SOURCE: Vanderauwera, Ria. “The Brabant Mystic: Hadewijch.” In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, pp. 186-203. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

In the following excerpted introduction to her selected translation of Hadewijch's writing, Vanderauwera summarizes the content and critical history of Hadewijch's literary works, as well as her status as the representative Dutch mystic writer of the thirteenth century.

Of Hadewijch, we know only her name, texts (poetry and prose), and a few scattered references. Nonetheless we recognize her as one of the foremost representatives of early minnemystiek, a brand of mysticism to which women made an especially impressive contribution in the thirteenth century. We possess three complete manuscripts of her works, parts of her work in a recently discovered codex, and a few smaller fragments.¹ The three complete manuscripts contain thirty-one letters, forty-five stanzaic poems, fourteen visions, and twenty-nine poems mostly in rhyming couplets (one...