FLUIDITY IN STILLNESS: A READING OF HADEWIJCH'S STROFISCHE GEDICHTEN/POEMS IN STANZAS

Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 179-211
Author(s):  
ANITA MIR

That women felt and men thought has long been the predominant lens through which medieval Christian writing has been analyzed. The work of the religious women vernacular theologians, or Beguines, who emerged across North Europe from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries has therefore often been dismissed as affective mysticism. Recent scholarship has begun to re-appraise this work and re-evaluate its place within the Christian tradition. This paper looks at the work of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century mystical poet from Brabant in the Netherlands who, though less well known than other Beguines such as Hildegaard of Bingen and Marguerite Porete, may, as John Arblaster and Paul Verdeyen argue, “rightly be called the greatest poetic genius in the Dutch language.” It is probable that her work was not widely known during her lifetime (not, that is, directly), but research is strengthening the argument that her theology was transmitted via the works of John of Ruusbroec. This paper will attend both to Hadewijch's poesy and her theology and ask what the dynamic structure in her verse — its shifts of perspective, gender perspective, and non-linear narrative — might lead us to grasp about her theology.

2010 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Marin

In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.”1 They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.”2 In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.”3 Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines.4 Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.”5 He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.”6 Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls.7 It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hollender

AbstractBased on Ivan Marcus’s concept of “open book” and considerations on medieval Ashkenazic concepts of authorship, the present article inquires into the circumstances surrounding the production of SeferArugat ha-Bosem, a collection of piyyut commentaries written or compiled by the thirteenth-century scholar Abraham b. Azriel. Unlike all other piyyut commentators, Abraham ben Azriel inscribed his name into his commentary and claims to supersede previous commentaries, asserting authorship and authority. Based on the two different versions preserved in MS Vatican 301 and MS Merzbacher 95 (Frankfurt fol. 16), already in 1939 Ephraim E. Urbach suggested that Abraham b. Azriel might have written more than one edition of his piyyut commentaries. The present reevaluation considers recent scholarship on concepts of authorship and “open genre” as well as new research into piyyut commentary. To facilitate a comparison with Marcus’s definition of “open book,” this article also explores the arrangement and rearrangement of small blocks of texts within a work.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-50
Author(s):  
Maggy Wishaupt

Probably only about 5% of books published in the Netherlands are art books. There is a very limited demand for art books in the Dutch language; in order to sell in greater numbers, books have to be produced in English or in several languages, and/or as co-editions, while the domestic market is flooded by foreign imports including cheap remainders. In these circumstances the publication of art books depends on grants or on the income which some publishers earn from bookselling, printing, or other activities. Nonetheless a few, small, specialist publishers are producing art books of high quality, while some general publishers also publish the occasional art book. Museum publishing activities are considerable but are largely confined to exhibition catalogues.


1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
J. A. Le Loux-Schuringa

Summary In this paper some theories on tenses are described. These theories appeared in the Netherlands in the first half of the 19th century. The purpose is not just describing the different tense-systems of P. Weiland (1805), W. Bilderdijk (1826), W. G. Brill (1846) and L. A. te Winkel (1866). In the first half of the 19th century some fundamental changes took place. It is shown that these changes are based upon continuity of research of time and tense in the Dutch tradition. This continuity is found on three levels: (a) The research was concentrated on the verbal forms, no other information from the sentence was used. (b) The grammarians took the relationship between linguistic forms and logical categories as a one-to-one relation. (c) The morphological form of the Dutch language determined the grammatical representation of the tense-systems more and more.


2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Jacques Van Keymeulen

Abstract Digital tools for dialectology at the Ghent UniversityTill the year 2000, all professors of Dutch Linguistics at Ghent University were professional dialectologists, who were at pains to carefully document the dialects of Dutch speaking Belgium. These efforts resulted in large collections of dialect data. During the last decade, all collections were digitized and made available in open access to a large audience. In this article, we will in short present both already available databases (and the accompanying tools) and the projects in progress. Eventually, all Ghent dialect databases will be hosted and cared for by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Institute for the Dutch Language) at Leiden (The Netherlands).


Author(s):  
Johannes A. de Waal ◽  
Mathijs W. Schouten

Abstract. At the start of gas production its effects on land subsidence are not certain. There are uncertainties in mechanisms, models and parameters. Examples are non-linear deformation of reservoir rock, fault transmissibility, behaviour of overlaying salt and aquifer activity. Looking back at historical cases in the Netherlands, a factor two or three difference between initial prediction and final outcome is quite common. As the Dutch regulator, SSM is tasked with assuring proper management by operators of the risks associated with land subsidence from natural gas production in The Netherlands. Large initial uncertainties can only be tolerated if operators can demonstrate that timely actions can still be taken when predefined subsidence limits are at risk of being exceeded now or in the future. The applied regulatory approach is illustrated by the case history of gas production induced subsidence in the Dutch Wadden Sea area. This environmentally highly sensitive UNESCO World Heritage Site is a natural gas province. Extensive legal, technical and organisational frameworks are in place to prevent damage to its natural values. Initial uncertainties in the predicted subsidence (rate) were later exacerbated by the detection of strong non-linear effects in the observed subsidence behaviour, leading to new concerns. It was realised that – depending on the underlying physical cause(s) – there will be a different impact on future subsidence. To assure proper management of the additional uncertainty by the operator, several improvements in the regulatory approach have been implemented. Possible underlying mechanisms had to be studied in depth and improved data analysis techniques were requested to narrow down uncertainties as time progresses. The approach involves intensified field monitoring, scenario's covering the full range of uncertainties and a particle filter approach to handle uncertainties in predictions and measurements. Spatial-temporal double differences, production data and the full covariance matrix are used to confront scenario predictions against measurements and to assess their relative probability. The regulator is actively involved in assuring this integrated control loop of predictions, monitoring, updating, mitigation measures and the closing of knowledge gaps. The regulator involvement is supported in the Mining law and by appropriate conditions in the production plan assent. With the approach it can be confidently assured that subsidence (rate) will remain within the allowed range.


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUZANNAH CLARK

Abstract.The texts of thirteenth-century vernacular motets have held centre stage in many recent debates about this polytextual genre: the purported unintelligibility of the words in performance has led to questions about how motets were meant to be understood, especially by third-party listeners, both medieval and modern. The irony is that the purpose of the music has gone unheard in this debate. Using a single motet as point of focus, this article suggests various ways in which the music clarifies rather than obscures the meaning of the text in performance. These range from the use of simple musical devices, such as musical repetition or changes in texture that draw attention to significant moments in the text, to the exploitation of refrain melodies, which I argue carries out an ‘intersonic’ duty that serves as an interpretive companion to the more traditional ‘intertextual’ readings of recent scholarship.


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