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.

Angela of Foligno, "Female Evangelist"

Angela of Foligno ("equivalent canonization," 9 October 2013)

Of Angela of Foligno, theologian and emeritus professor Bernard McGinn writes, 

I like to describe Angela as one of the four "female evangelists" of thirteenth-century mysticism. 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.*

Some doubts have been raised about whether such a historical person as "Angela of Foligno" ever existed. For his part, McGinn notes that there is a middle ground between taking later accounts of her life at face value and dismissing her biography as a "mystic tale." 

An eighteenth-century print of the
thirteenth-century mystic

We will follow McGinn, then, in saying that Angela of Foligno was probably born about the year 1248, in the Umbrian province of Perugia, to a fairly affluent family. She was married and had a number of children.

At the age of forty, Angela had a dream that would change her life. Francis of Assisi appeared to her in a vision, with the result that she came to regard her previous life as sinful and determined to live a life of purity and the pursuit of perfection. (According to legend, Angela was wealthy, beautiful, and vain--definitely sinful.)

As a married mother, pursuing a life of spiritual purity might not have been easy. Like Margery Kempe, Angela of Foligno found her road to the religious life blocked by her very human family. (There is no evidence that Kempe would have encountered the ideas of Angela of Foligno in England, as she did for Birgitta of Sweden, but on her pilgrimages she did visit sites associated with the Italian visionary and might have learned about her. Certainly there are remarkable parallels in their experiences and behavior.)

But by 1388 Angela's "problem" was solved--her mother died, and then, a few months later, her husband and children died. Angela was able to begin her religious life by giving away her possessions.

With one female servant, a woman named Masazuola, she became, by 1291, a tertiary of St. Francis--that is, she became a member of a "third order" of the Franciscans, someone who, for a variety of reasons, may not take formal vows to join a religious order but who, as a lay person, lives outside the convent according to the ways of life of those who live inside. (For a discussion of tertiary orders, click here.) 

In 1292, under the direction of a spiritual adviser whom McGinn refers to as "Brother A." (other sources identify him as Father Arnoldo of Foligno), Angela began to dictate the story of her conversion and a "narrative of her inner journey," twenty stages on "her itinerary to God." A further set of ten stages, which Brother A. found difficult to understand and condensed into seven "supplementary stages," were incorporated into her memoriale, completed in 1296.

Angela's remains are in the
Church of St. Francis in Foligno

In 1298, according to McGinn, the book was submitted for approval, which it received. Brother A. then revised the Memorial (1299-1300), adding a series of thirty-six instructiones, which "reflect Angela's teaching between 1296 and her death in early 1309." 

The whole is known today, depending on the edition or translation, as Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, The Spiritual Journey of the Blessed Angela of Foligno according to the Memorial of Brother A, or Angela of Foligno: Complete Works.

Angela of Foligno was beatified by Pope Clement XI on 11 July 1701. In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI spoke on Angela at a general audience. Angela of Foligno was given an "equipolente canonization" by Pope Francis on 9 October 2013 (here's an explanation of what that means). 

For an extended discussion of Angela of Foligno's Book, see McGinn's The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism--1200-1350, vol. 3 of his History of Western Christian Mysticism.

This dome, which includes a representation of

Angela of Foligno, is in the Basilica Cattedrale di San Feliciano

in Foligno, where Brother A. met her and transcribed her 

book of memories and instruction.

*I've also posted on Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete—click to read those posts.  

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.