Hadewijch

Hadewijch (13th Century) is, along with Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete, one of the best-known of the Beguines, a thirteenth-century women’s religious movement. Mostly well-educated, from among the aristocratic and emergent bourgeois classes, the Beguines gave up their families to live communal lives of poverty and celibacy. Because they did not follow a specifice order, however, they were treated with suspicion—as Free Spirits, or what the philosopher Simon Critchley calls “mystical anarchists.” Hadewijch is considered one of the great poets of the Dutch language.