Gender, Power and Knowledge in
The Strophische Gedichten of Hadewijch 1
by Elizabeth Petroff
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA
Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten (“Poems in Stanzas”) 2 is a collection of poems on the theme of minne, Lady Love. Reading these sophisticated and confident lyrics which re-create some of the themes, image and metrical forms of the Provençal love lyric to explore the poet's experience of minne, I had to remind myself how unprecedented this accomplishment was, given the early date at which Hadewijch was writing. It is thought that she wrote during the first quarter of the thirteenth century, thus making her a younger contemporary of Jacques de Vitry and the mulieres sanctae in the area of Liège, of Saint Francis and Saint Clare in Italy and of the trobairitz (women troubadours in Provence). She is only one generation removed from the Provençal troubadours, from Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes. Although she wrote in Dutch and is thought to have lived in Antwerp, we must not take this to mean that she lived in a cultural backwater. By living there, she participated in a rich culture based on both romance and germanic roots. She had read widely in Latin, Old French and Provençal, as well as in Dutch, and she was obviously sensitive to poetic technique in all those literatures, since her own technique suggests now the forms of the Latin sequence, now the chansons de geste and, again, the Provençal lyric. She was a beguine, a member of a new spiritual movement for women that quite possibly allowed her to reach her full potential both as a writer and as a spiritual leader; and she wrote for other beguines, often as their spiritual director. She was a mystic, writing to illuminate her own experience of the divine and to draw from it lessons for others: here too she is breaking new ground. All mystics seek union with the divine; for Hadewijch particularly the divine was love, both as process and goal. To this love with which she is seeking the fullest fruition, she gives the name of minne.
The Strophische Gedichten form only one part of Hadewijch's collected works; she also wrote Mengeldichten (“Poems in Couplets”), 3 a collection of prose letters (“Letters to a Young Beguine”) 4 and Visioenen “Visions”). 5 Each of these collections exhibits its own particular way of viewing her experience of love. Although courtly elements may be seen in all her works, it is in the Strophische Gedichten that she especially highlights the language and forms of the courtly tradition as a framework for exploring and presenting her experience. Like the Provençal lyrics, her poems depict a lover's role in relation to a distant and powerful beloved; in this depiction, her use of the first person creates a poetic self with a sublimely personal voice, often heard uttering complaints about the lack of attention from the beloved and claiming a right to better treatment. This personal voice also embodies meditations on the nature of love, on the inevitability and the meaningfulness of suffering and longing in the total experience of love. In these poems we nowhere find the poet taking refuge in the modesty topos nor apologising for being a woman and daring to write. 6
It is particularly in the creation of a personal voice in her poems that Hadewijch's lived experience of minne explodes the boundaries of the troubadour tradition. Minne, for her, is a Being, a Lady Love, not the personification of an abstract idea, and not the forbidden wife of the vassal's lord. At the same time, minne is love, the total experience of love. As such, she is all-powerful and all-knowing. She is not God; she may contain God. She is A-mor, “delivered from death.” 7 Minne stands as the object of the poet's desire and only she can satisfy that desire. Like the troubadour's lady, she may at times seem capricious, arbitrary, fickle, but for Hadewijch her capriciousness is merely the way she appears when seen from the limited human point of view. Capriciousness is not in her character; although the lover may perceive her as capricious, this is his failure of fidelity, not hers. She is free, and she grants her lovers freedom if they will surrender to her. In addressing her and speaking about her, the lover/poet finds his own voice, his own nature, and points the reader in the direction of that same nature.
Minne can best be approached through paradox, for she is beyond all systems of binary opposition and contains all opposites. The language of paradox forces the poet to abandon ordinary truth, to move mentally into a new space where real truth dwells:
The madness of love … is a rich fief
Those who at first were two
she can make into one.
I am declaring the truth about this:
The madness of love
makes bitter what was sweet … 8
In Poem 17, love is seen to be both confining and immense as are its griefs:
What joy can surround
Him whom Love has thrown
into close confinement,
When he wishes to journey
through Love's immensity
And enjoy it as a free man
in all security? 9
The paradox of confinement being expansive is suggested again in Poem 26: “Love,” she says,
is one of the most beautiful imprisonments
And an unconquered new power. 10
In the original Dutch, the rhyme hacht/macht supports the paradoxical equation between imprisonment and power. Another paradox is expressed in a martial metaphor, the hand-to-hand struggle of two champions:
For he who has never fought against Love
Has never lived a free day. 11
Love conquers him so that he may conquer her: 12
If someone submits enough
to the power of Love
I say that he is empowered by submission. 13
The fact that in Hadewijch's use of the Dutch language the verbs and the nouns associated with them rhyme - rike wijet/ bi wike rijet - supports the grammatical parallelism which in turn reinforces the equation between submission and empowerment:
Love is unknowable,
yet can be experienced:
The thing has no form, no manner,
no outward appearance.
It can only be tasted as something actual:
It is the substance of my joy … 14
Scholars know nothing of this force that strengthens and annihilates:
I say no scholar is able to consider
How fortunate will be the state
Of him who has wrought deeds of strength in Love …
Then, in the madness of Love,
He will burn in her deepest flood
And melt away like tallow. 15
Likewise, the ordinary world, the “aliens” see only the loss of self and not the rewards:
Nothing of myself remains to me …
I have given up honour and repose.
Because I wish to live
Free, and receive in love
Great riches and knowledge …
I cannot do without this gift.
I have nothing else:
I must live on Love. 16
PERSON, GENDER AND RELATIONSHIP
These examples illustrate something of the conceptual basis of Hadewijch's poems but to get closer to her experience, we need to explore the process undergone in each poem, the way in which Love as minne and love as experience reveal themselves to the speaking and writing voice(s). As we go through a particular poem, we will do well to keep in mind the several voices that are being articulated to express different optics on the experience. The first observable consciousness is in the third person: this is often a male voice, the representative love: “he,” “someone,” “anyone.” Often in contrast to this consciousness there is a first person voice - an “I” - whose experience of love is contrasted, usually in negative terms, with the third person. In those rare moments when Love herself speaks, she too uses the first person. There are other points of view implied as well: the “aliens” (vremde) who cannot understand the value of love and sometimes try to oppose “anyone” or “I”, and the scholars of the church who know nothing of the knowing of Love. Hadewijch the poet is all these voices or consciousnesses; it is not fair to Hadewijch's art or to her mystical knowledge to identify her solely with the “I” who is not privileged to have the fuller, more joyful experience of “anyone.” The entire poem represents Hadewijch's knowledge of love, a knowledge in which she participates through her experience of Love, “to be with love in Love.”
Although no one poem can illustrate all of Hadewijch's skill, Poem 6 illustrates many of her tech-niques. Like a majority of the poems in the Strophische Gedichten, the poem opens with a seasonal description: just as all life quickens in March, so the lover's longing is intensified and he wishes to conquer Love so that “she will give herself wholly in love” and he will “live wholly as Love with love.”17 A relationship is being defined here, one that at first seems to be a matter of domination and conquest, but which in fact is characterised by specularity, to use Irigaray's term for a kind of mirroring that leads to a full acceptance and merging of difference of the other. 18 The terms, rules, for this relationship are known to the poet and spelled out. If “he” [the representative lover] maintains his zeal and hope, Love will indeed strengthen him:
He shall conquer his Beloved;
For Love can never
Refuse herself to anyone;
Rather she gives him
what she is willing he possess,
And more than she herself promised him. 19
But March can also be a cold month and doubt, if it arises, will blight the lover's growth as frost blights the leaves of trees. Only the sun (equated with minne) can “call forth/ flowers and fruit from the mind.” 20 Love's promises are reiterated: if the lover demonstrates submission, strength and understanding, he
will receive in full freedom
Love's unheard-of power …
He shall yet subdue Love
And be her lord and master. 21
Now suddenly, surprisingly, Hadewijch speaks in the first person, revealing the differences between her experience and what she has just described as the law of love. Perhaps, she thinks, the situation she has just described is not universally applicable. Love, she says
makes me wander outside myself
My misfortune is too great,
And for me to do without Love is death,
Since I cannot have fruition of her. 22
Why, she asks, if she ought to “love totally … did she not give me total love?” 23 She has nothing of herself left:
I have so spent what is mine,
I have nothing to live on . . .
But even if she gave me something,
hunger would remain,
For I want the whole. 24
Hadewijch's personal assertions 25 greatly enrich and problematise the reader's appreciation of minne the being and minne as experience. At the same time, this presentation of two optics, two voices, allows the poetic “I” to remember that she is not alone in this isolation. Many of Love's lovers have denied themselves for her sake and are
now … in heavy chains,
Exiled in their own land.
There they wander, subject
To alien adventures. 26
Literally, they are exiled and wander in the hand of alien adventures. The repetition of “vreemde” (“exiled”) and “vremder” (“alien”) in the poem's final stanza - the tornada - underscores the dimension of alienation. At the same time, the language implicitly compares Love's lovers with the outcast protagonists of a chanson de geste or a Germanic heroic legend like Beowulf. Consequently, this ending to the poem is surprising but not, ultimately, discouraging. Why is this so?
We have moved, in the course of the poem, from a springtime landscape - apparently in harmony with human desire - to the promised relationship with Love, if the lover will do his part; and then to a personal assertion of the pain of waiting for Love to do her part; and finally to the fusion of “I” and “he” in the experience of alienation, a disjunction between man and his world. But thanks to the cyclical nature of the seasons and the episodic nature of the chansons de geste, we are led to think of love as an entire cycle (of seasons, of adventures) and of the events of this poem as just one moment in that cycle. Although the lover no longer dwells in the ordinary world because of his fidelity to love, his alienation from that world is the sign, the visible mark, of his relationship to Love and to other lovers who share his experience. In that relationship, gender and person are only the beginning of our experience, our life cycle. Ultimately gender and person have no fixed referent, for “I” and “he” have the same experience and, in seeking to lose themselves in Love, they abdicate any distinction between “her” ( minne) and “him” or “me” (the lovers). Even the metaphors of personal combat lose their original gender specificity, for we learn that all the persons of the poem - “I,” “he,” and “She” (minne) - seek to conquer in being conquered.
Yet in the language of the poem, it is initially very important that minne is female and “anyone” seems to be male. In the courtly tradition - especially in the lyric - role reversal is an essential aspect of the new love experience being articulated. The (male) poet is placed in an unusual relation vis-à-vis his lady; he is powerless to gain her love unless she grants it freely. She has the upper hand. Yet in the course of many romance lyrics, the poetic “I” manages to turn the tables on the figure of the lady who is seen to derive her very power from the poet's creation of her. Difference implies hierarchy and, in the proper order of things, males dominate. In Hadewijch's treatment of the love relationship, we also begin with what seems to be a role reversal, but it soon becomes clear that in their mutual conquest and surrender, Love and the lover are not in a hierarchical relationship, but one characterised by specularity. Each mirrors the difference and sameness of the other. If power and knowledge are located anywhere in the poem, it is in minne but the lover is located in her and she in him.
GENDER AND BODY
But perhaps, it may be objected, we cannot generalise about gender identification on the basis of an analysis of just one poem. Gender may show up more strongly in those poems which depict the bodily experience of desire, particularly since the desire is felt for a being characterised as feminine who also experiences desire. Hadewijch uses a number of image clusters to present the experience of love; some seem to have as their referent the physical body, while others speak more metaphorically of the soul's experience. Love may be seen in martial terms such as imprisonment, conquest, battle and its accoutrements, siege and so on. It may also be presented in terms of physical sensation, primarily images of hunger and thirst and their opposites, devouring and swallowing. Veins, channels and floods are the locus of sensation and anxiety. Images of madness and dissolution - whether of the body or the consciousness - appear often, especially in the later poems of the sequence. These image clusters often overlap within any one poem, resulting in a feeling of confusion - synæsthesia - in the reader, a state which corresponds to the totality of the state being depicted.
In the first poem, Love has the power to “strike” (slaen) the lover/narrator, to “scourge or pardon” (soenen ende slaen). Love can “set us free or chain us fast” (die minne fijn/ Vri maken ende benden). In the next poem, the poet's “singing” (nuwe sanghe) is “hushed” (ic mach wel vander). She suffers “pain and heartache” (Daer ic nu doghe pine/ Ende van herten seer). She “wither[s] like an old man and waste[s] away” (Dies oudic ende dwine). Love herself is “fertile” (drachtich), “mother of the virtues” (moedeer van aire doghet) and epitomises the fidelity (die trouwe) that grants power. She is “so sweet in her nature/ That she conquers every other power” (Soe suete es minne in hare natuere,/ Dat si alle andere cracht verwint), yet to the immature lover she “taste[s]… bitter and sour” (Soe smaect hi bettere ende suere). He who loves properly is “As the beautiful rose/ Appears to us in the dew between the thorns” (Ghelijc dat ons die scone rose/ Metten dauwe comt uten dorne gheghaen). In Poem 3, the lover/narrator carries a shield that “has warded off so many stabs/ There's no room left on it for a new gash” (Want mi es die scilt so sere dorehouwen/ Hine can intoe niet meer slaghe ontfaen). Love sometimes gives “consolations, then again wounds” (Alse nu den troest, alse nu die wonde) and “her pleasure gives/ The sweet kisses of her mouth” (Den enen gheeft si, dien sijs an,/ Die suete cussenne van haren monde). In Poem 4, the male lover is “always new and afire with longing” (Hi es altoes nuwe ende van niede heet); he “has experienced silence amid great noise” (“Ende in hoech gheruchte scilentie ontfaen).
In Poem 7, the madness of love is imaged as dissolution and this in turn is imaged as an abyss into which the lover is hurled. The abyss is connected to wounding, and this means no more health (ghesonde). This would seem an impossible concatenation of metaphors, but look at what Hadewijch has done with it:
My soul melts away
in the madness of Love;
The abyss into which she hurls me
is deeper than the sea;
For Love's new deep abyss
Renews my wound:
I look for no more health,
Until I experience Love as all new to me. 27
Another way of looking at madness is found in Poem 12 where the frenzy of love is described in bold sexual images:
With Love they shall cleave in oneness
to Love,
And with love
they shall contemplate all Love -
Drawing, through her secret veins,
On the channel where Love gives all love,
And inebriates all her drunken friends
with love
In amazement before her violence. 28
Even a cliché like the proverbial arrow of love is depicted graphically and physically, so that we really feel the pain of penetration and the resulting infection.
As Love's arrows strike [the soul],
It shudders that it lives … .
At all times when the arrow strikes,
It increases the wound and brings torment . . .
Longing keeps the wounds
open and undressed. 29
In Poem 17 Hadewijch describes her experience as being “again under the lash.” 30 She comforts herself with the observation that
“Before the All unites itself to the all,
Sour bitterness must be tasted.” 31
In Poem 19, she describes Love's ways with “someone”:
Although she forces him with violence,
She contents him and sweetens his chains.32
In the next poem, Poem 20, she sums up her experience:
No living man under the sun
Can content Love. 33
Nor can the human be contented by love, for
Love is always possessed in violent longing:
Here one cannot find repose. 34
In the twelfth and final stanza of this poem, the narrator speaks directly to Love, asking her when she will
reach out to me
And say: “Let your grief cease.
I will cherish you;
I am what I was in times past;
Now fall into my arms,
And taste my rich teaching!” 35
Sadly, this consolation is only a fantasy, albeit a very specific one that tells us of one dimension of Hadewijch's needs: to be cherished by a loving mother and teacher. The learning she offers is not easily grasped, as in Poem 22 we see that Love may command “in storm or in stillness,” for
She impels us to long desiringly for her
And to taste her without knowing her being. 36
The only knowledge the soul can possess is the knowledge that love cannot be gained without renouncing the self, and this is a burden that “weighs me down” (mi swaert). Yet this poem is ultimately affirming, for in it we see an increase in Hadewijch's knowledge of herself and of Love's attraction, even if her being is unfathomable. Such self-knowledge is reflected in the use of first person pronouns in each line of her conclusion:
Even if desire crushes my heart,
Even if strength slips away from me
through Love's coercion,
I shall yet know what draws me
And awakens me so mercilessly
If for a moment I seek pleasure in repose. 37
It has often been noted that in the later poems of this sequence of forty-five poems, Hadewijch complains more and more bitterly of what she has not received from Love. What has not been noted is how, from Poem 25 on, the descriptions of Love and the experience of love are cast in bodily terms. At the same time, descriptions of Love and union are more extended and more erotic. In Poem 25, the experience of Love is characterised by synæsthesia, as when Hadewijch tells us that
That great noise, that loud gift
Of soft stillness makes me deaf. 38
The poem continues, moving from the first person narration of Stanza 3 into the more impersonal narrative of Stanza 4, and fusing the two points of view into one experience:
Love's soft stillness is unheard of,
However loud the noise she makes,
Except by him who has experienced it,
And whom she has wholly allured to herself,
And has so stirred with her deep touch
That he feels himself wholly in Love.
When she also fills him
with the wondrous taste of Love,
The great noise ceases for a time;
Alas! Soon awakens Desire, who wakes
With heavy storm
the mind that has turned inward. 39
In Poem 31, Love has transformed Hadewijch's very body, so that she can give birth to Love herself. Up to this point, the vocabulary devoted to the assaults of love on the lover have not been gender specific, but now Hadewijch's physicality seems definitely feminine. As this new life is enclosed within her, so is she contained by that powerful female, Love.
[Love] … with her infinite strength
So enlarges my heart
That I have given myself
over to her completely,
To obtain within me
the birth of her high being.
But if I wish to take free delights,
She casts me into her prison. 40
In Poem 36, although the subject is apparently not Hadewijch but “someone,” we see both genders implied in Love's actions of penetration and engulfment:
The Judgment of Love,
Pierces deep within
Through the inward senses, [so that]
By the fury of Love
He is all devoured in Love. 41
Penetration is the reference again in Poem 37:
Where would you have come
by the strange hatred
With which you transpierced him
Who gives you his kiss at all times? 42
In Poem 38, it is more feminine associations that characterise Love, as she both devours and nourishes like an ancient Mother Goddess:
One you possess in your madness
So that, from within, he is utterly devoured;
Others you nourish tenderly -
Without making them yours for an instant!
… To be reduced to nothingness in Love
Is the most desirable thing I know … 43
Nevertheless, this accumulation of more specifically sexual images to describe the love experience does not mean that the old images of struggle and hand-to-hand combat have been abandoned. The difference is that now these images of battle are more suggestive of the sexual encounter. In this, Hadewijch is simply utilising a view of sexuality that has long been found in European erotic poetry. What is unusual is that earlier she had excluded this reading where images of combat instead suggested the male-bonded world of mediæval heroic and chivalric poetry. Now in this battle, the weapon employed by both Love and the lover is longing:
And if anyone then dares
to fight Love with longing,
Wholly without heart and without mind,
And Love counters this longing
with her longing:
This is the force by which we conquer Love . . .
Love cannot resist the violence of the assault:
But he shall abide firm in the storm,
conformed to Love. 44
The combat motif is taken up again in Poem 40 where the lover's wound implies penetration, but this is followed by a more nurturing image, the image of the lover drinking from Love's veins:
Love conquers him
so that he may conquer her . . .
When he experiences this sweet Love,
He is wounded with her wounds;
… He imbibes eagerly from Love's deep veins,
With continual thirst for a new beginning,
Until he enjoys sweet Love.
So for the soul things go marvellously;
While desire pours out and pleasure drinks,
The soul consumes what belongs to it in love
And sinks with frenzy in Love's fruition …
Thus is the loving soul well fed by Love alone. 45
In Poem 42, we get another extended description, one of the most sensual in Hadewijch's collection. This description is unusual, not in that it is based on the imagery of the Song of Songs - for Hadewijch quotes more from this book of the Bible than any other 46 - nor in the borrowing of a female speaking voice, but because it reproduces the gender roles of that text, where the Beloved is male and the eager lovers are female. In the usual allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, Christ is the Beloved and the Shulamite - the love-stricken young girl - represents the Church. Thus, as one would find in Hadewijch's Visions and Letters, minne can be - but is not always - assimilated to the figure of Christ. Yet Christ is never named; the Beloved is always minne. It is possible that the imagery here is intended, at least unconsciously, to suggest differences between male and female experiences of union or of orgasm.
It is your lofty name,
Like oil poured out, Love . . .
Since, Love, your name is poured out,
And since it overflows
with a flood of wonder,
The young maidens are melted away in you
And love with violent longing,
above counsel. 47
When I gave this paper the title “Knowledge, Gender and Power in Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten,” my secret agenda was to explore what difference it makes that Hadewijch makes Love a feminine being. I wondered whether the discovery that minne partook of the same gender as the poet would be empowering. I expected, on the basis of my previous study of mediæval women mystics, 48 that Love, like the poet, would turn out to be an androgynous figure. From my previous examination of Hadewijch's Letters to a Young Beguine and Visions, I was prepared to find erotic imagery used to describe the mystical union. What I have tried to demonstrate is that through her experience of minne, Hadewijch acquires knowledge of Love's way, knowledge of the Divine, as well as self-knowledge. It is this knowledge that empowers her as a poet and a spiritual teacher. From her connection with minne, I believe Hadewijch learns that her female nature does not have to be transcended, for it is already transcendent in its ability to seek love. Such transcendence, however, does not imply any denigration of the male gender; 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. Orewoet - the stormy longing that characterises the soul seeking minne - is, from one point of view, the storm of old dualities, of difference within the mind, warring for domination, and unable to do anything but find reconciliation in minne.
NOTES
1 “Ende die de minne met niede dan besteet,/ Al sonder herte ende sonder sinne,/ Ende minne dan nied met niede versleett:/ Dats cracht daer men bi minne ghewinne./ . . ./ Sine can verweren die storme heet,/ Hine wone ghelijc met hare daer binnen” (38.7.5-8 and 8.3-4).1 Paper first presented at the 25th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 10, 1990, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI.
2 Hadewijch: Strophische Gedichten, ed. Jozef van Mierlo 2 vols. (Antwerp: Standaard, 1942); translated by Mother Columba Hart in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980): pp. 123-258.
3 Hadewijch: Mengeldichten, ed. Jozef van Mierlo (Antwerp: Standaard, 1952); translated by Mother Columba Hart, op. cit. pp. 307-358.
4 Hadewijch: Brieven, ed. Jozef van Mierlo. 2 vols. (Antwerp: Standaard, 1947); translated by Mother Columba Hart, op. cit. pp. 43-121.
5 Hadewijch: Visioenen, ed. Jozef van Mierlo. 2 vols. (Louvain: Vlaamsch Boekenhall, 1924-25); translated by Mother Columba Hart, op. cit. pp. 259-305.
6 I recall only two occasions in the Strophische Gedichten where she refers to herself as a woman: “What must I, a poor woman, do?” (15.3.9) and “I expected to be a lady of her court” (21.5.3). In the first she is a poor woman because she is deprived of love, not because she is a woman; in the second she is saying that she thought she knew how Love's court worked, and now she is confused. I mention that because the modesty topos is so obvious as to be irritating in most writings by mediæval women.
7 “Hare[n] name amor es: vander doot” (2.5.4).
8 “Orewoet van minnen/ Dats een rike leen . . ./ Die tiersten waren twee/ Die doetse wesen een./ Dies ic die waerheit tonghe:/ Si maect dat soete es soer” (28.4).
9 “Wat mach hem liscap ommevaen,/ Die miine in hachten heeft inghe ghedaen/ Ende die de wijdde van minnen woude ommegaen/ Ende vri gheburken in trouwen” (17.3.1-6).
10 “Dats ene die aire scoenste hacht/ Ende ene onverwonne nuwe macht” (26.6.4-5).
11 “Want die minne nie en vervacht,/ Hine leefde nie vrie daghe” (21.5.8-9).
12 “Die minne verwint dat hise verwinne” (40.5.1).
13 “Die ghenoech der minnen rike wijet,/ Ic segge dat hi bi wike rijet” (23.4.1-2).
14 “En heeft forme, sake noch figuere;/ Doch eest inden smake alse createure;/ Hets materie miere bliscape . . .” (22.3.3-5).
15 “So seeghic dat en merke clerc/ Hoe scone het den ghenen stoede/ Die in minnen wrachte sterc werc . . ./ Hi soude in minnen oerewoede/ Verbernen in hare diepste vloede/ Ende versmelten alse caden” (23. 11.2-4, 7-9).
16 “Mijns selves en es mi bleven niet/ Ere ende raste hebbic begheven,/ Omdat ic wille leven/ Vri ende in minnen ontfaen/ Ic en machs niet ontberen, /Ic en hebbe el niet: ic moet op minne teren” (24.5.8; 24.6.4-6, 9-10).
17 “Dat sie hare all in minnen gheve”/ “Ende minne met minnen leve.”
18 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
19 “ Minne sainew wel ghessterken:/ Hi sal sijn lief ghewinnen;/ Want minne niene can/ Hare selve ontsegghen nieman, /Sine gheve hem dat si hem an/ Ende meer dan daer sine selve toe spane (6.2.7-12).
20 “Die bloyen doet die sinne.”
21 “He sal al vri ontfaen/ Dier onghehoer de macht:/He sal noch die minne dwingen/ Ende wesen al hare voghet.”
22 “Waeer vindic der minnen iet/ Mijn wederstoet die es te groet,/ Ende mi es darven der minnen een doet/ Want ic en macher ghebruken niet.”
23 “Sint ic al minnen soude,/ Wan gave si mi al minne?”
24 “Want ic hebbe so dat mine verlevet,/ Ic en hebbe el niet sine ghevet/ Ende al gave si iet, hongher blevet:/ Want ict gheheel al woude.”
25 I call them “personal” for simplicity's sake, although the historical person Hadewijch is not to be equated only with this voice.
26 “Nu sijn si in swaren bande/ Ende vreemde in haers selfs lande./ Daer dolen si in de hande/ Der vremder avonturen.”
27 “Mi smelten mine sinne/ In minnen oerwoede;/ Die afgront daer si mi in sende/ Die es dieper dan die zee;/ Want hare nuwe diepe afgronde/ Die vernuwet mi die wonde:/ Ic en sjoeke meer ghesonde/ Eer icse mi nuwe al kinne” (7.4.5-12).
28 “Si selen met minnen ane minne een cleven,/ Ende selen met minnen al minne doresien,/ Ende met haren verhoelnen aderen al tien/ In[t] conduut daer minne[n] haer minne al scincket./ Ende met minnen hare vriende al dronken drinket,/ In wondre vore haren woeden” (12.6.3-8).
29 “Alsenne der minnen strale ruren,/ So gruwelt hem dat hi levet./ In allen tiden als ruert die strale/ Meerret hi die wonde ende brenghet quale/. … / Die nied houdse open ende ongehebonden” (14.2.5-6; 3.1-2; 12.3).
30 “onder den slach.”
31 “Eertt al met al wert vereent,/ Smaect men bitteren suere.”
32 “Aldoet si hem cracht ende gheweldichede,/ Si doet hem ghenoech ende suet den bant.”
33 “Hine levet onder der sonnen/ Die der minnen g[he]noech vermoghe.”
34 “Altoes in woede hoemen minne ommeva:/ Hier en doech gheseten.”
35 “Sal mi minne bescarmen/ Ende segghen:/ dijns rouwen si keer./ Ic sal di warmen;/ Ic ben dat ic was wilen eer;/ Nu valle in minen armen/ Ende ghesmake mijn[s] rike gheleer.”
36 “Daeer sijt ghebiedet lude ende stillekine/ Want si doet met begheerten na hare haken/ Ende sonder kinnen hare wesen smaken.”
37 “Al soude mi noch begherte therte tewriven/ Ende cracht van minne node, mi en soude ontbliven,/ Ic sal noch weten wat mi trect,/ Ende dicke so onsachte wect/ Als ic mi selven in rasten soude gheriven” (22.7.3-7).
38 “Dat gherochte, dat hoghe prosent/ Der neder[r]e stillen, doet mi verdoven.”
39 “Hare nedere stille es onghehoert/ Hoe hoghe gheruchte dat si maect,/ En si allene dies hevet becoert/ Ende dien minne in hare al hevet ghesaaect,/ Dat hi hem al ghevoele in minne./ Alse sine met wondre also doresmaect,/ Cessert een ure tgheruchte daerinne;/ Ay, saen wect begherte die waect/ Met nuwen storme di inneghe sinne.”
40 “Want sie mii met harer groter crachte/ Mine nature maect so wijt,/ Dat ic mijn wesen al verpachte/ In die hoghe gheboert van haren gheslachte./ Als ic wil nemen vir delijt,/ So werpt si mi in hare hachte” (30.1.3-8)
41 “Vonnesse van minnen/ Gheet diepe binnen/ Met inneghen sinnen … Bider minnen woet/ Wert hi al gheten/ in die minne” (36.5.1-3 and 10.9-11).
42 “Waer soudi nemen vremden nijt,/ Daer ghi den ghenen met doresnijt/ Die u gheeft cussen in alle tijt?”
43 “Den selken besitti in uwe woet,/ Dat hi van binnen al wordt gheten;/ Die selke sijn sachte van u ghevoedt/ Ende sijn van u doch onbeseten!/ … ./ Te niet werden al in minnen,/ Dat es dat beste dat ic weet … ”(38.5.5-8 and 7.1-2).
44 “Ende die de minne met niede dan besteet,/ Al sonder herte ende sonder sinne,/ Ende minne dan nied met niede versleet:/ Dats cracht daer men bi minne ghewinne./ … Sine can verweren die storme heet,/ Hine wone ghelijc met hare daer binnen” (38.7.5-8 and 8.3-4).
45 “Dien minne verwint dat hise verwinne/ … / Als hi ghevjoelt die soete minne,/ Wort hi met haren wonden ghewont./ Soe werdet utermaten goet: /Begherte scept, ghenluechte drincket,/ Die fiere die dat sine in minne verdoet/ Ende met woede in hare ghebruken sincket/ … / Ende so wert die minne al minne volvoet” (40. 5.1,3-4 and 6.1-4,7).
46 Job is a close second.
47 “Het est ghelijc uwe hoghe name/ Als olye ut gheghoten, minne,/ . . ./ Dies, minne, u name es uutgheghoten,/ Ende met wonders vloede al avergaet,/ So sijn die opwassende dorevloten/ Ende minne in woede boven raet” (42.4.1-2 and 5.1-4).
48 See my introduction to Consolation of the Blessed (New York: Alta Gaia Society, 1979), soon to be reprinted by Peregrina Publishing Co.