has just described as the law of love. Perhaps, she thinks, the situation she has just described is not universally applicable. “Love makes me wander outside myself” [Waeer vindic der minnen iet], she says.

Mijn wederstoet die es te groet,
Ende mi es darven der minnen een doet
Want ic en macher ghebruken niet.

(6.5.10-12)

[My misfortune is too great,
And for me, to do without Love is a death,
Since I cannot have fruition of her.]

“Why,” she asks, if she ought to “love totally … did she not give me total love?” [Sint ic al minnen soude, / Wan gave si mi al minne?] She has nothing of herself left:

Want ic hebbe so dat mine verlevet,
Ic en hebbe el niet sine ghevet
Ende al gave si ict, hongher blevet:
Want ict gheheel al woude.

(6.6.9-12)

[I have so spent what is mine,
I have nothing to live on. …
But even if she gave me something, hunger would remain,
For I want the whole.]

Hadewijch's personal assertions (we will call them that for simplicity's sake, although we know that the historical person Hadewijch is not to be equated with only this voice) greatly enrich and problematize the reader's appreciation of Minne the being and minne as experience. At the same time, this presentation of two optics, two voices, allows the poetic “I” to remember that she is not alone in this isolation. Many of Love's lovers have denied themselves for her sake, and

Nu sijn si in swaren bande
Ende vreemde in haers selfs lande.
Daer dolen si in de hande
Der vremder avonturen.

(6.tornada)

([Are] now … in heavy chains,
Exiled in their own land.
There they wander, subject
To alien adventures.)

Literally, this reads “they are exiled in their own land, in the hands of alien adventures.” The repetition of “vreemde” [exiled] and “vremder” [alien] in the poem's tornada underscores the dimension of alienation. At the same time, the language implicitly compares Love's lovers with the outcast protagonists of a chanson de geste or a Germanic heroic legend like Beowulf. Consequently, this ending to the poem surprises, as it moves us from a lyric to an epic context. Yet this conclusion is not, ultimately, discouraging. Why is this so?

We have moved, in the course of the poem, from a springtime landscape apparently in harmony with human desire, to the promised relationship with Love if the lover will do his part, to a personal assertion of the pain of waiting for Love to do her part, and, finally, to the fusion of “I” and “he” in the experience of alienation, a disjunction between man and his world. But thanks to the cyclical nature of the seasons and the episodic nature of the chansons de geste, we are led to think of love as an entire cycle (of seasons, of adventures) and of the events of this poem as just one moment in that greater cycle. Although the lover no longer dwells in the ordinary world because of his fidelity to love, his alienation from that world is the sign, the visible mark, of his relationship to Love and to other lovers who share his experience. In that relationship, gender and person are only the beginning of our experience, our life cycle. Ultimately gender and person have no fixed referent, for “I” and “he” have the same experience, and in seeking to lose themselves in Love, they abdicate any distinction between “her” (Minne) and “him” or “me” (the lovers). Even the metaphors of personal combat lose their original gender specificity, for we learn that all the persons of the poem, “I,” “he,” and “she” (Minne) seek to conquer in being conquered.

Yet in the language of the poem, it is initially very important that Minne is female and “anyone” seems to be male. In the courtly tradition, especially in the lyric, role reversal is an essential aspect of the new love experience being articulated. The (male) poet is placed in an unusual relation vis-à-vis his lady; he is powerless to gain her love unless she grants it freely. She has the upper hand. Yet in the course of many romance lyrics, the poetic “I” manages to turn the tables on the figure of the lady, who is seen to derive her very power from the poet's creation of her. Difference usually implies hierarchy, and in the proper order of things, males dominate. In Hadewijch's treatment of the love relationship, we also begin with what seems to be a role reversal, but it soon becomes clear that in their mutual conquest and surrender, Love and the lover are in not a hierarchical relationship, but one characterized by specularity. Each mirrors the difference and the sameness of the other. If power and knowledge are located anywhere in the poem, it is in Love, Minne—but the lover is located in her, and she in him. In this world that Hadewijch is creating in the Strofische Gedichten (a world that she claims to have experienced and is now bearing witness to in these poems), gender would seem to be irrelevant. Can this be true?

GENDER AND BODY

It may be objected that we cannot generalize about gender identification on the basis of an analysis of just one poem. Gender may show up more strongly in those poems that depict the bodily experience of desire, particularly since the desire is felt for a being characterized as feminine, who also experiences desire. Hadewijch uses a number of image clusters to present the experience of love; some seem to have as their referent the physical body, whereas others speak more metaphorically of the soul's experience. Love may be seen in martial terms such as imprisonment, conquest, battle and its accoutrements, siege, and so on. It may also be presented in terms of physical sensation, primarily images of hunger and thirst and their opposites, devouring and swallowing. Veins, channels, and floods are the locus of sensation and anxiety. Images of madness and dissolution—whether of the body or the consciousness—appear often, especially in the later poems in the sequence. These image clusters often overlap within any one poem, resulting in a feeling of confusion, synaesthesia, in the reader, a state that corresponds to the totality of the state being depicted.

In the first poem, Love has the power to “strike” [slaen] the lover-narrator, to “scourge or pardon” [soenen ende slaen]. Love can “set us free or chain us fast” [… die minne fijn / Vri maken ende benden]. In “Poem 2,” the poet's “singing” [nuwe sanghe] is “hushed” [Ic mach wel vander]. The “I” of the poem suffers “pain and heartache” [Daer ic nu doghe pine / Ende van herten seer] and “wither[s] like an old man and waste[s] away” [Dies oudic ende dwine]. Love herself is “fertile” [drachtich], “mother of the virtues” [moedeer van alre doghet], and epitomizes the fidelity [die trouwe] that grants power. She is “so sweet in her nature / That she conquers every other power” [Soe suete es minne in hare natuere, / Dat si alle andere cracht verwint], yet to the immature lover she “taste[s] … bitter and sour” [Soe smaect hi bettere ende suere]. He who loves properly is “As the beautiful rose / Appears to us in the dew between the thorns” [Ghelijc dat ons die scone rose / Metten dauwe comt uten dorne gheghaen]. In “Poem 3,” the lover-narrator carries a shield that “has warded off so many stabs / There's no room left on it for a new gash” [Want mi es die scilt so sere dorehouwen / Hine can intoe niet meer slaghe ontfaen]. Love sometimes gives “consolations, then again wounds” [Alse nu den troest, alse nu die wonde], and “her pleasure gives / The sweet kisses of her mouth” [Den enen gheeft si, dien sijs an, / Die suete cussenne van haren monde]. In “Poem 4,” the male lover is “always new and afire with longing [Hi es altoes nuwe ende van niede heet]; he “has experienced silence amid great noise” [Ende in hoech gheruchte scilentie ontfaen].

Gender, as these verses indicate, is not fixed. At times, when martial images characterize the relationship between the lover and beloved, male gender seems implied for both beings. At other times, the lover is male (an old man), while Minne is female, a fertile mother. Some images are without gender and speak of sensation (Minne is sweet but tastes bitter to the immature lover) or beauty (the enlightened lover is like a “rose … in the dew between the thorns”). In the same poem, Minne may seem first male and aggressive, dealing wounds to the lover, and then a yielding female, giving sweet kisses to her lover.

Images of wounding and healing are central to the presentation of desire and body. In “Poem 7,” the madness of love is imaged as dissolution of the soul, and this in turn is imaged as an abyss into which the lover is hurled. The abyss is connected to wounding, and this means no more health [gesunde]. This would seem an impossible concatenation of metaphors, but look at what Hadewijch has done with it:

Mi smelten mine sinne
In minnen oerwoede;
Die afgront daer si mi in sende
Die es dieper dan die zee;
Want hare nuwe diepe afgronde
Die vernuwet mi die wonde:
Ic en sjoeke meer ghesonde,
Eer icse mi nuwe al kinne.

(7.4.5-12)

[My soul melts away
In the madness of Love;
The abyss into which she hurls me
Is deeper than the sea;
For Love's new deep abyss
Renews my wound:
I look for no more health,
Until I experience Love as all new to me.]

The final line directs us to a fuller and truer experience of Minne, in which the lover will find health, not madness—but this experience requires a complete renewal of the concept and experience of Love. Another way of looking at this madness is found in “Poem 12,” where the frenzy of love is described in bold sexual images, underscored by the emphatic repetition of the word “minne”:

Si selen met minnen ane minne een cleven,
Ende selen met minnen al minne doresien,
Ende met haren verhoelnen aderen al tien
In[t] conduut daer minne[n] haer minne al scincket.
Ende met minnen hare vriende al dronken drinket,
          In wondre vore haren woeden.

(12.6.3-8)

[With Love they shall cleave in oneness to Love,
And with love they shall contemplate all Love—
Drawing, through her secret veins,
On the channel where Love gives all love,
And inebriates all her drunken friends with love
          In amazement before her violence.]

In the real world, the madness of love is both physical and emotional, and here this higher love implies bodies with veins and channels for release, but it is a release that inebriates, goes to one's head, a release and an intoxication that stun by their violence. Body cannot be separated from body, nor can soul and body be distinguished, in this violent becoming one in love. Even a cliché like the proverbial arrow of love is depicted graphically and physically in “Poem 14” so that we really feel the pain of penetration and the resulting infection.

Alsenne der minnen strale ruren,
                    So gruwelt hem dat hi levet.
In allen tiden als ruert die strale
Meerret hi die wonde ende brenghet quale.
Die nied houdse open ende onghebonden.

(14.2.5-6; 14.3.1-2; 14.12.3)

[As Love's arrows strike it,
                    It shudders that it lives.
At all times when the arrow strikes,
It increases the wound and brings torment.
Longing keeps the wounds open and undressed.]

(“It” in this translation is the soul, and soul can be understood only with the language of the body.) If penetration is associated with the male gender, and yearning and openness with the female, then Minne is male and the lover female, but we know this is not so, for male pronouns are used for the lover and female ones for Minne.

In “Poem 17,” Hadewijch describes her experience as being “again under the lash” [onder den slach]. She comforts herself with the observation that “Before the All unites itself to the all, / Sour bitterness must be tasted” [Eertt al met al wert vereent, / Smaect men bitteren suere]. In “Poem 19,” she describes Love's ways with “someone”: “Although she forces him with violence, / She contents him and sweetens his chains” [Aldoet si hem cracht ende gheweldichede, / Si doet hem ghenoech ende suet den bant]. In the succeeding poem, “Poem 20,” she sums up her experience: “No living man under the sun / Can content Love” [Hine levet onder der sonnen / Die der minnen g[he]noech vermoghe]. Nor can the human be contented by love, for “Love is always possessed in violent longing: / Here one cannot find repose” [Altoes in woede hoemen minne ommeva: / Hier en doech gheseten]. In the twelfth and final stanza of “Poem 20,” the narrator speaks directly to Love:

Sal mi minne bescarmen
          Ende segghen: “dijns rouwen si keer.
          Ic sal di warmen;
          Ic ben dat ic was wilen eer;
          Nu valle in minen armen
          Ende ghesmake mijn[s] rike gheleer.”

(20.12. 5-10)

([When will you] reach out to me
          And say: “Let your grief cease.
I will cherish you;
I am what I was in times past;
Now fall into my arms,
And taste my rich teaching!”)

Sadly, this consolation is only a fantasy, albeit a very specific one that tells us of one dimension of Hadewijch's needs, to be cherished by a loving mother and teacher. The learning she offers is not easily grasped, as in “Poem 22” we see that Love may command “in storm or in stillness” [Daeer sijt ghebiedet lude ende stillekine], for “She impels us to long desiringly for her / And to taste her without knowing her being” [Want si doet met begheerten na hare haken / Ende sonder kinnen hare wesen smaken]. The only knowledge the soul can possess is the knowledge that love cannot be gained without renouncing the self, and this is a burden that “weighs me down” [mi swaert]. Yet this poem is ultimately affirming, for in it we see an increase in Hadewijch's knowledge of herself and of Love's attraction, even if Minne's being is unfathomable. Such self-knowledge is reflected in the use of first-person pronouns in each line of her conclusion:

Al soude mi noch begherte therte tewriven
Ende cracht van minnen node, mi en soude ontbliven,
                    Ic sal noch weten wat mi trect,
                    Ende dicke so onsachte wect
Als ic mi selven in rasten soude gheriven.

(22.7.3-7)

[Even if desire crushes my heart,
Even if strength slips away from me through Love's coercion,
                              I shall yet know what draws me
                              And awakens me so mercilessly
If for a moment I seek pleasure in repose.]

It has often been noted that in the later poems of this sequence of forty-five poems, Hadewijch complains more and more bitterly of what she has not received from Love. What has not been noted is how, from “Poem 25” on, the descriptions of Love and the experience of love are cast in more explicit bodily terms. At the same time, the paradoxes of love are explored, and Reason is called on to help resolve them. To bring this home to the reader, the descriptions of Love and union are more extended and more erotic and involve all of the bodily senses. In “Poem 25,” the experience of Love is characterized by synesthesia, as when Hadewijch tells us that “That great noise, that loud gift / Of soft stillness makes me deaf” [Dat gherochte, dat hoghe prosent / Der neder[r]e stillen, doet mi verdoven]. The poem continues, moving from the first person narration of stanza 3 into the more impersonal narrative of stanza 4 and fusing the two points of view into one experience:

Hare nedere stille es onghehoert
Hoe hoghe gheruchte dat si maect,
En si allene dies hevet becoert
Ende dien minne in hare al hevet ghesaaect,
Dat hi hem al ghevoele in minne.
Alse sine met wondre also doresmaect,
Cessert een ure tgheruchte daerinne;
Ay, saen wect begherte die waect
Met nuwen storme die inneghe sinne.

(25.4.1-10)

[Love's soft stillness is unheard of,
However loud the noise she makes,
Except by him who has experienced it,
And whom she has wholly allured to herself,
And has so stirred with her deep touch
That he feels himself wholly in Love.
When she also fills him with the wondrous taste of Love,
The great noise ceases for a time;
Alas! Soon awakens Desire, who wakes
With heavy storm the mind that has turned inward.]

But the poem does not end here. Hart has entitled this poem “Reason, Pleasure, and Desire,”¹⁸ and with good reason, for the fifth stanza sets out the difficulty:

Ghenuechte loke wel die oghen
Ende plaghe gherne dies si hevet,
Mocht die verwoede begherte ghedogen
Die altoes in woede levet.
Want si [haer] alle uren daertoe ghevet
Te roepenne: “ay, minne, wes al mine!”
Oec wec[t] se redenne, die hare dat seghet:
“Sich hier, dit steet di noch te volsine.”
Ay, daer redenne ghenuechte ontseghet,
Dat quetst meest boven alle pine.

(25.5.1-10)

[Pleasure would certainly close her eyes
And gladly enjoy what she possesses
If fierce Desire, who always
Lives in fury, would tolerate it.
For every hour Desire begins anew
To cry: “Alas, Love! Be all mine!”
Thus she awakens Reason, who says to Pleasure:
“Behold, you must first reach maturity!”
Alas! That Reason should refuse Pleasure
Cuts more than all other pains.]

It is Reason who urges the soul to grow if she wishes to experience Love more deeply: “Behold! Take possession of the highest glory!” The next three poems urge the lover to greater and greater desire and reveal the paradoxes of Minne that force the reader toward the aporia that may catapult into a higher level of thought. (The constitution of Minne through paradox in “Poem 28” is discussed at the beginning of this essay.) “Poem 29” reveals the secret the soul needs to grow—the incarnation, with the transcendent paradox of the God Man. It would seem that Hadewijch deliberately structured her collection of poems to lead irrevocably to this point.

Hart notes that, according to J. Bosch, Hadewijch “structured this entire book according to the principles of medieval numerology, and that in the scheme she evolved (without giving the reader any hint of it) “Stanzaic Poem 29,” on the subject of the Virgin Mary, is the central poem of the entire series of forty-five.”¹⁹ In this poem, the Virgin Mary's willing acceptance of the incarnation initiates the possibility of the full experience of Minne. In the first stanza, the poet explains that “He for whom I languish / … / Has given me to understand / That by High Love” [Mijn swaere draghen / sonder claghen / … / Hi hevet mi doen verstaen / Dat ic met hogher minnen sal ontgaen] she can go beyond the pain of love that she is experiencing at this stage of her spiritual growth. The Virgin Mary is the model of the humility that is necessary for this going beyond in high love:

En wardt nieman, die conste
Gherechte minne verstaen,
Eer dat marie, die goede,
Met diepen oetmoede,
Die minne hadde ghevaen.

(29.4.2-6)

[There was no one who could
Understand veritable Love
Until Mary, in her flawlessness,
With deep humility,
Had received Love.]

It is Mary who began to unlock the paradoxes of love by showing the potency of humility:

Die vader van anebeghinne
Hadde sinen sone, die minne,
Verborghen in sinen scoet,
Eerne one marie,
Met diepen oetmoede ja,
Verholentlike ontsloet.
Doen vloeide die berch ten diepen dale,
Dat dal vloyde even hoghe verwommen,
Daer langhe strijt was an begonnen.

(29.5.1-10)

[The Father in the beginning
Kept his Son, Love,
Hidden in his bosom,
Until Mary,
With deep humility indeed,
In a mysterious way disclosed him to us.
Then the mountain flowed down into the deep valley,
And that valley flowed aloft to the height of the palace.
Then was the castle conquered
Over which long combat had taken place.]

This humility affects the very course of nature by reversing high and low, life and death. Such a reversal, although prophesied in the Old Testament, could come about only by Mary's experience of Minne, and only through her could it be passed on to us:

Dat was bi diepen niede
Dat hare dat grote ghesciede,
Dat die edel minne uut wert ghelaten
Dien edelen wive
van hoghen prise
Met overvloedegher maten;
Want si el ne woude, noch haerre el ne was,
So hadse al daer elc af las.
Dus heeftse dat conduut gheleit,
Dat elker oetmoedegher herten es ghereit.

(29.99.1-10)

[It was by deep longing
That this mystery happened to her,
That this noble Love was released
To this noble woman
Of high praise
In overflowing measure;
Because she wished nothing else and owned nothing else,
She wholly possessed him of whom every Jewish woman had read.
Thus she became the conduit
Open to every humble heart.]

Here the language of courtly and romance literature fuses with the language of Scripture to make of the Virgin Mary the model for the mystic's longing. As the Virgin Mary, in the incarnation of the God Man, brings the body into history, so the poet brings the body to transcendence in the experience of Minne. Thus it is that in “Poem 31,” Love has transformed Hadewijch's very body so that she can give birth to Love herself. Up to this point, the vocabulary devoted to the assaults of love on the lover have not been gender-specific, but now Hadewijch's physical being seems definitely feminine. As this new life is enclosed within her, so is she contained by that powerful female, Love.

Want sie mii met harer groter crachte
Mine nature maect so wijt,
Dat ic mijn wesen al verpachte
In die hoghe gheboert van haren gheslachte.
Als ic wil nemen vri delijt,
So werpt si mi in hare hachte.

(30.1.3-8)

([Love] … with her infinite strength
So enlarges my heart
That I have given myself over to her completely,
To obtain within me the birth of her high being.
But if I wish to take free delights,
She casts me into her prison.)

In “Poem 36,” although the subject is apparently not Hadewijch but “someone,” we see both genders implied in Love's actions of penetration and engulfment. The “Judgement of Love, / Pierces deep within / Through the inward senses,” so that “By the fury of Love / He is all devoured / In Love” (Vonnesse van minnen / Gheet diepe binnen / Met inneghen sinnen. … Bider minnen woet / Wert hi al gheten / In die minne [36.5.1-3; 36.10.9-11]). Penetration is the reference again in “Poem 37”:

Waer soudi nemen vremden nijt,
Daer ghi den ghenen met doresnijt
Die u gheeft cussen in alle tijt?
[Where would you have come by the strange hatred
With which you transpierced him
Who gives you his kiss at all times?]

In “Poem 38,” more feminine associations characterize Love as she both devours and nourishes like an ancient Mother Goddess.

Den selken besitti in uwe woet,
Dat hi van binnen al wordt gheten;
Die selke sijn sachte van u ghevoedt
Ende sijn van u doch onbeseten!
Te niete werden al in minnen,
Dat es dat beste dat ic weet …

(38.5.5-8; 38.7.1-2)

[One you possess in your madness
So that, from within, he is utterly devoured;
Others you nourish tenderly—
Without making them yours for an instant!
To be reduced to nothingness in Love
Is the most desirable thing I know …]

Nevertheless, this accumulation of more specifically sexual images to describe the love experience does not mean that the old images of struggle and hand-to-hand combat have been abandoned. The difference is that now these images of battle are more suggestive of the sexual encounter. In this, Hadewijch is simply utilizing a view of sexuality that has long been found in European erotic poetry. What is unusual is that she has excluded this reading earlier, where images of combat suggested instead the male-bonded world of medieval heroic and chivalric poetry. Now the weapon employed by both Love and the lover is longing:

Ende die de minne met niede dan besteet,
Al sonder herte ende sonder sinne,
Ende minne dan nied met niede versleett:
Dats cracht daer men bi minne ghewinne.
Sine can verweren die storme heet,
Hine wone ghelijc met hare daer binnen.

(38.7.5-8; 8.3-4)

[And if anyone then dares to fight Love with longing,
Wholly without heart and without mind,
And Love counters this longing with her longing:
This is the force by which we conquer Love.
Love cannot resist the violence of the assault:
But he shall abide firm in the storm, conformed to Love.]

The combat motif is taken up again in “Poem 40,” where the lover's wound implies penetration, but this is followed by a more nurturing image, the image of the lover drinking from Love's veins:

Dien minne verwint dat hise verwinne
Als hi ghevjoelt die soete minne,
Wort hi met haren wonden ghewont.
Soe werdet utermaten goet:
Begherte scept, ghenluechte drincket,
Die fiere die dat sine in minne verdoet
Ende met woede in hare ghebruken sincket.
Endee so wert die minne al minne volvoet.

(40.5.1, 3-4; 40.6.1-4, 7)

[Love conquers him so that he may conquer her.
When he experiences this sweet Love,
He is wounded with her wounds;
He imbibes eagerly from Love's deep veins,
With continual thirst for a new beginning,
Until he enjoys sweet Love.
So for the soul things go marvelously;
While desire pours out and pleasure drinks,
The soul consumes what belongs to it in love
And sinks with frenzy in Love's fruition.
Thus is the loving soul well fed by Love alone.]

In “Poem 42,” we get another extended description, one of the most sensual in Hadewijch's collection. This description is unusual not because it is based on the imagery of the Song of Songs, for Hadewijch quotes more from this book of the Bible than from any other (Job is a close second), or in the borrowing of a female speaking voice, but because it reproduces the gender roles of that text, where the Beloved is male and the eager lovers are female. In the usual allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, Christ is the Beloved, and the Shulamite, the love-stricken young girl, represents the Church. Thus, as one would find in Hadewijch's Visions and Letters, Minne can be—but is not always—identified with the figure of Christ. Yet Christ is never named (except in “Poem 29,” where the Son is Minne); the Beloved is always Minne. It is possible that the imagery in this poem is intended, at least unconsciously, to suggest differences between male and female experiences of union.

Het es ghelijc uwe hoghe name
Als olye ute gheghoten, minne,
Dies, minne, u name es uutgheghoten,
Ende met wonders vloede al avergaet,
So sijn die opwassende dorevloten
Ende minnen in woede boven raet.

(42.4.1-2; 42.5.1-4)

[It is your lofty name,
Like oil poured out, Love,
Since, Love, your name is poured out,
And since it overflows with a flood of wonder,
The young maidens are melted away in you
And love with violent longing, above counsel.]

What I have tried to demonstrate is that through her experience of desire for Minne [orewoet van minnen], Hadewijch acquires knowledge of Love's ways and knowledge of the divine, as well as self-knowledge. The acquisition of this knowledge comes through self-abandonment to a descent, an abyss of humility, where she discovers God and herself. Minne, the bearer of God to her, is Other, utterly unlike the poet's humanity, and yet this Other needs the human and finds itself in the abyss of love, just as the human lover does. It is this knowledge that empowers her as a poet and as a spiritual teacher. From her connection with Minne, and Minne's physical birth in the Virgin Mary, I believe Hadewijch learns that her female nature does not have to be transcended, for it is already transcendent in its ability to seek love. Such transcendence, however, does not imply any denigration of the male gender; Love reconciles all contradictions and differences, including gender, and proves that ultimately being is profoundly androgynous, capable of experiencing all extremes of existence without being torn apart by them. Orewoet, the stormy longing that characterizes the soul seeking Minne, is, from one point of view, the storm of old dualities, of difference within the mind, warring for domination, and unable to do anything but find reconciliation in Minne.

Notes

1. The standard text is Hadewijch: Strophische Gedichten, ed. Jozef van Mierlo, 2 vols. (Antwerp: Standaard, 1942). See also the translation by Mother Columba Hart, Poems in Stanzas, in Hadewijch: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 123-258.

2. Hart, in Hadewijch, p. 19.

3. Although little is known of Hadewijch's external life, most scholars date these poems to the second quarter of the thirteenth century. This makes Hadewijch a younger contemporary of Jacques de Vitry and the mulieres sanctae in the area of Liège, of St. Frances and St. Clare in Italy, and of the trobairitz (women troubadours) in Provence. She is only one generation removed from the Provençal troubadours, from Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes; seventy-five years later, Dante, another great religious poet who wrote in the vernacular, would compose his Divina Commedia. If it is true that Hadewijch was composing her works between 1221 and 1240, she would have been a contemporary of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Beatrijs of Nazareth. For more on Hadewijch's life, see Chapters 1 and 3.

4. Hadewijch: Mengeldichten, ed. Jozef van Mierlo (Antwerp: Standaard, 1952); Poems in Couplets, in Hadewijch, trans. Hart, pp. 307-358. Of the thirty-one poems included in this collection, the final thirteen are not by her, but by another Hadewijch, called Hadewijch II or Pseudo-Hadewijch.

5. Hadewijch: Brieven, 2 vols., ed. Jozef van Mierlo (Antwerp: Standaard, 1947); “Letters to a Young Beguine,” in Hadewijch, trans. Hart, pp. 43-121.

6. Hadewijch: Visioenen, 2 vols., ed. Jozef van Mierlo (Louvain: Vlaamsch Boekenhall, 1924, 1925); Visions, in Hadewijch, trans. Hart, pp. 259-305.

7. Reinder P. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries (Cheltenham: Thornes, 1978), p. 17.

8. Hadewijch: Strophische Gedichten, p. 178.

9. I recall only two occasions in the Strophische Gedichten where she refers to herself as a woman: “What must I, a poor woman, do?” (15.3.9) and “I expected to be a lady of her court” (21.5.3). In the first, she is a poor woman because she is deprived of love, not because she is a woman; in the second, she is saying that she thought she knew how Love's court worked, and now she is confused.

10. Theodoor Weevers, ed., Poetry of the Netherlands in Its European Context, 1170-1930 (London: Athlone Press, 1960), p. 27.

11. According to Tanis Guest, “So for Hadewijch there is a confusion, on the conscious level, between her relationship—minne—with her Beloved and the Beloved—Minne—himself. In different contexts in the trofische Gedichten the word is used in now the one sense, now the other, and again—sometimes deliberately, sometimes perhaps unknowingly—with ambiquity, in either meaning or both together” (“Hadewijch and Minne,” in Poetry of the Netherlands, ed. Weevers, p. 15).

    “Minne is not, in many if not the majority of cases, to be simply identified with God or His Son. If we consider those relatively few cases where Hadewijch uses the word ‘God,’ we find for the most part stereotyped phrases such as ‘God weet,’ ‘God gheve,’ from which nothing can be deduced; but of the others there are only two which contain a positive identification, in XX, 25-6:

    God, die ghemaecte alle dinghe,
    End boven al es minne sonderlinghe,

    and XXIX, 41-2:

    Die vader van anegeghinne
    Hadde sine sone, die minne:

    of which the first is somewhat ambiguous, since the same stanza contains:

    Hem [God] biddic dat hi ghehinghe
              Na sijn ghenoeghen
    Dat minne nu minne Also na noch dwinghe
                        Alsi can voeghen.

    There are, on the other hand, a number of cases which seem to suggest that there is no exact equivalent of God and Minne” (p. 17).

12. Meijer, Literature of the Low Countries, p. 17.

13. Ibid.

14. Hart, in Hadewijch, pp. xiv-xv.

15. Hadewijch, “Letter 18,” in Mediaeval Netherlands Religious Literature, ed. and trans. Eric Colledge (New York: London House and Maxwell, 1965), p. 79. Hart's translation is slightly different: “If it maintains its worthy state, the soul is a bottomless abyss in which God suffices to himself; and his own self-sufficiency ever finds fruition in this soul to the full, as the soul, for its part, ever does in him. Soul is a way for the passage of God from his depths into his liberty; and God is a way for the passage of the soul into its liberty, that is, into his inmost depths, which cannot be touched except by the soul's abyss. And as long as God does not belong to the soul in his totality, he does not truly satisfy it” (Hadewijch, “Letter 18,” in Hadewijch, trans. Hart, p. xv).

16. Hart, in Hadewijch, p. xvii.

17. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

18. Hart says that Hadewijch did not title any of her poems, but van Mierlo provided titles for all the poems included in his 1950 Hadewijch Anthology, and modern editors of the “Letters” have done the same (Hadewijch, p. 41).

19. Ibid., pp. 19-20. Hart is referring to J. Bosch, “Vale milies: De structuur van Hadewijch's bundel ‘Strofische Gedichten,’” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse taal-en letterkunde 90 (1974): 173-175.