Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Loving and Knowing

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 no...