Promised Bodies: Time, Language, & Corporeality in Medieval Women’S Mystical Texts

Jessica Boon has noted that among English-language scholarship, however, a certain tendency prevails: “Most authors choose to analyze Hadewijch only in the light of her poetry” and, as such, have “focused on her use of courtly love metaphors or how her work reflects typical female religious experience, especially through metaphors such as food and the body.”1 Once again, immediacy, experience, and the body become a central tenet whose presence tends to paralyze literary considerations beyond or even within these thematic trends. Hadewijch’s poetry does, of course, lend itself to the seductive appearance of the immediate (as presented in lines such as “Desire pours out and delight drinks” [Lied 40, l. 42]),² encouraging many contemporary readers to deem eros and bodily pleasure as ubiquitous as the images of nature in her poems. While commentary on her poetry has problematically highlighted its erotic and sensual nature by tracing out an influence of the Song of Songs and the expressions of love common to troubadours and trouvères, once again the nature of both embodiment and desire (and consequently eros and sensuality) becomes complicated if one goes beyond the face value of their manifestations and considers the larger poetic framework of Hadewijch’s poetic corpus and its interrelation with literary, temporal, and theological contexts. The affective nature of the poetry is oft en equated with eroticism without interpreting how precisely that affect is engaged in her work and to what end.

This emphasis on the “courtly” has also assumed a dominant strain in Hadewijch interpretation—despite the ever-increasing ambiguity that surrounds this term and the growing awareness of its complex filiation to secular and religious realms.3 As early as 1994, Joris Reynaert emphasized that Hadewijch

was not the only one of her time, and she probably was not the first either, to have adapted the vocabulary and the poetic form of the courtly song to a mystic content. In order to appraise her significance and her real place in literary history we must not satisfy ourselves with comparing her poems with troubadour or trouvère poetry and then deciding that she certainly “borrowed” a great deal. We should also take into account that the language of courtly mystic poetry, which she seemingly initiated, in fact already existed or was coming into existence in her cultural milieu (beguine or otherwise) and that she could make use of it quite naturally, not necessarily manifesting herself as an imitator of the worldly poets, but on the contrary stepping forward as a representative of a certain conception of “divine love” and as a member of the spiritual “community” which was founded on it.⁴

The Victorine use of the figure of the courtly in forming the canons regular (from the outside in) has been noted by Stephen Jaeger, but never overtly related to the spiritual formation of beguines.⁵ Newman’s clever designation la mystique courtoise has proven a helpful way of identifying hybridity or interdependence between traditions, as has her work on the complexity of the figure of Minne, yet on the whole the meaning of “courtliness,” “eros,” “desire,” “nature,” “the body,” and other terms as they relate thematically and formally to Hadewijch’s work remains a complex and unresolved matter for interpretation.⁶ If we assume in interpreting these themes that the songs are the self-expression of Hadewijch’s personal experience, the conditions that frame and structure this experience and the status of love itself oft en risk remaining unquestioned.⁷

In addition, in reading her songs and poetic work as testimony to the immediacy of experience (inasmuch as she is a woman, beguine or mystic), once again we tend to lose sight of how her material works insofar as it is a literary text and how the representation of experience is conditioned by the letter. Scholars’ desires to attribute authority, empowerment, and the expression of voice to experience in women’s writing may paradoxically mask the way in which that power, authority, or voice is constructed—oft en through collective (and not necessarily individual) means. That women’s work is oft en read with less attention to its formal qualities because of our assumed emphasis on “experience” reveals more about contemporary presuppositions regarding the natural, formless, egoistic (in the psychological sense of the term), or self-evident nature of experience than it does about the variety and definition of experience in women’s writing or the constructed form, function, and relation of what we think of as “experience” in respect to literary and theological traditions. When, however, Hadewijch’s visions and letters are evaluated according to a hermeneutic measure and are used to examine the poetic fashioning of her work, the material takes on greater formal complexity and pedagogic purpose.

I read Hadewijch’s poetic work in relation to the larger literary and theological framework that underlies her corpus in order to demonstrate that the poetic fabric of her songs and poems is intimately related to an immanent textuality that ideally structures an individual’s life, situated as it is in the historical time of the exo anthropos, the outer person, but that hopes to synchronize the time of life with the measure of the divine. My reading begins with the claim that her songs should be framed specifically as a fulfillment of the obligation of her highest way of loving, which we saw illustrated in her visions: that she live according to affection (affectien), but in privation (derven) in accordance with the suffering of Christ, performing works of virtue. The relation of poetry to lived werke is essential, in both formal and thematic ways. Like psalms, Hadewijch’s songs are framed according to the personal and lived relation to the divine, and unlike the visions, her songs find their primary content in the domain of the outer, of what dwells in historical time, working according to a human tenor, that is, the fallible way of longing for and seeking the divine. The presence of the divine or union with the divine does not dominate the content of the songs, which is rather an articulation of absence, privation, striving, and delay, as it is with Job, and becomes a planctus for the lack of experience of Minne. This framing is not uncommon in the readings of Mommaers, Frank Willaert, and Rob Faesen, who emphasize absence, longing, and separation as the dominant signs of the songs.8

The story her songs tell, however, does not stop here, at the level of theme and content. The absence of Minne and the display of extremes (which Willaert has extensively commented upon) are mediated or countered by a poetics operative within her text that provides a pattern for recognition of the figure of Christ in human weakness and failure in a manner common to psalms. The song allows for both unbinding and containment at one and the same time; it allows for that which seems outside of faith (as in what Hadewijch calls “noble unfaith”) to be constantly folded back into the hermeneutic expanse of her theological world. The mystery of the divine that we saw operative in the inner person is thus linked to the (less immediate and less visible) figural body of the divine in the song. The patterning in the songs enables the immediate, the affective, and the outer to be read according to the less obvious and reflexive mirroring of speaker and his or her relation to the song (and creation) as a whole. As form and content work together in the psalms to order forms of experience and enable recognition of the divine in the human, prompting what is voiced in the first person to be subsumed to a larger design, so too do Hadewijch’s songs provide guidance and ordering for affective imitatio. Human extremes find their measure in and through recognition of their purposefulness as they attest to the divine. In other words, while her songs bemoan the absence of union and absence of a positive experience of the divine, they simultaneously perform an alliterative and echoic summoning, recall, and inventio (in the sense of “finding”) of the divine meaning of this experience in the mediation of language.

In this fashion, the poetics operative in the text becomes a performative means for enacting, remembering, and finding the significance of lived experience. One is asked to live poetically—to use a Heideggerian motif—and this “living” is in part guided and performed through the relation of life to words and speech. Actively tracing the figure of the divine in life allows the speaker of the song to recognize her way of living as her divinely sanctioned way of loving. Like Gregory’s Moralia in Job, the songs prompt the speaker to read and interpret her experience of absence according to a divine paradigm, that is, as a test in which one seeks to conquer weakness and in turn be conquered by the divine; like a psalm, the formal qualities of the song simultaneously incite and order the passions so that they are understood in relation to their greater promised work of salvation. Once again, the interaction between text and the life it intends to script is of central concern, and the ability to read the world and embodiment as part of the symbolic economy of spiritual life is part of the text’s pedagogic project. This spiritual economy is not rigid in its articulation (especially given beguines’ lack of vows): remembering and inventing the meaning of suffering is a constantly renewable and metamorphosing event—like the recitation of the 150 psalms in the liturgy—allowing the variety of human experience to accompany inner transformation as the beguine recognizes theological-aesthetic counterparts.9

The text is used, once again, to pattern and thus transform the sense of the biographical, to make the writing of the outer conform to the inner, yet it differs from what we saw in the visions. Instead of a spiritual content being scripted from the inner to the outer, the hermeneutic process works in inverse fashion: the formal qualities of the text provide a key for meaning to be worked on primarily from the outside in, so to speak. Living according to the way one reads is yet again of central importance, but this time, reading what one lives as divinely ordered is the hermeneutic at stake. Likewise, ordering speech, actions, and passion to conform to fit a spiritual end is part of the work of the songs. The poetic work (the songs and rhyming letters) thus shows how inner (the likeness to the divine) and outer (the form of lived experience) cohabit one another poetically by performing this unity of the two. It performs the relation to inner and outer thematically and formally through the art of showing how to become what one should be and to simultaneously recognize being that which one already is (the image of the divine), whether or not one has reached perfection (but provided one is actively pursuing this spiritual calling of divine love).¹⁰

The aesthetic framework of the song or poem provides a sense of containment for the most uncontainable of affective experiences (extremes of longing, despair, elation), both prompting and patterning experience, allowing a theological pattern to resound in and transform suffering, desire, and longing. A seeming immediacy in poetic language—the garment of appearance—is linked to performative and transformative ends; mystical poetry again performs an exegetical exercise that is intimately linked to embodied experience—however complex that double-edged term proves itself to be.

Moving from Hadewijch’s visions to her poems, the reader is immediately struck by a change in the way the divine inhabits or dwells in Hadewijch: the change in form signals an alteration in the figural presence of the divine, from the previous “richness” in love shown (toende) in her visions, to bankruptcy and debt (scout) when translated into the substance of song.¹² In the visions, divinity figures as the unlived memory of a Trinitarian presence into which Hadewijch had been absorbed. While the figure of the divine is complicated in the visions by temporal and linguistic mediation, it is nevertheless an affirmation of divinity, an illumination, even if it is elusively felt in the inner body as an atemporal union. Figures of divinity (the “face” of the divine, the body of Christ), divine gift s to humankind for accessing divinity (wisdom, virtue, Queen Reason), and the individuals who personify human perfection (Mary, Augustine, the champion) are endowed with a linguistic and affective reality that gives substance to the soul’s inner life and allows the soul to orient itself toward and be guided by the inner person. This orientation of the soul toward the inner person in turn promises to animate the body in life and works.¹³ In the songs, however, according to the speaker, Minne seems to have fled and only remains as a hope or memory and the experience of an absence.

The theme of wandering in the wilderness reappears in the poems to describe this seeming desertion and to reflect on the duplicity of Minne in a way that echoes the striving of a lover in secular courtly love poetry. Yet it also echoes the wandering of Mary Magdalene in the desert, and her searching for Christ in the empty tomb resembles that of the figure of the Bride in the Song of Songs.14 Hadewijch places Mary Magdalene at number four on her List because “her devout love brought her to her greatness and gave her all things that gave her perfection in the three beings that are one.”¹⁵ Mary was the “apostle of the apostles,” having learned how to love Christ completely. Given the beguines’ interest in modeling themselves on the apostolic life rather than on a rule, it is understandable that this fusion of love and life, understood in the Augustinian sense, is a model for Hadewijch. Although Hadewijch has an identifiable way of loving that can be performed according to an imitatio, there is no other clear path for her to follow, hence every path necessarily entails wandering or adventure.

As she advises in Letter 15 through an allegory of the pilgrim on the path to God—“You must ask about the way. He himself says this: I am the way”—Hadewijch explicitly shows us that the “way” entails inner and outer works that are intimately tied to language and to a spirit in performance: “Oh, since he is the way [wech], consider what ways he went—how he worked [wrachte], and how he burned interiorly with charity [berrende in karitaten van binnen] and exteriorly in works of the virtues [werken van doechden van buten] for strangers and for friends” (CW, 78).¹⁶ This way is intimately connected to speech, not only because living according to Christ entails living according to the Word, but also because, as is stated in the final ninth point of in this same allegory, the pedagogic or productive nature of speaking of God is critical. Quoting Saint Bernard, Hadewijch writes, “You must gladly speak of God. This is a criterion of Minne, that the name of the Beloved is found sweet. Saint Bernard speaks of this: ‘Jesus is honey in the mouth.’ To speak of the Beloved is exceedingly sweet; for it awakens Love immeasurably. And it enlivens [vliethecht] works” (CW, 79).¹⁷ As it awakens love in the inner person, making it immanent in the speaker, speech may also ignite longing and lead to the inhabitation of Minne by others in her community, to inner and outer in-spiriting, and thus to the human way of inhabiting its divine nature up to the point of perfection like those in the List. In reading Hadewijch’s poetry, discerning the correlation of this awakening and inhabitation with the desired coordination of outer with inner is essential or one risks missing the affective and effective purpose of the poetry and its relation to the shaping and means of defining her community as a whole.

The constant figure of the third in the articulation of Minne (as “love,” “lover,” and “beloved,” and in the multiple voices in the songs) complements its Trinitarian model. This emphasis on the greater community shares an Augustinian (and hence Victorine) concern. For Hadewijch as for Richard of Saint Victor, the verbal and affective sharing of love with a third is significant for the larger sense of community: “Mutual fruition, properly speaking, only happens when two love a third in a concordance of dilection, in a community of love and when the affections of two are united in the fire of this third.”18 Without this communal purpose, the songs would seem to consist in an elaborate—albeit beautiful—exercise in self-indulgence, far from the strict self-abnegating ethos associated with loving Minne. The doubleness or duplicity of poetic language—its capacity to be other than what it appears, its seeming ability to host a secret—will script the way for becoming and recognizing “being what one already is” and sharing it with others.

The poetics of the text allows Minne to haunt the body of the song in a different fashion particular to poetic language. To the degree that Hadewijch’s visions are testimony to an inhabitation by the divine marked by the doubling of her senses and her self, her songs, to the contrary, are testimony to Minne’s having fled the speaker and left her “wander[ing] in the land of strangers.”¹⁹ At least, this is what it seems to the speaker of the poem, despite the perpetual reminders that Minne appears in her very concealing of herself. Minne dwells poetically, for like poetry, as Hadewijch tells us, Minne’s concealings are her revealings: “The proximity of the nature of Minne / Deprives the soul of its rest: / The more Minne comes, the more she steals / The more she shows, the more she keeps secret” (CW, 336).²⁰ Like nature, the speaker of the poem guides its speaker to cyclically renew her love according to the hourly renewals seen in the letters and visions, in the promise that Minne will eventually allow the speaker to come close to full fruition and experience her.²¹ The oxymoronic time of the vision is itself testimony to the paradoxical condition of the poetics of disclosure. If poetry is marked by an absence that it simultaneously fills, then Minne haunts the figurative “body” of the poem in ways that are particular to Hadewijch’s theological, communal, and affective ends.

Despite—or perhaps thanks to—her poetry’s economically compact simplicity and affective resonance, the power of poetry is closer in kind to the sublime power of Minne, and despite Hadewijch’s lamentations, her poetry paradoxically expresses the proximity of Minne in attesting to her absence. Hadewijch’s Liederen address the paradoxical forms of expression of Minne and what appears as its effect on the speaker’s tormented desire. With regard to poetic form, it is as though the doubling of the senses witnessed in the visions is transformed into the double nature and duplicitous way in which Minne appears in the world and in poetic language. This doubleness dictates the way Minne must be read, interpreted, and interpolated as a form of judgment of oneself: reading Minne “outside” in the world guides the reading and judging of how Minne figures within. While Hadewijch is able to have a twofold perception of her divine nature in this vision, what it anticipates is her solitary way (wegh) of loving in life, according to her human side and a Christic and Marian imitatio. The songs read the vision’s prediction as a form of predication—a form of speaking and being. The songs are testimony to a path of darkness and privation; however, this path also attests the divine’s secret inhabitation of the world and shaping of human suffering. The songs therefore provide a guide not only for living but also for reading and revealing how one is secretly inhabited by the divine. Hadewijch’s striving thus finds a strong parallel to the figure of Job, to Gregory’s influential interpretation in his Moralia, and to the experience of a secret that inhabits both a way of life and poetic language.

This mystery of the divine in language and in the body means that her songs speak hidden words to their addressee in the articulation of suffering. This is echoed in her letter: “Suffer gladly the pain God sends you; thus you will hear his mysterious counsel, as Job says of him: You have spoken to me a hidden word” (CW, 51).22 This hearing is equated with reading according to the inner gift of reason: those “who have been chosen for such a state in union with Love” are enlightened souls who do not yet know that they can see according to the “secret light” of reason, and are able to “read the judgments in God’s countenance … in conformity with the truth of the laws of Minne” (CW, 87).²³ One has to read as if one were Minne or God, according to an exterior referent that becomes increasingly incorporated to the point of absolute identification. In Lied 11, this interpretive gesture as applied to suffering is clear: “For all judgments passed on him must be / Read in Minne’s countenance. / And there he sees clear truth without illusion / in many sweet pains” (CW, 158).²⁴ While not pleasurable, the success of this seeing has its fruits. Reading is translated into acting according to the truth and principles of what one has “read” in Minne’s face.

In the next stanza of Lied 11, this becomes even clearer. Internalizing this act of reading enacts kenosis:

He sees in clarity that he who loves

Must practice [pleghen] with full truth.

When he then knows [bekint] with truthfulness,

That he does too little for Minne

His high mind storms with pain [pinen],

For what he fully grasps from Minne’s countenance

[Is] how the lover should practice [pleghen] Minne,

And this judgment sweetens the pain [pine]

And makes him go completely out [gheven al om al]

So that Minne may be contented.

(CW, 158; LIEDEREN, 124)²⁵

The final two stanzas of this Lied demonstrate how this individual way of reading grounds community. The last two stanzas incorporate the “he” (“hi”) into a collective unity in which “he” can become one of the wise (one of “them”) once he understands love interiorly: “With love they shall cleave in oneness to love / … This remains completely hidden from strangers / But is open to the wise” (CW, 159).²⁷ Hadewijch’s mysticism is part of a communal culture of reading even if the primary material read is hidden, embedded as it is in the substance of life, and if the appeal to a message “heard” is enigmatic and entirely left to each individual to discover. The teaching is a form of autodidacticism that demonstrates a skepticism toward rote learning and exterior performances that are void of inner affective and cognitive counterparts. The ability to properly understand her poems and songs hinges on this interrelation among election, secrecy, hearing, reading, acting, and understanding, even when one is “not yet full grown” and has to earnestly (and gropingly) read between the lines. If one can unite inner understanding with outer actions and deciphering, one might then, and only then, catch a glimpse Minne’s “rich teaching” (rike gheleer) (CW, 202).²⁸

In her letters, Hadewijch offers an explicit attempt to teach how one should read her poetic work. Short sections of three of Hadewijch’s letters (Letters 17, 18, and 19) are composed in rhyming couplets (like those that comprise her Mengeldichten, her rhymed letters) but with ensuing lines of commentary that provide a means of understanding the difference in the way divine messages are articulated through poetry and prose and how they apply to living.29 The prose in her letters comments on the poetry and suggests that the verse formulations on Minne embody something that is slightly altered by its formulation in prose. It is as though poetic form, in its ability to address a “you” by means of a form that hosts the divine within, shared a secret with its subject material and were ontologically closer to the divine, performing a linguistic unity that is promised experientially in the visions and is only commented on in prose in a limited fashion. When spoken in verse, Hadewijch’s text communicates something that requires the reader to understand it personally, from inner understanding, as though verse had to be understood in both formal and intuitive ways.

Hadewijch’s Letter 17 starts with ten lines of rhyming couplets, in the manner of the didactic couplets oft en found in Latin pedagogic texts such as the Dicta Catonis (and the vernacular Den Duytschen Cathoen), which seek to impart moral virtue along with their teaching of language and life lessons:³⁰

Be generous and zealous for every virtue,

But do not apply yourself to any one virtue.

Fail not with regard to a multitude of things,

But perform no particular work.

Have good will and compassion for every need,

But take nothing under your protection.

This I wished to say to you for a long time,

For it lies heavy on my heart;

May God allow you to know what I mean,

Alone in the oneness of Minne’s nature.

Te alre doghet wes onstich snel;

En onderwinter di niet el.

En ghebrect in ghenen dinghen,

En werct te ghenen sonderlinghen.

Te alre noet hebbet onste ende ontfermen,

Ende en nemt niet in v beschermen.

Dit haddic di gherne langhe gheseghet:

Want mi wel groet opt therte leghet.

God doe v kennen wat ic mene,

Jnder enegher Minnen naturen allene.

(CW, 82, WITH ALTERATIONS; BRIEVEN, 126)

Immediately following these ten lines of poetry, Hadewijch reflects on them and states, to the addressee of the letter: “The things were ordered me by God, which I [now] in these words order you. Therefore I desire in my turn to order you the same things, because they belong [behoren] perfectly [volmaecteleec] to the perfection of Minne, and because they belong perfectly and wholly in the divinity” (CW, 82).³² “The things” (dese dinghen) refers to the poem’s commands, which appear to be a set of instructions, like dicta of wisdom, on how to conduct oneself in spiritual life. These orders or commands are not referred to as Hadewijch’s thoughts, or as her own creation (although she does specify that she put them in verse form); rather, in its form, the content takes on an impersonal thinglike quality and embodies a form of expropriation that parallels the way in which virtues or werke should belong (behoren) to Minne. The things commanded in the poetry (to be generous, zealous, and compassionate), which Hadewijch passes on to the reader, should be done as selflessly as if one were Minne herself.

Unlike her letters, which speak of the divine—but by way of an explanation from one human being to another—her poetry addresses itself to a “you” through the divine message in her which she claims to host, as though the message could speak the divine in and through itself. For Hadewijch, how one inhabits or belongs to the divine is also reflected in how the divine inhabits poetic form. The poems in Letter 17 are described by Hadewijch as though they were spoken by divinity and transmitted through Hadewijch into the body of verse, in a fashion similar to how divine messages are transmitted through inner and outer bodies as witnessed previously in the visions. Inner and outer take on different dimensions in verse, as though they were transposed into the nature of poetic language, its relation to layers of meaning, and an accompanying embodied hermeneutics.

Rather than comprising a simple set of instructions (a literal level of meaning), the poem’s commands are in fact an exposition of how to embody the Trinity according to each person, according to the spiritual sense of what is written. In the narrative lines that follow them, Hadewijch provides a kind of exegesis of the formal qualities of each line and shows how each is associated with qualities of the three persons. She writes, “The beings [wesene] that I name here, these are perfectly the divine nature,” and she asserts, “to be generous and zealous is the nature of the Holy Spirit,” and “not to apply oneself to a particular work is the nature of the father,” “this pouring out and keeping back are the pure godhead and the entire nature of love” (CW, 82).33 As the first and the third persons of the Trinity are demonstrated in the first and third lines, the ensuing fifth line (“Have good will and compassion for every need”) is reserved for the son, as it is “what is proper to his person.” The formal attributes of the poem emulate the figure and persons of the Trinity, but more pertinently for the addressee of the letter, they do so in relation to their appearance in human life so that they may be imitated. Hadewijch’s Liederen then are Christic in their mission, but Trinitarian in spirit. Rather than being descriptive or emotive expressions of a self, they reflect a highly crafted way of inhabiting the world like a poem.

As a person increasingly adopts and interiorizes these commands as her own, so too, one assumes, is she able to interpret the significance of acting in a particular way. Spiritual growth is thus both a process of interiorized motivation for action and an accompanying hermeneutic skill applied to living. While this observation is not necessarily new in relation to monastic life, as readers we tend to overlook the reality that beguine life (and other forms of women’s spirituality) is ordered according to this radical interiorization of Trinitarian faith through the Word and to overlook the fact that unconventional forms of women’s devotion do participate in textual communities, to use Brian Stock’s term, albeit in different—that is, applied or lived—forms.³⁴ What theologians like Hugh, Richard, or Bernard speculate on theologically and exegetically for the sake of the desire for a true experience of a text, beguines and mystics like Hadewijch translate into a poetics of inhabitation or embodiment that affects the style of the text itself.³⁵ Embodiment becomes a form of exegesis, and, as is the case for Saint Francis, each life is given priority (in conformity with scripture) as testimony to the way in which the divine dwells in the human. For Hadewijch, as with other dissatisfied beguines in the thirteenth century who disdained the taking of vows as a less authentic spiritual practice (like those who criticized the excesses of the Church), this process of voluntary and interiorized adoption of divine will, virtuous acts, and spiritual discernment is no longer perceived as unrelated to its monastic counterparts when forms of the body’s scripting of the letter (and the logos) are given consideration as a textual practice, although in a more self-regulated and affectively engaged fashion.³⁶

Unlike the rules or vows that a religious order requires (like those of the Cistercians of poverty, chastity, and obedience) but similar to the affective spirituality that these same orders encourage in order for individuals to successfully fulfill those vows (especially the Cistercian figure of the miles Christi, which the Citeaux Moralia fuses with its illustration of Job, or the Clairvaux Speculum virginum’s image of the militant virtue thrusting its sword into vice), beguine spirituality teaches the spirit that should be engaged in the material of living, as though the theological underpinnings found their most salient implications in the spirit of life.37 When Hadewijch recapitulates the three lines (1, 3, and 5) further on in the letter, she explains that the qualities highlighted articulate “the most perfect life one can attain on earth” (CW, 83),³⁸ and while the verses do not specify how to act in particular circumstances, the poem itself dictates the spirit and form in which all works should be conducted, leaving it to the addressee to discern the proper application (for only God can enable this understanding).³⁹

Not only does the poem teach its addressee about the vestiges of the Trinity in human beings, but it also becomes a didactic instrument for teaching the tools of reading a text as it applies to life. According to a true Trinitarian (and Augustinian) paradigm, all works reflect an equal participation and emulation of divine will, work, and might so that “they have an equal part in his justice, just as the three persons are in one God.” The meticulous patterning in Hadewijch is therefore clearly not a haphazard or arbitrary phenomenon, but part of a teaching (gheleer) of Minne, that is, part of Hadewijch’s service to others. As Lied 23 makes explicit in the transference of terms from Minne to her pupil, “If we understood Minne’s glorious teaching, / And if by this teaching we grew into glory / We would win Minne / And gain all her riches.”⁴⁰ Reading and teaching, and their scripted application to life, are yet again intimately constructive of women’s devotional practice, yet perhaps it is because this “work” leaves little trace—ephemeral and self-effacing as it is by nature—that we as readers see so little evidence of its having taken place, unless a monk or hagiographer has duly noted it when it is before his eyes.

Work, for Hadewijch, is divided into two categories in a way that will influence the structuring of the songs, as this division reflects the essential difference between becoming Minne and being Minne. The first category of work applies to those who are already somewhat accustomed to the apprenticeship of loving and are now totally devoted to Minne (as is the case with Hadewijch), and the second is for those who are learning to love and emulate the Trinity.41 The first Hadewijch describes as those who are already “in the fruition of Minne” and the second as those for whom “fruition grows less or passes away” (CW, 83) and who, one infers, remain in need of some incitement, recollection, or prompting. The second form of work is forbidden to Hadewijch since she has surpassed it and is thus prohibited to perform works reserved for this stage, yet the distinction between the two kinds of work and their accompanying ethos marks a progression in loving and sets the stage for the interaction of the different kinds of voices the songs will put into play.⁴² For Hadewijch, the form of loving that she is now commanded to follow is “to have nothing outside of Love and to live in Love so exclusively that everything outside of Love should be hated and shunned” (CW, 83). Therefore, paradoxically, she should only live in Love and thus not tend towards “inclination, virtuous acts, or perform[ing] particular works that would assist them or mercy that would protect them” but instead must “remain constantly in the fruition of Love” (CW, 84).⁴³ Just as Minne herself “does not seek after virtues, virtuous tendencies, or particular works” and is thus indifferent to all else but her own perfection and unity, so too must Hadewijch imitate being Minne and heed the law of indifference to all but constant fruition.⁴⁴

The division of works between the more and less advanced lovers of Minne is not something Hadewijch can completely explain, as it is linked to a form of inner understanding and recognition that exhausts and exceeds the instrumental quality of communication. To understand unity, one must inhabit it. Likewise with her poems: they too require inhabitation, yet given their temporal nature, this inhabitation is of a different sort than that witnessed in visions, as it requires the existential or ontological turn of living.

Just as the art of poetry through fictitious fables and allegorical similitudes composes a moral or physical doctrine to exercise the human minds—for this is the proper quality of heroic poets who praise the deeds and manners of brave men—, so theology, as if it were some kind of poetry, by means of fictive imaginations, adapts Holy Scripture to the inquiry of our mind and the impressions of the exterior corporeal senses, as though from some imperfect childhood, to a perfect knowledge of intelligible things, as though into a certain adulthood of the interior man.

The marriage of appearance and essence, practice (pleghen) and being, is staged in the poems through the adoption of an aesthetic and an ethos that will gradually metamorphose into the speaker’s promised transformation of being. The familiar trope of taking on Christ as a garment—the work that is a life—is the model, especially in the initial stages of the apprenticeship. The shifting value of the “garment” makes this clear.⁴⁶

The garment is initially associated with work (“The garments are the works,” as Lied 8 states), and one begins work by focusing on particulars: performing works, good deeds, and virtuous acts as ends that, as will become clearer, must necessarily fail as ends in order to be associated with Christ’s humanity. As noted previously, this particular kind of work is initially framed as a voice that the singer takes on, a role that the individual plays, and—as is common to the image of the “adornment” of virtue—clothing that the person must assume in the mode of imitation. As Letter 30 states, “He who wishes to clothe himself, and to be rich and to be one with the Godhead must adorn himself with all the virtues that God clothed and adorned himself with when he lived as Man; and one must begin this by the same humility with which he also began it” (CW, 117).47 This clearly does not entail a literal taking on the clothing of a particular order, but rather a taking on of the qualities personified in Christ. Because, as Gregory points out, Christ himself assumes the flesh, taking it on as a garment, so too then should humans regard their earthly vessel—the outer person—as a garment, a unique means (that the soul does not possess) to suffer, perfect the soul, and imitate Christ according to the passion.⁴⁸ Adorning oneself with virtues, or assuming the garment (as seen in Vision 9), is one stage in a process of redemption that, as stated previously, works from the outside in and functions according to a shifting metonymy of likenesses as one becomes closer to the source, effecting inner change.

Becoming Minne at first entails assuming certain virtues and behavior, and thus reciprocally Hadewijch’s songs reflect this alternating economy of growing equivalences. The garment is at one point referred to in terms of taking on the humility of Christ, and at another as the sign of the refined nature of the lover or the man (what translators have problematically called the “knight” or the “vassal”). Both share in the process of adopting a form applied to actions and speech, as though the outer form aided in producing the desired inner effect.⁴⁹ While Hadewijch clearly knows the difference between hollow and meaningful actions (or empty and full speech, to use a psychoanalytic distinction), nevertheless, the act or form seems to nurture a corresponding motivation. Hadewijch begins by associating an aesthetic of fairness or beauty with an ethos, again making form the means whereby the content will conform to its Christlike end. Like thirteenth-century books of conduct, Lied 8 makes this association of exterior attractiveness with an inner state clear.

Unlike the vagrant, who does not focus on the higher purpose of love while enduring hardship, the man enacting an unflinching pursuit of Love possesses the proper form (vorme) for recognition as worthy. In the third and fourth stanzas, the vagrant is contrasted with the errant but virtuous man:

The repetition of scone and its association with both speech and actions, as well as its connection to the fairness of reason and virtue, emphasize the way in which the latter can script the former to produce an inner state. Virtuous demeanor, or fin amor, is a coloring, a form, and an adornment—a quality recognizable to the exterior eye but also to the discerning (spiritual) judgment of Minne.52 Again, the inner and outer persons ideally fuse as they do in the promise of the vision, but here the cohesion of the person is on the way to becoming Minne—that is, not yet being Minne—so fusion with the garment is only one initial step, and becoming man—that is, becoming fully Christlike (or Minne-like, as we shall see)—is the goal.⁵³ For Hadewijch, to mistake the garment—the work—for an end and as reason for praise is an error both of reading and of spiritual understanding. Only in equating the outer person with its transitional and adaptable role is the soul enabled. As Mommaers has pointed out, the theme of fruition (ghebrukene), which dominates the tone of the visions, is replaced by its opposite, failure (ghebrekene), in the songs, which “materializes as ‘to be like’ (gheliken) the labouring and suffering Humanity.”⁵⁴

When reading Hadewijch’s songs, one should thus be careful to take into account the transitive quality of these figures for humankind. If we fail to interpret her poems accordingly—for instance, by designating “courtly” as a fixed value and measure—we likewise fail to see its function in the measure of a transformative process that seeks to diminish any celebration of itself. Hadewijch’s mysticism is therefore not so much wed to the courtly or to any particular demeanor as it is to the use of it in order to eventually overcome and dispose of it on the way to true imitatio. In Letter 30, Hadewijch explains,

We wish to be exalted for our patience and honored for our good deeds, and we forget the debt of Love too soon. … We wish that our virtues be known; for this reason we do not have on that wedding garment. … Our humility is in our voice, in appearances [ghelaet], on our face [schein], and not fully motivated by God’s greatness or by our perception of our littleness. Therefore we do not carry God’s Son maternally [moederleke] or suckle him with exercises of love.

(CW, 119)⁵⁵

In this passage the outer form—the appearance of humility—is good, but clearly not enough. The marriage of appearance and essence culminates in the fusion of bride, host, and mother, when inner and outer are fused in practice. Hadewijch contrasts exterior appearance with internal motivation, suggesting that the wedding garment trumps the initial courtly ones, although again, to call her mysticism bridal mysticism would fall short in recognition of the role of living (over an isolated interest in the life of the soul).⁵⁶

Hadewijch’s use of this panoply of terms reflects her theological interest in both the inner and the outer: like Bernard, the final image for the soul is that of the bride, but like Richard’s fourth degree of love, the final term for Love is not the third—the feminine soul conformed to divine light, as it is in visions—but rather the descent of the soul, and the living (and masculine) Christ, who suffers and lives; hence the fusion of feminine and masculine figures, and their respective associations with inner and outer. Gender figures as part of a complicated trope. The form of the servant—a figure for the proper form of life in Hadewijch, Julian, Gregory, Richard, and many others—is likewise the elevated sign for how to embody Christ in life.⁵⁷

In the The Four Degrees of Violent Love, Richard of Saint Victor describes the thoughts the “soul” should have in the final degree of “violent love” (violentae caritatis), and the corresponding Pauline “newness” that one finds in this rebirth of the soul. The soul passes from its feminine form to its masculine life:

In this light—with the shifting from the “she” to the “he” and the reading of Hadewijch’s visions as the third degree of love that predicts the form of the fourth articulated in the Liederen—it is not so surprising that a masculine figure (man, knight, or vassal) in Hadewijch’s songs is used to represent an individual’s new incarnation in pursuing a life led according to imitatio and its initial travails, finding (invenire) the habit of the man, Christ.59 The newness that punctuates Hadewijch’s Liederen and is oft en apparent in the Naturingang (nature-beginning) corresponds to this “new life” the songs hope to elicit. In Lied 19 (Poem in stanzas 20), this newness accordingly promises new materie, the renewal of the outer in the inner, finding the inner in the outer, echoing the language of the closing of Vision 8: “Yes, most noble of all creatures / Chosen for Minne’s nature / In rich fruition and tasting of Minne / New material [materie], joy [bliscap], and blooming [bloyen] all hours / shall be awarded you by almighty [gheweldeghe] Minne” (CW, 181).⁶⁰ The newness is also a gift of the inner spiritual senses, the new senses, which inaugurate the Liederen themselves, enabling the reader to read, understand, and practice their content: “Mankind’s senses [sinne] are so small … God must give us new faculties [nuwen sin] / For noble and free love / So that we live renewed in her / That Minne bless us / And make us with her new taste.”⁶¹ Renewal and transformation in the songs are also made possible through the songs, as a form of new understanding (or taste) of one’s experience and interpretive capacity to join inner and outer according to the sense of how they should truly correspond with the divine. The songs give language to a form of inventio, that is, of finding the true habit or garment of man.⁶²

For Hadewijch, however, in another teleological twist that follows many devotional texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the historical Mary and imitatio Mariae become the ultimate and perfect composite for masculine and feminine, that is, as host and nurturer of the living Christ, enabling and producing a virtuous and perfect life for human beings. As Rachel Fulton has argued, the historical nature of the figure of Mary—the figure of a person who has lived a perfect life—is fused with the exegetical understanding in the songs in a way that makes her “the perfected imitation of Christ,” and not a static type representing the Church, as were many twelfth-century representations.⁶³ Lied 29 is perhaps the most dramatic statement of Mary’s lived perfection and human means of hosting the divine, demonstrating how she makes evident God’s work:

The constant shifting of terms reflects the transitory nature of the human exo anthropos, the exterior person, as it is renewed through Christ, the real figure of the eso anthropos, the inner person. The terms for the exterior garment are as perishable or transitory as is the outer person, yet they reflect unity with the divine image they echo in life and the unity they seek to become in Love. Given the complexity of the figurative work involved, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the shifting terms of Hadewijch’s mysticism and claim her as Marian, courtly, bridal, or Christic, for she is perhaps all of them simultaneously in a purposive and teleological fashion. Our tendencies to overly identify women’s mysticism with one category or another oft en betrays the contemporaneity of our own interests, perhaps precisely because of the amenability of women’s mysticism to translation into so many terms, including ours. The “bricolage” de Certeau refers to in describing its amalgam of genres is applicable here, inasmuch as it is understood as purposive and not haphazardly coincidental. That women’s mysticism is oft en involved in this dilating movement in the breadth and expansion of spirituality and its articulation in the Middle Ages is beginning to be noted in the history of Christian spirituality, yet should be put in conversation with other forms of expression such as dicta, which meticulously elaborate the translation of the letter into life.

Darkness (unknowing, uncertainty, blindness) and the need for constant reinvention of meaning are at the heart of the Liederen and represent part of the cost of ontological separation in time from a promised face-to-face encounter. Although Hadewijch does not articulate a clear-cut list of the stages of love and enlightenment as methodically as Gregory, Richard, Beatrice, Marguerite Porete, or Bernard (among others), the process of growing in conformity to Minne and the discovery or inventio of Minne’s promise are nevertheless operative in Hadewijch’s work.

As a form of life-writing—that is, practicing the scripting of a life to produce a desired lived end—the stages of Hadewijch’s mysticism entail a rapprochement of body and letter and effectuate this in part through the adoption of a voice that trains its speaker, partly by a pedagogic lesson in reading. Reading helps one “practice” (pleghen) Minne and adopt her way of being in the world. The stages of Minne begin with reading separation into the world, meaning not only an ontological condition of separation or a condition of desire, but a space for the reinvention of meaning. In this process of becoming “full grown” (as referred to in the visions), one begins by separating from the illusion of abundance of Minne, experiencing her as lacking, taking on a garment of virtues (and rewriting one’s relation to worldly things), emptying oneself and “going out” to seek Minne (kenosis), pursuing in solitude a path of darkness, recognizing absence as a form of presence, and, finally, sharing that insight with a community in the corporate mission of Christ.⁶⁹

With a bit of irony, those who are the newest in love, ghi jonghe (the youth), are also the most (deceptively) “infused” with Minne in a fleeting state (which they do not yet recognize as such), as youth seems to experience Minne as abundant love, and has yet to be weaned (Lied 7, l. 57) in order experience Minne as separation, as do the “old.” In Lied 27, this process is described as loss and in terms of endurance in time:

As shown earlier, Hadewijch explicitly traces two different stages or ways of being in her letters—encompassing those who seem to be in the fruition of Minne, or at least understand what this absolute devotion entails, and those who are actively becoming Minne. Being in the fruition of Minne does not, however, imply a state of constant union, as that is reserved for a moment outside of historical time; rather, it means being at a more advanced stage of imitatio, in which Minne herself is the sole model, rather than the intermediary human figures (with the exception, perhaps, of Mary).⁷¹

The stages of love referred to in the Liederen are temporally based; any kind of union that is staged in the songs is of a different register, as will be clear later in this chapter, one inhabiting the figural body of the song or poem. The formal qualities of the Liederen reflect this multiplicity of temporal stages with a theological and pedagogic purposiveness in a variety of ways: in the thematic and temporal contrast of the figure of the young (ghi yonghe) with the wise or old (derre weelden, den ouden), in the multiple voices in the songs and their responsiveness and interrelation with one another (voices of counsel, despair, collective wisdom, observation), in the psalmodic modeling of the songs, and in the constant hypothetical nature and temporal delay that frames the songs, off-setting any seeming immediacy, and requires the suffering or enduring of time itself. The next part of this chapter shows how this multiplicity functions thematically and formally in the songs to identify and produce its desired ends in a communal fashion, teaching the singers how to “go out” (in the mode of kenosis) and discover (invenire) Minne and partake in a communal “we” or a “they.”

The songs reflect a topographical emphasis that in-spirits familiar figures with a double nature, constantly requiring a hermeneutic that will allow one to read emotional and relational situatedness as a spiritual sign. Like the psalms, the songs are intended for initiates as well as for the “old” in love (“But both the old and the young may soothe their mind by singing of love”),72 allowing individuals to be mirrored in their spiritual teaching in prosopological fashion, yet they function particularly well for those “new” to the stages of Minne, as they are intended to aid and give delight at one and the same time, using aesthetic and musical patterning and beauty to teach, touch, and transform their speaker.⁷³ Like the psalter, the songs perform a communal “revolution” in a human appropriation of divine material, and they do so in an emotional register that allows for the emotional truth (virtutem) of what is spoken to be understood, as opposed to a purely intellectual content. As Peter Jeffery explains, from the turn of the Benedictine revolution, when choral psalmody replaced solo psalmody, the function of the psalms changed along with it: “‘Instead of being primarily a message from God to man, it has become chiefly man’s homage to God. … The hearers of the word of God have been changed into those who sing his majesty.’ The psalm itself was now the prayer, providing the words by which humans addressed God, rather than the divine word to which humans listened. … From the monastic exegesis of imagining oneself in the psalms, the monk now felt obliged to become himself the very speaker of the psalms.”⁷⁴ Although Hadewijch’s Liederen are not to be mistaken as liturgical compositions or monastic material, unlike Hildegard’s songs, their purpose and form are better understood in relation to works that are part of the ordering of spiritual life, since they are constructed in close parallel with their spiritual ends.⁷⁵

From the fourth century onward, the psalms were thought of as a mirroring device, “applying them to oneself as if looking into a mirror,” providing a means for compunctio and, most importantly, for consequent revision of one’s actions.⁷⁶ The recitation and singing of the psalms are the substance of the officium divinum (the divine office, the liturgy)—a critical element in Hadewijch’s visions and, by extension, her daily life—and are predominantly Christological in emphasis (as is the underlying tenor of Hadewijch’s Liederen). The psalms oft en illustrate a moral sense for the reader/singer to apply to his or her own personal context, allowing for a form of recognition in emotive description. The reflexive mirroring operative in various specula of women’s visions (such as Marguerite’s) and numerous pedagogic texts (like the Speculum virginum) finds its complement in the lifelike specula embodied by the psalms and their lyric counterparts, the songs: both promise to “read” their speaking subject and offer corresponding directives for living.⁷⁷

While Hadewijch’s individual songs may not be mappable onto any specific psalm per se, the widespread use and adaptation of the psalms (for example in psalmic prayers or in the earlier De psalmorum usu), the glosses and the commentaries on them, and their frequent interpolation in medieval lyric provide multiple forms for the infusion of both their material and their emphasis on the natural and human world of divine creation.78 Not only are the psalms’ influence explicit (to the point of Hadewijch’s advocating an imitatio David in Lied 29), but their purpose is almost identical, as is the formal means for achieving this goal, making this instance of mystique courtoise equally definable as mystique psalmodique.⁷⁹ Musical sources for Hadewijch’s possible use of contrafacture have been traced to vernacular (including devotional) Minnesang, and trouvère and troubadour lyric, as well as melodies from Latin hymns. If we take into consideration in Louis Peter Grijp’s compelling musicological analysis, then Hadewijch’s use of material that further appeals to the articulation of the spiritual in the language of secular form (however problematic the distinction may be) can be seen as commensurate with the Christological mission that underlies her songs.⁸⁰

This use of material follows a long-standing tendency—established by the psalm and song traditions—to translate the exigency of spiritual calling and divine address into increasingly familiar, intimate, and available forms—forms that in turn lend themselves to a translation into acts, or ways of being. Daniel O’Sullivan argues that it would be incorrect to interpret devotional lyrics’ use of contrafacture as testimony to a “derivative, parasitical, and secondary” secular tradition (invoking Pierre Bec): “Such a conclusion misses the point entirely of many contrafacta: their composers use existing melodies not because they deem their religious compositions unworthy of a new melody, but rather … because doing so furthers their devotional aim.”⁸¹ Hadewijch’s insistence on actively immersing oneself within the temporal world uses a vocabulary common to twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance, lyric, and devotional texts that couple outer form with an inner spirit. Her use of these forms to accomplish the goal of werke and become fully like Minne finds a pivotal vocabulary (turning from outer to inner, and vice versa) in the double nature of the language of the Liederen.⁸²

Hildegard’s musical works, written for her convent’s liturgy, provide an interesting comparison to Hadewijch’s Liederen. They share an emphasis on the lived nature of the divine word and aim at eliciting the recognition (and confession) of weakness and renewal through an appeal to Mary or to other forms of divine grace so as to allow for spiritual rebirth. While Hildegard’s musical compositions for the divine office are more traditionally monastic in context (in that they are formulated for psalmody), reflecting her own position as a Benedictine abbess, her work, like Hadewijch’s, perceives itself in terms of the aural, embodied, and poetic nature of inhabitation for her immediate community of women.83 As Margot Fassler has meticulously shown in her analysis of Hildegard’s musical compositions for the office, “singing makes an indwelling of the Logos possible, both literally and figuratively” and allows for a communal bond to be articulated in and through the body through voices in antiphonal psalmody, allowing speech acts to be shared in unison.⁸⁴ The “I” who sings in the songs and antiphons is thus physically and spiritually incarnating its corporate identity through hosting and sharing divine words.⁸⁵ Likewise for the Victorines: “Just as the flesh and the heart are to play in harmony within each individual during the act of singing, so too are both halves of the choir to sing together with one melody, and this is representative of the unity of their customs and of the common life. God will tune this communal instrument so that it will play a unified tune.”⁸⁶

Hadewijch’s Liederen differ from Hildegard’s musical works in a number of ways. Hildegard’s pedagogic style, as Carolyn Muessig, has notes, evinces Benedictine and Cistercian ideas for male monastics, for Hildegard believed that the “external reflected the internal perfection of the soul.”⁸⁷ For Hildegard the perfection of her nuns would be realized in their outward comportment, while for Hadewijch this outer perfection retains only a formal value for patterning and reforming the inner, as inaccessible and invisible as it may be.

In ways similar to Hildegard, the “I” of Hadewijch’s songs differs from the “I” of her visions in that while the “I” of the visions understands herself to be a unique and elected recipient of a divine gift transmitted in writing, the “I” of the song must discover the sense of this election and the proper form of inhabitation in Minne. The song may be inhabited by whoever sings it, not merely the individual mystic herself. The song itself may also assume a different interpretive tone (remembrance, consolation, warning, encouragement) depending on its speaker. Interpreting the “I” of the songs as autobiographical is thus both true and false: true in that any expression of the “I” is referring to an envisioning of a lived experience that includes Hadewijch’s, yet false in that this overlooks the pedagogic role inscribed in the adoption of the “I” in the song and the ways in which, given what we know from her letters and visions, her way of living and loving is no longer that of becoming Minne (those who take on a more youthful and courtly demeanor), but that of being Minne. A limited look at diverse voices in the songs assists in discernment of the various roles scripted within them and the subtle ways in which they frame the sense of the “lived.”

The songs are often characterized by oral references spoken by a first person—hence the constant descriptions of them as personal expressions attributable to Hadewijch—but they also refer to spoken acts in the third-person singular and plural. The only relation to the written form is in reference to “reading” the judgments of Minne, which in fact is not referring to the written word, but to the reading of the inner through the outer, what is a reading of conscience in the case of Marguerite d’Oingt.

The poems are often framed as speech acts: “Ic dar wel segghen openbaer” (“I dare well say openly”88; “Ic roepe ic claghe” (“I cry out, I clamour”).⁸⁹ They refer to their own activity as sanc, “song,” in past and present tenses: “Dat ic van minnen vele songe … mijn sanc, mijn wenen scijnt sonder spoet” (“That I sang so often of Love … my song, my weeping seem without success”)⁹⁰; “Altoes mach men van minnen singhen, / eest herfst, eest winter, eest lenten, eest somer, / ende jegen hare ghewout verdinghen / want en onsteet hare nieman vromer. / Mer wi, traghe, segghen …” (“Always may one sing of love / Be it autumn, winter, spring, or summer, / And plead one’s case against her power / But we, slacking, say …”).⁹¹

Lament, plea, and clamor constitute one performative aspect of the Liederen, yet this reflects only a part of the picture. Oral references also betray a difference in voice and status: “Ic rade,” meaning “I counsel,” is used in many instances, but is used in Lied 39 in a way that suggests that there may be subtle differences between a voice who offers counsel in the Lied and a voice representing a youth who is less experienced in love. As is often the case in Hadewijch’s final stanza, Lied 39 ends with a refrain that is a general pedagogic address in the form of advice or counsel (at times in the collective form of a “we” or a “they”). After first offering itself as an exemplum and describing in a first-person voice how “I remain at Minne’s side” (keeping faith) no matter what happens, it turns to a prescriptive voice and describes how a “fiere gheve” (valiant one) should act. The narrative then evolves from this exemplary voice, first to giving a prescription, and then to the voice of counsel:

Even in these few lines, the song shows us how, as advice, the songs performatively participate in Hadewijch’s Christic mission to live virtuously and serve others. Voiced in the person of an initiate, it also accomplishes a kind of self-teaching or self-fashioning that is characteristic of the beguines and evident in Hadewijch’s letters.93 In this stanza, the voice of counsel (which, in Lied 43, l. 78, is associated with the scone werke of reason) is subtly differentiated from the youth. While it identifies itself as performing in all the ways it encourages in the firen (valiant), it occupies a position as both inside and outside its more mature subject, able to identify with others yet separated in time and in being from their precise stage of Minne. Being separated in time and growth from the “youth,” however, could also be seen as a sign of kenosis, that is, being separated from oneself and one’s willful longing to conquer love. Completely emptying out oneself, that is, annihilating the self is the ultimate form of Minne, so that a rhetorical distance from the youthful voice may be sign of transformation—to be adopted by the singer in the hope of simultaneously being and not being that voice itself.

Hadewijch’s invocation of progress has a hierarchical component, as do many medieval stages of spiritual perfection, and is even referred to as an “ascent” (for example in Letter 20), but does not have the same kind of absolutism that hierarchical “stages” imply, with mastery on the final end. It is as though structure and hierarchy were an apparatus acknowledged as needed but ultimately to be discarded as one is absorbed in the object of pursuit. One can understand why rules are disdained by Hadewijch (in Letter 4, ll. 64–68), and why, stylistically, the poetics of inhabitation is a far more suitable representation of how to be and enact Minne than a set prescriptive or instructions, which assumes a visibly applicable external measure.⁹⁴ This poetics asks for inner and outer to be united, through acts, understanding, and reason. Becoming a meester (“master” or “mistress”⁹⁵) may make one closer to the mistress of love herself, but it does not ensure an absolute economy of likenesses: “The course of the firmament and of the planets, / And of the signs that stand in the firmament, / We can in part know by likenesses, / And count the measure with calculation. / But no master can presume this / That he can make love understood with the senses” (CW, 245).⁹⁶ The resonance with the inner has no other judge than the divine, and the secret of divinity is ultimately kept. The host of the divine is both host and hostage to a secret she will never be able to fully access or divulge.

Elsewhere in the Liederen, true counsel (rade) is associated with Minne herself, suggesting that this ability to counsel is a sign of (almost) being Minne, meaning a sign of having interiorized the ethos that will allow one to approximate her and to resemble the divine in humanity. Yet the final sign of belonging to Minne is, paradoxically, to love beyond counsel, so fully has one given one’s will and being over to Minne and been wounded (struck) by her.97 In the last stanza of the final song, Lied 45, the counsel of Minne is taken as the ultimate principle for being: “Ay, ben ic in vrome ochte in scade, / si al, minne, bi uwen rade” (“Oh, whether I am in profit or in debt, / May all be, Love, according to your counsel” [CW, 258]).⁹⁸ While much counseling seems to be offered her and referred to, Minne’s counsel is nevertheless elusive in terms of its content. Minne herself is tied to the prosopopaic figure that constitutes the human relation to the divine in the figures of love, lover, and beloved, like Augustine’s trinity of love witnessed in the first chapter, yet Minne herself is not any one clear figure other than the promised figure of love one seeks, and the promised figure of love one imitates and hopes to become. Given the veiled and temporally inaccessible nature of this love, all counsel likewise comes silently, even secretly, like the hidden words in Job’s suffering. Even though Hadewijch’s songs are themselves a form of counsel, they nevertheless subtly deny themselves the authority to speak the final word. They do not impose order as would a rule, making their exteriority a measure for perfection; rather, they articulate an approximated yet unfinalizable series of figures of perfection for the outer person to imitate as she conforms to the inner workings of the divine.

In contrast to many scholars who have wanted to seize on one particular figure (especially a gendered one) in defining the persona articulated through Hadewijch’s poetry, my interpretation has shown that the indefinite nature of figuration and language in the poems and the progressive movement toward greater spiritual perfection prevents any one figure from having a privileged position. Hadewijch is paradoxically able to assume the many varied figures (gendered and other) that allow for fuller expression of unity with the divine. The feminization of Minne and the use of the courtly have less to do with a biological identification or a fixed identity of her “outer” than they do with a proper ethos for pursuing the divine without and becoming the divine within. This insistence on the secrecy of counsel demonstrates a condition of language when the secret of the divine is transferred into the domain of the lived. The demarcation of inner and outer so clearly spelled out in the visions is translated into a secrecy of inhabitation and a secret that inhabits language in Hadewijch’s poetry. This mutual relationship between poetry and inhabitation brings to the fore another figurative body, like the promised body of the personified Minne, that inhabits the mystical text in poetic form.