SOURCE: Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. “Gender, Knowledge, and Power in Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten.” In Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, pp. 182-203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Petroff studies Hadewijch's representation of desire and gender reconciled through love in her Strofische Gedichten.

Hadewijch's Strophische Gedichten¹ is a collection of poems on the theme of Minne, or Lady Love. In these sophisticated and confident lyrics, the great Dutch mystic and poet re-creates some of the themes, images, and metrical forms of the Provençal love lyric to explore the experience of Minne. She is a very great poet:

[T]he gift for poetry she displays in the Poems in Stanzas can only be termed lyrical genius. … Her poems themselves are proof that she had mastered the troubadours' art. It has been said that just as Bernard of Clairvaux used the Song of Songs to...