SOURCE: Murk-Jansen, Saskia M. “The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch.” In Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, pp. 52-68. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

In the following essay, Murk-Jansen explores Hadewijch's use of gender reversal and gendered imagery to create a language of God oriented toward a female audience.

Images are multivalent, and none more so than images of gender, which not only reflect a multiplicity of meanings to any one reader but also mean different things to men and women. Furthermore, gender-related images are not always primarily, or even at all, about gender, about the differing roles of women and men apparently reflected by the image.¹ In this respect, Ricoeur's theory of imagery is a more satisfying explanation of the way in which gender images function than that put forward by those who see symbols and images as...