SOURCE: Murk-Jansen, Saskia. “Hadewijch and Eckhart: Amor intellegere est.” In Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, edited by Bernard McGinn, pp. 17-30. New York: Continuum, 1994.

In the following essay, Murk-Jansen traces thematic affinities between Hadewijch's works and those of German theologian Meister Eckhart.

Academics today may be forgiven for wondering why so little attention has been paid to the question of influence between Hadewijch and Eckhart, or at least to the possibility of common themes in their work. Hadewijch, after all, was writing around the middle of the thirteenth century in an area that was geographically and linguistically not very far removed from Eckhart's own, half a century or so later. The manuscripts of her works were known to ecclesiastic scholars in the fourteenth century although not very widely disseminated, certainly not compared for example to those of Marguerite...