Hadewijch

Abstract

Hadewijch (active c. 1240) was a mystic and author of a literary oeuvre encompassing letters and visions in prose, song lyrics, and epistolary poems. She was among the earliest writers to use the Middle Dutch vernacular to express spiritual teachings. As a historical figure, she is unknown. In her writings on minne (mystical love), courtly and religious literary traditions are creatively fused. She advocates a radical mysticism of desire as a path to deification. Her work survives in three fourteenth-century single-author manuscripts with her complete works. Until c. 1500 some of her letters circulated more widely in both the Southern and Northern Low Countries, and minor traces have also been found in two Rhenish miscellanies. Afterward, she was forgotten until the three oeuvre manuscripts were rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Today she has a prominent place in Dutch literary history and the history of Western mysticism.