Hadewijch of Antwerp

The central word in Hadewijch's writing is minne, which translates as love and behaves in her poems as a person and a force. Minne is not what the soul feels. Minne is what acts on the soul: she summons, she withholds, she demands total service, she wounds, she abandons, and the correct response to her cruelty is not complaint but more service. The vocabulary comes straight out of the courtly lyric of the period, the poetry of a knight bound to an unattainable lady, and Hadewijch takes it over whole and directs it at God.

That transfer is the technical achievement. Courtly love already had a fully worked language for unsatisfied desire, for fidelity under humiliation, and for a devotion that is proved by not being rewarded. Applied to God, it gives her an idiom for the experience she keeps returning to, in which nearness and absence are not opposites but two faces of the same relation, and in which the failure of consolation is evidence that the love is real rather than that it has failed.

She writes in three forms and they do a different job each. The Visions record extraordinary states and are the most extreme. The Letters are practical direction, written to younger Beguines, and are steadying, precise and frequently stern. The Poems in Stanzas carry the courtly machinery. Together they are among the first serious religious literature in any Dutch dialect, written by a woman at a time when a woman writing theology in the vernacular was itself a contested act.

The Beguines were women who lived a religious life without taking permanent vows and without entering an order. They gathered in houses and, in the Low Countries, in whole walled courtyards, supported themselves by work, kept chastity while they remained, and could leave and marry. The arrangement was popular, it was female led, and it was regarded with suspicion by churchmen who disliked unsupervised women teaching each other about God.

Hadewijch was one of them, and that is nearly all that is securely known about her life. Her letters show her guiding a group and later separated from it, apparently under pressure and possibly expelled, and she refers to hardship and to opposition without ever explaining the circumstances. There is no reliable record of her dates, her family, her house, or her death, and the identification with Antwerp rests on the manuscript tradition rather than on documents.

Her works then went quiet for centuries. The manuscripts survived, were copied, and were read at a distance by later writers, but her name dropped out of general circulation until scholars working on Middle Dutch manuscripts in the nineteenth century brought the material back into view. She is now normally read as the strongest of the vernacular love mystics and as a probable influence on the later Rhineland writers, though influence in that period is easier to assert than to demonstrate.