SOURCE: Vanderauwera, Ria. “The Brabant Mystic: Hadewijch.” In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 186-203. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpted introduction to her selected translation of Hadewijch's writing, Vanderauwera summarizes the content and critical history of Hadewijch's literary works, as well as her status as the representative Dutch mystic writer of the thirteenth century.]

Of Hadewijch, we know only her name, texts (poetry and prose), and a few scattered references. Nonetheless we recognize her as one of the foremost representatives of early minnemystiek, a brand of mysticism to which women made an especially impressive contribution in the thirteenth century. We possess three complete manuscripts of her works, parts of her work in a recently discovered codex, and a few smaller fragments.¹ The three complete manuscripts contain thirty-one letters, forty-five stanzaic poems, fourteen visions, and twenty-nine poems mostly in rhyming couplets (one manuscript has only sixteen of them), of which thirteen were probably not by Hadewijch but by another woman of her environment. The significance of her work for Dutch literature lies in the facts that her stanzaic poetry belongs to the very few extant Middle Dutch love songs in the troubadour tradition of courtly love and that her prose, together with that of the Cistercian mystic Beatrijs of Nazareth (circa, 1200-1268), is the earliest extant prose in the vernacular.

From her writings, Hadewijch emerges as an accomplished, articulate, and sensitive woman. Although we have Latin vitae about other mystic women who are her predecessors or contemporaries—for example, Marie of Oignies (1177-1213) and Lutgardis of Tongeren (1228-1246)—we have no vita and indeed no biographical information on Hadewijch other than that contained in her writings. As a result, scholars must attempt to reconstruct the personality of this important writer from her works alone.

Modern research shows that Hadewijch lived in the first quarter of the thirteenth century and that her main literary activity took place between 1220 and 1240, if not earlier.² The dialect in which she wrote is Brabant. She might have lived in Antwerp, for a rather late reference (fifteenth century) speaks of her as “B[eata] Hadewigis de Antverpia.” She might have lived in Brussels, where her work was read and quoted in the fourteenth century at the abbey of Groenendaal, founded by Jan van Ruusbroec.³ Evidence is stronger for Brussels, for two manuscripts were made at the Rodeklooster, another Brussels monastery. Hadewijch must have known about or read mystic writers such as Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard, William of Saint Thierry, Hugo, and Richard of Saint Victor. Most probably she knew Latin: passages in her letters have been identified as translations of William of Saint Thierry and Richard of Saint Victor, though she might have borrowed translations. She was acquainted with the literary tradition of the age, in particular with the courtly love song and the visionary genre. Her erudition points almost certainly to a noble or aristocratic descent. Her letters suggest that though she was not a nun, she lived for some time in a small community of religious women. She has been identified with the notorious fourteenth-century heretic Heilwich Bloemaerts and the abbess of a Cistercian convent, until she was finally thought of as a laywoman, somewhat like a Beguine. But we have no conclusive proof of this, and a recent study suggests that Hadewijch was closer to the reclusae, more of an aristocratic artist than a leader of a Beguine community.⁴

Like so many women of her time, Hadewijch took an active part in the great spiritual revival. In the southern Netherlands, this “women's movement” led several Beguine communities to flourish in the thirteenth century. Since the late twelfth century, many women had chosen to lead a life of charity and prayer without necessarily belonging to a religious order. They lived close to monasteries or convents, accompanied traveling monks, or lived as reclusae or in small communities. Reformist lifestyles and alleged links with heretic movements often made these women subject to persecution. From her letters we know that, if not persecuted, Hadewijch was at least subject to criticism. Both charity and ecstasy characterized the earliest manifestations of this religious revival among women. In her letters and poems, Hadewijch encouraged her audience to help the poor and suffering, and the visions showed great exaltation. To the speculative aspect which had begun to affect the movement in the thirteenth century, she contributed the formulation of her mystic thought in the vernacular.

Apparently Hadewijch made no attempt to explain her mysticism in a systematic doctrine. But the central concept of her thinking is quite obvious: minne, ‘love.’ We have yet to establish a comprehensive understanding of minne in courtly love poetry and, more specifically, in relation to mystic thinking. Nevertheless, a tentative explanation is crucial to appreciating these writings. In Hadewijch scholarship, minne has often been identified with God or Christ, which classifies her thinking as yet another example of Christ or bridal mysticism. Yet she does not often refer to Christ, to his birth or suffering, nor does she make great use of the bridal theme. From both her letters and her poems, one gets the impression that minne refers more to an abstract quality than to a concrete person. This abstract concept of minne has been noted before; one scholar even speaks of “an amorphous entity.”⁵ N. de Paepe recently investigated the matter thoroughly, and for him minne is not God, not Christ, not even, as another suggested, the love of God for humanity but the love of a human being for God.⁶

Like the whole of the spiritual revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Hadewijch's minnemystiek originates in Saint Bernard, who provoked a basic shift of focus in religious life and thought from knowledge of God to experience of God. Bernard implies the equation knowledge of God = experience of God = amor or love or, in de Paepe's formulation, meeting-of-God-in-an-earthly-situation. Hadewijch's minne is precisely this amor, this experience of God. With Tanis Guest, who carefully considers this thesis, I tend to believe that de Paepe takes too extreme a view of the matter, neglecting instances where minne clearly refers to the beloved (not necessarily the bridegroom). However, the value of de Paepe's idea is that it reverses the order in which we approach Hadewijch's minne. He convincingly demonstrates that the guiding notion should be minne as experience rather than minne personified as God or Christ. On the other hand, one should be aware of other shades of meaning, especially since Hadewijch plays word games with minne. De Paepe further distinguishes three basic moments in Hadewijch's experience of minne which are helpful in reading her work: the awareness of a distance between minne and herself—een ghebreken, ‘a lack’; the complete surrendering to minne—een ghebruken, ‘to use and enjoy’; and, finally, restored balance. The tension between ghebreken and ghebruken, which is Hadewijch's craving for love, runs through most of her writing.

All the forty-five stanzaic poems extant are in the tradition of the courtly love song. Scholars differ on the question of Hadewijch's indebtedness to either the southern troubadours or the northern French trouvères. Further research will probably give more definite answers, and there may well be a number of intermediary models of which we do not know. Meanwhile, the impact of romance on her poetry or, more safely, on the type of poetry Hadewijch wrote is fairly well established, as it is on Middle Dutch literature in general. The scarcity of Middle Dutch courtly poetry complicates research in this field. The poems by van Veldeke (1140?-1190), which we know only through their German transcriptions, and those by Hadewijch betray the existence of a substantial Middle Dutch tradition of the love song. Scholars assume that many texts have been lost, probably through the vigorous reaction against courtly poetry at the end of the thirteenth century, staged by a number of didactic poets with new bourgeois ideals. That Hadewijch's work survived such an outrage might well be due to its religious, “safe” content.⁷

Hadewijch is one more link in the tradition, but establishing her exact position is difficult. Judging from her accomplishment, she was probably writing in the heyday of courtly poetry in the Netherlands. But it would contribute to our knowledge of the notions of medieval literature if we knew for certain whether she herself was acquainted with the troubadour writings or whether she relied on intermediary models in Middle Dutch. It is interesting to note that unlike van Veldeke—who acquired a reputation in German-speaking territory, where his poetical techniques became influential—Hadewijch played no such role, which might be due to the religious frame of her reference.

Tanis Guest's thorough study of the poetic form of the stanzaic poems amply illustrates how Hadewijch made use of the conventions of the courtly love song: nature opening, tripartition, tornada, rhyme scheme, concatenation, and imagery.⁸ She wrote with great technical skill and in much the same way as the troubadours had composed before her; she used conventions not as rigid rules but as options, which she would sometimes take, sometimes not, and sometimes adapt to suit her own purposes or to fit the constraints of the language she was working in. Instead of using coblas unisonas (the same rhyme and rhyme scheme in every stanza), which is hardly possible in a Germanic language, she used coblas singulars (the same rhyme scheme but not the same rhyme). Her rhyme is remarkably pure. Rather than being Romance syllabic, Hadewijch's rhythm is the Germanic stress rhythm. She makes intensive use of alliteration, assonance, and repetition. On the whole, she is less interested than the troubadours in sophisticated rhyming techniques, yet sometimes she gives the impression of forcing her thoughts and emotions into the complicated stanzaic format, and her poetry is not entirely free of easy verse filling. The imagery of courtly love—the unattainable lover, the submissive service to love, the complaints, the hope and despair, the all-pervading power of love—provides the poems with a strong thematic link.

In Hadewijch, secular imagery acquired a new spiritual meaning. De Paepe points out that whereas the unattainability of the lover had become pure literary convention in the courtly love song, for Hadewijch the unattainability of minne was an ontological given, which time and again she attempted to transcend by striving for, and reaching, a state of union with minne.

In translating some of the poems, I have chosen to give precedence to sense and imagery, rather than to original rhyme and meter. The loose format of the prose poem—rhythmic and particularly able to render motions of thought—is probably today's best form to capture the riches of Hadewijch's reflections on mystic love. Indeed, this aptness of prose rather than poetry might well apply to the original text of Hadewijch as well. Though she will remain one of the foremost representatives of the Dutch courtly love song, her prose is increasingly regarded as superior to her poetry. This is certainly true of her writings in the visionary genre, as well as of the much simpler epistolary form.

Of all Hadewijch's writings, the letters are probably the least affected by literary conventions; in fact, they are our only source of biographical data. Most scholars agree that they were written to a woman (or women) who belonged to a small religious community of which Hadewijch had also once been a member. The letters are of varying lengths. Some of the longer ones are real treatises on religious or spiritual problems. Others are more intimate communications: Hadewijch gives practical advice on living a life of charity and devotion to minne; she speaks about her own experience with minne or urges the addressee to persevere. As in the poems, she complains about love's inconstancy, and she expresses her despair. Here also she is apparently transferring motifs of courtly love to spiritual experience. Her advisory tone indicates that she must have enjoyed the high regard of whomever she wrote to; perhaps she had been the leader of the community. At the time she wrote the letters, she seems to have been wandering or living in another small community. She also appears to be the victim of enmity and jealousy.

Hadewijch's epistolary prose is rhythmic and has great clarity. As in her poetry, she uses alliteration and repetition. I have chosen to translate some of her more personal communications, as they might shed better light on her life. I have, however, also included “letter 20,” a long treatise on “the twelve unspeakable hours of love,” which illustrates both her powerful and passionate thinking on the nature of love and her superior skill as a prose writer.

The least accessible parts of Hadewijch's writings are her visions. Nevertheless, they are often considered as one of the greatest achievements in Dutch artistic prose of the Middle Ages, by far excelling her stanzaic poems in literary importance and aesthetic value. Yet, apart from a polemical debate about her doubtful orthodoxy, based on “vision 5,” where she mentioned that she had once been a Lucifer, not much work on the visions has been done. She wrote the visions apparently at the request of someone; in this work, she appears reluctant and embarrassed. In her letters she refers very little to the visions; when she does so, she speaks of them as being those of a third person. The language of the visions is difficult and their composition is not logical. Usually she opens with the occasion of the vision, a church holiday. As in the prevailing tradition of visionary writing, the vision itself seems to be regarded as an actual description of her ecstatic experience. She makes use of the medieval lore of allegory and symbols as well as the obligatory angels and seraphim so typical of the genre. For the modern reader unacquainted with the conventions or the psychology of mystical experience in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, these visions might be difficult to appreciate. However, two recent translations into modern Dutch herald a new interest. The sixteen remaining poems, mostly in rhyming couplets, are actually letters in which Hadewijch develops themes similar to those in her prose letters and gives similar advice.

After the discovery of the manuscripts in 1838, Hadewijch took her place in the present Dutch literary canon. Regarded as one of the most gifted literary geniuses of her period, she figures in every school anthology that treats Dutch literature from its beginnings. As the “discovery” of the manuscripts indicates, Hadewijch has not always been part of the canon. Not only was she pushed to the periphery; she was even lost completely. Interesting in this respect is the story of Fleribertus Rosweyde, who in the early seventeenth century intended to write a scholarly study on the lives of the saints. He had come across the inscription “B[eata] Hadewigis” and consulted a historian for more information. But the historian in his turn confirmed in at least two letters that Hadewijch was completely unknown to him.⁹ However, her work might well have been known and used in smaller circles at that period. A seventeenth-century Schala Anagogica by a Capuchin monk contained her name plus two texts from the rhyming letters, albeit from those not attributed to Hadewijch.¹⁰ In any case, in the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries, she was not or no longer part of a lively and continuous tradition of mystical literature.

We have indications that she and her writings were remembered up to the early sixteenth century—particularly “letter 10,” a warning against the danger of mistaking sensuous yearning for the true excitement of spiritual love, must have been widely circulated. The most important occurrence, together with excerpts from several other letters, is found in a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century collection of, mainly, sermons translated from German, known as the Limburgse Sermonenen. Interestingly, the collection also contained Beatrijs of Nazareth's small treatise Van Seven Manieren van Minnen. Hadewijch was known, read, and copied in the fourteenth century (all three complete manuscripts were made in this century), especially in the Brussels area. Judging from indications in catalogs, several monasteries in Brabant must have possessed work by her. Avoiding the question of direct influence, which is hardly relevant if one accepts that she belonged to a wider movement of mystic thought, we can say that, after her, Gheraert Appelmans (early fourteenth century) continued the tradition of speculative mysticism in the Netherlands and that particularly Jan van Ruusbroec (1293-1381) built his systematic doctrine on thoughts similar to those developed by Hadewijch.

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we find Hadewijch in rapiaria, collections of ideas from several writers and thinkers, in margins and annotations, and we know of a possibly fifteenth-century Latin translation of the visions. But the letters especially were widely excerpted. Their success can be attributed to a new wave in the spiritual movement, the moderne devotie, in which a life of charity and devotion took precedence over speculation. Hadewijch's letters give much advice precisely in this respect. Vulgarizations of religious writings became quite common in that period, and the letters were paraphrased by Hendrik Mande (circa 1360-1431), surnamed the Ruusbroec of the North and a member of the new movement. We possess at least one other fifteenth-century anthology of the letters, the so-called Bloemlezing. A recently discovered manuscript of part of Hadewijch's work in a codex from around 1500 indicates that her work was still copied at least up to the early sixteenth century. From then on little is known of her or her work.

Internationally, Hadewijch was known in Germany in the fourteenth century by the name of Saint Adelwip from Brabant.¹¹ We know at least three fourteenth-century German manuscripts containing translations from her work; in two of them “Letter 10” occurs once again. A comment by the Franciscan poet Lamprecht von Regenburg (circa 1250) indicates that, if not Hadewijch, at least certain mystic women from Brabant (and Bavaria) were known in thirteenth-century Germany.¹² Since the Dutch minnemystiek seems to precede German mysticism, scholars have tried to establish the dependence of one on the other, which is hard to prove on the strength of a limited corpus. In view of the movements of trade and the geographical situation of the Netherlands, the Low Countries might have functioned as a cultural passageway between Romance and Germanic territory. If so, early Dutch mysticism played an intermediary role in spreading eastward the spiritual revival from Cîteaux.

After the discovery of the manuscripts, modern scholars were at first preoccupied with establishing editions of reliable texts and with gathering information on Hadewijch's life. The massive editing work of Jos van Mierlo is still the chief source for all Hadewijch scholarship. Attempts to draw Hadewijch's profile, vitiated by guesswork based on personal bias, are in themselves interesting material for a metacritique of certain brands of literary study. Because we know nothing certain about her, the temptation to confuse her writings with her life is great, and it is indeed not always easy to establish what exactly is literary convention and what is not. As a woman who wrote passionately about love, Hadewijch poses much mystery. Some suggest that she was disappointed in earthly love or, as one scholar put it, that she was a “grande amoureuse” under different circumstances in a different period.¹³ Too often, the emotional quality of her writing, with its exaltation and its nonsystematic exposé of her thought, is attributed to the feminine psyche. Yet those who read Hadewijch attentively cannot but be struck by the intellectual mastery of her expression. That Hadewijch wrote masterfully, belonged to a larger movement of religious women, and was for a long time regarded as a classic in the mystical tradition tells us about the position of certain women in medieval society more appropriately than any speculation on the feminine psyche ever could.

Scholars of mysticism have naturally paid much attention to Hadewijch's thought and to her affinity with other mystics, especially with William of Saint Thierry and the Victorines. Recent research focuses more on the artistic and literary aspects of her stanzaic poems and visionary prose. Modern Dutch versions of her poems, letters, and visions are available, as are translations in English, French, German, and Italian, both in anthologies and as separate volumes.

Notes

1. Manuscripts A and B are in the Royal Library in Brussels under the numbers 2879-80 and 2877-78; manuscript C is in the University Library, Ghent, under the number 941; the recently found codex is in the Library of the Ruusbroec Genootschap, Antwerp, under the number 385 II.

2. Compare Hadewijch, Visioenen, ed. Jos Van Mierlo, vol. 2, pp. 127 ff.; Th. Weevers, Poetry of the Netherlands in Its European Context: 1170-1930, p. 28; and P. C. Boeren, Hadewijch en Heer Hendrik van Breda.

3. Van Mierlo, ed., Visioenen, pp. 127, 136.

4. Marie van der Zeyde, Hadewijch: Een Studie over de Mens en de schrijfster, p. 22.

5. Tanis Guest, Some Aspects of Hadewijch's Poetic Form in the “Strofische Gedichten,” pp. 2 ff.

6. N. de Paepe, Hadewijch: Strofische Gedichten.

7. Compare Weevers, pp. 24, 25-26.

8. Guest, Aspects of Hadewijch's Poetic Form.

9. Van Mierlo, ed., Visioenen, pp. 129-130.

10. K. Porteman, “Een nieuw getuigenis voor Hadewijch uit de 17de eeuw,” Spiegel der Letteren 12 (1968-1969): 204-210.

11. Jos Van Mierlo, Adelwip.

12. Boeren, p. 43.

13. Van der Zeyde, p. 20.

Bibliography

Primary Works

Van Mierlo, Jos, ed. Hadewijch, Brieven. 2 vols. Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and Louvain, 1947.

———. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten. Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and Louvain, 1952.

———. Hadewijch, Strophische Gedichten. 2 vols. Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and Louvain, 1942.

———. Hadewijch, Visioenen. 2 vols. Louvain, Ghent, and Mechlin, 1924.

Related Works

Boeren, P. C. Hadewijch en Heer Hendrik van Breda. Leiden, 1962.

Colledge, Eric, ed. Mediaeval Netherlands Religious Literature. London and New York, 1965.

De Paepe, N. Hadewijch: Strofische Gedichten. Ghent, 1967.

Gooday, Frances Amelia. “Mechtild von Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Antwerp: A Comparison.” Ons Geestelijk Erf 48 (1974): 1-362.

Guest, Tanis. Some Aspects of Hadewijch's Poetic Form in the “Strofische Gedichten.” The Hague, 1975.

Hart, Sister M. Columba. “Hadewijch of Brabant.” American Benedictine Review 13 (1962): 1-24.

Van der Zeyde, Marie. Hadewijch: Een Studie over de Mens en de schrijfster. Groningen, 1934.

Van Mierlo, Jos. Adelwip. 1933.

Weevers, Th. Poetry of the Netherlands in Its European Context: 1170-1930. London, 1960.