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

3. Bynum turned to Hadewijch’s Vision 7 as an illustration of the thirteenth-century passion for the Eucharist, asserting, “Thirteenth-century women seem to have concluded from their physicality an intense conviction of their ability to imitate Christ without role or gender inversion. To soar toward Christ as lover and bride, to sink into the stench and torment of the crucifixion, to eat God, was for the woman only to give religious significance to what she already was” (“Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” 205).

4. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex. On Irigaray and mysticism, see “La Mystérique” in her Speculum of the Other Woman, 195–202, and “Divine Woman” in Sexes and Genealogies, 191–250. For Kristeva, see “Le bonheur des Béguines,” and The Feminine and the Sacred. Hollywood discusses these philosophers’ invocation of mysticism in Sensible Ecstasy.

5. Irigaray, “La voie du féminin,” 161; Lacan, Encore, 76.

6. Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation,” 819.

8. Hollywood, “Inside Out,” 79.

9. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 29.

11. Watson, “Desire for the Past,” 168.

12. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, vol. 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. Peter Brown’s introduction to A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture notes that the insularity of what, merely ten years ago, had constituted “literature” has “broadened and deepened to include other kinds of writing, especially of the religious variety” (A Companion to Medieval English Literature, 1). Mary Mason’s early essay from 1980, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” is often overlooked in its early claim that women’s mystical texts corresponded with a new genre of autobiography. Citing Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe while contrasting them with Augustine and Rousseau, Mason invoked female mystical texts as counterexamples to what she saw as the male writers’ prototypical masculine pattern.

13. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book, 195.

14. See Newman’s work on Hadewijch, “The Beguine as Knight of Love: Hadewijch’s Stanzaic Poems,” in God and the Goddesses, 169–181. For other work on mysticism’s relation to literary traditions see also Albrecht Claassens’s work on Margery and others in The Power of a Woman’s Voice.

15. Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” 540.

16. See, for example, Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh; Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride”; Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism”; Ayanna, “Renegotiating the Body of the Text”; McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich; and Lichtmann, “‘God fulfilled my bodye.’” The invocation of the body for authorial power often centers on the appropriation and revalorization of the flesh.

17. Aers, “The Humanity of Christ,” 35.

18. Heldris of Cornwall, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance. On medieval understandings of the gendered body see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages and Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ.

19. Eric Jager has explored this figure extensively in The Book of the Heart. He notes, however, that “Greek and Latin authors almost never associate the heart with interior writing,” but that writing on the heart only emerged with Judeo-Christian culture (4, 5). His reading of the Pauline texts likewise emphasizes the non-Platonic aspect of Paul. See esp. 12–15.1 will use the King James version of the Bible with occasional modifications.

20. Augustine, The Monastic Rules, 117.

21. Aune, “Anthropological Duality,” 221. There is much heated discussion on the relation of Paul to Neo- and Middle Platonism. See, for example, Hans Dieter Betz, “The Concept of the ‘Inner Human Being’ in the Anthropology of Paul”; Walter Burkert, “Towards Plato and Paul: The ‘Inner’ Human Being”; and Emma Wasserman, “The Death of the Soul in Romans 7.” For an analysis of Paul’s distinction between pneumatikos and psychikos and its relation to eso and exo anthropos in Philo see Richard Horsley, “Pneumatikos vs. Psychikos,” 288.

22. The mind (nous) is often equated with the individual soul, the psyche, the entity in which spirit (pneuma) occasionally dwells. Pauline vocabulary is, to say the least, challenging to pin down. The language for the body is multifarious: the body can be identified as soma (body) or sarx (flesh), but also defined indirectly as eso and exo anthropos (inner and outer persons) or in relation to the kardia (heart) or suneidesis (conscience). While sarx is unconditionally associated with the perishable mortal body, the soma is, appropriately, a site for both negative and positive associations, one that reflects the body’s dwelling in the temporal and material world and its potential transformation into a spiritual body.

23. See also Col 3:4 for a similar formulation: “When Christ who is your life will appear [phanerōthē] then you will also appear [phanerōthēsesthe] with him in glory.”

24. By contrast, a prophetic voice can speak in the name of the divine; that is, it can claim to truly host a voice other than its own, as can the medieval visionary claim to have received (and hosted) the words and vision of the divine.

25. Paul does not negate the flesh or surpass it in favor of the spirit; rather, the presence of sin increases opportunities for grace and redemption.

26. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies conceives of the natural and the (mystical) political bodies of the king in relation to two bodies, one accorded to man by nature, the other by grace. Its model derives from the classical Christological distinction of the two natures in Christ. This is developed by Paul and the interpretation of Pauline texts in the later medieval concept of the corpus mysticum. See The King’s Two Bodies, 206.

27. Paul’s linguistic and philosophical complexity has enjoyed a great deal of attention as a means for articulating a universal identity. Even though it would be too complicated to trace the possible relations between Paul, in the many ways he is read today, and medieval mystical texts, the insistence, for example, on the messianism of Paul, in Giorgio Agamben, and of a lived immanence highlights something that speaks to a non-Platonizing reading of Paul that resonates with contemporary political and philosophical stakes in the claim for a universal that is grounded in the singular.

28. The texts of greatest significance for the elaboration of the inner senses in Origen are De principiis, Contra Celsum, In Leviticum homiliae, In Ezechielem homiliae, In Canticum Canticorum, Commentarius in Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, In Lucam, In Joannem.

29. Origen, “Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs,” in An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, 222.

30. Origen, “Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs,” 221.

32. Origen specifies, “Just as there is said to be a fleshly love [carnalis amor], which the poets also call Love according to which the person who loves sows in the flesh, so also there is a spiritual love [spiritalis amor] according to which the inner man [interior homo] when he loves sows in the Spirit (cf. Gal. 6:8). And to speak more plainly, if there is someone who still bears the image of the earthly according to the outer man [exteriorem hominem], he is led by an earthly desire and love. But the person who bears the image of the heavenly according to the inner man [interiorem hominem] is led by a heavenly desire and love (cf. 1 Cor 15:49)” (ibid., 223; In Canticum canticorum Prologus: Patrologia Graeca 13, col. 67B).

33. Although this term is used liberally to speak of both Eastern and Western forms of monasticism, Bernard McGinn and others use the term “monastic mysticism” to speak of the kind of mysticism prevalent in monastic communities that articulate a culmination of monastic life in the language of mystical union. Sheldrake’s New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality defines “monastic mysticism” as “essentially biblical and liturgical in the senses that the monastics sought God in and through personal appropriation of the spiritual meaning of Scripture cultivated within the liturgical life of the monastic community” (455–456).

34. Largier, “Inner Sense, Outer Senses,” 5.

35. David Aune suggests that the difference between Hellenistic eschatology and Judeo-Christian apocalyptic eschatology lies in the tendency for the former to emphasize the individual, while the latter places its emphasis on the community at large. In other words, the body that one will assume in the afterlife is a corporate, that is, collective body, often referred to in the plural. Aune argues against a purely Platonic reading of the inner man showing that the inner and outer are different but not opposing. See Aune, “Anthropological Duality,” 218.

36. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 70. “Affectus est qui generali quadam potentia et perpetua quadam virtute firma et stabili, mentem possidet, quam per gratiam obtinuit” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 389A). Thomas Davis describes it as “a basic and elemental thrust or gravity of the soul that ought to be expressed in truly noble, generous, and beautiful desires” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 111, n. 9). On “affectus” see Hollywood, “Song, Experience, and Book in Benedictine Monasticism,” 67ff.

37. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 70–71. “Itaque quisquis ille est, suit dicit beatus Iohannes, secundum hoc quod natus est ex Deo, id est secundum interioris hominis rationem, in tantum non peccat, in quatum peccatum quod corpus mortis foris operatur, odit potius quam approbat ’semine spiritualis nativitatis, quo ex Deo natus est, eum interius conservante. … Immo statim fecundius et vivacius convalescit in spem boni fructus, et surgit” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 389B–C).

38. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72. “Sicut enim corpus habet suos quinque sensus, quibus animae coniungitur, vita mediante, sic et anima suos quinque sensus habet, quibus Deo coniungitur, mediante caritate” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 390B–C). On this “instrumentality,” or mediating nature, see Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 10 in Sermones de diversis/Occasional Sermons.

39. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72. “Hic ostenditur quia per sensus corporis veterascimus, et huic saeculo conformamur: per sensum vero mentis renovamur in agnitionem Dei, in novitatem vitae, secundum voluntatem et beneplacitum Dei” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 390C). See also his treatise on the physiology of the body and its relation to the soul, especially section 37, on the body as the instrument of the soul in De natura corporis et animae, 106. For a stunning Victorine work that details the “ordered love of the flesh” see Godfrey of Saint Victor, “Microcosm.”

40. William of Saint Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 80. “Affectus ergo caritatis Deo indissolubiliter inhaerens, et de vultu eius omnia iudicia sua colligens, ut agat vel disponat exterius, sicut voluntas Dei bona, et beneplacens, et perfecta, dictat ei interius; dulce habet in vultum illum semper intendere; et sicut in libro vitae, leges in eo sibi legere vivendi, et intelligere, illuminare fidem, roborare spem, suscitare caritatem” (De natura et dignitate amoris: PL 184, col. 394B–C).

41. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs IV, 85.12.208–209.. “Ergo quam videris animam, relictis omnibus, Verbo votis omnibus adhaerere, Verbo vivere, Verbo se regere, de Verbo concipere quod pariat Verbo, quae possit dicere: mihi vivere Christus est et mori lucrum, puta coniugem Verboque maritatam” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 315]).

42. Bynum, Docere verbo et exemplo, 45; Zinn, “Historia fundamentum est,” 135–158.

43. Manuscripts A and B were, according to Erik Kwakkel’s recent studies, both related to the Carthusian Herne Charterhouse, even though A’s origins may derive from a nonmonastic context. B was copied by the charterhouse for a bookseller in Brussels, Godevaert de Bloc, and then fell into the possession of the Rooklooster monastery. Manuscript C, the source of the standard edition compiled by Josef Van Mierlo, is from the (male) Bethlehem priory, near Louvain. Van Mierlo, who republished Hadewijch’s works in the mid-twentieth century, mistook the C manuscript as the oldest, and so our current translated editions are all based on the later manuscript version. On the dating and contents of each manuscript see Kwakkel, “Ouderdom en genese van de veertiende-eeuwse Hadewijchhandschriften,” and Willaert, “Les Opera omnia d’une mystique brabançonne.” An additional late fourteenth-century manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 920, which includes work by Ruusbroec, contains two of Hadewijch’s letters (6 and 10) and was once owned by the Rooklooster monastery. There is a sixteenth-century manuscript, Antwerp, UFSIA, Ruusbroecgenootschap, ms. Neerl. 385 II, which may have come from Carthusians in Zelem near Diest. An additional manuscript from ca. 1500 contains only her letters.

Aside from several lines of poetic verse interspersed in her letters, Hadewijch’s poetic works comprise forty-five Liederen (formerly referred to as Strofische Gedichten, or “poems in stanzas”), between fifteen and one hundred lines in length, and the sixteen Mengeldichten, or Rijmbrieven (“poems in couplets” or “rhyming letters,” since twelve of the sixteen are in epistolary form), which range from fifty to two hundred lines in length. The additional poems grouped with the Mengeldichten, numbered 17–29, are strophic, but as noted above are not in the earliest manuscript. They are considered to be composed by a different author, referred to as “Hadewijch II.” The main editions of her poetry are J. Van Mierlo Jr., SJ, Mengeldichten. For the Liederen, see the new edition of Veerle Fraeters and Frank Willaert, Hadewijch Liederen, which I cite here, but which differs in content from other editions because it is based on the earliest witness, the thirteenth-century manuscript. Those other editions—E. Rombauts and N. de Paepe, Strofische Gedichten, and Werken van zuster Hadewijch I: Gedichten, and, more recently, Marieke van Baest’s edition and translation, Poetry of Hadewijch,—are based on a fourteenth-century manuscript. The main translation of her poems which I refer to as songs, or Mengeldichten (except for strophic poems 17–29 of the Mengeldichten) is Columba Hart, Hadewijch: The Complete Works. A translation of Mengeldichten 17–29 is found in Mary Suydam, “Hadewijch of Antwerp and the Mengeldkhten.” Hadewijch’s Letters have recently been reevaluated as poetic compositions that may have been sung; see Anikó Daróczi, Groet gheruchte van dien wondere. I will refer to Hadewijch’s songs as her Liederen throughout.

44. Manuscript C includes, in this order: visions, the List of the Perfect, letters, songs, The Twofold Little Treatise (Twee-vormich tractaetken), Mengeldichten 1–16, and the newer strophic poems 17–29.

45. The language of charters in Brabant oscillates among French, Latin, and Brabant (what we commonly designate as Flemish), with a changing emphasis from Latin to French. The earliest Brabantine charter written in the vernacular is written in Old French and dates to ca. 1237, although surrounding provinces were using French for charters earlier. See Godfried Croenen, “Latin and the Vernaculars in the Charters of the Low Countries.” That Brabantine was used by the nobility is attested to in many documents “internal” to households, although the majority of these documents are in French, even in Dutch-speaking households. The majority of thirteenth-century vernacular charters in the Brabant region are in French, which can be explained by the reasoning that French was the language of diplomacy and the language of the courts.

46. McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 201.

47. On the influences on Hadewijch, see Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic, 58–83. On Richard of Saint Victor’s influence, see Reynaert, De Beeldspraak van Hadewijch, 147–149.

48. For the Dutch edition of the Letters, I cite Mommaers, De brieven van Hadewijch (=Brieven). “Daer af sprect Sente bernaert: Jhesus es honech inden mont” (Brieven, 118); “Sente Bernaert XVIII. Daeraf wetic oec een lettel” (Vis, 158).

49. Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic, 63ff.

50. “Obsculta, o fili, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui” (Kardong, Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, 1).

51. “Furthermore, when someone accepts the title of abbot, he should direct his disciples with a twofold teaching. That means he should demonstrate everything that is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words. He should teach gifted disciples the Lord’s commands by words, but he will have to personally model the divine precepts for those who are recalcitrant or naïve” (Kardong, Benedict’s Rule, 47–48). “Ergo, cum aliquis suscipit nomen abbatis, duplici débet doctrina suis praeesse discipulis, id est omnia bona et sancta factis amplius quam verbis ostendat, ut capacibus discipulis mandata Domini verbis proponere, duris corde vero et simplicioribus factis suis divina praecepta monstrare” (46).

52. Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity, 7.

53. Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 88.

54. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 269. Jaeger describes a further step in a life becoming text in Geoffrey of Clairvaux’s biography of Bernard, which he says moves from “charismatic presence to charismatic text.” He notes, “It is a peculiar feature of the exemplary life that it takes on literary forms, and tends to create new ones adequate to the individual in its wake. ‘Life experienced as literature’ is an interesting phenomenon” (276).

55. The influence of Augustine and Paul on the Western spiritual tradition is uncontested but perhaps has become so commonplace that its ubiquitous nature is not always self-evident. In some sense, one could say Augustine and Paul were the Freuds of their subsequent times, in that the concepts inherited from them became part of a shared cultural vocabulary.

56. Drawing on Jaeger, Carolyn Muessig has also shown that the relation between inner and outer is reflected in Hildegard, who emphasizes the perfected outer, rather than the movement from inside to outside seen in Bernard. She writes, “For Hildegard, the perfection of her nuns would be realized in their outward comportment. In the world of her monastery, the Rupertsberg liturgy reflected a little bit of Paradise. Ritual and song acted out by her nuns created heaven on earth” (“Learning and Mentoring in the Twelfth Century,” 93). Lynda L. Coon even goes one step further, arguing for architecture as an essential component of the body since “the aesthetic body was mirrored in the sacred spaces constructed by monks” (Dark Age Bodies, 2).

57. Letter 4: “Met ordenen te houdene becommert men met vele dinghen diermen quite mocht sijn; ende dat doet reden dolen. Een gheest van goeden wille werct in binnen scoendere dan alle ordenen gheuiseren mochten. … In begherten van deuocien dolen alle die minschen diere yet in sijn soekende. Want men sal gode soeken ende el niet” (Brieven, 34, 36).

58. On the development of the term liber experientiae see Jager, The Book of the Heart, 60–64.

59. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 16, 27. The contexts of these terms are: Sermon 3: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae,” and Sermon 5: “Cur enim inter corpora spirituales scrutetur sensus, quos in libro vitae et absque contradictione legit, et absque difficultate intelligit?” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 3.1.14; 5.4.23]).

60. William of Saint Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, Cant 100, 81. “Et iam in amando Deum homo quidem est in opère, sed Deus est qui operator. Non enim Paulus, «sed gratia Dei» secum (1 Cor 15)” (Expositio altera super Cantica canticorum: PL 180, col. 508B). In describing Bernard of Clairvaux’s idea that God “creates our minds to participate in him,” Bernard McGinn explains that “the humility and the hope that are the beginning of our journey away from sin and back to God are not our own effort, but are already the work of the incarnate Word in us” (The Growth of Mysticism, 173).

61. The influence of Paul and Augustine on the Middle Ages has been looked at extensively, for example, in terms of theological doctrine, rhetorical practices (in figurative and typological reading), liturgical influences, and the way in which theology operates in mystical texts. Theological studies have constituted a subject of recent scholarship on women’s mystical texts. I am thinking specifically of the recent book by Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian; Denise Nowakowski Baker’s earlier book Julian of Norwich’s Showings; and Hollywood’s meticulous The Soul as Virgin Wife. For a fuller elaboration of the theological studies of Julian, see The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 24, n. 72.

1. McGinn addresses the long-standing issue concerning Augustine and his designation as a mystic in The Foundations of Mysticism, 228–262.

2. Margaret Miles highlighted the influence of Paul on the later Augustine, especially in the focus on temporality and its association with the body: “This dichotomy between the spiritual and all phases of bodily existence which informs Augustine’s anthropology is a contemporaneous development with his immersion in the theology of Saint Paul; it is a dichotomy which has as its characteristic image in the mature Augustine that of a long journey along a ‘darkening highway’” (Miles, Augustine on the Body, 3 4).

3. True to his understanding of the contingency of the literal on the figural, Augustine does not define gender as a literal trait. In his reading of Paul and the divisions of the soul, he makes this distinction clear, arguing that Paul “wanted to use the distinction of sex between two human beings to signify something that must be looked for in every single human being” (Trinity 12.19 [332–333]). “Quamvis in diverso sexu duorum hominum aliquid tamen significare voluisse quod in uno homine quaereretur” (DT, 50:373). For Trinity, I cite book, chapter, and page number.

4. “Verum dico, mihi dico, quid non possim scio” (DT, 50A:532).

5. “Die luttel weet, hi mach luttel segghen: dat seghet die wise Augustinus” (Brieven, 168).

6. Duffy, “Anthropology,” 26. He continues, “The biblical category ‘flesh’ denotes for Augustine not mere sensual indulgence, a case of the inferior seducing the superior, but a fault within the mind itself. Spirit becomes carnal, a servant of the flesh, when immersed in the fleshy; flesh becomes spiritual when it serves the spiritual” (29). Allan Fitzgerald, citing a Pauline influence, credits Augustine with having dramatically changed, in his mature years, in his attitude toward the body; see Fitzgerald, “Body,” 106.

7. Harrison, “Spiritual Senses,” Augustine Through the Ages, 767 On the sources of Augustine’s inner senses see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, and “Sensus interior in Augustine, Le libero arbitrio 2.3.25–6.51.”

8. Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue, 173.

9. In the context of the resurrection, Paula Fredriksen argues, “For both Paul and Augustine … salvation involves the body. But I take Paul’s spiritual body as undergoing a transformation of substance, from flesh to something else. Augustine’s … moves from ‘fleshy’ flesh to ‘spiritual’ flesh, but corporeality remains” (“Vile Bodies: Paul and Augustine on the Resurrection of the Flesh,” 86). How one understands the transformation of the living flesh and body in Paul is connected to the identification with Christ: “For we who live are constantly delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made manifest [phanerōthē] in our mortal flesh [sarki]” (2 Cor 4:10–12). Paul seeks to “crucify” the flesh and transform the body into its living likeness. But it is through the flesh that this transformation is accomplished.

10. Whatever position one takes on the issue of Augustine’s Neoplatonism in his earlier years, the body is central in his project of redemption. Margaret Miles concludes that despite the younger Augustine’s attraction to metaphysical dualism, the old Augustine “realized the inadequacy of resolving an experiential tension by metaphysical descriptions which destroy the unity of human being. Despite his own unconscious resistance and that of his culture to the revaluing of the body, Augustine has done a herculean task of integrating the ‘stone which the builders rejected.’ The body became the cornerstone of his theology” (Augustine on the Body, 131). See also Williams, “Augustine vs. Plotinus,” and Fitzgerald, “Body.”

11. “Nitamur igitur si possumus in hoc quoque exteriore indagare qualecumque vestigium trinitatis, non quia et ipse eodem modo sit imago Dei. Manifesta est quippe apostolica sententia quae interiorem hominem renovari in Dei agnitionem declart secundum imaginem eius qui creavit eum cum et alio loco dicat: Et si exterior homo noster corrumpitur, sed interior renovatur de die in diem” (DT, 50:333).

12. “Non enim maior essentia est Pater et Filius simul quam solus Pater aut solus Filius, sed tres simul illae substantiae sive personae, si ita dicendae sunt, aequales sunt singulis, quod animalis homo non percipit. Non enim potest cogitare nisi moles et spatial vel minuta vel grandia volitantibus in animo eius phantasmatis tamquam imaginibus corporum” (DT, 50:265).

13. On the inner trinity and its relation to knowledge, see Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate.

14. “Sed quia omnes iustos quibus nunc regnat ex fide viventibus mediator Dei et hominum homo Christus Jesus perducturus est ad speciem quam visionem dicit idem apostolus facie ad faciem” (DT, 50:49). Augustine continually reiterates this “face-to-face” encounter throughout On the Trinity, including “Faith unfeigned would be purifying their hearts in order that the one who is now being seen in a mirror might one day be seen face to face” (Trinity, 15.44 [429]; see also 1.16 [76], 1.2.8 [87], 1.31 [90], 2.28 [118], 3.9 and 3.10 [132], 5.1 [189], 6.12 [214], 9.1 [270], 12.22 [354], 14.4 [372], 14.23 [390], 14.25 [391], 15.13 and 15.14 [405], 15.15 [406], 15.20 and 15.21 [411], 15.40 [427], and 15.44 [429]). Augustine’s interest in what happens to the material body after resurrection is detailed in City of God. For more on the resurrected body see Nightingale, Once out of Nature and Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity.

15. Lewis Ayres elaborates further on this participation in Christ, what Augustine calls the participatio verbi, or participation in the Word: “Augustine presents Christ’s work as providing both an exemplum for the ‘outer man’ and a sacramentum for the ‘inner man’” (Augustine and the Trinity, 168).

16. Translation modified. ‘‘Sed dum peregrinamur a domino et per fidem ambulamus non per speciem, posteriora Christi, hoc est carnem, per ipsam fidem videre debemus. … Tanto enim certius diligimus quam videre desideramus faciem Christi quanto in posterioribus eius agnoscimus quantum nos prior dilexerit Christus … quia hoc in membris Christi speramus quae nos ipsi sumus quod perfectum esse in ipso tamquam in capite nostro fidei sanitate cognoscimus. Inde non vult nisi cum transierit videri posteriora sua ut in eius resurrectionem credatur” (DT, 50:119–120).

17. On the theory of visions, see Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?”

18. Translation modified. “Ipsa enim natura vel substantia vel essentia vel quodlibet alio nomine appellandum est idipsum quod Deus est, quidquid illud est, corporaliter videri non potest. Per subiectam vero creaturam non solum filium vel spiritum sanctum sed etiam patrem corporali specie sive similitudine mortalibus sensibus significationem sui dare potuisse credendum est” (DT, 50:126).

19. “Quem tamen nisi iam nunc diligamus, numquam videbimus. Sed quis diligit quod ignorat? Sciri enim aliquid et non diligi potest; … Et quid est Deum scire nisi eum mente conspicere firmeque percipere? Non enim corpus est, ut carneis oculis inquiratur” (DT, 50:275). The importance of loving without knowledge, that is, with an understanding that does not fully identify with or know its object, will be a common motif in affective spirituality of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, articulated often in terms of the sense of taste, that is, tasting something of the divine while not consuming it entirely. The other sensoria related to the commentaries on the Song of Songs will also operate in this same register, allowing for limited understanding and experience of the divine, but without knowing it in the scholastic sense.

20. Augustine, Trinity, 274. “Quod si sunt aliqua corpora quae secari omnino et dividi nequeunt, tamen nisi partibus suis constarent corpora non essent. Pars ergo ad totum relative dicitur quia omnis pars alicuius totius pars est et totum omnibus partibus totum est. Sed quoniam et pars corpus est et totum, non tantum ista relative dicuntur, sed etiam substantialiter sunt” (DT, 50:299).

21. Sermon 117: Augustine, Essential Sermons, 198. “Et quamdiu versas ut videas, partes, vides” (Sermones: PL 38, col. 664).

22. “Per oculos enim corporis corpora videmus quia radios, qui per eos emicant et quidquid cernimus tangunt, refringere ac retorquere in ipsos non possumus nisi cum specula intuemur … oculis cernere non valemus; sed mente quaerimus, et si fieri potest etiam hoc mente comprehendimus” (DT, 50:296).

23. See William’s reworking of Augustine with regard to the inner and outer senses: “On the level of the bodily senses, the act of sensation consists in perceiving in the mind, through a certain mental image, a certain likeness to the thing perceived in accordance with the nature both of the sense which perceives, and of the thing in question. If what is perceived, pertains, for instance, to the sense of sight, it cannot be seen at all by him who sees, unless the visible element of it is first formed in the mind of him who sees, by the likeness of a certain image, through which he who perceives is transformed into the thing perceived. In this way, and to a much greater degree, the vision of God is brought about in the sense of love by which God is seen” (William of Saint Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 79–77).

24. CW, 97; Brieven, 168–190.

25. “Ut mens tamquam in speculo se noverit” (DT, 50:317).

26. “Gignitur ergo ex re visibili visio, sed non ex sola nisi adsit et videns. Quocirca ex visibili et vidente gignitur visio ita sane ut ex vidente sit sensus oculorum et aspicientis atque intuentis intentio. … Ideoque non possumus quidem dicere quod sensum gignat res visibilis; gignit tamen formam velut similitudinem suam quae fit in sensu cum aliquid videndo sentimus” (DT, 50:336).

27. “Quae utrumque coniungit magis, ut dixi, spiritalis agnoscitur” (DT, 50:345).

28. “Nam et animae in ipsis peccatis suis non nisi quamdam similitudinem Dei superba et praepostera et … servili libertate sectantur. Ita nec primis parentibus nostris persuaderi peccatum posset nisi diceretur: Eritis sicut dii. Non sane omne quod in creaturis aliquo modo simile est Deo etiam eius imago dicenda est, sed illa sola qua superior ipse solus est. Ea quippe de illo prorsus exprimitur inter quam et ipsum nulla interiecta natura est” (DT, 50:344).

29. “Neque enim omnino inde gignitur quoniam aliquid aliud adhibetur corpori ut ex illo formetur, id est sensus videntis. Quocirca id amare alienari est” (DT, 50:344–345).

30. “Prius enim quam Visio fieret iam erat voluntas quae formandum sensum cernendo corpori admovit, sed nondum erat placitum. Quomodo enim placeret quod nondum erat visum? Placitum autem quieta voluntas est” (DT, 50:345).

31. “Finem fortasse voluntatis et requiem possumus recte dicere visionem ad hoc dumtaxat unum (DT, 50:345).

32. “In hac igitur distributione cum incipimus ab specie corporis et pervenimus usque ad speciem quae fit in contuitu cogitantis, quattuor species reperiuntur quasi gradatim natae altera ex altera, secunda de prima, tetria de secunda, quarta de tertia. Ab specie quippe corporis quod cernitur exortiur ea quae fit in sensu cernentis, et ab hac ea quae fit in memoria; et ab haec ea quae fit in acie cogitantis. Quapropter voluntas quasi parentem cum prole ter copulat: primo speciem corporis cum ea quam gignit in corporis sensu, et ipsam rursus cum ea quae ex illa fit in memoria, atque istam quoque tertio cum ea quae ex illa paritur in cogitantis intuitu. Sed media copula quae secunda est, cum sit vicinior, non tam similis est primae quam tertiae. Visiones enim duae sunt, una sentientis, altera cogitantis. Ut autem posit esse Visio cogitantis ideo fit in memoria de visione sentientis simile aliquid quo se ita convertat in cogitando acies animi, sicut se in cernendo convertit ad corpus acies oculorum. Propterea duas in hoc genere trinitates volui commendare, unam cum visio sentientis formatur ex corpore, aliam cum visio cogitantis formatur ex memoria” (DT, 50:353).

33. “Quaedam ergo cogitationes locutiones sunt cordis … et os” (DT, 50A:484).

34. In On the Trinity, Augustine notes that the mind can snatch something from what it inspects, “and deposit it in the memory as though swallowing it down into its stomach, and by recollection it will be able somehow to chew this in the cud and transfer what it has learnt into its stock of learning” (Trinity, 12.23[335]). “Tamen quod inde rapuerit etsi transiens mentis aspectus et quasi glutiens in ventre ita in memoria reposuerit, poterit recordando quodam modo ruminare et in disciplinam quod sic didicerit traicere” (DT, 50:377). In book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, this parallel is initially developed: “We might say that the memory is a sort of stomach for the mind, and that joy or sadness are like sweet or bitter food. When this food is committed to the memory, it is as though it had passed into the stomach where it can remain but also lose its taste. Of course it is absurd to suppose that the memory is like the stomach, but there is some similarity nonetheless” (Confessions, 10.14 [220]). “Nimirum ergo memoria quasi venter est animi, laetitia vero atque tristitia quasi cibus dulcis et amarus: cum memoriae commendantur, quasi traiecta in ventrem recondi illic possunt, sapere non possunt. Ridiculum est haec illis similia putare, nec tamen sunt omni modo dissimilia” (Confessionum: CCSL 27:166).

35. “Oculum amoris” and “visio illa Dei” (DT, 50:78).

36. Augustine claims a rhetorical truth in his ability or knowledge to wed the gaze of spiritual contemplation with the truth of language. As I noted previously, in the epilogue of On the Trinity, he equates it as follows: “But you are unable to fix your gaze there in order to observe this clearly and distinctly. You cannot do it, I know. I am telling the truth, I am telling it to myself, I know what I cannot do. However this same light has shown you those three things in yourself, in which you can recognize yourself as the image of that supreme trinity on which you are not yet capable of fixing your eyes in contemplation” (On the Trinity, 15.50 [435]). “Sed ad hoc dilucide perspicueque cernendum non potes ibi aciem figere. Scio, non potes. Verum dico, mihi dico, quid non possim scio. Ipsa tibi tamen ostendit in te tria illa in quibus te summae ipsius quam fixis oculis contemplari nondum vales imaginem trinitatis agnosceres” (DT, 50A:532). In other words, what Augustine can say, utter, or profess is not an epistemological claim, but a claim to recognizing something indirectly, but truly.

37. “Iudicamus autem de corporalibus ex ratione dimensionum atque figurarum quam incommutabiliter manere mens novit” (DT, 50:357). Memory will then have a first level of conserving and distilling the physical world into representation, but it will also have the capacity of recalling something of which the body does not yet have the experience, as I noted in the introduction. This is what I call the “memory of God,” “the memory of the imago,” understood in the sense of the subjective and objective genitive, and in the sense of God’s recall to himself of the imago in the mystic as well as in the mystic’s memory of God. See my article “Time and Memory.”

38. “Melior est tamen imaginatio corporis in animo quam illa species corporis in quantum haec in meliore natura est, id est in substantia vitali sicuti est animus, ita cum Deum novimus, quamvis meliores efficiamur quam eramus antequam nossemus maximeque cum eadem notitia etiam placita digneque amata verbum est fitque aliqua Dei similitudo illa notitia, tamen inferior est quia in inferiore natura est” (DT, 50:307).

39. Giles Constable stresses the interest in the twelfth century of the relation between image and true likeness, posed by Gen 1:26, as it affects teachings on the imitatio Christi, adding that “Augustine … maintained that every image was a likeness, but every likeness was not an image, which incorporated some, though not necessarily all, features of its prototype, and he applied the term ‘imitation’ to image and likeness in On True Religion and On the Trinity, where he distinguished ‘image’ from ‘to the image,’ saying that only Christ was the image and equal of the Father and that man was made ‘to the image, that is, he is not made equal by parity but approaches it by a kind of similarity.’ Man is separated from God by unlikeness and approaches Him by likeness” (Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, 166–167).

40. Minne means: (1) remembrance or thought; (2) love (religious love, love of neighbor, Christian love, live of God and Christ, that is, caritas); (3) the object of one’s love, beloved or lover (that is, amor); (4) good understanding, friendly relations, peace, concord (that is, gratia); (5) love for what one does, affection, cordiality. See “Minne” entry in the Middelnederlands: Woordenboek en teksten.

41. The term Minne is feminine in gender, which Hadewijch plays out in various ways, most notably in her poems in stanzas (known now as Liederen, or songs), inverting gender roles in this context and making herself the knight in pursuit of Love. The figure for Christ in her letters is, however, most often masculine. Newman has cleverly (and aptly) called this phenomenon of the play and pursuit of Minne la mystique courtoise, referring to the language of the fine amour in Hadewijch, Mechthild, and Marguerite, but this is only one aspect of Hadewijch’s very complex and wide-ranging articulation of her mysticism, applicable mainly in the context of her poems. Why poetic language is “courtly” is addressed in chapters 2 and 3. See Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” 137–167.

42. “De forma in formam mutamur atque transimus de forma obscura in formam lucidam” (DT, 50A:480).

43. “Conformes facti in hac parte non patris imaginis aut spiritis sancti sed tantummodo fi-lii” (DT, 50A:456).

44. “Sic enim nunc eandem imaginem portare possumus, nondum in visione sed in fide, nondum in re sed in spe” (DT, 50A:456).

45. By “language,” I mean both words and images, that is, signs that construe meaning. I do not mean that there is something like a unified body that one would designate as “a language”; rather, the very signifying processes seem to be accompanied by the promise of a unity that can never be accounted for.

46. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 248.

47. My argument might partially remedy what McGinn sees as a sigh of despair from those who read On the Trinity: “In concluding this glance at how Augustine’s thought on the imago Dei as detailed in On the Trinity forms and integral part of his mysticism, it is worth noting the role that book 15 plays in the full presentation. Those who have strained their minds to follow some of the most difficult passages in all of Augustine’s writings are sometimes disappointed upon getting to book 15 and learning how little they have really learned: “The Trinity itself is one thing, the image of the Trinity in something else is another’” (McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 248). While the two remain separate, the promise of joining the two is, I am arguing, the significant aspect of Augustine’s reading of how the Trinity operates in man.

48. Dante, Paradiso, ll. 19–21: La commedia secondo I’antica vulgata, 4:5; Paradiso, 4.

49. Lines 22–24 read, “O godly force, if you so lend yourself to me, that I might show the shadow of the blessed realm inscribed within my mind” (Dante, Paradiso, 4). “O divina virtù, se mi ti presti / tanto che l’ombra del beato regno / segnata nel mio capo io manifesti” (Dante, La commedia secondo l’antica vulgata; 4:5). While this “ombra” (shadow, figure) of the blessed kingdom may not necessarily be the imago Dei, the emphasis is on the figure inscribed in the mind which foreshadows the future time of redemption.

50. On the relation of performance to text, see Schaeffer, “The Dialectic of Orality and Literacy.”

51. Augustine, Trinity 11.1 (303). “Et si exterior homo noster corrumpitur, sed interior renovatur de die in diem” (DT, 50:333).

52. Augustine continues, “Therefore I do not have to be continually explaining about God’s acts of speaking in this present work. For unchanging Truth either speaks by itself, in a way we cannot explain, to the minds of rational creatures, or it speaks through a mutable creature, either to our spirit by spiritual images, or to our physical sense by physical voices.” “Nec sic loquitur angelis Deus, quo modo nos in vicem nobis vel Deo vel angelis vel ipsi angeli nobis sive per illos Deus nobis, sed ineffabili suo modo; nobis autem hie indicatur nostro modo. Dei quippe sublimior ante suum factum locutio ipsius sui factiest inmutabilis ratio, quae non habet sonum strepentem atque transeuntem, sed vim sempiterne manentem et temporaliter operantem. Hac loquitur angelis sanctis, nobis autem aliter longe positis. Quando autem etiam nos aliquid talis locutionis interioribus auribus capimus, angelis propinquamus. Non itaque mihi adsidue reddenda ratio est in hoc opere de locutionibus Dei. Aut enim Veritas incommutabilis per se ipsam ineffabiliter loquitur rationalis creaturae mentibus, aut per mutabilem creaturam loquitur, sive spiritalibus imaginibus nostro spiritui sive corporalibus vocibus corporis sensui” (DC, 48:507).

53. Augustine, City of God 15.2 (598); DC, 48:454–455.

54. Augustine, City of God 15.2 (598). “Invenimus ergo in terrena civitate duas formas, unam suam praesentiam demonstratem, alteram caelesti civitati significandae sua praesentia servientem” (DC, 48:455).

55. “Illa est de patre sine matre / ista de matre sine patre; / illa est sine aliquo tempore, / ista in acceptabili tempore / illa aeterna, / ista opportune: / illa sine corpore in sinu patris, / ista cum corpore quo non violata est virginitas matris: / illa sine ullo sexu, / ista sine ullo virili complexu” (Sermon 214: PL 38, cols. 1068–1069). Eugene Cunnar argues for the development of rhyme in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “not merely for aesthetic considerations but in order to have the sequence structure, including improper rhyme, mirror the theological doctrine and liturgical context.” Cunnar ties the interest in rhyme to temporal theological concerns, arguing that “sequence writers slowly began to understand that the rhyming effects created by patterned figures of repetition could correspond with the unique linear nature of Christian history present in the liturgy, and through that correspondence convey the strong theme of repetition and recurrence in salvific history to the listener” (“Typological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of Saint Victor,” 402, 399).

56. “Þæt cild is tua acenned. he is acenned of þam fæder on heofonum, buton ælcere meder. and eft þa ða he man gewearð. þa wæs he acenned of þam clænan mædene marian, buton ælcum eorðlicum fæder” (Ælfric, “De initio creaturae,” in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 1st ser., 187, ll. 241–244). In his homily on the nativity of Christ we read, “How is man born twice? Each man is born fleshily of a father and a mother. But he is not born as God’s child unless he is born of the spiritual mother of the bride of Christ. Just as he himself says ‘Except for he who has grown from of water and of the holy spirit, he may not go into God’s kingdom.’” “Hu bið se mann tuwa acenned? Ælc man bið acenned lichamlice of fæder and of meder. ac he ne bið na godes / bearn buton he beo eft acenned of þære gastlican meder of cristes bryde. swa swa he sylf cwæð; Buton gehwa beo geedcenned of wætere and of ðan halgan gaste. ne mæg he faran into godes rice” (Ælfric, “De natale Domini,” in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 2nd ser., 6, ll. 104–109).

57. Hilary of Poitiers, In Matthaeum 1.2: PL 9, cols. 920–921. At col. 921A: “Nullus error esse poterit scientibus non eam solum esse Domino nostro Jesu Christo originem, quae coepit ex Maria; sed in procreatione corporea, nativitatis aeternae significantiam comprehendi.” He is also drawing from John 3:1–8 when he exclaims in a hymn, “O Christ, for us the twice-born God! / Born once, from God unborn; Born twice, when the child-bearing Virgin / Brought out into the world, / Embodied and still God!” (“Bis nobis genite dues, / Christe! Dum innato nasceris a Deo / vel dum corporeum et Deum / mundo te genuit virgo puerpera”) (S. Hilarii episcopi Pictaviensis Opera, 4: Hymni; CSEL 65:209). See also John Chrysostom’s second homily on Matthew, which speaks of the two-fold birth.

58. “Tuwa we beoð on þysum life acennede: seo forme acennednys is flæsclic of fæder and of meder seo oþer acennednys is gastlic. Þonne we beoð geedcynnede on þam halgan fulluhte on þam us beoð ealle synna forgyfene þurh þæs halgan gastes gife; Seo þridde acennednys. bið on þam gemænelicum æriste, on þam beoð ure lichaman geedcynnede to unbrosniendlicum lichaman” (Ælfric, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 1st ser., 405, ll. 157–164). Malcolm Godden does not recognize any clear derivation, although Michael Lapidge cites a pseudo-Origen known by Ælfric in another homily; see Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library, 263.

59. Tauler, Predigten, 13.

60. “Sed attende in spirituali matrimonio duo esse genera pariendi, et ex hoc etiam diversas soboles, sed non adversas, cum sanctae matres aut praedicando, animas, aut meditando, intelligentias pariunt spirituales. In hoc ultimo genere interdum exceditur, et seceditur etiam a corporeis sensibus, ut sese non sentiat quae Verbum sentit. Hoc fit, cum mens ineffabili Verbi illecta dulcedine, quodammodo se sibi furatur, immo rapitur atque elabitur a seipsa, ut Verbo fruatur. Aliter sane afficitur mens fructificans Verbo, aliter fruens Verbo: illic sollicitat necessitas proximi, hic invitat suavitas Verbi. Et quidem laeta in prole mater, sed in amplexibus sponsa laetior. Cara pignora filiorum; sed oscula plus délectant. Bonum est salvare multos; excedere autem et cum Verbo esse, multo iucundius. At quando hoc, aut quamdiu hoc? Duke commercium; sed breve momentum, et experimentum rarum! Hoc est quod supra, post alia, memini me dixisse, quaerere utique animam Verbum, quo fruatur ad iucunditatem” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 315–316]).

61. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 87.

62. Ibid., 85. Bynum refers to the inner as the soul, the self, and the inner man. Bynum’s critical point is the emphasis on patterning and group formation in Cistercian spirituality in its evocation of inner and outer. In this particular chapter, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” she counters the emphasis in the early eighties on the “discovery” of the individual and the development of individuality in the twelfth century, highlighting the way the inner is linked to an overarching concern of belonging to and defining groups. Giles Constable articulates a similar thought: “In the interiorization of virtue, in the stress on inner responsibility and a direct relation to God, and in the consecration of the way of life of every faithful Christian lay in the essence of what has been called the individualism of the twelfth century, which may be better described as a personalism, since it involved a sense of the importance of the inner persona rather than a view of society, in modern terms, made up of distinct units marked by self-awareness of their differences from other people” (The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 293).

63. “Et quoniam quantumcumque se extenderit in id quod aeternum est tanto magis inde formatur ad imaginem Dei” (DT, 50:365).

64. “Quisquis igitur potest intellegere verbum non solum antequam sonet, verum etiam antequam sonorum eius imagines cogitatione volvantur, hoc enim est quod ad nullam pertinet linguam, earum scilicet quae linguae appellantur gentium quarum nostra Latina est;), quisquis, inquam, hoc intellegere potest iam potest videre per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate aliquam verbi illius similitudinem de quo dictum est: In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum” (DT, 50A:485).

65. Augustine, City of God 18.1 (761): “God’s city lives in this world’s city, as far as its human element is concerned; but it lives there as an alien sojourner” (“De civitatum duarum, quarum Dei una, saeculi huius est altera, in qua est, quantum ad hominum genus pertinet, etiam ista peregrina” [DC, 48:592]).

66. On the inner word see Gerard Watson, “Saint Augustine and the Inner Word.”

67. “Proinde verbum quod foris sonat signum est verbi quod intus lucet cui magis verbi com-petit nomen. Ita enim verbum nostrum vox quodam modo corporis fit assumendo earn in qua manifestetur sensibus hominum sicut verbum Dei caro factum est, assumendo earn in qua et ipsum manifestaretur sensibus hominum. Et sicut verbum nostrum fit vox nee muta-tur in vocem, ita Verbum Dei caro quidem factum est, sed absit ut mutaretur in carnem. Assumendo quippe illam, non in eam se consumendo, et hoc nostrum vox fit et illud caro factum est” (DT, 50A:486–487). See Elena Lombardi’s analysis on this and other passages in Augustine, in The Syntax of Desire, 60ff.

68. In her study of Augustine’s early dialogues, Catherine Conybeare notes, “At the moment when Augustine is beginning to reflect seriously on the implications of Christ’s incarnation for his own life, he also brings into the foreground, in the person of his mother, a reminder of his own incarnation. We can expect this to produce a certain emphasis on the embodied self; but more prominently in these dialogues it brings an emphasis on the embodied nature of language” (The Irrational Augustine, 200). Conybeare, however, turns to Kristeva and semiotics, whereas I focus on the promised and contingent nature of embodiment.

69. I do not mean to revive the adoptionist heresy and imply that, for Augustine, there are two natures that are not united in Christ’s humanity; rather, I understand Augustine as saying that the flesh is not divinized, rather it is fully human and fully divine, both at the same time.

70. de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2: The Four Senses of Scripture, 139.

71. McGinn highlights how lectio and meditatio become separate moments in the eleventh century (The Growth of Mysticism, 385).

72. “Quapropter qui cupit ad qualemcumque similitudinem Verbi Dei quamvis per multa dissimilem pervenire. … Ut ad illud perveniatur hominis verbum, per cuius qualemcumque similitudinem sicut in aenigmate videatur utcumque Dei Verbum” (DT, 50A:487).

73. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 47, 50.

74. As I have emphasized in the introduction, the resurrected body, for Paul, is enacted in a now-time. Paul is interested in the way in which human beings promise likeness to the resurrected Christ in the present through the transformed materiality of the body itself. Stephen Duffy articulates this in slightly different terms: “Like Paul, whose spirit/flesh distinction is a moral and not a metaphysical distinction, Augustine asserts a radical moral conflict within human beings, not a clash of opposing, independent substances” (“Anthropology,” 29, 30).

75. “lam vero animae reditus, conversio ejus ad Verbum, reformandae per ipsum, conformandae ipsi. In quo? In caritate. Ait enim: Estote imitatores Dei, sicut filii carissimi; et ambulate in dilectione, sicut et Christus dilexit vos [Ephes 5:1, 2]. Talis conformitas maritat animam Verbo, cum cui videlicet similis est per naturam, similem nihilominus ipsi se exhibet per voluntatem, diligens sicut dilecta est. Ergo si perfecte diligit, nupsit. Quid hac conformitate iucundius? quid optabilius caritate, qua fit ut, humano magisterio non contenta, per temet, o anima, fiducialiter accedas ad Verbum, Verbo constanter inhaereas, Verbum familiarite percuncteris, consultesque de omni re, quantum intellectu capax, tantum audax desiderio? Vere spiritualis sanctique connubii contractus est iste. Parum dixi, contractus: complexus est. Complexus plane, ubi idem velle, et nolle idem, unum facit spiritum de duobus” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 209]).

76. William of Saint Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 18.

77. McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, 155.

78. Hugh of Saint Victor, De contemplatione et ejus speciebus/Contemplation et ses espèces, 47.

79. The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, 132. “Prima lectio intelligentiam dat, secunda meditatio consilium praestat, tertia oratio petit, quarta operatio quaerit, quinta contemplatio invenit” (Eruditio didascalia: PL 176, col. 797B).

80. Harkins, Reading and the Work of Restoration, 12. Ivan Illich argues that Hugh “teaches how sacred books ‘ought to be read by the man who seeks in them the correction of his morals and a form of living.’ With his novices Hugh has in mind their vocation, namely, what they will one day teach others by the example of their forma vivendi” (In the Vineyard of the Text, 79).

81. Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 45–46.

82. “Lectio enim quasi fundamentum prima occurrit, et data materialis mittit nos ad meditationem. Meditatio quid appetendum sit diligentius inquirit, et quasi effodiens thesaurum invenit et ostendit; sed cum per se obtinere non valeat, mittit nos ad orationem. Oratio se totis viribus ad Deum erigens, impetrat thesaurum desiderabilem, contemplationis suavitatem. Haec adveniens praedictorum trium laborem remunerat, dum coelestis rore dulcedinis animam sitientem inebriat” (Guigo II, Scala claustrialum, 106–108).

83. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 11.8.75–76. “Haec meditamini, in his versamini. Talibus odoramentis refovete viscera vestra. … Quae dicta sunt de aliis tenete memoria, probate vita” (Sancti Bernardi Opera 1,59).

84. Worthen, “Interpreting Scripture for the Love of God,” 66.

85. “Opus autem esse non potest nisi praecedat verbum sicut Verbum Dei potuit esse nulla exsistente creatura; creatura vero nulla esse posset nisi per ipsum per quod facta sunt omnia” (DT, 50A:489).

86. Cunnar, “Typological Rhyme in a Sequence by Adam of Saint Victor,” 407. See Margot Fassler’s Gothic Song for an analysis of the Victorine sequence in the context of Victorine theology and the Augustinian canons’ way of life.

87. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, 14.8.104. “Quid facit oleum in vasis, si non sentias et in membris? Quid tibi prodest pium Salvatoris nomen lectitare in libris, nec habere pietatem in moribus? Oleum est; effunde, et senties virtutem ejus, quae triplex est” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera I, 81]).

88. “Sed si eum quem videt humano visu spiritali caritate diligeret, videret Deum qui est ipsa caritas visu interiore quo videri potest” (DT, 50:288).

89. “Quid est quod accendimur in dilectione Pauli apostoli cum ista legimus nisi quod credimus eum ita vixisse? Vivendum tamen sic esse dei ministris non de aliquibus auditum credimus sed intus apud nos, vel potius supra nos in ipsa veritate conspicimus” (DT, 50:289).

90. “Et nisi hanc formam quam semper stabilem atque incommutabilem cernimus praecipue diligeremus, non ideo diligeremus illum quia eius vitam cum in carne viveret huic formae coaptatam et congruentem fuisse fide retinemus” (DT, 50:290).

91. “Quid est autem dilectio vel caritas quam tantopere scriptura divina laudat et praedicat nisi amor boni? Amor autem alicuius amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans et quod amatur et amor. Quid est ergo amor nisi quaedam vita duo aliqua copulans vel copulari appetens, amantem scilicet et quod amatur? Et hoc etiam in extremis carnalibusque amoribus ita est. Sed ut aliquid purius et liquidius hauriamus calcata carne ascendamus ad animum. Quid amat animus in amico nisi animum? Et illic igitur tria sunt, amans et quod amatur et amor” (DT, 50:290).

92. William of Saint Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs, 10. “Sensus autem spiritualis hic est. Conversa ad Deum anima, et verbo Dei maritanda, primo praevenientis gratiae divitias intelligere perdocetur, et permittitur gustare quoniam suavis est Dominus: postmodum vero in domum conscientiae suae remittitur erudienda, castificanda in obedientia caritatis, et perfecte mundanda a vitiis, et perornanda virtutibus, ut ad spiritualem gratiam pietatis admittit, et affectum virtutum, qui sponsi thalamus est, digna habeatur” (Expositio altera super Cantica canticorum: PL 180, col. 477A–B). Hadewijch will reiterate this in Letter 10; after describing the example of the bride in the Song of Songs who must preserve the good that she receives from the Bridegroom, she extends the analogy to the role of a pure conscience: “We therefore should continually increase our grace with desire and wisdom, and carefully cultivate our field, rooting out weeds and sowing virtues; and we should build the house of a pure conscience, in which we may worthily receive our Beloved” (CW, 68; Brieven, 80).

93. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages. See also Simons “‘Staining the Speech of Things Divine.’”

94. Astell, Eating Beauty, 21.

95. “Verum nos vivimus quidem post corpus; sed ad ea quibus beate vivitur, nullus nobis accessus patet, nisi per corpus. Senserat hoc qui dicebat: Invisibilia Dei, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur [Rom 1:20]. Ipsa siquidem quae facta sunt, id est corporalia et visibilia ista, nonnisi per corporis instrumentum sensa, in nostram notitiam veniunt. Habet ergo necessarium corpus spiritualis creatura quae nos sumus, sine quo nimirum nequaquam illam scientiam assequitur, quam solam accepit gradum ad ea, de quorum fit cognitione beata” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 1, 21–22]).

1. Visions are by nature understood as eliding the control or agency of the subject who hosts the vision. Concerning the interpretation of scripture, Hollywood explains: “In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find the argument that if God chose to give women visions, to bestow prophecies on them, or to render himself one with them, then women might also be permitted—indeed even be called on—to speak and write of these things. As a result, women’s lived experience of Christian truth became one of the primary means through which they were empowered to speak publicly, to teach, and to write. For women, then, the experiential aspect of the mystical is necessarily distinct from its exegetical base. Rather than arguing that mystical contemplation came to them through their interpretation of scripture, many medieval women mystics claimed that they came to understand scripture through their visionary and mystical experience” (“Mysticism and Mystics,” 596).

2. On women, mysticism, and authority, see Hollywood, “‘Who Does She Think She Is?’”

3. Since the vision is given by divine grace, the visionary might be allowed to teach from it within her immediate community. McGinn writes: “About 1290 the Paris master Henry of Ghent, disputing the question ‘Whether a woman can be a doctor of theology?,’ distinguished between teaching ex officio (that is, by ecclesiastical approbation) and teaching ex beneficio (that is, from grace). Women were excluded from the former, but “speaking about teaching from divine favor and the fervor of charity, it is well allowed for a woman to teach just like anyone else, if she possesses sound doctrine” (The Flowering of Mysticism, 21).

4. While the Augustinian understanding of hierarchies of vision is slightly modified over the course of the Middle Ages, the general distinction between inner and outer persons and the former’s link to the mind or soul is the basis for a medieval interpretation that emphasizes the dyadic structure of inner and outer. Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram makes distinctions among the kinds visions, noting the difference between the visio intellectualisa a vision unmediated by images; the visio spiritualis, in which one sees the disembodied image of an object perceived; and the visio corporalis, which entails the direct vision of bodies. True to Augustine’s belief in an incorporeal God, the first is of highest value and involves a direct “perception” by the mind. The soul’s sense faculty in the inner person is related to the second form of vision, spiritual vision. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the emphasis on spiritual vision will permit some, like the Victorines, to shift the hierarchy from a tripartite structure to a dyadic structure that merely emphasizes inner spiritual vision, as opposed to outer vision. Hadewijch, however, still seems to work with a tripartite understanding of visions, since in Vision 6, when she falls out of her spirit, she is engulfed in unity and in a higher “plane,” so to speak, “engulfed and lost, without any comprehension of other knowledge, or sight, or spiritual understanding, except to be one with him and to have fruition of this union” (CW, 279). For Hadewijch, pure intellectual unity seems to be the highest form of vision, yet paradoxically still must be enacted through her person, as a form of believing in and attesting to the divine in the way one lives.

5. “Heldegaert die al de visione sach” (Vis, 160).

6. Worthen, “Interpreting Scripture for the Love of God,” 59.

7. McGinn raises this issue in connection with Hadewijch’s Vision 7 (“The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 197).

8. See Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 28–30.

9. Elizabeth Robertson argues for reading practices in the Ancrene Wisse that rely on negative assumptions about the flesh but which appeal to what she calls a “materialist immanence” in which women participate in an incarnational mode of thought; see Robertson, “‘This Living Hand.’” For more on the relation between literacy and mysticism see Bartlett, “Miraculous Literacy and Textual Communities in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias,” and Uhlman, “The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script.” On “reading” a picture and literacy, see Camille, “Seeing and Reading.”

10. Letter 22: “Then anyone whom—yes with the earthly man—God elevates with himself, he shall draw most deeply within himself and have fruition of him in nonelevation. O Deus! What a marvel takes place then—when such great dissimilarity attains evenness and becomes wholly one without elevation” (CW, 95–96). “Dien dan god met hem seluen verhoghet, Ja sonder den ertschen man, dien sal hi diepst in hem trecken ende sijns ghebruken in onuerhauenheiden. Ay deus, wat wonder ghesciet dan daer, Daer groet onghelijc effene ende al een wert sonder verhelfen” (Brieven, 172).

Mengeldicht 3, 11.97–108: “No one can content [God] / so long as he bears the image of the earthly man. / If we feel something, we call it the divine touch / And we lose reason, and wish to lean on this feeling, / And fancy we are one with what we love. / Thus we upset the game before we win it. / But he who rather wears the earthly man as a garment / Considers what is owed to reason, / Which is his rule of life and teaches him the works / By which he can turn from himself to Love, / And how he can keep Love /And how with Love he repays Love” (CW, 324). “Want nieman hem genoech gedoen en can / Die draghet die ymagie vanden erdschen man. / Ghevoelen wij iet, wij werden gherenen / Ende Verliesen redenne ende willenre op lenen / Ende wanen een sijn met dat wij minnen. / Dus breken wij tspel eert wijt ghewinnen. /Die ane dreghet den erdschen man / Besie die scout der redennen an, / Die sine reghele es, ende die hem leert / Die werke die men ter minnen keert, / Ende hoe men minne mach behouden, / Ende waer met minne hevet minnen vergouden” (Mgdt, 23).

11. Hadewijch explicitly names the inner senses as such (die inneghe sinne) in Lied 25, 1. 40 (not translated in Hart [CW, 197] but is accurately rendered in Van Baest’s translation [POH, 181]); Lied 42, 1. 28 (CW, 249; POH, 274); Letter 22, 11.17–18 (CW, 94). Although, as Reynaert notes, Hadewijch theorizes the “inner senses” as does William of Saint Thierry (Reynaert, De Beldspraak van Hadewijch, 189), most “theories” are enacted and implicit throughout Hadewijch’s writings, making this a moot point. In Vision 8 Christ refers to the inner and outer ways Hadewijch has known divinity: “Now you have tasted me and received me outwardly and inwardly [van buten and van binnen], and you have understood that the ways of union wholly begin in me” (CW, 284; Vis, 88).

12. Vis, 32, 58, 60.

13. Citing Gordon Rudy, for example, McGinn comments how taste and touch, in Hadewijch, “imply an immediacy of contact, a reciprocity of action between lover and beloved,” and are favored modalities of her mysticism (“The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mystics,” 199); see Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages. As I will argue further on, taste connotes an understanding that unites inner and outer persons, and, as Andrew Louth has shown in relation to the ictu cordis of Augustine, touch is transitory futural as it provides a “foretaste of the joys of heaven” in drawing the senses inward (The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 137). On taste, for example, Pierre Adnès warns us that “ces métaphores et d’autres semblables, seront recueillies, commentées, développées par les auteurs spirituals et mystiques. Mais l’imprécision, dont soufre parfois leur language, ne permet pas toujours de dire à première vue ce qu’ils entendent exactement par le mot goût. Un examen attentive montre cependant qu’on peut répartir sommairement les textes en deux grands groupes: ceux qui font du gout un sens spirituel, intérieur à l’âme, grâce auquel celle-ci appréhenderait et expérimenterait les réalités surnaturelles selon un mode de connaître analogue à la sensation gustative fournie par le sens physique du même nom, et ceux qui, d’une manière plus vague, parlent de goûts spirituels pour exprimer le caractère agréable, délectable de certains phénomènes d’ordre cognitivo-affectif, qui apparaissent dans l’oraison ou le cours de la vie spirituelle” (“Goût spirituel,” 627–628). On the use of inner faculties and their relation to the inner senses, see also Reynaert, De Beeldspraak van Hadewijch, 189–229.

14. Hadewijch’s Vision 11 illustrates her love of Augustine and his function as a model for living in love. In this vision she experiences union (in the form of two eagles, one of which is her) with the saint, despite her only wanting union with God; her List of the Perfect gives him a prominent position and demonstrates that she did know something of his life, most likely through a knowledge of his Confessions. On Hadewijch’s influences see Mommaers and Dutton, Hadewijch and Willaert, “Hadewijch en Maria Magdalena.” For the List of the Perfect, see Vis, 150–262; and “List of the Perfect by Hadewijch of Antwerp,” 277–287.

15. Letter 22 (translation modified). “Die luttel weet, hi mach luttel segghen: dat seghet die wise Augustinus. Alsoe doen ic oec, wet god; vele gheloue ich ende hope van gode. Mer mijn weten van gode es cleine: een cleyne gheraestel maghic van hem gheraden; Want men mach gode niet tonen met menschen sinnen” (Brieven, 168).

16. Letter 22 (translation modified). “Mer die metter zielen gherenen ware van gode, hi soudere yet af moghen toenen den ghenen diet metter zielen verstonden. Verlichte redene toent den inneghen sinnen een lettel van gode, Daer si bi moghen weten dat god es ene eyselike ende ene ouervreselike suete nature ane te sine van wondere, Ende dat hi alle dinc es te allen Ende in allen gheheel” (Brieven, 168).

17. On touch (ghereinen), see my article, “Hadewijch d’Anvers: Le secret de la touche,” and Suydam, ‘“The Touch of Satisfaction.”

18. Using language borrowed from William of Saint Thierry’s Exposition on the Song of Songs and Hugh of Saint Victor’s On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, Hadewijch will, in Vision 8, prioritize the “eye” of Love over the “eye” of reason—as Hugh will speak of three eyes of humanity (physical, intellectual, and contemplative)—and emphasizes the need to repair the two “eyes” of reason and contemplation. See Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis 1.10.2: PL 176, cols. 329C–330A. As with Augustine, for these theologians, all is ultimately united by Love, by loving love itself.

19. Vision 14; “Daer ic toe ghecoren was, dat ic mensche ende God in eenre const smaken soude, dat ni mensche doen en mochte, hi ne ware al aise God ende altemale was die onse minne es” (Vis, 148).

20. “Daer si bi moghen weten dat god es ene eyselike ende ene ouervreselike suete nature ane te siene van wondere” (Brieven, 168).

21. Willaert argues that the fourteenth-century compiler of manuscript C seems to have placed an even greater emphasis on her visions by putting them at the front of the manuscript: “À mon avis, la place de marque des Visions dans ce manuscrit visait justement à souligner le fait que ses paroles ont été inspirées et autorisées par Dieu lui-même. … Nous ne savons pas à quelle époque remonte l’ordre de succession dans ce manuscrit, mais il ne me paraît pas impossible qu’en donnant aux Visions une place de choix et en mettant en exergue le statut visionnaire de l’auteur, on ait voulu souligner l’orthodoxie, toujours sujette à caution au XIVe siècle, de ces textes mystiques” (“Les Opera Omnia d’une mystique brabançonne,” 343–344).

22. See Fraeters, “Gender and Genre”; Fraeters, “Visionen als literaire mystagogie”; and Mommaers, “Hadewijch: Tasting Man and God in One Knowledge.”

23. See Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience on this emphasis.

24. “Kere weder in dine materie ende laet bloeyen dine werke” (Vis, 90). According to the Middelnederlands: Woordenboek, the term kimp(e), or kemp(e) is associated with the Latinate terms meaning “fighter,” “warrior,” and “boxer”: “kimp, vetus kamp, certamen; kimp vetus kamper, pugil; kimpen vetus kampen, luctari, certare.” It is related to the Middle High German kempfe, and the Old High German chempio. Hadewijch’s use of this term further associates the vision with Rom 8:37–39: “Sicut scriptum est qui propter te mortificamur tota die aestimati. Sumus ut oves occisionis. Sed in his omnibus superamus propter eum qui dilexit nos. Certus sum enim quia neque mors, neque vita, neque angeli, neque principatus, neque instantia, neque futura, neque fortitudines, neque altitudo, neque profundum, neque creatura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quae est in Christo Iesu Domino nostro” (my emphasis) (“As it is written: ‘For your sake, we are put to death all day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. But in all these things we overcome [conquer], through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is Christ Jesus our Lord’”). When we read Hadewijch’s Visions 7 and 8 as one vision, the theme of overcoming all divisions through the love of Christ more clearly ties the two together. The kimpe could be the sensuous soul, represented in bodily form. For more on the “rätselhafte Figur des ‘kimpe,’” see Gerald Hofmann, Hadewijch. Das Buch der Visionen, 2: Kommentar, 130ff.

25. Vis, 76. See also Vision 11, when she returns “poor and miserable” to herself (CW, 290; Vis, 104).

26. “Een waren sonder differentie” (Vis, 82).

27. On beguines’ access to the written word see Simons, “‘Staining the Speech of Things Divine’,” and de Hemptinne, “Reading, Writing, and Devotional Practices.”

28. “Ic was in Nativitate Beate Marie te mettenen ende na die III lessen wart mi vertoent in ene geeste een lettel wonders” (Vis, 92).

29. On the issue of authorship and Hildegard’s Vita see Newman, “Hildegard and Her Hagiographers.”

30. “Life of Hildegard,” 179,159. “Subsequenti demum tempore mysticam et mirificam visionem vidi, ita quod omnia viscera mea concussa sunt,” and “Tunc in eadem visione magna pressura dolorum coacta sum palam manifestare que videram et audieram” (Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, cols. 116B, 103C).

31. “Sed ego, quamius haec viderem et audirem, tamen propter dubietatem et malam opinionem et propter diversitatem verborum hominum, tamdiu non in pertinacia, sed in humilitatis officio scribere recusavi, quousque in lectum aegritudinus flagello Dei depressa caderem; ita quod tandem multis infirmitibus compulsa … manus ad scribendum apposui. … Et iterum audivi vocem de caelo mihi dicentem: ‘Clama ergo et scribe sic’” (Hildegardis Bigensis scivias, 5–6).

32. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture. My reading of the body differs, however, from Holsinger’s in that I associate the body not only with the outer flesh but with the inner body and distinguish between the two.

33. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, 160. “Vivit et non vivit, cinerosa sentit et non sentit, ac [et] miracula Dei non per se, sed per ilia tacta profert, quemadmodum chorda, per cytharedam tacta, sonum non per se, sed per tactum illius reddit” (Hildegard von Bingen, Liber vitae meritorum 6, 45:291–292).

34. Mark Amsler argues that the Ancrene Wisse likewise uses the body as a means for what he calls “affective literacy.” He reads the focus on the kiss as a means and pivot for interior experience: “While these somatic and affective experiences are located in or on the body as part of corporeal presence, they are authorized as literate technologies for the soul or heart. … The senses employed in reading link the body with the soul, thus inhabiting a liminal position between the inner and outer worlds.” In his astute reading of the Amiens book of hours, he concludes, “Affective reading, then, is marked as a trace on the skin, in and out of time and on/in the book. Traces of such reading always confront readers with prior acts which transmute textuality but only partially determine future readings” (“Affective Literacy,” 89, 97).

35. The progression from lectio to meditatio, oratio, operatio, and contemplatio common to Cistercians connotes a gradual evolution, yet the “progress” is often circular for the mystic herself, where the vision informs the sense of the outer and the outer perfection reforms the inner. While the vision clearly happens before the mystic understands it and is framed as an occasion for contemplatio, it is part operatio, and also part meditatio, as it performs an exegesis of what it sees.

36. Translation modified. “Ic sach gode god ende menche mensche. Ende doe en wondered mi niet, dat god god was, ended at de mensche mensche was. Doen saghic gode mensche, Ende ic sach den mensche godlec. Doen en wonderde mi niet dattie mensche verweent was met gode” (Brieven, 230).

37. This emphasis on space and place gives mystical texts an interesting relation to medieval romances, especially regarding the common figure of the orchard or grove of trees that mystics like Hadewijch encounter at the beginning of their visions, and the felicitous ending in which she sees a robe adorned with perfect virtues that accompany the lover to the beloved. The final lines of her visions are testimony to her having achieved victory and surmounted the obstacles presented to her in spiritual tests, “And since you are so courageous, and since you never yield, you are deemed the most courageous, and it is right that you know me perfectly” (CW, 305) (“Ende want due coene, dus coene best, ende dus niet ne bughes, soe heeti coenste, ende soe eest recht dattu mi tevollen kins” [Vis, 148]). What the masculine figure encounters allegorically through fight and physical combat, the feminine mystic encounters allegorically through visions. The mystic is involved in spiritual combat of sorts, like the Cistercians, who are the novi milites Christi, especially as illustrated in the Citeaux Moralin in Job.

38. “Doe ic Onsen Here ontfaen hadde, doe ontfic hi mi te heme, soe dat hi mi opnam alle mine sinne buten alle ghedinkenesse van vreemden zaken om sijns te ghebrukene in enecheden. Ende ic wart ghevoert alse in enen beemt, in een pleyn dat hiet ‘de wijtheit der volcomenre doechde’” (Vis, 32).

39. See, for example the Middle Dutch Limburg Sermons, wherein passages of Hadewijch’s letters appear throughout. Scheepsma argues for their using the same source text. For a rich discussion of beguine communities, the manuscripts of Hadewijch (among others), and the spirituality of the Low Countries, see Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 56–100.

40. “Ende ic wart op mine knien, ende mijn herte gheberde vreseleke dat enechleke te anebedene” (Vis, 80). Frank Willaert reminds us that the posture of prayer “ties in with a belief that goes back to Augustine, according to which an appropriate posture makes the affectas of the heart flare up higher” (“Margaret’s Booklets,” 109 and n. 26).

41. Fraeters, “Handing on Wisdom,” 161.

42. Summit continues, “Indeed in many instances devotional reading is conceived as a form of writing: thus the late fourteenth-century English Book to a Mother constructs its female addressee, ‘thou maist lerne aftir thi samplerie [exemplar] to write a feir trewe bok,’ by which it imagines that the reader herself will become a fresh ‘book’ in which she herself can ‘write withinne and withoute’ the lessons of humility, poverty, and chastity” (“Women and Authorship,” 104).

43. Translation modified. “Lumen igitur quod video locale non est, sed nube que solem portat multo [et multo] lucidus, nee altitudinem, nee longitudinem nee latitudinem, in eo considerare valeo, illudque umbra viventis luminis michi nominatur; atque ut sol, luna et stelle in aqua apparent, ita scripture, sermones, virtutes, et quedam opera hominum formata in illo michi resplendent” (Hildegardis Bigensis Epistolarium, CIIIr: 261).

44. Then joined in faith, hope, and charity in the service of reason, “seeing [God],” William of Saint Thierry writes, “this is understanding” God. The activity of vision, “which is that very understanding which is the soul,” involves the soul’s alignment with the inner person (The Mirror of Faith, 5). William even goes so far as to say that so long as faith, hope, and charity are the guiding forces of a person, “they grasp what is perfect without books” (6) (“Igitur sine tribus [fides, spes, Caritas] istis anima nulla sanatur, ut posit Deum videre, hoc est intelligere” and “Ipsa autem visio intellectus ille est, qui est in anima, cum animae intelligere, hoc est Deum videre, contingent” [Speculum fidei: PL 180, col. 366]).

45. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages, 45.

46. “Mystical Networks in the Middle Ages,” 43.

47. Hollywood’s reading occurs in the context of Hadewijch’s Vision 7, that of the Eucharist. She notes, “Rather than marking a disjunction between female- and male-authored mystical texts, then, the distinction between visionary or cataphatic language and apophatic language occurs within mystical texts. Men, within medieval Christianity, had authority to interpret scripture; women did not. Thus, in naming the divine, maleauthored texts tend to use language drawn from scripture rather than from visionary experience; scriptural language becomes the language unsaid through apophasis. On the other hand, for many medieval women, who were denied authority to interpret scripture, their visions, auditions, and ecstatic experiences of the divine become the texts that both name God and are ‘unsaid’ in the process of mystical writing” (Sensible Ecstasy, 98).

48. For a comparison see Hugh of Saint Victor, De arca Noe morali, in which Christ is represented as both tree and book of life. Hugh describes three books, and the third, as Grover Zinn explains, “is found within the Trinity in the Person of the Son, the Wisdom of God. It is this Book that the faithful seek through the simulacra of the external world and through the contemplative quest set within the inner world of spiritual reality” (“Book and Word,” 151).

49. Paulsell continues, “This inclusive act of reading makes it possible for one to practice lectio divina not only by reading books, but by listening to books being read aloud in the chapter house and refractory and by listening to the liturgy” (“‘Scriptio Divina,’” 135–136; see also 138ff.).

50. Paulsell writes, “Marguerite develops what I am calling scriptio divina, a spiritual discipline to which writing is central, but also a many-layered understanding of the relationship of God’s creativity to her own” (“‘Scriptio Divina,’” 143). And further, “for Marguerite, the discipline of lectio divina belongs even to those who may not be able to read or who may not have ready access to written texts: one may practice the lectio by attention to those texts one has learned ‘by heart’: the book of one’s own experience, the color and rhythms of one’s own visions and the mystical body of Christ that is inscribed by those who have been gathered by it” (157). She also argues for a more circular pattern, as Marguerite can return to her own text for further meditation. Where Paulsell emphasizes Marguerite’s “creative self,” I highlight the relation to the inner body.

51. Marguerite d’Oingt, Writings, 42; Œuvres, 92.

52. Ibid., 43; Œuvres, 94.

53. Ibid., 43; Œuvres, 94.

54. Ibid., 45, 47; Œuvres, 98,102.

55. Newman writes that “imaginative theology” is “the pursuit of serious religious and theological thought through the techniques of imaginative literature, especially vision, dialogue, and personification. … It focuses on how theology might be performed; it draws attention to theological method and epistemology” (God and the Goddesses, 292, 297). While I would agree with this evaluation, use of the term “imaginative” risks implying that women’s theology is a less structured complexity than that crafted by men. Rosemary Drage Hale notes the interrelation between the outer and the inner: “The medieval mystics not only regard the living soul as a mirror of the body, but the body as raw material for contemplation” (“Taste and See, for God Is Sweet,” 12).

56. Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 146.

William of Saint Thierry also claims in his Speculum: “Will is the beginning of love. Love then is a vehement will” (Mirror, 18); the Latin reads, “Voluntas enim initium amoris est. Amor siquidem vehemens voluntas est” (PL 180, col. 371). Or William’s On the Nature and Dignity of Love: “Spiritui ipsi sancto, qui Patris et Filii amor est et voluntas, bono sui assensu incipit inhaerere; et vehementer incipit velle quod Deus vult, et quod volendum memoria suggerit et ratio: et vehementer volendo amor efficitur. Nihil enim aliud est amor quam vehemens in bono voluntas” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184, col. 383A). It would not be surprising to have a Cistercian text in a Carthusian monastery, given William’s support of solitude and his inspiration by Carthusian spirituality. Another possible tie is to Richard of Saint Victor’s De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis—in which, in the progression of love, the mnemonic second step is characterized by vehemence: “in secundo eius vehementia” (PL 196, col. 1213D).

57. Writings of Margaret of Oingt, 67.

58. Hadewijch also explicitly reads in her visions, as in Vision 12, when the name of each virtue is written (ghescriven) on the robe of the bride (CW, 294; Vis, 116).

59. Julian, A Revelation of Love, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 169.

60. For a nuanced reading of corporeality and its inextricable tie to interpretation see Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love.”

61. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory. For a discussion of the term “nonexperience” in mysticism and religious thought as it relates to the elaborations of a limit-experience, especially in Blanchot, Bataille, and Lévinas, see Kevin Hart, “The Experience of Nonexperience.”

62. On the difference between Augustine’s use of memory and the more traditional forms associated with the spatialization of memory elaborated by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers, see Dave Tell, “Beyond Mnemotechnics.” Tell argues that because “God must be remembered but he cannot be placed, the memoria Dei requires a memorial practice in which the past is not preserved through placement in memory.” It is through a performative confession that this dilemma is resolved: “Confession … is a way of remembering that which cannot be placed in the storehouses of memory. Confession is a performative remembering in which the object of memory is not contained in the mind before it is disclosed through speech; rather, it is embodied in the speech act. … Confession, then, displaces memory; it surpasses the palaces of the mind for which Augustine has become famous and refigures memory within the confessive expression itself. As such, confession renders Augustine’s absurd solution tenable: it is a way of remembering that which cannot be placed in memory” (“Beyond Mnemotechnics,” 233, 234).

63. I am referring to Marianne Hirsch’s use of the term “postmemory,” which “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,” and thus have no direct historical access to the memory’s referent (“Past Lives,” 559). See Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, for a sense of the inevitable failure of Augustine’s confessional venture.

64. “Ende dat ic dies ghevoele met Gode in Gode, dat ics maer te meer en ben ondersceden, alse mi es te sprekene” (Brieven, 230).

65. One could argue that this difference itself is minimal since Augustine too is marked by the divine in that the divine is acknowledged within at the moment of conversion; however, Augustine cannot attest an instance of unity, but can only access its promise.

66. “Ic was opgenomen in den geeste in Sente Jans daghe Ewangelists in de kerstdaghe” (Vis, 96).

67. William of Saint Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 18–19. Hadewijch will inherit William’s and other Cistercians’ more engaged or affective sense of man’s relation to the Trinity rather than that of Augustine. What for Augustine is framed in the language of self-reflection and love, William frames in terms of affective piety and charismatic love. J. M. Déchanet clarifies love in William, explaining, “Not all love for God is ‘knowledge’; but only the love described as charismatic,’ the love of the unitas spiritus, the enlightened love of the nous brought into unity by the Holy Spirit” (The Golden Epistle, xxix). While one might nevertheless be able to read Augustine in a similar fashion, the terms that William and Hadewijch use push Augustine further to emphasize a promised deification of man. See especially Hadewijch, Letter 17: “But when by fruition man is united to Love, he becomes God, mighty and just. And then will, work, and might have an equal part in his justice, as the Three Persons are in one God” (84). For an excellent study of Hadewijch’s use of the term “fruition” (ghebrukene) and presentation of Hadewijch’s work in general, see Mommaers and Dutton, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic.

68. Both William and Hadewijch criticize those who obey rules and put on the habit of piety without knowing or assuming the content. Hadewijch is able to take it one step further, since beguines did not initially take vows: “In keeping a rule of life, people encumber themselves with many things from which they could be free; and that causes reason to err. A spirit of good will assures greater interior beauty than any rule of life could devise” (CW, 54).

69. On textuality and the body in martyrologies see Ross, Figuring the Feminine.

70. “In enen dertiendaghe was ic binnen der messen opghenomen in den geeste ute mi selven” (Vis, 114).

71. Through a reading of Hadewijch’s Vision 4, Mary Suydam argues that Hadewijch’s citational use of the liturgy authenticates her vision of heavenly space; see Suydam, “Bringing Heaven Down to Earth.”

72. CW, 140 (ll. 20–21); Liederen, 90.

73. My usage oscillates between the terms Minne and “Love,” depending on context and usefulness in hearing it as “Love” or Minne.

74. Letter 20: Brieven, 160,162.

75. Almost every one of Hadewijch’s visions is prompted by the liturgy and framed by liturgical experience. Many of them occur at Matins—that is, at the earliest part of the divine office, which starts in the morning before any light appears and ends with the rising of the sun. The liturgy prompts visions perhaps because of the close association with the reconfiguration of time and the attempt to accommodate human time to a time aligned with divinity through memory and anticipation. The versicle and response found in Matins—“Domine, labia mea aperies,” and “Et os meum annunciabit laude[m] tuam”—exemplify the scripting of body and voice.

76. For studies on various kinds of time in Christianity, see, for example Bourgeois, Gibert, and Jourjon, L’expérience chrétienne du temps; Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et Saint Augustin; Clément, “Le temps mystique dans la poésie spirituelle du XVII^e siècle”; Boros, “Les categories de la temporalité chez Saint Augustin.”

77. Veerle Fraeters notes, “The vision reveals, in a visual mode, the hidden sense of the liturgical text the visionary was meditating upon. In the case of women with a well-stimulated memory, what is seen during the vision is fed not only by the specific liturgical text of the day, but also by other texts and images that are triggered during the visionary’s affective ruminations on the text. Consequently, the visions of well-read beguines and nuns like Hadewijch and the Helfta nuns display a high degree of intertextual dialogue between scripture and a wide array of other religious and classical texts” (Fraeters, “The Appearance of Queen Reason”).

78. I am indirectly referring to Derrida’s reading of Celan and the date in “Shibboleth,” in which he describes the date that is tied to a poem as possessing a force that exceeds its “once”: “If the poem is due its date, due to its date, owes itself to its date as its own inmost concern … it speaks of this date only insofar as it is freed, as it were, of its debt—and of its date, which is also something given—releasing itself from the date without disavowing it. It absolves itself of its debt so that its utterance may carry beyond a singularity which might otherwise remain undecipherable, mute and immured in its date—in the unrepeatable” (“Shibboleth,” 311). If one reads the liturgy as an intricate poem, as does Jean Leclercq, the vision is a kind of poetic improvisation or commentary (or both) and a paraliturgical form of exegesis; see Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 236.

79. Letter 11 “Seder dat ic x. iaer out was, soe hebbic alsoe na van herteleker minnen bedwonghen gheweest, Dat ic binnen den iersten twee iaren dat ics began hadde doot gheweset” (Brieven, 84).

80. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18. Dominick LaCapra warns of the dangers of sacralizing trauma and of trying to preserve its transcendence in LaCapra, History in Transit, 117–123.

81. The Writings of Margaret, 53. “En aut teins jut e darey entendiment en totes cetes choses” (Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 116).

82. The Writings of Margaret, 54. “Nos non trovein pas que illi voucit unques de ceta vision revelar autres choses maque … illi non o porret recontar ne comprendre” (Marguerite d’Oingt, Œuvres, 118).

83. Vision 11 (translation modified). “Doe verkindic een kint gheboren werdende in die verhoelne minnende geeste. … Ic sach van alrehande geesten die voermen, yeghewelken in sijn wesen daer hi in levede … Some daerbi van binnen ende oec van buten een groet deel; ende some bekindicse daer van binnen die ic nemmermeer van buten en sach” (Vis, 102).

84. Translation modified. “Want al dat men siet metten geeste, die met minnen es opghenomen, dat dorekint men, dat doresmaect men, dat doresiet men, dat dorehoert men” (Vis, 104).

85. Watson notes that for Julian, “the revelatory process is still at work even as Julian sets out to record an experience that is far in her past” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 69).

86. See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Aft erwardsness.” Laplanche argues “that there is something that goes in the direction of the past to the future, from the other to the individual in question, that is, in the direction from the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated, following a temporal direction which is, in an alternating fashion, by turns retrogressive and progressive (according to my general model of translation–detranslation–retranslation)” (“Notes on Aft erwardsness,” 265).

87. Cath Caruth argues, “The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never fully be known, but in an inherent latency within the event itself” (Unclaimed Experience, 17).

88. See Letter 22, l. 69: CW, 95; Brieven, 172; and Mengeldicht 3, ll. 98, 103: CW, 324; Mgdt, 23.

1. Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?,” 25.

2. “The Seven Manners of Holy Love,” 319. “Dit es itoe hier een ingelec leuen ende hier na volght dat ewelec leuen” (Seven manieren van minne, 28).

3. Vision 12: “Si ne brachte wel alle nederheit hoghe ende alle hoecheit neder” (Vis, 118).

4. See Andrew Louth’s discussion of this in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 132–133.

5. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 51.

6. Hadewijch may be influenced by Gregory the Great in using werke as a way of balancing the inner and the outer, finding perfection in the growing knowledge of one’s failings. For Gregory, the inner is not necessarily superior to the outer, but rather, each is constantly balancing the other out. As Carole Straw notes, “Vices and virtues, good works and temptations keep the natural propensities of the spirit and the flesh in the right equilibrium,” making “‘weakness’ … the very ‘guardian’ of virtue” (Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, 244–245).

7. “Die mint, hi werct grote werke” (Brieven, 240). See Letters 2 and 30 (CW, 49, 116) for elaborations of “great works.” The Middle Dutch dictionary defines werk in these terms: “Arbeid, bezigheid, het verrichten van arbeid, het werken, werking. Kil. werck, opus, operatio, actus, opificium, negotium; Plantijn: werck, werckinge, besongne, oeuvre, ouvrage, opus, opificium, operatio; dat werck spoeyen, faire exploiter besongne, opus excitare vel accelerare, operi instare; het werck staken, cesser de la besongne, sistere opus; opus intermittere, cessare; het werck volenden, achever la besongne, opus exigere, int werck zijn, estre à la besongne, esse in opere; te werck komen, venir à l’oeuvre, ad opus venire; Teuth. werck, opus; werck maken, ondernemen, annemen, intermittere, occupare; Voc. Cop. werc, opus,” from Middelnederlands: Woordenboek en teksten. Whichever sense of werke was intended in Vision 8, the time of the writing postdates the vision itself and allies itself with the time of materie. The command to “let her works blossom forth” means that the message should be communicated to her community. Committing the vision to writing is a part of this task, as she makes clear in Vision 13. In this vision she references how she envisions her own activity and its transmission, claiming the need for editing, as “a great book would be required if one were to write everything perfectly in full truth” (“Want daer soude een groet boec toe gaen daer ment volcomelec in volre waerheit al scriven soude”) (CW, 290; Vis, 104).

8. On this point, see Baker, “Augustine on Action, Contemplation, and Their Meeting Point in Christ.”

9. Letter 30: Brieven, 240.

10. Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor, 156.

11. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs III, 47.4.6. Bernard continues: “And the more a man is conscious he has not failed in works of charity through love of his own ease, the more he will contemplate things sublime and make bold to study them.” “Post bonum denique opus securius in contemplatione dormitur, et tanto quis fiducialius sublimia intueri et vestigare aggreditur, quanto sibi conscius est minime se, propriae amore quietis, caritatis operibus defuisse” (Sermones super Cantica canticorum [Sancti Bernardi Opera 2, 64]). Bernard certainly values what he calls “active” love, or “love in action”; nevertheless, he places a greater reciprocal emphasis on action and contemplation (as symbolized by Martha and Mary) than Hadewijch.

12. Richard of Saint Victor, “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 287. “In primo intrat meditatione, in secundo ascendit contemplatione, in tertio retroducitur in jubilatione, in quarto egreditur ex compassione” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis: PL 196, col. 1217D). See also Richard’s De statu interioris hominis on the threefold promise related to the inner person: “Prima itaque olei species est promissio veniae; secunda, promissio gratiae; tertia, promissio gloriae” (PL 196, cols. 1154D–1155A).

13. See Simons, Cities of Ladies and Scheepsma, “Introduction,” The Limburg Sermons.

14. The virtues listed in Vision 12 are, in ascending order: faith, hope, fidelity, charity, desire, humility, discernment, works, reason, wisdom, peacefulness, and patience.

15. For William of Saint Thierry, the understanding of eternal things in temporal modes constitutes one form of work, and Christ’s life is understood as his supreme work: “The dignity of the work testified in the heart of the person who understands to the greatness of divine goodness, and the supreme good, understood to some degree by the sense of love, constitute a work worthy of God. … His [Christ’s] life was his work, and he was eternally with God” (The Mirror of Faith, 62). “Magnitudinem siquidem divinae bonitatis in corde diligentis testatur dignitas operis, et intellectum aliquatenus summum bonum in sensu amoris constituit dignum Deo opus suum. … Vita erat opus suum, et aeternaliter erat apud Deum” (Speculum fidei: PL 180, col. 387C).

16. Hadewijch’s visions are numbered as fourteen, but Visions 7 and 8 are accepted as one continuous vision. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the published numeration when referring to the visions. Although the List is not included in the current English translation of her complete works, this is not because of any question as to its inclusion with the visions in the manuscripts.

17. “Ic en hadder niet genoech toe ghepijnt noch gheleeft int ghetal van soe hogher werdecheit” (Vis, 32).

18. The figure of the forest is a spiritual trope in the Limburg Sermons. See Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 433–439.

19. Fraeters, “Handing on Wisdom and Knowledge,” 154.

20. “Miraclen ende ghichten van buten die waren in di sere begonnen te werkene. Die heves du mi ontseghet ende bester af ghestaen ende en wilter niet” (Vis, 52).

21. “Met verstannesse saltu wise minen wille werken. … Niemene en ghebrec nemmermeer tote dien daghe dat ic di segghe: ‘Dijn werc es al voldaen.’ … Dus werke minen wille met verstanesse, mine alreghenoechlecste gheminde” (Vis, 52). I have altered Hart’s translation. She translates the verbal form of werke as “fulfill.”

22. “Met minnen saltu leven ende gheduren ende mijns verholens willen pleghen daer du mi mede best ende ic di” (Vis, 52).

23. On Hadewijch’s access to a pseudo-Origen homily on Mary Magdalene see Willaert, “Hadewijch en Maria Magdalena.”

24. The second grouping of the perfect treats those “among the still living” and is classified predominantly by locale: “In England, there are nine: five hermits, two recluses, and two virgins. In Flanders, there are five: three beguines and two nuns. … In Paris there is a forgotten Master [of the schools] who lives alone in a little cell. He knows more about me than I know about the good in myself” (List, 286). The list ends with name distribution: “Among these fift y-six names are seven Johns, two Diederichs, three Claus, one Ghielis, one Boniface, one Godevaart, three Henrys, three Walters, one Robert, one Godschalk, two Sarahs, one Hadewijch, one Aleyda, three Emmas, five Margarets, two Agnes, one Agatha, one Beatrice, two Odas.” Following, this, she adds a disclaimer for her addressee, referencing her own unique knowledge of their lives: “I do not know what you can make of all these people as their lives are unknown to you and in what marvelous wonders they have arrived at this perfection and shall arrive at it” (287). While she speaks of fift y-six in this group, she actually seems to list fift y-seven.

25. Vis, 136. “Fully grown,” volwassen, is a spiritual term that designates full conformity to the godhead according to all three ways of being (wesene) of divinity; it does not equate to our sense of biological development. See especially Letter 13.

27. “Sente Gregorius VII, die in allen III overvolmaect was” (Vis, 150).

28. Translation modified. Letter 1: “Die alre meeste claerheit die men hebben mach in ertrike, Dat es ghewaricheit in ieghenwordeghen werken van gherechticheden, ‘Ende van allen wesenen waerheit te pleghene omme claerheit der edelre minnen die god es” (Brieven, 10).

29. Similarly, Watson argues, it is Julian’s “much later identification of its deepest source as the Trinity rather than Christ alone, that renders the process of interpretation—of ‘seeing’ in a figurative as well as a visual sense—possible” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic” 69). Watson sees Augustinian distinctions in Julian’s understanding of visions but does not connect them in depth to their relation to the inner senses.

30. “Ende onuerhauen bliuen van al uwen werken die ghi gheleisten moghet” (Brieven, 24).

31. See Hadewijch, Letter 22: “He who wishes to understand and know what God is in his name and his essence must belong completely to God—yes, so completely that God is all to him and he is free from himself” (CW, 94).

32. Steigman, “Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint Thierry, the Victorines,” 33.

34. As McGinn has noted, the ways in which divinity proffers gift s to humans (in the soul as reason, memory, and the will; in Christ; in giving humans his nature, and in condescending in [“neyghede”] time) parallel the means by which humans may return to, understand, and unite with Christ. He also outlines the four paradoxes of the divine nature: “Just as God ‘pours forth his Unity in Persons,’ he also ‘inclines’ the persons of the Trinity toward us through four gift s that form the basis of our return to union with him. … If the first gift [that of eternal time] is a participation in eternity, and the second our creation in time, then the third gift is the path of recreation or redemption by which God-man delivered up his substance to death and left us himself to be consumed in the Eucharist. Finally in the fourth donation, God ‘relaxes time’; that is, he waits for us to embrace him during the course of our lives” (The Flowering of Mysticism, 212). See Hadewijch, Letter 22: CW, 97; Brieven, 176. This inclining in time could be read as influenced by Origen, for whom God “stoops down in kindness,” and radically distinguishes Origen’s approach to love from the Stoic and Platonic traditions; McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Origen, 146.

35. Letter 22: “Wantmen met al desen weghen in gode gheet, dore hem seluen, Dore den hemel, Dore de helle, Dore dat vagheuier, Daer omme es god onghesloten, al es hi binnen al” (Brieven, 182).

36. Letter 22: “Sijn rike ropen dat ons toe come” (Brieven, 170).

37. “Geeft ende al gheuet dat hi heuet, ende al es dat hi es” (Brieven, 174).

39. Scheepsma, The Limburg Sermons, 182.

40. On begherte in Hadewijch see Faesen, Begeerte in het werk van Hadewijch.

41. Letter 22: “Ja sonder den ertschen man … ghebruken in onuerhauenheiden” (Brieven, 172).

42. Letter 22: Brieven, 190. Hadewijch may have also been influenced by Godfrey of Saint Victor, who uses the figure of the eagle for an extensive exegetical enumeration of the “wings” of love in his visionary work, “Microcosm.” This text bears a striking resemblance to Hadewijch’s writings (especially in relation to the themes—of work and inner and outer persons—I am emphasizing in this chapter) and deserves further study.

45. Letter 22: “Si oefenen hen in Minnen sonder groet wee ende in devocien Ende in ghenoechten ende in weelden, daer sise hebben moghen sonder groet wee” (Brieven, 178).

46. Letter 22: “Die den wch dore den hemel te gode gaen, si hebben teren ende voeden: Want hi sine nature gaf, so nemen sise vrileke. Dese wonen hier int lant des vreden” (Brieven, 180). In Hadewijch’s descriptions of her own ways of loving, this way does not seem the most common, given the passionate and fiery nature of her love, except in her visions. Yet to take the poems as the only form of attestation of her way of loving would be to overlook the other indirect descriptions of her “states.”

47. Mengeldicht 16, ll. 197–198; Mgdt, 78. See chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of the Mengeldichten.

48. “De redene en can gode niet ghesien sonder in dat hi niet en es; Minne en rust niet dan in dat hi es” (Brieven, 140). Hadewijch continues, “Reason has its secure paths, by which it proceeds. Love experiences failure, but failure advances it more than reason. Reason advances toward what God is, by means of what God is not. Love sets aside what God is not and rejoices that it fails in what God is” (CW, 86); “Minne gheuoelt ghebreken; Nochtan ghebreken vordertse meer dan redene. Reden vordert in die dinc die god es Bi dier dinc die god niet en es. Minne settet achter di dinc die god niet es Ende verblidet hare daer si ghebrect in die dinc die god es” (Brieven, 140). William’s text describes what he calls the two eyes of the soul as love and reason, stating, “Reason seems to advance through what God is not toward what God is. Love, putting aside what God is not, rejoices to lose itself in what he is” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 78); “Ratio ergo per id quod non est, in id quod est videtur proficere: amor postponens quod non est, in eo quod est gaudet defi-cere” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184 col. 393B). In William’s Speculum, he distinguishes between reason and love, noting that while the “outer senses of the body concern themselves with bodily things, so does the inner with inward realities, that is, with rational and divine or spiritual things. But the inward sense of the soul is its understanding. Yet a greater and worthier sense and a purer understanding of the soul is love, if love is pure. … In those things which pertain to God, the sense of the mind is Love” (The Mirror of Faith, 70–71). Since Hadewijch did not know William in his own name, but as Bernard, this may explain why Bernard is in her list (and not William).

49. My understanding differs from Willaert’s positing the meaning of sinne as identical with reason. He writes, “Sinnen chez Hadewijch signifie indubitablement ‘raison,’ ‘facultés intellectuelles’” (“Matière et sens chez Chrétien de Troyes et Hadewijch,” 430). While sinne, “the senses”—especially the inner senses, in Hadewijch’s use of the term—encompasses reason, the term also includes other spiritual senses and understanding that are developed to enrich “inner” life.

50. See Jacques Derrida’s essay on Michel de Certeau in which he elaborates on an affirmation, a “yes,” in mystical texts that “gives or promises that very thing [cela même], it gives it right from the promise: the incalculable itself” (“A Number of Yes,” 238).

51. Letter 22: Translation modified. “Si berren met Innegher begherten sonder cesseren omme dat hen alle es vore gheneighet: De mont gheboden, de arme ontploken ende dat rike herte ghereet. … Dat wilde ontdoen van gode maentse alle vren van binnen bouen hare gheleisten” (Brieven, 178).

52. She continues, “What causes the soul’s wrath to increase continually is that she knows with her interior spirit what of God is lacking to her—that he has something that she does not have to the full, and that is not given her fully. This is the wrath of the soul” (CW, 99); “Die wonen int lant dies heilichs torens: Want wat hen in toeuerlate ghegheuen wert, Dats saen verteert in dien gapenden diepen nyed. Dit doet altoes wassen die tornicheit der zielen: Dat si met inneghen gheeste weet dat ouerbliuen van gode, dat hi yet heuet datse niet ne volheuet, noch hare niet en es uol. Dits de tornecheit der zielen” (Brieven, 182).

53. “Want al berren si dat si vanden viere soe ongheberrent sijn (Die volcomene minne es een brant), Si barren om hem ghenoech te werdene” (Brieven, 180).

54. “Den vijft en wech gaen de ghemeyne metten slechten gheloue Die met allen vterste dienste te gode gaen” (Brieven, 180). Hadewijch’s numbering of the ways is confusing: she numbers the three temporal ways (of heaven, hell, and purgatory) as the first, second, and third way of loving (according to the three persons), even though she considers the “timeless” way also a way. When she gets to the last way, that of service, she calls it the fifth way, even though she has not named a “fourth.”

55. “Want men met desen .iiij. weghe in sijn alre binneneste comen mach” (Brieven, 180).

56. Vision 9: CW, 285; Vision 128: CW, 295; Vision 12: CW, 285, 295.

57. Letter 1: “Ay … al seggic alte suete, dat es mi ouer oncont, sonder inden wensch van miere herten Dat mi doghen suete heuet gheweest om sine minne” (Brieven, 12).

58. Translation mine. Vis, 158.

59. CW, 120, 274, 301.

60. I am indebted to Columba Hart’s meticulous annotation of Hadewijch’s work, especially here where she demonstrates that the title “the Angel of the Great Counsel” is given to Christ in “the Introit of the third Mass of Christmas, et vocabitur nomen eius magni consilii Angelus (Isa 9:6, Vulgate, Admirabilis consiliarius)” (CW, 380, n. 51). This appellation is, however, also found in book XI of Gregory’s Moralin in Job, contrasting the magni consilii angelus to those who, like those noted in Hadewijch’s Letter 6, falsely use spiritual acts for temporal gain. Jerome also refers to Christ as the Angel of Great Counsel in his commentary on Isaiah, and Gregory may likewise be following Jerome. Both Gregory’s and Jerome’s texts were well known to Cistercians of the twelfth century.

62. William sees the soul’s renewal through the senses of the mind: “The soul likewise possesses her own senses; she possesses her own sight or eye by which she sees God. For as the body has its five senses by which it is joined to the soul by the instrumentality of life, so, too, the soul has her five senses by which she is joined to God by the instrumentality of charity. … This demonstrates how we become old through the senses of the body and are conformed to this world, but through the senses of the mind we are renewed to the recognition of God, in newness of life, according to God’s will and pleasure” (The Nature and Dignity of Love, 72); “Habet enim anima etiam sensus suos, habet visum suum vel oculum, qui videt Deum. Sicut enim corpus habet suos quinque sensus, quibus animae conjungitur, vita mediante: sic et anima suos quinque sensus habet, quibus Deo conjungitur, mediante caritate. … Hic ostenditur quia per sensus corporis veterascimus, et huic saeculo conformamur: per sensum vero mentis renovamur in agnitionem Dei, in novitatem vitae, secundum voluntatem et beneplacitum Dei” (Liber de natura et dignitate amoris, PL 184 col. 390B–C).

63. As I argued in the introduction, in his reading of inner and outer bodies in Paul, Aune argues for an emphasis on a corporate body in the afterlife. See Aune, “Anthropological Duality in the Eschatology of 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:10,” 218. In addition, part of Hadewijch’s theology involves the necessity of restoring the numbers in the heavens, due to Lucifer’s Fall. The Fall of Lucifer is also responsible for destroying the undivided unity of the heavens, resulting in Purgatory and Hell. Hadewijch’s topography of the ways of Minne, which include the way of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, is suggestive of this Fall and the ensuing work of restoration.

64. Vision 4: Vis, 66.

66. “Daerse mede volwassen sal” (Vis, 64).

67. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 215.

69. Newman, “La mystique courtoise,” 146. I would agree with Prudence Allen that “even though Hadewijch was influenced by Neoplatonism … she did not tend towards abstraction, nor did she devalue the body as do so many others who follow this particular philosophical tradition. It is in Hadewijch’s theory of virtue that this movement beyond Neoplatonism is particularly evident. Acts of virtue are dependent upon the materiality of the human condition. They need a body to be performed” (Allen, The Concept of Woman, 46). For an excellent essay that distinguishes between the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and medieval notions of the mirror and demonstrates the progressive and non-Platonic nature of medieval visions, see Bradley, “The Speculum Image in Medieval Mystical Writers.”

70. “Du heves, lieve, sterke, grote ende vrowe, willen weten met dinen twivele te mi, waerbi dat wesen soude ende met wat werke datse mi ghelijc volwassen soude, dat ic hare ghelijc wesen soude ende di ghelijc mi selven” (Vis, 64).

73. In Hadewijch’s understanding, Minne imitates the processional nature of Christ by going out of herself and recollecting herself in her nature. Hadewijch’s immersion “into the abyss of Minne” is also part of her departure and return to herself, as it is a departure and return of Minne to herself.

74. Letter 6: “Ende vte dien heileghen anschine leset al v vonisse ende al v pleghen van uwen leuene” (Brieven, 50). For the reading of Minne’s judgments also see: “He who wishes that Love heal his suffering. … He lets it appear that he shall read all judgments passed on him in love” (Lied 36; CW, 231).

75. See Letter 14, in which the way up the mountain is characteristic of “those who still remain here below, who are following after [Christ] in perfect virtues” (CW, 78).

77. “Sich hier hoe ic ben kimpe ende rijclec ghenen ghewareghen aenscine” (Vis, 84).

78. “Ende den vijft en die dine es, die sal di oercunden de gherechte God die hem di sende ende die hem di sent” (Vis, 84). The name kimpe is not a unique designation for the man who appears in this vision. It is not a proper name as the translation would make it seem in calling him “Lord Champion,” but is Hadewijch’s general term for a person who is victorious in love. See stanza four of Lied 40: “He who wins over the powers of love, he may well be called a champion” (CW, 244); “Die dus verwint der minnen cracht / hi mach sijn kimpe wel bekint” (Liederen, 296). See chapter 2, n. 24.

79. Vis, 90. This passage has been read by Hart and others as signaling her difference with Abelard, yet it may also be an echo of a distinction that Gregory the Great makes in relation to the Stoics, in favor of a balanced life.

82. Mary Clark offers an explanation of procession: “The relation of the Christian faith to history and to the divine Word of God made flesh is a significant departure from Neoplatonic philosophy. The Word of God entered human history, Augustine explains, to incorporate human individuals into his body. Christ will lead them back to the Father who created them, where they will be in eternal life, ‘the glory of God’” (Clark, “De Trinitate,” 95).

84. “Die ure hebic di ghesent met mi ende di sent voert ten dinen met mi” (Vis, 86).

85. “Nu hevestu mijns ghesmaect ende ontfaen van buten ende van binnen, ende du heves verstaen die eneghe weghe die gheheel in mi beghinnen” (Vis, 88).

86. Translation modified. Vis, 126.

87. I list oratio, “prayer,” as coming before “work” because Hadewijch’s is a temporally oriented model (oft en invoked in her letters) that seeks to appeal to the divine according to human desire and prefigures a way of loving.

88. “Dat was ene cracht van sijns selfs wesene, hem God te sine met minen doghene na heme ende in heme, ghelijc dat hi mi was doe hi mensche levede te mi” (Vis, 140).

90. “Dies moetic nachte bi dage leven” (l. 32; Liederen, 264).

91. “Ende hi seide: ‘Kere weder in dine materie ende laet bloeyen dine werke ende stucken van onghenade sijn di nakende, want du best kerende alse al verwinnende, want du al verwonnen heves.’ Doe quam ic in mi selven alse ene nuwe herde sereghe ende emmermeer wesen sal tote dien daghe dat ic daer weder in valle daer ic doe af keerde” (Vis, 90).

92. “Ende ic quam weder in mijn leet met meneghen groten wee” (Vis, 70); “Ende ic wart met dien wederbracht jammerleke in mi selven” (Vis, 76).

93. Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 129.

94. The relation between gender and sexual difference is not simple; nevertheless, it is almost as if Hadewijch depended on the power of sexual difference as ontological difference to connote the limits between Minne and her pursuers.

95. See Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” 184. While compelling in its direction, Lochrie’s argument—that “violence, enslavement, demonic desire, torture, and even death become defining negative experiences of mystical love and sex—experiences that lead to a disassociation of speech and thought from human subjectivity”—is contradicted by Hadewijch’s understanding of the role of language in modifying thought, speech, and action in life. While Lochrie wants to see suffering as a form of “queering” desire, she does not consider, despite her interest in performativity, Hadewijch’s own understanding of the role of suffering in relation to the unity it promises or how “acts” relate to deeds. In a reading that wants to counter Bynum’s in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Lochrie invokes Hadewijch and warns that we “must be careful not to subsume the violence of the sexual language in their writings to masculine uses of the language of courtly love. By reversing this convention, the women mystics sometimes contest the idealizing strategies of male abjection and the spiritualized mythos of courtly love” (185). What Lochrie wants to see as a reversal of a hetero-normative paradigm in Hadewijch seems to concretize Hadewijch and the role of gender—there where her work in fact fails any “narcissistic” reflection, to use Lochrie’s expression—making Lochrie as attached to an oppositional model of gender as the one she critiques. The language of courtly love is valued in a masculine way in her poems: not for its bliss in unity, but for the way in which masculine suffering is praised. Hadewijch moves from the language that praises the glorious knight and lover to the even more valuable servant, both of which are masculine in gender, yet their masculinity, while culturally valuable, is subsumed to the idea it serves. As we know from her visions, privation is her highest and most perfect form of loving.

96. Murk-Jansen, “The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch,” 66. Murk-Jansen concludes that any thought about what this reveals about Hadewijch’s “womanhood is … necessarily speculative.” I side, however, with Hollywood’s response to this; she asks, “Yet doesn’t the fluidity of human gender before God tell us something about how Hadewijch experienced gender, at least on the level of her relationship to the divine (itself central to her life)?” (Hollywood, “Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; or, Queering the Beguines,” 411).

97. For an evaluation of the literary qualities of gender in Hadewijch’s Mengeldicht 2, see Prudence Allen’s brief reading of the relation of debate to masculine forms of academic discourse: Allen, The Concept of Woman, 46–47.

98. In this sense, Hadewijch shares the Neoplatonic pseudo-Dionysian ideal of oneness and unity in Minne; however, her language places far less importance on an originary oneness than it does on the paradoxical means of approximating the divine in the realm of dissimilarity.

99. For a careful reading of gendered pronouns in Hadewijch’s Mengeldichten, see Suydam, “‘Ever in Unrest’: Translating Hadewijch of Antwerp’s Mengeldichten.” In her reading of gender in Hadewijch’s Liederen, Elizabeth Alvida Petroff concludes that, for Hadewijch, “Love reconciles all contradictions and differences, including gender, and proves that ultimately being is profoundly androgynous, capable of experiencing all extremes of existence without being torn apart by them” (Body and Soul, 201). I disagree with this conclusion, since the extremes of desire allow for the will and Minne to align themselves in her “way” of loving, marking a fundamental difference between human beings and divinity.

100. “Die pine die v van gode beuolen es die doghet gherne al dore ende dore: soe suldi den verholenen raet van hem horen, Alsoe iob van hem seghet: Te mi es gheseghet een verborghen woert” (Brieven, 22).

101. “Ende alsoe doen noch die ghene die in vrihede der Minnen dienen: Si rusten op die soete wise borst ende sien ende horen die heimelike worde die onuertelleec Ende onghehoert sijn den volke ouermids die soete runinghe des heilichs gheests” (Brieven, 146).

102. Lied 4, ll. 13–18: “Die hem met trouwen in waerheit gheeft / ende met waerheiden dan trouwen levet, / dat verhoelne woert wert hem gheseghet / dat nieman vreemders en mach verstaen, / dan diet van smake ghevoelt al hevet / ende in hoech gheruchte silentie ontfaen” (Liederen, 86).

103. Vis, 134. The number twenty-eight is the number associated with the lunar cycle and is commonly associated with Mary, as she is the reflection of the sun. Adding the number one, the perfect number, makes for twenty-nine.

104. Translation mine. “Dese III wesene” (Vis, 136).

105. McGinn, “The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism,” 214. McGinn meditates on what constitutes the specificity of women’s mystical texts and highlights the emphasis in the 1990s on “extravagant bodily manifestations.” He also cautions that any conclusion needs to begin “not from a fixed ideological perspective but from textual analysis which recognizes the complexity of the relationship between experience and representation” and should problematize the notion of “experience” (216–217).

106. I disagree with Ulrike Wiethaus’s claim that women’s “sense of self and of Christ as physical stressed continuity between their social and biological experience, on the one hand, and the experience of encounter with God, on the other,” and that “physical nonecstatic reality was symbolically aligned with a repressive secular reality” (“Gender and the Body in Medieval Spirituality,” 36, 51), which then makes visions the place where a gendered identity is recreated.

Hugh of Saint Victor, Soliloquy on the Earnest Money of the Soul, 24: “Sensibus foris decoravit, intus sapientia illustravit. Sensus dans quasi exteriorem, sapientiam quasi interiorem habitum” (PL 176, col. 961). Hadewijch, Lied 8: “Die werke sijn die cleder dan” (Liederen, 108). Hadewijch, Mengeldicht 3, ll. 103–106: “Die ane dreghet den erdschen man / Besie die scout der redennen an, / Die sine reghele es, ende die hem leert / Die werke die men ter minnen keert” (Mgdt, 111).

1. Jessica Boon, “Trinitarian Love Mysticism,” 488, n. 19. Boon’s article offers an astute and, to my eyes, correct assessment (and remedy) of the problem that “most scholars mistakenly consider Hadewijch’s poetry and visions to be direct, unedited descriptions of a mystical experience, putting aside her Letters as ‘less immediate.’ In fact, all reports of contact with the divine are mediated, not direct, descriptions since the very language that a person picks up to use in a descriptive passage is filtered by his or her conceptual knowledge of the world, including the conceptual limits imposed by his or her religious tradition” (“Trinitarian Love Mysticism,” 489, n. 21).

2. CW, 244; POH, 269. “Begherte scept, geneuchte drinket” (Liederen, 296).

3. For a reading of the formal ways in which Hadewijch’s work uses “courtly” forms, see, for example, Guest, Some Aspects of Hadewijch’s Poetic Form in the “Strofische Gedichten” and Newman, “The Beguine as Knight of Love,” in God and the Goddesses, 169–181. The meaning of the designation “courtly” as a vernacular term, however, is increasingly unclear. Maurice Keen reminds us that “Knighthood was a Christian calling” (Chivalry, 76), and the distinction between secular and vernacular forms is not fully understood. With regard to how “courtly” and “spiritual” have become increasingly difficult to separate, see, among others, Daniel O’Sullivan’s book, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, which has put the term “courtly” into question as an easily definable and classifiable category.

4. Reynaert, “Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly Love,” 221.

5. See Jaeger, The Envy of Angels.

6. Newman, “The Beguine as Knight of Love,” 169–181. For a reading of desire (as begherte) in Hadewijch see Faesen, Begeerte in het werk van Hadewijch. Dutch-language scholarship, versed as it is in a wide theological and literary framework, has tended to be more inclusive of her work as a whole. Reynaert signaled the difficulty in directly associating eros with the courtly, noting, “Even if the erotic current in medieval mysticism cannot be traced back to Bernard of Clairvaux himself, it does already manifest itself in twelfth-century spirituality” (“Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly Love,” 215).

7. One exception is Willaert’s De Poetica Hadewijch Strophische Gedichten, in which he argues for an ethos at work in the poems. Willaert’s early study—one of the first on Hadewijch—emphasizes poetic tropes and language, although it tends to overlook the theological underpinnings of the concepts invoked.

8. Marieke von Baest has also highlighted the presence of Job in Hadewijch’s poems (see POH), yet the significance of this influence (aside from its thematic presence) has not been explored, especially in relation to Gregory’s Moralia. The text of the Moralia was one of the most popular in the Middle Ages, and therefore it survives in numerous manuscripts. The Moralia was read by all monastics, including the Cistercians, but in that regard they were simply following the example of the Benedictines. For a brilliant exposition of the Citeaux Moralia in Job, see Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life.

9. This is not to say that suffering becomes aestheticized, although it is given meaning through a tie to its relation to imitatio, which does have an aesthetic counterpart. The psalms themselves could have been known by Hadewijch in a variety of forms, not only in the Latin translation of Jerome (for the office) and earlier Latin forms (for the Mass), but also by interpretive antiphons and commentaries. This variance in form of the psalms implies that the content is widely known to religious communities and individuals who participate in the office and prayer and thus are able to understand the “rff,” so to speak, that a new contextualization might make of its material. Simons’s work on liturgical, paraliturgical, and nonliturgical song in beguinages is particularly interesting in this regard; he notes: “The court beguinages of the Southern Low Countries … mostly formed quasi-independent parishes in which clergy and beguines were able to create a liturgy of their own, obviously within the norms imposed by the secular cursus of the local diocese” (“Beguines, Liturgy, and Music,” 19). Simons also traces an early (fourteenth-century) practice of nonliturgical singing—a type that evinced a dangerously close relation to secular song—to beguine communities.

10. Letter 30 makes it clear that redemption is based on an economy of debt, but that this is also based on an economy of debt (scout) and demand (manen) between the three figures of the Trinity. Hadewijch’s use of the language of gift, debt, and demand within the Trinity is profoundly influenced by Richard of Saint Victor’s Trinity. Richard also emphasizes the necessity of three people to share the love in the Trinity; this will be a model for human relationships in Hadewijch’s articulation of Minne as threefold. While Gordon Rudy sees Minne as “a demanding and capricious feudal lady,” part of this “demand” is actually a debt transformed into an ethic that is “responsive,” to use Richard’s language; see Rudy, The Mystical Language of Sensation, 79. For an exposition of Richard’s theory of the Trinity, see Clark, “The Trinity in Latin Christianity,” 286–292.

11. Translation mine. Lied 30, ll. 43–48: Liederen, 240. Hart translates this passage as: “In the beginning Love enriched me. / She added to my sensible joy / And showed me all the winnings. / Why does she now run away like a vagabond? / She added to my sensible joy, / But now I wander in a strange land” (CW, 214). Hart’s translation loses the exactitude of the Middle Dutch’s “doubling” (dobbeleerde) of the senses (not “joy”), which I interpret in a literal sense as a reference to the doubling of the senses seen in the visions. For a translation that agrees with mine see van Baest, Poetry of Hadewijch, 213. While some may interpret dobbeleerde as an act of enriching or intensifying sinne, reading sinne as “understanding, the mind,” … this equally valid gloss does not disqualify the technical means—that is, the medium of the senses—whereby this “intensification” occurs in Hadewijch.

12. This transition into debt is made conceptually clear in Letter 30. Because man did not “answer the demand of the Unity, he fell,” and thus by the demand of the Trinity Christ was born, died, and rose. So, Hadewijch writes, “it is also with us. When payment of the debt we owe is demanded of us by the Trinity, grace is given to us to live worthily according to the noble Trinity, as is fitting. But if, because our will is estranged [vremden], we thwart this and fall back from this unity into our own self-complacency, we no longer grow and no longer make progress in that perfection which was thus demanded of us from the beginning by the Unity and the Trinity. But if man’s noble reason [edel redene] would recognize its just debt [werdeghe scout] and follow Love’s leading into her land—that is, follow Love according to her due—then he would be capable of attaining that great object and being enriched in God with divine riches” (CW, 117; Brieven, 242–244). Hadewijch’s understanding may be influenced by Richard of Saint Victor.

13. The plurality of figures of the divine and of human properties for accessing or allying oneself with the imago in the visions is sharply contrasted with the songs, in which only one figure of the divine, Minne, remains. Since the songs are set in historical time, it is understandable that Minne becomes a figure for the Trinitarian nature of the divine and for the human way of experiencing and aligning oneself with the divine in the world, that is, through service to love, humility, and adopting the will of the divine.

14. The legend of Mary Magdalene’s wandering in the desert was well known in the Middle Ages. Aft er the crucifixion, it was said, she fled to the south of France near Marseilles and wandered there during the last thirty years of her life. Perhaps more influential is Gregory’s Sermon 25 on John 20:11–18, which uses Mary’s searching for the absent Christ as a paradigm for the searching Bride of the Song of Songs. As Grover A. Zinn Jr. notes, in an exegetical turn in the sermon, “the Bride now defines the Magdalene’s love: ardent, searching everywhere, presently unsatisfied, soon to be fulfilled in a marvelous manner of divine presence” (“Texts Within Texts,” 210). Zinn’s article presents rich material for consideration in relation to Hadewijch’s work. Hadewijch’s poetry is exegetical in its use of the Song of Songs in the tradition of Gregory and Hugh.

15. Vis, 150 (translation mine).

17. Translations modified. “Ghi selt gherne om goe spreken. Dat es een teken van Minnen, dat lieues name suete es. Daer af sprect Sente bernaert: Jhesus es honech inden mont. Het es ouer sere, Ende het vliethecht de werke” (Brieven, 118).

18. “Condilectio autem iure dicitur, ubi a duobus tertius concorditer diligitur, socialiter amatur et duorum affectus tertii amoris incendio in unum conflatur” (Richard of Saint Victor, La Trinité, 208–210). See book 3 of The Trinity.

19. The “doubling” of the senses is a reference to the domains of inner and outer described in chapter 2 and to the awakening of the “inner” senses (of sight, taste, hearing, touch) to Minne, through reason. Richard of Saint Victor offers an interesting explanation of reason’s relation to the spiritual senses in his Benjamin Minor: “Every rational spirit is given two powers by the Father of lights from whom comes every good and perfect gift. The one is reason, the other the affections; the reason for truth, the affection for virtue. … They are the two wives of a rational being which produces numerous off spring and are the heirs of the heavenly kingdom. Of reason springs right counsel, of affection holy desires. Of the first spiritual senses, of the second ordered affections. The latter produces all the virtues, the former all truth” (Benjamin Minor, 80). “Omni spiritui rationali gemina quaedam vis data est ab illo Patre luminum, a quo est omne datum optimum, et omne donum perfectum. Una est ratio, altera est affectio; ratio qua discernamus, affectio qua diligamus; ratio ad veritatem, affectio ad virtutem. … Hae sunt spiritus rationalis geminae uxores, ex quibus oritur generosa proles, et regni coelestis heredes. Ex ratione oriuntur consilia recta, ex affectione desideria sancta. Ex illa spirituales sensus, ex ista ordinati affectus. Ex ista denique omnis virtus, ex illa vero veritas omnis” (Les douze patriarches, ou, Beniamin minor, 96).

20. Mengeldicht 10, ll. 47–50: “Die naheit vander minnen natueren / Die beneemt der sielen hare ghedueren: / So si meer comt, so si meer steelt; / So si meer toent, so si meer heelt” (Mgdt, 45).

21. The filiation between absence of direct contact and the lack of certainty of Minne’s “presence” is testament to the importance of the senses for Hadewijch in her formulations of Minne. The investment in the vision is significant, for it provides an atemporal pivot around which her poetry and letters find their “absent” center. This absent center is the promised union and perfection in love, that is, the promise of becoming Minne herself.

22. Letter 2: “Die pine die v van god beuolen es die doghet gherne al dore ende dore: soe suldi den verholenen raet van hem horen, Alsoe iob van hem seghet: Te mi es gheseghet een verborghen woert” (Brieven, 22).

23. Letter 18: “Ende die te dusghedanen wesene sijn vercoren inder Minnen enecheit Ende noch daer toe niet volwassen en sijn, si hebben de ghewelt in hare moghentheit vander ewicheit, Mer si es hen onbekint ende oec anderen. Aldus secrete verlicht de redene. Dit sien der zielen verlicht de ziele in alre waerheit vanden wille gods: Want die sine vonisse leset uten anschine gods, hi werct in alre redenen na die waerheit dier seden der Minnen” (Brieven, 142). Unlike the case of Hadewijch’s visions, the only predominant reference to reading in the songs is with regard to reading Minne’s judgments, that is, reading where one stands in relation to Love. There are two other mentions: in Lied 40, a reference is made to reading (leest) of Minne’s might, “Anyone who wins over Minne’s power /He may well be known as a champion / For one reads of Love’s might / That she wins over all thing” (“Die dus verwint der Minnen cracht / Hi mach wel sijn kimpe wel bekint / Want men leest vander minnen macht / Dat si al andere dinc verwint” [Lied 40, l. 27: CW, 244; Liederen, 296; POH, 266]). This “reading” may allude to popular romance, with which Hadewijch was clearly familiar. In Lied 29, another mention of reading is made in l. 88, regarding Mary and what others have “read” of her: “Because she wanted nothing more and nothing else had, she had everything of which everyone has read” (“Want si el ne woude noch hare el ne was, / soe hadse al daer elc af las” [Liederen, 234]). The majority of references in the songs are to spoken or sung words.

24. Translation modified. Lied 11, ll. 37–40: “Want sine vonnessen moeten al sijn / ghelesen in minnen anscine, / ende daer siet hi, claer ware, sonder scijn, / in meneghe suete pine” (Liederen, 124). (Poem 12 in POH, 104). Note that CW and Liederen are not aligned in their numbering here, as a result of the use of an earlier manuscript (A) for the edition of the latter. In CW, this is Poem 12; in Liederen it is Lied 11.

25. Lied 11, ll. 41–50: “Hi siet in claerheiden dat die mint, / met volre waerheit pleghen moet. / Alse hi met waerheiden dan bekint / dat hi der minnen te lettel doet, / verstoermt met pinen sijn hoghen moet. / Want in minnen anscine neemt hi al, / hoe minne der minnen pleghen sal, / ende doet hem gheven al om al / omme der minnen ghenoech te sine” (Liederen, 124).

26. This practice of introspection, carried out in the face of Minne, parallels the explicit identification of psalmody prayers as practiced in the sight of God. Susan Boynton writes, “Psalmody prayers oft en explicitly identified singing the psalms as the sinner’s offering to God, a performance carried out in the sight (in conspectu) of God. The use of the word conspectus in reference to psalm singing recalls the conclusion of chapter 19 of the Benedictine rule: ‘Therefore let us consider how to behave in the sight (in conspectu) of God and his angels, and let us stand to sing the psalms in a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices’” (“Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters,” 906). Beguine liturgy is extremely diverse, and the study of it is gaining momentum—see the 2009 book Mannaerts, ed., Beghinae in cantu instructae: Musical Patrimony from Flemish Beguinages (Middle Ages–Late Eighteenth Century), and especially Simons’s contribution, “Beguines, Liturgy, and Music.”

27. POH, 105. Lied 11, ll. 53, 59–60: “Si selen met minnen ane minne een cleven, / … Dit blivet den vreemden al ontwinket, / ende openbaer den vroeden” (Liederen, 124). This rhetorical distance between the speaker and a collective unity that has no understanding of the speaker’s actions and frame of mind is made clear in the opening stanza of Lied 22, which contrasts the speaker, who “must practice what I am,” and the “people” (lieden), who remain outside of the kind of knowing professed by the speaker (CW, 186; POH, 158; Liederen, 184).

28. Lied 27, l. 7: Liederen, 216.

29. The “subtitle” that Columba Hart imposed on Letter 17, “Living in the Rhythm of the Trinity,” further underscores the point I am making regarding life and poetic form. Anikó Daróczi’s study (Groet gheruchte van dien wonedere) of inner rhyme in Hadewijch’s letters does not, I think, undermine my point here, but complicates the distinction between kinds of verse.

30. Letter 17 is one of the few letters (if not the only one) that fuses poetry, visions, and letter into one didactic and spiritual ensemble. The tradition of the Dicta, or Disticha Catonis, or Dionysii Catonis Disticha de moribus ad filium (an ensemble of didactic Latin couplets known as the Distichs of Cato in the form of advice from father to son) dates from the fourth or third centuries. It was widely popular throughout the early and later Middle Ages for its usage in learning Latin (in tandem with moral virtues) but was also translated into vernaculars. The Middle Dutch translation, Den Duytschen Cathoen, is not a strict literal translation but oft en a free adaptation with a prologue that is not included in the Latin. For more on Middle Dutch texts in rhyme see Kienhorst, Lering en stichting op klein format.

31. I am alluding to Jean Laplanche’s use of the term “hollowed-out transference” for this kind of repetitive awakening of an enigma encrypted into “life.” Laplanche argues for a recovering of an enigma at the base, so to speak, of human experience, from a “filled-in transference” to “hollowed-out” transference. He writes, “The problem of the addressee, of the anonymous addressees, is an essential part of any description of the poetic situation. The addressee is essentially enigmatic, even if he sometime takes on individual traits. … What can be isolated here as characteristic of the cultural is an address to an other who is out of reach, to others ‘scattered in the future’” (Essays on Otherness, 224, 234).

32. Translation altered. Brieven, 126. The “rhymed letters” (which have no determinate addressee) are similar to a form of prayer. They circumnavigate the author in the hopes of reaching the addressee by way of God, “I pray God who is the Master of all virtues, / That he make you conformed to Love” (CW, 325), and “I pray God that he may direct your understanding / In his veritable Love” (CW, 329). They also hover on the form of a command, “I command your senses to God” (CW, 331). The more impersonal, aphoristic, quasi-universal tone and form of the poems make them far less didactic and liturgical then the letters. They seem to embody the principles and divine truths that Hadewijch seeks to impart pedagogically in the prose of her letters.

33. “Die wesene die ic daer noeme, die sijn volcomeleke hare nature: Want gheonstech ende snel, dat es de nature vanden heileghen gheest. … Ende niet sonderlinghe te onderwindene, dat es die nature vanden vader. … Die vte gheuen ende dit op houden: dit es pure godheit ende gheheele nature van Minnen” (Brieven, 126, 128).

34. The significance of the “lived” for beguines is highlighted in economic detail by Penelope Galloway, “‘Life, Learning, and Wisdom’: The Forms and Functions of Beguine Education.”

35. As Jean Leclercq has long noted, and which by now may seem self-evident, the purpose of monastic life is to live a text, not only to read and know it; see The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.

36. Claire Waters’s insightful work Angels and Earthly Creatures makes strides in reconsidering the relation between preaching and women. In Lied 31, Hadewijch elliptically suggests that song (sanc) can performatively capture the simultaneous experience of consolation (troest) and cruelty (meslone) tasted in Love in a way that exceeds any sermon: “Consolation and cruelty in one / That is the essence of Minne’s taste / Wise Solomon, were he alive, / Could not unravel such high matters / We are not apprised of it in any sermon / The song surpasses every tune” (Lied 31, ll. 25–30: CW, 217; POH, 216). “Troest ende meslone in enen persoen: / dats wesen van der minnen smake./ Al levede die wise Salemoen, / hi liete te ontbendene soe hoge sake. / Wi ne werdens berecht in gheen sermoen: / die sanc verhoghet allen toen” (Liederen, 244).

37. Again, see Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life for a demonstration of how the figure of the knight is used as a figure for combating even the most mundane or quotidian of domestic enemies in monastic life. Hadewijch’s use of the figure of the knight has a long-standing precedent in its association with religious quest. The image of the Bride of Christ going to war is part of how the Speculum envisions the continued work of the virgin upon entering the monastery—see 9.22–23, cited in Listen, Daughter, 165.

38. “Die drie andere waert die ic segghe die enicheit ende minne volcomen maken” (Brieven, 128).

39. The Liederen may have been memorized, offering themselves as “riddling formulations of what has already been expressed in prose, like the rhyming hexameters of the Summa Musicae” (Page, Summa Musicae, 15).

40. Translation altered with reference to CW, 188; POH, 164. Lied 23, ll. 14–17: “Verstonde wij der minnen ghehere gheleer / ende worden wij metten ghelere gheheer, / wi souden minne verwerven / ende in al hare rijcheit erven” (Liederen, 190). All of the references to Minne’s gheleer make note of her richness, or “rich teaching” (rike gheleer).

41. Hadewijch also describes her own circumstances in this letter (Letter 17): “What was forbidden me (as I told you it was forbidden) was to have on earth any undueness of love; that is, to stand in awe of nothing outside of Love, and to live in love so exclusively that every thing outside of Love should be utterly hated and shunned” (CW, 83). “Dat verbot dat ic v gheseghet hebbe dat mi verboden was, dat was ongherechticheit van Minnen te hebbene op ertrike Ende niet te spaerne dat buten Minnen es, Ende soe na der Minnen te pleghene, dat alle dat dat buten Minnen es si ghehaet” (Brieven, 130).

42. The prohibition was made known to her in a vision described in Letter 17, which is used as a pedagogical tool to emphasize the complex relation between embodiment, exegesis, and language: “These were prohibited to me on Ascension Day, four years ago, by God the Father himself, at the moment when his Son came upon the altar. At this coming, I was kissed by him; and by this token I was shown what follows. Having been made one with him, I came before his father. There the father took the Son to himself with me and took me to himself with the Son [Daer nam hi hem ouer mi ende mi ouer hem]. And in this oneness [enicheit] into which I was taken and where I was enlightened [veclaert], I understood this essence and knew it more clearly than—by human speech, reason, or sight [dan men met sprekene ocht met redenen ocht met siene]—one can know anything that is knowable on earth. This seems wonderful indeed. But although I say it seems wonderful, I know indeed it does not astonish you. For earth cannot understand heavenly wisdom [Want hemelsche redene en mach ertrike niet verstaen]. Words enough and Dutch enough can be found for all things on earth, but I do not know any Dutch or any words that answer my purpose. Although I can express everything insofar as this is possible for a human being, no Dutch can be found for all I have said to you, since none exists to express these things, so far as I know” (CW, 84; Brieven, 132). As seen before, her vision of a kiss is not an exclusively erotic experience, but becomes a means for understanding her symmetrical relation to Christ and their unity in the divine. I thank Susan Boynton for noting that this seems likely to be a reference to the kiss of the peace at Mass since she describes the Eucharist laid on the altar table on Ascension Sunday. In the Middle Ages, communicants kissed a liturgical object called a “pax” in preparation for taking communion. The object itself could depict a crucifixion, which explain the idea that she received a kiss from Christ (from the pax), and then was made one with him (took communion). The Ancrene Wisse will also prescribe, “Aft er the kiss of peace when the priest consecrates the host, forget all the world, be whole out of your body [al ut of bodi], embrace in shining love your lover who has alighted into the bower of your heart from heaven, and hold him as tight as you can until he has granted all that you ever ask (Gen 32:24–26). This prayer of the great cross is of great power” (Anchoritic Spirituality, 59–60; Ancrene Wisse, 82–83).

43. Translation modified. “Noch doghet, Noch sonderlinghen werc vore en doe, hem met te verdraghene, Noch ontfermicheit hen met te bescermene, Mer slach ouerslach in ghebrukenessen van minnen” (Brieven, 130). See Colledge’s translation: “I was to have no regard for anything but Love, and so to give myself to the service of Love that everything which is foreign to Love might be hated and avoided by me, that I in my delight in Love should no longer feel any inclination towards good, no longer do any particular work for Love, no longer feel compassion for Love or long to protect it, but always, unceasingly, to live in the delight of Love” (“Selected Letters,” 76).

44. Mary is also the perfect figure for all but the perfection of the will in the divine in that unlike prophets, Mary practices the divine; see Lied 29. The prophets, she says, “saw visions / and in beautiful parables spoke of what God would do. / But to my sense / Clear and free love / Remained unpracticed [ongheploen] by them. For their customs were like those of other men, / Now here, now there, now on, now off. /But Mary said nothing / But be it done to me as God wills” (ll. 61–70; CW, 210; POH, 206; Liederen, 232). One then can assume that Hadewijch too sees her visions as less significant than her actions.

45. Quoted and translated in Willemien Otten, “Between Damnation and Restoration: The Dynamics of Human Nature in Eriugena’s Periphyseon and Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus,” 344. “Quemadmodum ars poetica per fictas fabulas allegoricasque similitudines moralem doctrinam seu physicam componit ad humanorum animorum exercitationem—hoc enim proprium est heroicarum poetarum, qui virorum fortium facta et mores figurate laudant—ista theologica, veluti quaedam poetria, sanctam scripturam fictis imagina-tionibus ad consultum nostri animi et reductionem a corporalibus sensibus exterioribus, veluti ex quadam imperfecta pueritia, in rerum intelligibilium perfectam cognitionem, tanquam in quamdam interioris hominis grandevitatem conformat” (Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam coelestem: CCCM 31, 23–24).

46. Susan Boynton reminds me that in the Benedictine rule, assuming the garment is a critical moment in the novitiate, which suggests that Hadewijch could be using this metaphorically for her own novices in Minne. The poetic figure of the garment might also allude to the convention of the integumentum, a popular literary process in the twelfth century in which a text is conceived of as illustrating a hidden, deeper (oft en spiritual) truth that is “wrapped” in the outer rhetorical garments of language. See Bernard of Chartres (Bernard Silvester): “An integumentum is a type of demonstration that covers the understanding of truth under a fabled narrative; thus, it is also called a covering” (“Integumentum vero est genus demonstrationis sub fabulosa narratione veritatis involens intellectum, unde et involcrum dicitur”) (cited in Edouard Jeauneau, “L’usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” 130).

47. “Die hem cleden wilt ende rike sijn ende een metter godheit, hi sal hem seleuen cieren met allen doechden, Ja daer god hem seluen met cleedde ende cierde, doen hi mensche leuede, Ende dies salmen beghinnen ane die selue oetmoedicheit daer hijs ane began” (Brieven, 244). The Speculum virginum shares in the overall directive and tone of the poems in respect to their spiritual education of women: clothing oneself in virtues.

48. See Gregory, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, 142:215, 2.1.9: “Quid enim vestimentum eius est, nisi corpus quod assumpsit ex Virgine?”

49. The Middle Dutch term pleghen, which means “practice, way of being, mode of acting, mode of appearing, or custom,” is the term used to designate this way of acting as a person and in reference to Minne. See Lied 5, l. 7: “What one must practice towards Love” (POH, 65; CW, 139); “Wat men ter minnen pleghen sal” (Liederen, 90).

50. The reference to “the man” is not necessarily a reference to a knight or a vassal, as Hart or van Baest respectively translate it, although the qualities condoned do correspond with a courtly ethos. But in ignoring the value of shift ing correspondences and taking the courtly as the final term, we miss the sophisticated figural and theological stakes. In Vision 7, the vision of union with Christ, Christ appears “in the likeness and clothing of a man” (“ghedane des cleeds ende des mans”), phrasing that is clearly echoing this desired state. The eagerness to translate certain terms in the language of courtliness is oft en a greater reflection on our desire for the courtly than it is a clearcut identification.

51. Translation mine. Leid 8, ll. 26–40: CW, 149–150; POH, 85, 87.

52. The later Der leken spieghel (The Layman’s Mirror), composed ca. 1330 by the Brabantine poet Jan van Boendale, draws from the Disticha and also encourages its lay audience in manners, as well as in how to write like a cleric, one of the “learned,” or “lewed.” Like Hadewijch’s letter, its opening lines emphasize the pleasing nature of ghelaet (airs, demeanor, countenance): “Die mensche sal dat verstaet / Altoes hebben scoen ghelaet / Scoene zeden ende miniere” (“Men should always take care / To always have a fair demeanor, / Fair manners and graces”). I have altered the translation of Ben Parsons in “The Virtuous Life in Jan van Boendale’s Der Leken Spieghel,” published online by the Bartholomeus Society for Medieval Studies (2008): http://hbo-kennisbank.uvt.nl/cgi/fontys/show.cgi?fid=3617. Boendale emphasizes fidelity, the five forms of love, and the four estates in his third book and also makes a connection between writing well, living well, and living a virtuous life. Parallels between Hadewijch’s work and Middle Dutch didactic forms for the laity have yet to be pursued.

53. Serving vremden, that is, “strangers” (what translators call “aliens”), is one of the identifying points of compassion and empathy, a first step in love. I have translated vremden as strangers, since the term “alien” oft en implies a negative or hostile connotation, which is not always the case in Hadewijch’s work, even though they are not yet neighbors (see Lied 28, l. 39: CW, 206; Liederen, 224). This capacity to be concerned for others corresponds to Gregory’s valuing of humility and care of the neighbor as the first steps in Christic imitation and is emphasized by the Victorines.

54. Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience, 187.

55. “Wi willen sijn verdreghen van onsen langhen tide Ende gheeret van goeden werken, Ende vergheten der Minnen scout te vroech. … Wi willen dat onse doghet bekint si; Daer omme en hebben wiere dat brulocht cleet niet af. … Onse oetmoedicheit es in de stemme Ende int ghelaet Ende inden schijn, Ende niet te vollen omme gods groetheit Ochte omme dat wi onse cleynheit bekinnen. Daer om en draghen wi den gods sone niet moederleke, Noch en soghene niet met oefeninghen van Minnen” (Brieven, 250).

56. The wedding garment becomes the ultimate in figures, as is clear in Lied 27, but not according to the criterion of Bernard—that of the soul—but rather of Hugh—that is, as lived—in the figure of Mary.

57. Unlike humanity, Christ has dual natures of divine and human, thus is both creator and work created, master and servant. The figure of the servant will also appear in a manuscript that is important in the formation of women’s spirituality, the Speculum virginum. The sender of the Dusseldorf manuscript signs as “Peregrinus, Christi pauperum servus” (Listen, Daughter, 51).

58. “On the Four Degrees of Violent Love,” 293–294, translation modified. I have altered the translation to reflect the feminine gender of the soul (anima). “Hoc sentite in vobis, quod et in Christo Jesu. Qui cum in forma Dei esset, non rapinam arbitratus est esse aequalem Deo; sed semetipsum exinanivit formam servi accipiens, in similitudinem hominum factus, et habitu inventus ut homo. … Haec est forma humilitatis Christi, ad quam conformare se debet quisquis supernum consummatae caritatis gradum attingere volet. … Ad summum itaque caritatis culmen profecerunt, et jam in quarto caritatis gradu positi sunt, qui pro amicis animam suam ponere. … In tertio itaque gradu anima in Deum glorificatur, in quarto propter Deum humiliatur. In tertio gradu conformatur divinae claritati, in quarto vero conformatur Christianae humilitati. Et cum in tertio gradu quodammodo, quasi in forma Dei esset, nihilominus tamen in quarto gradu semetipsum exinanire incipit, formam servi accipiens, et habitu iterum invenitur ut homo. In tertio itaque gradu quodammodo mortificatur in Deum, in quarto quasi resuscitatur in Christum. … Incipit ergo in novitate vitae ambulare qui eiusmodi est, quia de reliquo sibi vivere Christus est, et mori lucrum … sit igitur nova creatura, qui eiusmodi est; vetera transierunt, et ecce nova facta sunt omnia” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis, PL 196, cols. 1222C–1223A). I am indebted to chapters 3 and 4 of Paul Mommaers’s insightful The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience for his elucidation of this emphasis on the humanity of Christ in both Richard and Hadewijch. For a closer translation of the Latin, see Clare Kirchberger’s in Richard of Saint Victor, Selected Writings on Contemplation, 230–231.

59. Lied 21 demonstrates that the feminine figure of the vrowe, the “lady,” for the speaker in her historical person is a position that mistakenly assumes scone ghelaet (fair airs) as though it would enable mastery: “I deceived myself in being the lady of the court when I first chose her, I fully gave in singing her praises, but could not hold out. … Now her rewards appear to me like that of the scorpion, that shows fair airs, and then strikes cruelly. Alas, what does such showing mean?” (CW, 184–185). The pedagogical nature of the subsequent stanzas shows us precisely what this showing means, as it counters the initial lack of understanding (seen in line 38, “I cannot understand her wild wonder”) with the wisdom shown by a “we” in the final stanza. Unlike the mistaken vrowe, the we wisely concludes, “So may we well say, ‘Oh my, how dare we cling to our repose’” (CW, 186). In a performative countering of this error, the stanzas that follow actively demonstrate that taking fair airs as an end is selfcomplacent. The following stanzas demonstrate how one should act: take the road of errantry, be led by Minne, and experience her as out of reach (onghehende) and unmasterable. This entails “going out” to find her, a kind of “emptying out,” kenosis; the next step is understanding this kenosis as a form of freedom and redemption.

60. Translation modified. Lied 19, ll. 37–42: POH, 148; Liederen, 170.

61. Translation mine. Lied 1, ll. 85–101: CW, 129–130; POH, 46; Liederen, 70.

62. The theme of “newness” is a constant in her work and corresponds to the ure, the hours of love and this renewal of outer in the inner, the earthly in the spiritual.

63. Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion, Marian Exegesis, and the Historical Sense of the Song of Songs,” 107. Fulton is arguing for this dominant motif in William of Newburgh’s twelfth-century Explanatio sacri epithalamii in matrem sponsi, but her overall argument for the interest in the interpretation of the Song of Songs according to Mary’s lived experience as the human and historical mother of Jesus is one that is applicable to Hadewijch. Hadewijch is far less interested in the martyrological aspect of Mary than is William, although Julian’s desired witnessing of the crucifixion echoes this.

64. Translation mine. Lied 29, ll. 41–46: CW, 209; POH, 204.

65. Translation mine. Lied 29, ll. 71–80: CW, 210; POH, 206.

66. Translation modified. POH, 289.

67. Lied 35, l. 32: “Dies moetic nachte bi dage leven” (Liederen, 264).

68. “Of the Four Degrees of Passionate Charity,” 224; translation modified. “Hoc itaque statu anima a Domino in solitudinem ducitur, ibique lactatur ut interna dulcedine inebritur” (De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis, PL 196, col. 1217D).”

69. Hadewijch describes emptying out as “taking away freedom from myself” and as “nothing remains to me of myself” (Lied 24, ll. 45, 48: CW, 194; Liederen, 200), but also in Lied 8 (= Poem in stanzas 9) as the movement of going out to conquer love so that one be conquered and “brought to nought in love” (CW, 151): “Ende dan in minnen te nieute werden mochte” (l. 77; Liederen, 110). In Lied 13 (= Poem in stanzas 14), it is described as “living in a new death” (CW, 163): “leven in nuwer doet,” (l. 24; Liederen, 132).

70. Translation modified. Lied 27, ll. 42–51: POW, 193. In a compelling analysis of ghebruken (fruition) and ghebreken (failure) and its relation to Hadewijch’s sense of unity, Paul Mommaers has emphasized Hadewijch’s transition from what she sees as a more childish way of thinking of unity as ghebruken to the wiser form of unity as ghebreken; he comments on a passage: “It is as if she were saying: ‘As long as I was “childish,” I identified the real being-one with the pleasurable ghebruken or jubileren. Now, having “grown up,” I realize that this real being-one, which I keep calling ghebruken, for it is the only “fruition” I finally value, lies hidden in a compound experience as the “truth” of both “rejoicing” with the Divinity and “failing” with the Humanity’” (The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience, 188).

71. The speaker in the poems is constantly reminding us that she has never tasted the fruit of Minne, and does not know of what she speaks.

72. Lied 18, ll. 87–88 (=Poem in stanzas 19). I have modified POH, 145; see CW, 179. “Maer dien ouden ende dien jonghen / coelt sanc van minnen haern moet” (Liederen, 166).

73. As Brian Daley, SJ, argues, quoting Athanasius, “What is distinctive about the Psalter in relation to other books is its more personal element, which allows the reader to identify the message with his or her inmost feelings: ‘It contains within itself the movements of each soul, their changes and adjustments, written out and thoroughly portrayed, so that if someone should wish to grasp himself from it, as from an image, and to understand on that basis how to shape himself, it is written there.’ The point of portraying the whole range of human spiritual ‘movements’ or emotions, Athanasius goes on to explain, is not simply poetic imitation—Aristotle’s mimesis—but therapy. The person who recognizes his own inner state in the psalms ‘can possess from this, once again, the image contained in the words, so that he does not simply hear them and move on, but learns what one must say and do to heal one’s disordered feelings.’ The psalms, in other words, do not simply command us to repent of our sins, to bear suffering patiently, or to praise God for his gift s,’ they actually give us the words by which we can come to say and do those things for ourselves” (“Finding the Right Key,” 200).

74. Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and the Emerging Roman Chant Repertory,” 77.

75. In Lied 23, Hadewijch makes reference to those who are called to the heileghe kerke (the holy church), stating that, with high hopes of love, they too are called to begin the works of love, “die minne met minnen werken” (ll. 78, 73; translation mine; CW, 191; Liederen, 194) and to persist in the storms of love.

76. Jeffery, “Monastic Reading and Roman Chant,” 59.

77. Various early manuscripts of the Speculum virginum, including the Clairvaux manuscript, are accompanied at their ending by the Epithalamium, a bridal song, which, as Catherine Jeffreys has pointed out, “responds” to the written word in musical form. Jeffreys also reads the Epithalamium as a new form of psalmody. Citing Anselm of Haverberg’s reference to “a new way of psalmody” (novum psallendi … modum), she suggests that “his phrase … implies that psalms were recited and responded to in a new way that existed outside established norms as part of a set of ‘new’ and ‘unusual’ monastic practices” (in “‘Listen, Daughters of Light’: The Epithalamium and Musical Innovation in Twelfth-Century Germany,” 138]). Morgan Powell also emphasizes the mirroring property of the Speculum: “Picture and Scripture are part of one hermeneutic experience—even one hermeneutic moment. … In both the virgin is to seek herself, a fact the author insists on by stating the seemingly obvious: Nothing can be called a mirror unless it reflects the image of its beholder.” He also frames the Speculum as “another method of monastic reading” in its possibly being read by a monk to the listener, who “‘reads,’ in the fully transformational monastic sense, through him” (“The Speculum virginum and the Audio-Visual Poetics of Women’s Religious Instruction,” in Listen, Daughter, 123, 115).

78. See Boynton’s “Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters,” for rich examples of the variety of the use of the psalms in devotional and liturgical contexts. Both Boynton and Fulton, whom she cites, stress the interrelation between prayer and practice through the psalms. See Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont.”

79. The pervasive significance of the psalms in medieval spirituality is incontestable but widely unexamined in relation to women’s mystical texts (with the exception of related texts by musicologists and scholars of medieval liturgy). The innumerable uses of the psalms—their modification and paraphrase in liturgical form, the extensive exegesis in twelfth- and thirteenth-century spirituality, the emotive appeal that provides a guide for reading, and the multiplicity of their functions—are echoed in Hadewijch’s Liederen. For a discussion of the extensive nature of different kinds of exegesis of the psalms, see Colish, “Psalterium Scholasticorum”; Kuczynski, Prophetic Song; van Deusen, The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages.

80. Grijp, “De zingende Hadewijch,” 72–92, 340–343; “Hadewijch dicht mystieke liederen voor haar vriendinn. Brabantse begijnen tussen Atrechtse trouvères en een Maaslandse” (23–30); also see his hypothetical reconstructions of the melodies in Liederen, 348–428. His analysis of Lied 45, for example, demonstrates how this work was modeled on the Latin sequence Mariae praeconio, keeping some of the Latin.

81. O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, 7. O’Sullivan concludes his chapter “Women’s Devotional Song” with the argument that “at the centre of women’s devotional song lies a desire less for reward than for deliverance” from suffering (73). While Hadewijch seems to focus less on the kind of pain and suffering that O’Sullivan finds in women’s Marian lyrics, the promise of deliverance does play a significant part in how one hermeneutically understands the role of temporal strife.

82. As Will Hasty has pointed out, the early association in German songs of hoher muot (high spirits) with Minne is characteristic of the love lyric (Minnesang) in the stories of ladies and of knights, but in a way that emphasizes the failure and hopelessness of the quest for love and, especially in the case of Werbelieder, most oft en assume a tone of lament. “In some verses the singers seem to suggest that their love service, even if there seems to be no serious possibility that it will ever earn love’s reward, nevertheless has a value all its own. Monks are (or at least should be) made purer by their ascetic suffering; figures such as Erec, Iwein, and Parzifal in the courtly romances improve themselves in the ascetic rigors of their adventures. Similarly, the singer who remains loyal to his beloved, whose perfection simultaneously qualifies her and makes her eternally remote, can be improved in love-service and the sacrifice it has involved” (“Minnesang–The Medieval German Love Lyrics,” 146). This would support Hadewijch’s use of Minnesang in relation to ghebreken, failure, and identification with the humanity of Christ. Hasty also notes the parallel with Marian poetry.

83. For more on the embodied nature of Hildegard’s work, see Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture.

84. Fassler, “Hildegard and the Dawn Song of Lauds,” 222. An in-depth comparison of Hadewijch’s and Hildegard’s musical work is not possible here, but the parallels pro vide for a better understanding of how Hadewijch’s work may be conceived. See also Boklund-Lagopoulou, “Yate of Heven: Conceptions of the Female Body in the Religious Lyrics.”

85. Hildegard’s Ordo virtutum, a lyric and musical dramatization of the travails of a soul who falls into sin and struggles with virtue to redeem herself, shares the tone of Hadewijch’s Liederen.

86. Fassler, Gothic Song, 317.

87. Muessig, “Learning and Mentoring in the Twelfth Century,” 92.

88. Lied 34, l. 23: CW, 224; POH, 231; Liederen, 258.

89. Lied 18 (=Poem in stanzas 19), l. 92: CW, 179; POH, 145; Liederen, 166.

90. Lied 18 (=Poem in stanzas 19), ll. 85, 91: CW, 179; POH, 145; Liederen, 166.

91. Lied 8 (=Poem in stanzas 9), ll. 1–5: CW, 149; POH, 85; Liederen, 106. I have altered Van Baest’s translation.

92. Translation mine. Lied 39, ll. 91–95: CW, 243; POH, 265.

93. Lied 35, ll. 49–50 make the association of counsel with the divine directive for the human explicit: “Minne, you were there at counsel, / Where God called me to be a human being” (“Minne, ghi waert daer te rade / daer mi God mensche wesen hiet”) (CW, 228; POH, 239; Liederen, 266). But also seems to be suggesting in Lied 23, stanza 11 that the cleric’s scholarly mastery of divine subjects prevents them from seeing how performing works of love would make all even stronger.

94. In an even more explicit statement of the “better” rule, Hadewijch’s Mengeldict 3, which I have discussed at length, looks to the role of reason for a rule: “But he who rather wears the earthly man as a garment / Considers the debt to reason, / Which is his rule of life and teaches him the works / By which he can turn from himself to Love” (ll. 103–108: CW, 324; Mgdt, 23).

95. See Lied 13, l. 64; Lied 22, l. 38; Lied 32, ll. 24, 25; Lied 40, l. 61.

96. Lied 40, ll. 57–62: POH, 268. “Die loep des troens ende der planeten / ende der tekene die metten trone gaen, / mach men iet met ghelike weten / ende met mate van ghetale bevaen. / Maer gheen meester en mach hem dies vermeten / dat hi minne met sinne mach doen verstaen” (Liederen, 298).

97. In Lied 24, l. 74, reference is also made to false counsel, “falschen rade” (CW, 195; POH, 177; Liederen, 202), given by strangers to the experience of Minne. References to Minne’s rade appear more than fift een times in the Liederen, as opposed to a mere four times in reference to the first person.

98. Lied 45, ll. 33–34: POH, 291; Liederen, 322.

99. When writing about the poet Catherine Pozzi in the final chapter of The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau suggests that this nonsignifying capacity of phonetic repetitions points to a memoryless memory addressed to and coming from the body itself. He writes, “The sounds, resembling fragments of refrain, form an uncanny memory, prior to meaning. One would be hard put to say what it is the memory of: it recalls something that is not a past; it awakens what the body does not know about itself” (The Mystic Fable, 297). This section, entitled “Overture to a Poetics of the Body,” in which he focuses on Hadewijch, marks an end to the first volume and an “opening” not just to a “poetics” of the body, but also to the second promised (and still unpublished) volume of The Mystic Fable. On the philosophical dimensions of de Certeau’s work, and of mystical affirmation, see Derrida, “A Number of Yes.”

100. Translation mine. CW, 352.

1. For a further demonstration of how “inner” and “outer” extend to earlier periods, see my “Questions of Dwelling in Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Medieval Mysticism,” which compares Hadewijch II, Porete, and Anglo-Saxon poetry.

2. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, x–xi.

3. Turner may have a more encompassing sense of “experience” in mind; however, as I noted in my introduction and as Sara Poor and others have emphasized, the association of women with “experience” is problematic and merits further development.

4. See, for example, Vincent Gillespie, “Pastiche, Ventriloquism, and Parody in Julian of Norwich,” on Julian’s stylistic originality. He argues, “If visionary experience is written down in the popular registers and codes of theology and devotional writing, it runs the risk of losing its specificity and uniqueness” (196).

5. In his analysis of hermeneutic complexity in Julian, which shares a common purpose with my argument, Watson acknowledges the Augustinian heritage in her distinction between corporeal and spiritual senses but, searching for the identical terms of “bodily” and “ghostly” in other mystics, states, “I know of no other women visionaries who use this Augustinian terminology, and no other visionary material which combines ‘bodily’ and ‘ghostly sight’ with any of the almost polyphonic complexity of Julian’s revelation” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 66–67). I am suggesting that the complexity witnessed in Julian’s revelations and the shift ing terms used to navigate the telling of the revelations (which he highlights) are in fact either implicit or explicit in women’s mystical and visionary texts and combine the language of apprehension, interpretation, understanding, and exegesis to show that reading is always incorporated in these processes.

6. Appleford, “‘The Comene Course of Prayers.’”

7. An extensive amount of work has been done by scholars on Julian and the Trinity, and I highlight a few here: Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic”; Barratt, “No Such Sitting: Julian Tropes the Trinity”; Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian; and Sheldrake, “Trinity and Anthropology.”

8. Turner also finds musical analogies helpful for understanding Julian’s method, noting that she “transform[s] the tiniest melodic features of each shewing into major thematic developments” (Julian of Norwich, Theologian, xi).

9. A vast survey of all women mystics is beyond the scope of this book—if not all books. Rather than single out women’s mystical texts from other texts because they conform to what we as twenty-first-century readers call “mystical” texts—a category, as Michel de Certeau notes, that dates from the seventeenth century—I stress that we should investigate other qualities of mystical texts (formal, thematic, didactic, liturgical) that allow them to be more clearly understood in relation to spiritual practices and literary techniques of the Middle Ages.

10. There are two primary texts ascribed to Julian: the “short” text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, and the longer and presumably later text, A Revelation of Love. On the manuscripts see Jenkins and Watkins, “Introduction,” in The Writings of Julian of Norwich; extracts of A Revelation of Love in this chapter are taken from this volume.

11. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 164.

12. The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 3.

13. As for Hadewijch, we have little biographical information about Julian aside from information derived from the manuscript, except that one of the manuscripts of the short text was dated 1413 and emended with a scribal note: “a deuoute Woman and her Name is Iulyan that is recluse atte Norwyche and sitt on lyfe.” The remaining information comes from several wills bequeathing donations to “Julian, anchorite.” This is nevertheless significantly more information than is available on Hadewijch.

14. Sheldrake, “Trinity and Anthropology,” 117.

15. The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 206.

16. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 23.

17. The theme of enclosure has been treated at length in relation to Julian. See, for example, McAvoy, The Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Place, Space, and Body Within the Discourses of Enclosure; Miles, “Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love.”

18. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 13.

19. Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” 540.

20. Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection,” 62.

21. “Ancrene Wisse,” 92 (translation modified); Ancrene Wisse, 132. For more on the inner and outer see Jocelyn Price, “Inner and Outer: Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum.”

22. Letter 4: “Met ordenen te houdene becom mert men met vele dinghen diermen quite mocht sijn; ende dat doet reden dolen. Een gheest van goeden wille werct in binnen scoendere dan alle ordenen gheuiseren mochten” (Brieven, 34, 36).

23. See Millett, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection” for a discussion of the historical factors surrounding the increase in female lay-anchoritism.

25. A Victorine canon (Jacques de Vitry) and Victorine-turned-Dominican (Thomas de Cantimpré) were responsible for the first vita of the beguine Marie d’Oignies. Millett emphasizes the similarities between the Ancrene Wisse and works of James of Vitry, an Augustinian canon who supported the beguines of Liège and who was an “enthusiastic advocate” of the mendicant orders (Millet, “Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection,” 71). On the Dominican origins of the Ancrene Wisse, see Millett, “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse.” For an earlier argument on an Augustinian origin see Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse. On Julian’s relation to spirituality abroad see Dutton, Julian of Norwich, 73–75; Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” 26; and Voaden’s edited volume Prophets Abroad, which, however, does not consider Hadewijch.

26. While doubting the claim made by Jusserand in 1984 that the three anchoresses for whom the Ancrene Wisse was originally written were beguines, Wolfgang Riehle underscores that an admiration for the beguine spirituality of the Low Countries is manifest in several instances: the vita of Marie d’Oignies was translated in English, “and as early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste praises the Beguine way of life as the highest stage of Christian perfection.” He adds that “in one manuscript the French source for the tract The Abbey of the Holy Ghost specifically refers to a ‘beguinage.’ The English translator did not take this term over directly but replaced it with the neutral term ‘religione’” (Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, 20).

27. Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation.”

28. Abbott, Julian of Norwich, 107.

29. Julian, A Revelation of Love 54.11–12 (297).

30. Ibid., 58.32–33 (307).

31. For more on the relation between the Augustinian hierarchies of the soul and their articulation in Julian, see Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic.”

32. “Man is changeabil in this life, and by frailte and uncunning falleth into sinne. He is unmighty and unwise of himselfe, and also his will is overlaide in this time. He is in tempest and in sorow and woe. And the cause is blindhede, for he seeth not God” (A Revelation of Love 47 [265]). Watson and Jenkins gloss: “changeabil: The main characteristic of the “sensualite” according to 45:3.”

33. In his meticulous analysis of Julian’s Trinitarian hermeneutic, Watson highlights her flexibility in the language she uses for apprehending the vision, noting that “she seems determined to use the language of revelation in as wide a variety of ways as possible, almost as though she is deliberately working against the restrictions of her own circumscribing hermeneutic structure” (“The Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 67).

34. Turner notes, “As Bernard McGinn has suggested to me—and as readers can tell for themselves once alerted—her chief scriptural source must be the Pauline letters” (Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 220, n. 2).

35. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 72–73.

36. Annie Sutherland shows how, for example, “the syntactical structure ‘by … in’ and ‘in … by’ used in articulating our relationship with Christ” parallels Rom 11:36 (“For of him, and by him, and in him are all things”) but that Julian may have “in mind the wording of the Canon of the Mass, recorded thus in the Sarum Missal” (“Julian of Norwich and the Liturgy,” 91).

37. Extensive work has been done on Julian and the figure of the maternal. See, for example, McInerney, “‘In the Meydens Womb,’” and McNamer, “The Exploratory Image.”

38. Julian, A Revelation of Love 58.52–53 (309).

39. Denys Turner will note that “for all the affirmative richness of her theological vocabulary, hers is a linguistic strategy every bit as apophatic as that of the Cloud author or Meister Eckhart” (Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 24).

40. Julian, A Revelation of Love 57.8–9 (289).

41. Julian is explicit with regard to her anti-Manichean tendencies in chapter 27, stating, “But I saw not sinne. For I believe it hath no maner of substance, ne no part of being, ne it might not be knowen but by the paine that it is cause of. And this paine, it is something, as to my sighte, for a time. For it pugeth and maketh us to know ourselfe and aske mercy. For the passion of oure lorde is comfort to us agenst alle this, and so is his blessed wille” (A Revelation of Love 27.22–26 [210–211]).

42. Watson and Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 236. They note that the term “bestely” may be a synonym for “impure” and that “godly” may also be a variant of “goodly.”

43. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 164.

44. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 183.

46. Kelner, “Conceiving a Form of imitatio Mariae in A Revelation of Divine Love,” 6. I am indebted to this wonderful senior thesis, which made Julian’s rhetorical use of “nought” much clearer to me.

47. Julian seems far less conflicted than Paul, in that she never articulates the two parts of the soul as being “at war” with one another the way Paul suggests, using the language of law. While Julian allows the option of willing what is “not good,” she nevertheless focuses on how redemption is possible through love.

48. Joan Nuth argues that the incarnation functions as a way to complete union with God: “In the human being, the same soul, whose substance is eternally united to God, becomes relegated to corporeal nature, but the unit … is a fragile one, incomplete, [and] partial. … The Incarnation, God’s work of mercy in time, completes human nature by bringing sensuality into complete union with the soul’s substance” (Wisdom’s Daughter, 45).