Hadewijch

Hadewijch was a 13th-century Beguine of the Low Countries (probably the Duchy of Brabant, near Antwerp), a mystic and poet who wrote in vernacular Middle Dutch rather than clerical Latin. Almost nothing about her life is documented: what is known is drawn only from her own writings, which show her as the spiritual guide of a group of young Beguines — women living a life of devotion in lay communities, freely and outside the cloister.

Her letters hint at opposition and even a period of wandering, but no birth or death date, family, or house can be securely fixed. Nineteenth-century attempts to make her a nun have been abandoned by scholars. Her surviving work falls into three great veins — a Book of Visions, some thirty prose Letters of spiritual counsel, and her Poems (forty-five Poems in Stanzas and sixteen Poems in Couplets).

Across all of them stands one word she leaves untranslated: minne, Love. Hadewijch takes the forms and fever of courtly love poetry and turns them wholly toward God, so that minne is at once the soul’s longing, the beloved, and God himself.

She insists on Love’s reciprocity and on its costliness — the noble suffering of Love’s absence is, for her, the surest sign of Love’s presence. Among the Atlas mystics she is a rare, fully vernacular female voice, and one of the earliest.