Hadewijch lived in the duchy of Brabant, in what is
now Belgium, around 1250. Her writings reveal
that she was well educated and therefore probably
a noble. She seems to have served as the leader of a
group of Beguine women. Beguine communities,
which first appeared in the late MIDDLE AGES, had
less structure and fewer rules than traditional religious
orders and consisted of individuals (usually
women) who attempted to lead lives of poverty,
prayer, and good deeds. Other members of
Hadewijch’s community eventually seem to have
questioned her leadership, perhaps because of her
unorthodox ideas about Christian love, and there
is some speculation that they may have forced her
to leave the community.
In the 1830s, German scholar F. J. Mone rediscovered
Hadewijch’s works, which had been preserved
in 14th-century manuscripts. These works,
which are written in Dutch, include 16 Didactic
Poems, most of which are rhyming couplets; 45
Poems in Stanzas; 14 Visions; and 31 Letters to admirers
and friends. They show that Hadewijch
knew some Latin and French and that she had read
many of the earlier Church fathers. She was aware
of Ptolemy’s theories on astronomy as well as contemporary
ideas about music and rhetoric. Her
writings also raise the possibility that she had read
Pierre Abélard’s poetry and listened to many TROUBADOURS’
love songs.
Like her near-contemporary BEATRICE OF
NAZARETH, Hadewijch concerns herself with the
idea of Christian love. She writes in one letter that
she has loved God since she was 10 years old: “In
the end, I cannot believe that I have loved Him
best, and yet I cannot believe that there is any living
man who loves God as I love Him.” In another
writing, Hadewijch names individuals whom she
sees as displaying a surpassing love for God. Her
list includes the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen,
Saint AUGUSTINE, HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, and
Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard of Clairvaux had argued in the 12th
century that individuals should strive above all to
love God, because by doing so they could become
one with God. Hadewijch, too, believes that
through love an individual can become one with
God. She perceives this union as both a burden and
a joy: “We all want to be God along with God; but
God knows that there are few of us who want to
be man with Him in His humanity, to carry His
Cross with Him, to hang upon it with Him, to pay
with Him the debt of human kind.” It seems to
some scholars that Hadewijch believed she was capable
of such suffering. At the same time, she
shows humility and an awareness of her own limitations
in other works, as in her love poem “Drawing
Close to Love:”
I drew so close to Love
That I began to understand
How great the gain of those
Who give themselves wholly to Love:
And when I saw this for myself,
What was lacking in me gave me pain.
Such expressions of belief and love were uncommon
during her time, especially for laywomen
of the Church, as was her style of
writing. Unlike most medieval Christian writers,
she rarely quoted the BIBLE. In addition, she
wrote in a Brabantine dialect of Dutch, no Latin,
and thus addressed a wider, less-learned audience.
Rather than composing scholarly treatises
that her audience would find incomprehensible,
she communicated her thoughts in poetry, letters,
and stories of visions. Even more remarkably,
her descriptions of religious love contain
passion and exaltation not often seen in religious
writings of previous centuries. In one
poem, love brings a “high, loud gift of low silence”
and “completely rob[s] me of myself.”
Similarly, during one of her visions Hadewijch
“remained in a passing away in my Beloved, so
that I wholly melted away in him and nothing
any longer remained to me of myself.” When
medieval writers employed such paradoxical,
self-annihilating language, they usually had
courtly love in mind (see CHIVALRY AND COURTLY
LOVE), not religious love. Hadewijch was using
the language and style of the troubadours.
Scholar J. Reynaert has recently argued that the
“borrowing of a profane courtly model for communicating
a religious ‘content’” may not have originated
with Hadewijch, and it did not make her
unique. Nevertheless, it adds a layer of meaning
and beauty to the mysticism that saturates her
writing, as do her references to Love and the Soul
as female:
. . . The soul is the way that God goes when he
proceeds from his depths to his liberty, that is
into his ground, which is beyond the reach of
all things but the soul’s depths. And as long as
God is not wholly her own possession, she will
not be satisfied.
(“The Deepest Essence of the Soul”)
In the beginning Love satisfied us,
When Love first spoke to me of love—
How I laughed at her in return!
But then she made me like the hazel trees,
Which blossom early in the season of
darkness,
And bear fruit slowly.
(“Love’s Maturity”)
English Versions of Works by Hadewijch
Hadewijch: The Complete Works. Translated and edited
by Mother Columba Hart. New York: Paulist
Press, 1980.
“Letters to a Young Beguine” and “Vision 7.” In Medieval
Women’s Visionary Literature, edited by
Elizabeth Petroff, 189–200. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Works about Hadewijch
Reynaert, J. “Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly
Love.” In Medieval Dutch Literature in its European
Context, edited by Erik Kooper, 208–225.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Milhaven, John Giles. Hadewijch and Her Sisters:
Other Ways of Loving and Knowing. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993.