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Hadewijch, a Flemish Beguine of the 13th century, is undoubtedly the most important exponent of love mysticism and one of the loftiest figures in the western mystical tradition.
Hadewijch, c. 1210-160, commands increasing attention internationally. As an author, she is extremely creative and artistic. As a beguine, she belongs to a revolutionary women's movement formed by religious women who, conscious of their gender, did not wish to enter into either marriage or a convent. Spiritually and materially independent, these first beguines come into conflict with social order, and endure the reaction of clerics, religious and secular authorities, and those in orders. As a mystic, Hadewijch illuminates both the glorious aspects of the love-relationship with God and its painful aspect: with the enjoyment of love (minne) goes an increasingly intense desire; in unity, the alterity of the Beloved becomes all the stronger. Consequently, union with God is not a spiritual elevation by which a person is released from his or her being human: the authentic mystical being-one consists rather of the interplay between resting in God and working in this world, between being God with God and being man with the Man (Christ). You must live as a human being! - this is the kernel of Hadewijch's life and teaching.
The Stanzaic Poems, written by Hadewijch of Antwerp in the 13th century, are a body of 45 lyrical poems in stanzas. They are daring God-talk in the guise of courtly love songs. Hadewijch uses the linguistic style of chivalry but her poems are by no means courtly poetry. She shifts the current meaning of chivalry by transferring its context to a field of meaning focused on God. Because of the view of Minne (=love) that is embodied in them, the Stanzaic Poems are an exponent of the age old tradition of women's songs - of which the Song of Songs is the best known example - and as such they are an expression of a particular manner of keeping company with God: they celebrate a relationship of mutuality between partners equivalent in love. An introductory essay highlights some of the striking points of lovers: the raging desire of 'orewoet': the gentility of humankind's origin. This essay is followed by a rendering of the Stanzaic Poems from Middle-Dutch into Modern English prose. With an introduction by Edward Schillebeeckx.
The great German mystic Meister Eckhart remains one of the most fascinating figures in Western thought. Revived interest in Eckhart's mysticism has been matched, and even surpassed, by the study of the women mystics of the late13th century. This book argues that Eckhart's thought cannot be fully be understood until it is viewed against the background of the breakthroughs made by the women mystics who preceded him.
Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century woman, describes her relationship with God as a mutual loving in which God and she affect each other personally and profoundly. This book presents in detail the account by Hadewijch of this supreme and most satisfying experience. Presented here are phenomenologically specific traits of the bodily knowing that Hadewijch and other women of her time and place prized in their devotion to Christ and his saints. The opposition to the traditional Western ideal and norm is evident. In prizing embodied mutuality, Hadewijch has learned from Bernard of Clairvaux, but sees much more.
This first book-length study of Marguerite Porete's important mystical text, The Mirror of Simple Souls, examines Porete's esoteric and optimistic doctrine of annihilation—the complete transformative union of the soul into God—in its philosophical and historical contexts. Porete was burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1310. Her theological treatise survived the flames, but it circulated anonymously or under male pseudonyms until 1946, and her message endures as testament to a distinctive form of medieval spirituality. Robinson begins by focusing on traditional speculations regarding the origin, nature, limitations, and destiny of humankind. She then examines Porete's work in its more immediate historical and literary contexts, focusing on the ways in which Porete conceptualizes and expresses her radical doctrine of annihilation through contemporary metaphors of lineage and nobility.
This book, focusing on the lives and writings of five women mystics, shows that, contrary to the modern idea that the supposed inferiority of women is an inheritance from Christianity, women have played a fundamental role in the Church. If the Church was able to pass beyond the collapse of medieval scholasticism and the errors of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, it was especially due to a succession of exceptional feminine personalities.
In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.