Beguine Mystics
The lay women's mystical movement that flourished in the thirteenth-century Low Countries and Saxony — distinct from cloistered Dominican mysticism but parallel in its apophatic-bridal theology, and recognized in scholarship as a significant precedent to the Rhineland school. Project translations on /sources/: Mechthild von Magdeburg's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (all seven books); Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Manners of Holy Love (the earliest surviving Middle Dutch mystical prose); Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls (complete in 15 sections; the work for which Marguerite was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310); and the complete Hadewijch project — Visioenen (six sections, Visions 1–14 + the Lijst der volmaakten), Strofische Gedichten (nine sections, all 45 Songs), Mengeldichten (six sections, Hadewijch-authentic Poems I–XVII plus the Hadewijch II school appendix XVIII–XXXII), and Brieven (ten sections, all 31 prose-Letters). See /about/translations/ for the project-translation methodology.
Source context· Greco-Christian stream · Greco-Latin cultural age
- Stream
- Greco-Christian
- Cultural age
- Greco-Latin (4th post-Atlantean cultural age)
- Composed
- c. 1260 CE
The Visions of Hadewijch
Hadewijch's Visions: Sections I–VI complete; project translation of the entire Visioenen is shipped.
6 sections · 27,035 words
Read →The Strofische Gedichten (Stanzaic Poems) of Hadewijch
Hadewijch's forty-five Stanzaic Poems (Strofische Gedichten, also called Liederen — Songs) are the lyric peak of Middle Dutch courtly-Minne poetry: the troubadour and Minnesang forms turned to the divine, the Beloved being God / Christ, the fier (proud, noble) lover the soul.
9 sections · 30,149 words
Read →The Mengeldichten (Mixed Poems) of Hadewijch
Hadewijch's Mengeldichten ('Mixed Poems') are her didactic verse corpus — sixteen poems by Hadewijch herself, with a further group (Poems XVII-XXIX) traditionally attributed to a slightly later writer called 'Hadewijch II' in the Hadewijch-school tradition.
6 sections · 20,964 words
Read →The Brieven (Letters) of Hadewijch
Hadewijch's Brieven — her thirty-one prose-Letters, addressed to one or more younger Beguines under her direction.
10 sections · 39,025 words
Read →The Mirror of Simple Souls
Marguerite Porete (c. 1250–1310), the Beguine of Hainaut who was burned alive in Paris on June 1, 1310 for refusing to recant or withdraw her book — the only medieval mystical writer condemned to death by name for the contents of a treatise still extant.
15 sections · 54,181 words
Read →Of the Seven Manners of Holy Love
Beatrice of Nazareth (c. 1200–1268), Cistercian nun and prioress of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Nazareth near Lier in the Duchy of Brabant.
1 sections · 5,252 words
Read →The Flowing Light of the Godhead — Books I-VII (complete)
Mechthild von Magdeburg (c. 1207–1282), the Beguine visionary whose Das fließende Licht der Gottheit is the first vernacular mystical work in German.
7 sections · 102,134 words
Read →JSON: /api/sources/beguine-mystics/index.json · Back to Sources.