9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 18 :: Jane Potthast on Hadewijch of Antwerp

Little is said of the Beguine women’s movement and its poetry. Rebels, feminists, and exiles — and still I have yet to meet someone who recognizes the word. Perhaps obscurity is a natural outcome for women who choose exile over submission. Perhaps 700 years from now a young scholar will write an essay on my 21st century self-exile (or today, self-quarantine) and search for a place, both physical and spiritual, safe from the forces that govern 2020.

The Beguines were a women’s movement that started in the thirteenth century Europe, in a time where the church reigned supreme. Women had two choices: to marry or become a nun. To be married was to stay in the house, subjugated to a husband’s will. The alternative, a convent, was not so different. In a convent, women were still under the authority of a priest, and like the married women who could not leave the home, nuns were not allowed outside the walls of the cloisters.

Then there came a third way: radical women, who wanted to lead a life of devotion unrestrained by cultural demands, started to form female communities. Known as Beguines, these women sought to live a holy life without allegiance to any recognized order or male authority. Unlike nuns, they did not remain apart but allowed themselves to come and go in the world, with women-only convent style living. This refusal to come under male authority was a threat, which in turn banished them to societal exile and accusations of heresy. Still, this did not stop the communities from flourishing.

Many Beguines were highly educated, talented writers and as such are the originators of what is known as Love-Mysticism literature — a poetic style, theology, and spiritual practice in which God is seen as the divine lover from whom one seeks a perfect union. The aim of Love-Mysticism is that the soul is wholly immersed in the divine love of God. What is so commendable is that though mysticism is characteristic of the Beguines, these women did not hide themselves away in search of union with the divine, but dedicated themselves to the care of the sick and the poor. They sought to live out their mystic ideals through service. It is from this that their poetry flows, and they are credited with some of the finest and most beautiful of mystic poetry.

Among the Beguine writers, a Dutch woman named Hadewijch stands out as a poet of exceptional skill. Little is known of her life, and the proposed reasons surrounding this lack of biography suggest exile in some form: familial rejection, hiding her whereabouts when marriage by rape or kidnap was common, or that she was a troubadour who left her teachers to lead a group of like-minded women.[1] Regardless, her poetry shows an unusual degree of literary education for a woman of that time, and is it this knowledge that informs her verses: popular convention was the French love lyric, portraying the perspective of the adventurous man who seeks to win an noble but ‘difficult’ and passive lady.

Hadewijch uses the same tropes and structure of these conventions but refers to herself as the male lover, attributing to God the female gender and the unpredictable lady who she strives to win. Naturally, this was radical for 13th century Europe. In choosing a life of service and exile as a Beguine, she had already placed herself outside of society’s myth of courtly love in which good women do not act. She then utilized the poetic style of this myth to represent the paradoxical reverses of the mystic life, simultaneously exploiting and subverting it.[2] Some of her most beautiful verses are in this tradition.

Forever to be in unrest,

Forever assault and new persecutions

To be wholly devoured and wholly engulfed

In Her (Love’s) unfathomable nature,

To founder in incandescence and in cold every hour

In the deep high darkness of Love

(Poem in Couplets 16)

You are mean and noble,

Soft as a lamb, and savage

As untamed wild animals

In the desert, without moderation.

(Mengeldicht 28)

However, Hadewijch was not limited to this male-female reversal. She enacts linguistic gender shifts throughout her texts, sometimes within the same poem, and always within the context of her relationship with her lover. The point is not that she changes pronouns fluidly, but that these gender reversals had a higher end than her identity; no matter how she speaks of herself, she always speaks of herself in relation to the one she loves, her God. Gender is a mode of expression through which she comes to understand union with divine love, not an end in itself.

What her poems achieve then, are both patriarchal disruption and an invitation to mystic contemplation. I find it arresting when a poet can both use and transcend political cause — she is not limited to an activist’s agenda because her aim is formed by the mystic’s characteristic desire: to be united with love:

O love, were I love

And with love to love you, love,

O love, for love grant that love

May know love wholly as love

(Poem in Couplets 15)

With the power of love

thought must

from herself

be wrest,

and forcibly turned

to the transcendent

There she will be led

purged, enlarged

in obscure ways

and be raised up

into a noble existence

as the triumph of grace.

(Mengeldicht 18)

Mystics of all cultures direct that it is not until we learn to love and encounter the source of Love, that we come to know and love ourselves and others. They teach that it is from relational love encounter that service and identity flow. Hadewijch is a poet who is engaged in the complexities of love, seeking both self-actualization in a repressive society, but primarily union with a love greater than herself or politics. As such, she could take a feminist stand without the spiritual limitations of an agenda. This is why Hadewijch fascinates me; she is a poet who loved something so infinite and beyond herself that she gave her life to serve it, and, if her poems ring true, she found it:

And that kiss will be with one single mouth,

And to fathom the one single ground,

And with a single gaze to understand all,

That is, and was, and shall be.

(Poem in Couplets 12)

[1] Saskia Murk-Jansen, Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines (Eugene: Wipf & Stock), p. 70.

[2] Murk-Jansen, pp. 45, 51.

Jane Potthast is a writer, entrepreneur, autism therapist, and Ars Poetica poet based in Washington, DC. Jane has a B.A. and M.A. in comparative literature from Goldsmiths, University of London, and begins her studies in Divinity at Yale in September 2020. She will likely channel the divine through her work, and repents often for spilling gin on her Bible.

You can find some of Jane’s other work on Anthrowcircus.com.