HADEWIJCH, Blessed. - Brabantine mystic; she is the most remarkable figure in the literature in the thiois dialect at the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th. She was probably a native of Antwerp; concrete details about her life are lacking.
Her works show her to be imbued with the chivalric spirit, which she probably drew from the nobility of her birth and her upbringing. H. must have grown up in a thiois environment, where courtly literature was in vogue and where she could come under the influence of the Provençal troubadours. On the other hand, her knowledge of Latin gave her the possibility of accessing the writings of the great spiritual authors in vogue in the Middle Ages. St. Augustine was her favorite author; she knew William of St-Thierry and Cistercian spirituality. From the age of 11 H. consecrated herself to Minne (the divine "Love"). At a more mature age she lived, it seems, in one of those free groupings of "feminae religiosae" that preceded the true and proper beguinages. In this circle of devout and mystical virgins, whom she led to the supreme conquest of Minne, H. enjoyed great authority. But, like all mystics, she also knew contradiction there. A list of perfect "friends of God" that she left shows that she had relations, or at least distant acquaintances, in various countries of Europe and as far as Palestine.
Both in prose and in poetry H. left remarkable writings. Her Strophische Gedichten, or collection of "strophic poems," are a rejuvenation and, for their mystical content, a transfiguration of what courtly poetry had produced at its best in Provence.
The Love that H. sings is love in its highest reality: God himself. No accent, then, is forced, all chivalric fidelity is justified and, in the disinterested service of this All of Love, nothing is excessive. H. employs stanza and rhyme with consummate art. It has been said, rightly, that never has the Dutch language worn a more regal mantle.
A collection of rhymed poems, Rijngedichten, is also attributed to H., but most of them are of minimal value and clearly denote a generation later than that of the poetess.
Her first collection of prose works are her apocalyptic Visioenen ("Visions"). Perhaps through her own spiritual director, H. noted down in them, at a more advanced age, her mystical experiences of the preceding years. Contrary to the visions of St. Mechtilde and St. Bridget, no consideration of a social, historical and politico-religious order is found in them. The mystical ascent of the soul to divine conformity takes on there the character of a complete assimilation to Christ.
Finally, in her letters (Brieven), H. reveals herself as the great teacher, full of chivalric impetus, who draws a chosen youth to the mystical conquest of Minne. Here, more than elsewhere, this brilliant mystic manifests, alongside her lively realist sense, the solid and profound intellectualism that lies at the basis of her life and her work. If her lyrics make her the greatest poet of the thiois Middle Ages, her letters make her the greatest prose writer. Her sentences, though always wonderfully balanced, are constructed according to the living movement of thought and feeling and abound in lapidary expressions.
In the literatures of the European mother tongues, H. has no equal in the Middle Ages, and in the history of Christian spirituality she is the only one who has, to such an extent, conceived and developed the mystical ascent to God in terms of the chivalric sentiment.
Bibliography2 works
Leonzio Reypens