Hadewijch of Antwerp: "Love Is Everything"

Hadewijch of Antwerp (posted on the date of Suzanne Lilar's death, 12 December 1992) 

I suppose that you could regard today's post on the thirteenth-century mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp as something of a double post.

There are simply too few details about Hadewijch's life to find a relevant date for writing about her, at least one related to her own history. We know virtually nothing about her, except for what can be teased out of her writing--frequently biographical details for medieval women writers are embedded in their work, but in the surviving texts, Hadewijch reveals little about her life. Or, at least, her physical life.

From a fourteenth-century manuscript

collection of Hadewijch's work

(Ghent University Library, MS 941),

the poem begins,

"Ay, al es nu die winter cout, /

cort die daghe ende die nachte langhe"

("Ah, though now the winter is cold,

the days short and the night long...")

I am writing about Hadewijch of Antwerp today, and choosing to do so on the date of the Belgian francophone writer Suzanne Lilar. Born Suzanne Verbist in 1901, she enrolled at the University of Ghent in 1919, where she studied philosophy and, in 1925, where she received a law degree. While at the university, she discovered the work of Hadewijch and found in the thirteenth-century mystic an inspiration for her own essays, plays, and poetry. 

In her 1963 Le Couple (translated as Aspects of Love in Western Society), in particular, she refers to Hadewijch's use of minne, or all-embracing love, and her mystical nuptial imagery, in her descriptions of an all-embracing, ideal of love, one that sees human love as a revelation of divine love.

As for Hadewijch. Bernard McGinn, the historian of western mysticism, named her as one of the "Four Female Evangelists" of thirteenth-century mysticism, along with Angela of Foligno, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete:

I use the term "evangelist" in a perhaps provocative way, not only to underline the stature of these four women (Angela, Hadewijch, Mechthild, and Marguerite Porete) as the most important female mystics of the thirteenth century, but also to emphasize the bold, quasi scriptural claims they made for their writings.

About Hadewijch, McGinn writes, she "remains a mystery, as much for the paradoxes and perplexity of her writings as for her life." 

Given her references in her work--she refers to the Latin and French works of St. Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and other Christian authorities, for example--we can conclude that she was "obviously learned." She must also have come from a noble family, not only because of the education she must have received, but also because of her familiarity with courtly love poetry. Like many of the women mystics of the thirteenth century, she used the language of courtly love in her visionary work, such mystic language variously identified as "courtly mysticism," Minnemystik, or la mystique courtoise, depending on your linguistic preference. Using elements that have their origins in troubadour poetry, female mystics expressed their yearning for the divine beloved in ecstatic and erotic terms. 

Like Mechthild and Marguerite Porete, Hadewijch was a beguine.* From details in her surviving letters, she seems to have been the head of a beguine house for some time, but she also seems to have been forced out of this life and into a wandering existence at some point. (This last detail comes from one of her letters, number 29, but McGinn also considers the possibility that this reference to a "wandering life" may be a kind of literary formula.)

Although Hadewijch's work survives only in a handful of fourteenth-century manuscripts, her "literary mastery surpasses that of any other medieval woman mystic, not least because of the variety of genres in which she expressed her message" (I am quoting McGinn here). 

Hadewijch's surviving work includes Strophische Gedichten (Poems in Stanzas), forty-five lyrics modeled on troubadour poetry, but adapting the language of secular love poetry "into the field of mystical discourse." The Mengeldichten (Poems in Couplets) are sixteen poems in rhyming couplets expressing elements of her faith.

Hadewijch's Visioenenboek (Book of Visions) is the "earliest vernacular collection" of this kind of visionary revelations, probably dating to the 1240s. Finally, there are thirty prose letters. What little biographical evidence that survives can be gleaned from these letters, but they also expand on and develop "all-embracing theme," love: "Minne is everything" (from letter 25, "Minne es al"). 

Despite Suzanne Lilar's interest in Hadewijch, her work has really only become well-known in the late twentieth-century. The first English translation appeared in 1980, when Mother Columba Hart published Hadewijch: The Complete Works for the Classics of Western Spirituality series. The first influential study of her Hadewijch and her work to appear was Paul Mommaers 1989 Hadewijch: Writer – Beguine – Love Mystic, which won the Flemish Prijs De Standaard (Mommaers's work was translated into English in 2004).

For the most complete discussion of Hadewijch, especially her complicated views of minne, I recommend Bernard McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism--1200-1350, volume 3 of his history of western Christian mysticism.

*As we have seen, the beguines were a lay religious movement--beguines like Marie of Oignies and Mechthild of Magdeburg were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus.

Beatrice of Nazareth: "Absorbed in the Abyss of Love"

Beatrice of Nazareth (feast day, 29 July)

The woman who became known as Beatrice of Nazareth was born about the year 1200 in Tienen, a town near the Flemish city of Leuven, to a relatively wealthy father, Bartholomew, a man known for his piety. She was the youngest of six children, educated at first by her mother--and the young Beatrice was recognized as "a prodigy of learning."

Stained glass depiction of
Beatrice of Nazareth,
Cistercian Abbey of Brecht,
the "official continuation"
of the monastery of Nazareth

After her mother's death, when Beatrice was about aged seven, her father sent her to a community of beguines at Zoutleeuw so "that she might more freely make progress in virtue."* While there she also attended a town school, open to both boys and girls, where she was trained in the seven liberal arts.

Called home by her father about a year later, Beatrice asked to join a religious order, and so, about the year 1210, when she was ten years old, she became an oblate at the Cistercian convent at Bloemendaal. She became a novitiate when she was about fifteen years old, and soon thereafter she was professed as a nun.

In 1216, the abbess of Bloemendaal sent her to the Cistercian community of Rameya to learn how to write liturgical manuscripts. At Rameya she developed a close spiritual friendship with the visionary Ida of Nivelles.

In January of 1217, under Ida's direction, Beatrice experienced her first mystical vision; as it was described by her contemporary biographer, "Beatrice, with devout meditation, praise, thanksgiving and all humility followed the Son as he ascended right up to the Father's presence." This is a vision seen "not with bodily but with intellectual eyes, with eyes not of the flesh but of the mind." 

Shortly after this experience, she returned to Blomendaal, where her father, two brothers, and two sisters had become lay members of the community. When a daughter community was founded in 1221, her family moved to the new Maagendal house, and Beatrice eventually joined them there, perhaps in 1221, perhaps later. Whenever she moved to Maagendal, she remained there until 1236 when she transferred to the new Cistercian convent of Nazareth, which gave her her name, Beatrice of Nazareth. She was elected prioress and remained there until her death in 1268.

A fourteenth-century Brussels
ms. of Beatrice of Nazareth's
The Seven Manners of Loving

For twenty years, from about 1215 until 1235, Beatrice is known to have kept a spiritual journal, now lost. In Nazareth, a Vita Beatricis (life of Beatrice) was written, and this document preserves much of the detail of Beatrice's life.

In Nazareth she also composed her own text, The Seven Manners of Loving--which religious historian Bernard McGinn regards as "a powerful exploration" of the most important themes "of the women mystics of northern Europe in the thirteenth century."

Beatrice of Nazareth is venerated as the Blessed Beatrice, her feast day celebrated on 29 July.

There is an excellent discussion of Beatrice of Nazareth as a mystic in McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350, volume 3 of his History of Western Christian Mysticism. In addition, Fione Bowles's volume in the Spiritual Classics series, Beguine Spirituality: Mystical Writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Hadewijch of Brabant, offers a good introduction to her work.

You can read Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Manners of Loving by clicking here.

*As we have seen, the Beguines were a lay religious movement--Beguines like Marie of Oignies and Mechthild of Magdeburg were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus. 

Marguerite Porete: Mystic, Writer, Martyr

Marguerite Porete (executed 1 June 1310)

About Marguerite Porete, theologian and historian Bernard McGinn writes, "No medieval woman mystic challenged her contemporaries--and still challenges us--more than the northern French beguine Marguerite Porete," whose "bold and uncompromising spirituality led to her execution as a heretic on June 1, 1310."

From a late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth manuscript copy
of The Mirror for Simple Souls
(Chantilly, Bibliothèque et archives du château, MS 5588)

We know about the end of Porete's life because records of the heresy trial that condemned her to death survive, but about her origins there is much less that is certain. Even her name depends on the testimony of those who condemned her--as her sentence was read out by one of her Dominican inquisitors before she was released to the secular authorities to carry out her execution, he named her as Marguerite, "called Porete." She was also said to have been born in Hainaut, in northern France, but none of the surviving evidence gave any indication about her date of birth or her family connections.

Marguerite Porete had been imprisoned in Paris for a year and a half. She had refused to speak to her inquisitors, she had refused to recant her beliefs, and she had refused to acknowledge a previous order, issued in 1306, that had required her to withdraw her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. 

Like two women we have already met in our posts for this year, Marie of Oignies and Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite seems to have been a part of the beguine movement--some beguines lived solitary lives, while others joined together into loosely organized religious communities of women who lived lives of poverty, chastity, and service, but who were not members of formally recognized religious orders. Marguerite refers to herself at one point as "formerly a mendicant creature," so she may have lived outside of any beguine community.

Another image from the 
Chantilly copy MS

Exactly why Porete's work brought her to the attention of the authorities isn't at all clear--after the 1306 order that her book be burned, she had sent her book to three noted theologians who had verified the orthodoxy of her views in The Mirror of Simple Souls. 

As she asserts in the prologue to her work, "It has already been read and approved by three men of learning and holiness": a Franciscan friar, a Cistercian monk, and a theologian from the University of Paris. She names them, quotes from their judgments of her work, and adds, "I obtained these approbations for you, readers, for your peace of mind."

But these endorsements were clearly not enough. The way of life practiced by the beguines--their asceticism, their refusal to marry, their independence, their traveling, their insistence on preaching and teaching--had always generated suspicion.

Most significantly, whether they chose an itinerant, solitary life or a life among other like-minded women in communities, they had avoided all of the male hierarchical strictures of medieval society. In 1215 and again in 1274, church councils had banned new religious orders for women, and by 1311, the Council of Varenne specifically condemned the beguines and other heresies, its bull Ad nostrum including articles drawn directly from Porete's work.

In her brief essay on Porete, written for The Guardian, theologian Tina Beattie observes that "It is not easy to establish exactly why Porete was condemned as a heretic":

The Mirror of Simple Souls, written in a vivid literary style in Old French, is a dialogue among the allegorical figures of Love, Reason and the Soul. The main challenge it poses to Catholic orthodoxy is in its claim that there is a state of mystical union in which the will completely loses itself in God so that it becomes undifferentiated and one with the divine. . . .

The fact that The Mirror of Simple Souls was written in the vernacular rather than Latin and had a popular following may have created suspicion among religious authorities. When in the 12th century theological education shifted to the universities from monasteries and abbeys (including some which had been presided over by powerful abbesses), Latin became the language of a male theological elite, but female mystics and vernacular theologians such as Porete claimed direct authority from God for their religious experiences and insights. It is easy to see how such claims threatened those who sought to maintain control of church teaching and doctrine by circumscribing the conditions under which a theologian could speak or write authoritatively.

When Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake, her book was burned with her. But, as McGinn notes, The Mirror of Simple Souls survived the conflagration--"no fewer than six versions in four languages with thirteen manuscripts" preserved Porete's words, "making it among the more widely disseminated of the vernacular mystical texts of the Middle Ages."

La Place de Grève, site of Marguerite Porete's execution,
from a map of 1572

While the text survived, Porete's authorship did not--her identity as author was suppressed, and the work circulated anonymously. In fact, Porete's authorship of The Mirror of Simple Souls was only reestablished in 1946 by Romana Guarnieri, a scholar of medieval spirituality (and, I might point out, a woman). Before Guarnieri's identification of the text's author as Marguerite Porete, scholars had assumed the author to be male--and one translator even identified the author as a theologian from the University of Paris!

In ending her essay on Marguerite Porete, Beattie recalls the words of Mechthild of Magdeburg: "No one can burn the truth." Here's the quotation, from The Flowing Light of the Godhead--it sounds remarkably prescient:

I was warned about this book, and people told me that if it were not protected, it could be thrown on the fire. Then I did as I have done since I was a child: whenever I was distressed, then I had to pray. . . . Then God himself at once to my sorrowful soul and held this book in his right hand and said: My love, do not be too distressed, no one may burn the truth.

For a great introduction to Marguerite Porete and her work, you can access Tina Beattie's essay by clicking here. There are several editions of The Mirror for Simple Souls, but I recommend the excellent edition by Ellen Babinsky, a volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

Excellent analysis of The Mirror of Simple Souls is in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism--1200-1350, volume 2 of McGinn's monumental history of western mysticism. For an in-depth volume on Porete, her text, her trial, and condemnation, see Sean L. Field's The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart.

Mechthild of Magdeburg and the "Flowing Light of the Godhead"

Mechthild of Magdeburg (Asteroid 873 Mechthild discovered 21 May 1917)

Because we do not know exactly when the Beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg was born or when she died, I have chosen today to post about her--on this day in 1917, the German astronomer Max Wolf discovered an asteroid now known as 873 Mechthild, named after this thirteenth-century woman.

Mechthild of Magdeburg,

Peter-Paul Metz, choirstall, 1896

Church of St. Gordian and Epimachus,

Leutkirch im Allgäu, Germany

What we know about Mechthild's life comes from the work for which she is principally known, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The biographical details are few--she seems to have been born between 1207 and 1210, the child of a noble family, since she refers to court life and customs.

She writes that she has a brother, Baldwin, who joins the Dominican order and who receives an excellent scholastic education, though Mechthild refers to herself as a "simple spiritual creature" (her work is notable in that, unlike most of the spiritual writing of her contemporaries, it seems to have been written in the vernacular rather than Latin).

Mechthild also tells us that she began her remarkable visionary life at the age of twelve--and that, for the next thirty-one years, "the loving greeting" from the Holy Spirit came to her "every day."

In her work she reveals that when she was a young woman (perhaps about 1230) and "through God's word," she went to Magdeburg to live a life of "renunciation of the world." There she joined a Beguine community and seems also to have grown into a position of leadership within this community.

As I have written in an earlier post, the Beguines were a lay religious movement--Beguines were not associated with any religious order, nor did they live in any officially sanctioned community. They lived an ascetic, spiritual life, devoting themselves to poverty and chastity, working among the poor and ill and modeling their lives on the life of Jesus. To be a Beguine was to live a potentially dangerous life--in a few days I will post on Marguerite Porete, a French Beguine who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1310.

Mechthild writes that she "painfully conquered the body for twenty years"--always tired, weak, and ill, she devoted herself to "sighing, weeping, confession, fasting, watching," following in her life the "glorious suffering" of Jesus. It is at this point, after twenty years of rigorous self-discipline, that her confessor tells Mechthild what God expects of her:

Then he [her confessor] commanded me to do that about which I often weep for shame when I look at my unworthiness: write this book out of God's heart and mouth. This book has thus come lovingly from God and not from the human senses.

For the next fifteen (or so) years, Mechthild records her visions, conversations with God, and revelations. At some point, probably about 1270, she puts aside her "homeless life" and joins the monastery at Helfta, joining the remarkable Gertrude of Hackeborn, her sister Mechthilde of Hackeborn, and a woman we have met before, Gertrude the Great.

Helfta, where Mechthilde of Magdeburg lived at
the end of her life

The reasons for Mechthild's move are not clear--but she was old, she had become blind, and, perhaps more critically, increasing restrictions were being placed on Beguines in Germany and the Low Countries, and Mechthild's own religious claims and her criticisms of the institutional church had made her vulnerable. The date of her death is not certain--there are a wide ranges of dates suggested, from 1282 to 1297.

One of the best accounts of Mechthild as a visionary is Bernard McGinn's, in vol. 3 of his history of western Christian mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350. There is a very affordable edition of The Flowing Light of the Godhead, but you can find a good, manageable chunk in Henry Carrigan's Meditations from Mechthild of Magdeburg.

The Blessed Marie of Oignies

Marie of Oignies (1 May 1240)

First, a word about why Marie of Oignies is the topic of today's post. Most of what we know about this remarkable religious woman comes to us from a biography written by the theologian Jacques de Vitry--whose death occurred on 1 May 1240. And so today, on the anniversary of Jacques de Vitry's death, I'm writing about Marie of Oignies.

Reliquary bust of Marie of Oignies,

silver and copper

(Church of Saint-Martin d'Aiseau,

Belgium)

To write about Marie of Oignies on the anniversary of the death of Jacque de Vitry is fitting, I think, because despite her undoubted influence on many religious women who followed, we don't have any information about Marie's family, or about her life, or about her religious experiences, except the details and interpretations that come to us from him. And his biographical work, Vita Mariae Oignacensis, was not written for the many laywomen who found inspiration in her life or who would seek to follow her model. In fact, I've preserved its Latin title here because the work was directed to (and written for) educated religious men so that they could use the details of her life in their own teaching.  

According to Jacques de Vitry's account of her life, Marie was probably born in 1176 or 1177, the daughter of a wealthy family from Nivelles, Belgium. Although she rejected the luxuries of life that her parents provided her and desired a life of poverty, expressing her wish to become a nun, her parents arranged for her marriage when she was fourteen (if she was born in 1176/77, that would date her marriage to 1190/91).

But, at least according to Jacques de Vitry's version of Marie's life, the new bride managed to persuade her new husband to take vows of chastity and poverty with her, and the two moved to a leper hospital in Willambroux, where they devoted themselves to lives of service, used their own money to support the work of the hospital, and earned the criticism of their respective families.

By 1207, Marie de Oignies left her husband and Willambroux, with his approval and consent, for a cell at the Augustinian priory of St. Nicholas at Oignies. There, although not having taken the vows of a nun belonging to any religious order, she lived a life of prayer and poverty. Nevertheless, despite her withdrawal from the world, she earned a reputation in the world for her powers of healing and her extraordinary visionary experiences. 

Perhaps drawn by Marie's reputation, Jacques de Vitry became a canon at the priory in 1209. He was ordained in 1210, probably as a result of Marie's influence, and, more important, became her confessor. He remained with her until her death in 1213, and he composed his Life of Marie Oignies two years later. 

Jacques de Vitry's account of Marie of Oignies was part of a larger project, his Liber de mulieribus Leodiensibus, (Book of the Women of Liège), which Annette Esser describes as "a propaganda effort to gain official ecclesiastical recognition for . . . the Flemish Beguines."*

Marie's religious dedication, as described by Jacques de Vitry, is witnessed by two key elements: her extreme asceticism (her early death is almost certainly due to her extended periods of self-starvation) and her extraordinary visionary experiences.

In her discussion of Marie of Oignies, Esser notes four key visions: "the vision of fiery excess," which occurs right after Marie's marriage; her vision of the life of Christ, which is accompanied by what Jacques de Vitry describes as a "flood of tears"; her "ecstatic vision" of "self-stigmatization," a vision that results in her using a knife to cut out a chunk of her own flesh; and her "vision of hands from purgatory," the result of fasting and endless work, in which she sees and experiences the suffering of souls in Purgatory.

Marie's life--and, in particular, her visionary experiences and her extremes of self-deprivation--would offer inspiration to and become a model for many women who did not have the social status, wealth, or education that would allow them to take up a religious life in a convent.

The interior courtyard of the abbey of St. Nicholas, Oignies,
where relics of Marie of Oignies are preserved

Marie of Oignies died in 1213 and was beatified by the Catholic Church, her feast day celebrated on 23 June. Some sources list 23 June as the day of her death, but I can find no documentation for that information.

There are several affordable paperback editions of the Life of Marie de Oignies. For an introduction to a range of medieval women mystics, I recommend Elizabeth Petroff's Medieval Women's Visionary Literature and her Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. Annette Esser's essay on Marie of Oignies is in Women Christian Mystics Speak to Our Time, ed. David Brian Perrin.

In her extreme fasting, Marie of Oignies precedes Catherine of Siena, whom we discussed two days ago, by more than a century. Two works I suggested there, Rudolph Bell's 1985 Holy Anorexia and Caroline Walker Bynum's 1988 classic, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, are equally relevant here.

*Although there is a great deal of uncertainty about the origins of the word beguine, this lay religious movement was important through the sixteenth century, especially, though not exclusively, in northern Europe. Beguines were not members of an established religious order (like the Benedictines or Franciscans, for example), but, following the model of a woman like Marie of Oignies, they lived individual or communal lives in imitation of Christ's, lives of poverty, chastity, self-denial, and service to the poor and the ill. (It is sometimes said the Marie of Oignies is the first beguine. In her 1986 women's history classic, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life, Margaret Wade Labarge calls Marie of Oignies "the mother of the beguine movement." )

Update, 1 May 2026: Since posting this essay, I have discovered Alicia Spencer-Hall's excellent (and extended) examination of Marie of Oignies, made available through the Open Library of the Humanities Journal. To read her “Marie of Oignies, of Nivelles, or of Villers: The Multiple Textual Identities of a 13th-Century Holy Woman,” click here.