1

Secret Song and Music in

the Visions of Hadewijch
of Antwerp
Laurence Wuidar

Introduction
If we talk about music and women before the seventeenth century, the phe-
nomenon of women as visionaries might be considered to lie at the margins of
musicological research but not at those of musical phenomena in pre-modern
European societies.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of music was dominated
by a three-way Boethian split: to say music was to say “musica mundana”
to mean all kinds of created music from the celestial ones to the rhythms of
the seasons; “musica humana” to mean the harmony of the body, of the soul,
and of their parts; and “musica instrumentalis” to mean instrumental or vocal
music. Music is therefore both sonorous (instrumental and vocal) and silent
in its human and celestial dimensions, respectively. These dimensions include
phenomena that remain largely on the fringes of musicological studies: mysti-
cal and prophetic musical visions. Hearing celestial realities, angelic or divine,
is perceived at times by the ear of the soul and at others by the ear of the
body of an individual, usually during ecstasy. It is a type of musical experience
transmitted via first- or third-person narratives. A large part of these texts are
works—treatises, visions, letters—composed by women (Hildegard of Bingen
[1098–1179] being the most famous).1
Mystical and prophetic musical visions represent a mode of expression
favored by women in pre-modern European societies, beginning with the
renaissance of the twelfth century. This expressive mode, in many respects, can
be generically defined as mystical literature. The term “mystical” is understood
in this context with Thomas Aquinas’s definition, which distinguishes between
the rational and speculative understanding of God and its experimental and
affective understanding (the cognitio Dei experimentalis).2 Mystical literature
deals with the latter, thereby performing the delicate work of translating expe-
rience into words and of translating affect into rational speech. This delicate
work resembles that of a music critic or a musicologist, who translates musi-
cal experience into words, sheet music into speech, and musical affect into
reasoned language. Mystical literature contains stories of divine experience,
such as a dialogue between the individual and the divinity or vision. Within
4 Laurence Wuidar
this literature, the number of women is not inconsiderable, from Hildegard to
Teresa of Avila (1515–82). The genre of mystical writing offers a space where
women write more or less freely (although censorship was always lurking)
and more or less directly. Many women, for various reasons, dictated their dia-
logues and visions to a brother, a father, or a male representative of the clergy.
From the south to the north of Europe, women—Franciscans and Dominicans,
Benedictines and Beguines—wrote of their experience in search of the divine,
in expectation of union, after the model of the Song of Songs; an experience
of dialogue between the soul and God, after the model of Moses; or a vision-
ary experience leading to an understanding of a suprarational knowledge, after
the model of the apocalyptic visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelations.
From the time of the visions of Saint John, which form the basis of visionary
experience, music has held a particular place and has appeared in many ways
in mystical literature.3 This literature provides a place of privileged expression
for the study of the relationship between woman and music. This approach
complements musicological studies, taking into account various other aspects
of musical phenomena, from their linguistic structure to their socio-cultural
context. It demonstrates for example questions such as the significance of
music and its connection with gnoseology and verbal language and indicates
how the consciousness of an intimate link between music and the ineffable
belongs to Western culture well before its aesthetic formalization and musi-
cological theorization. To take on theological literature, especially mystical
literature, is akin to an archeology of musicological knowledge.
The Visions of Hadewijch (†1248), who was probably a Beguine, offer a
precursor to vernacular-language theology and can provide an example of her
relationship with music even if that relationship has been more generally con-
sidered through the study of her Poems in Stanzas.4 The melodies of the poetry
of Hadewijch, a figure who is attracting growing interest,5 help us to ponder the
practical aspect of her 45 Poems in Stanzas6 or the reception of her 14 visions
(c. 1240) in the work of such contemporary composers as Louis Andriessen.7
But it is not these aspects that will occupy us here. Hadewijch’s Visions speak
about another music, a music heard by an individual from inside the secret
space of her auditive interior vision.8

The Foundations
The origins of a musical conception of the heavens are numerous, from the
Pythagorean and Platonic traditions to their Christianization. The Fathers of
the Church who interpreted the Hebrew tradition of the Old Testament had
formed an image of the singing heavens from the choir of angels evoked by
the triple Sanctus in the Book of Isaiah (6:3) to the firmament celebrating the
Creator with a hymn—part of the great symphony of the creation praising the
source of every creature mentioned in Psalm 148. Saint Ambrose of Milan
traces the genealogy of those who affirmed universal harmony: David situ-
ated the heavenly hosts singing praises to God in heaven, and following the
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 5
model of David, philosophers described the harmony of the spheres, producing
a music overtaking the sweetness of all terrestrial music.9 Ambrose, however,
noted the impossibility of the human ear to hear these concerts, whether they
be the angelic or the planetary. It is therefore impossible to have access to
these two realities; the senses cannot apprehend them because they exceed
their abilities. Ambrose reviews the different theses on the human incapacity to
hear the music of the heavens: for some authors, the ear becomes accustomed
to the sounds of the celestial spheres and can no longer identify them, while
for others, if the ear could perceive such a beauty, humans would forget their
duties and obligations and remain ecstatic.
This tradition of the inaudibility and sublimity of the music of the spheres
encounters another tradition that corresponds with another celestial music: the
one of the angels evoked above in reference to the Book of Isaiah and the Book
of Revelations. With their theme and place common to both the Jewish and the
Christian traditions, visions are found in both the Old and New Testaments,
theorized by theologians of the two first monotheistic religions before being
formalized by Scholasticism.10 Visions consist sometimes of images, some-
times of voices, sometimes of music such as the 24 old men playing musical
instruments or singing a new song (Rev. 5:8–11).
On these foundations, among the people dear to God, some will receive the
gift of the vision, which becomes a sign of being chosen. This sign, sometimes
a musical one, signifies that the individual is welcomed to heaven (vision of the
angelic choir at the moment of death) and sometimes that the person is chosen
by God to receive a message. It thereby becomes a hagiographic topic, such
as in the Legenda aurea (c. 1260), in which the Dominican Jacobus da Vara-
gine fills the lives of saints with musical visions. For example, he attributes to
Mary Magdalene daily musical visions experienced during ecstasy that take
her to the choir of angels. The great era of visionary musical narratives is situ-
ated in this time period. Beginning with Hildegard, musical visions become an
integral part of monastic tradition (one thinks of the famous example of Saint
Francis’s vision of the musician angel).11
From Flanders to Italy, it is essentially women who receive these visions,
who transcribe them, or, usually, have them transcribed. Space does not allow
an answer to the question of whether the women, by choice or by necessity,
preferred to illustrate their knowledge and transmit their ideas through the
visionary form. By definition, they functioned outside of the scholastic frame
of mind, outside of the universities, and outside of a certain form of knowledge
and its modalities of expression in defined structures (the summa or the debate).
Did the visionary form represent one of the rare forms in which women could
express themselves? Or may it even represent a defense at a time when mystics
could be the target of the Inquisition?12 Maybe. Visionary knowledge being
received by God and its transmission authorized by diverse authorities, always
a male authority, all the way up to, sometimes, the Pope, offered women a
safety net. Were the visions a form of literary refuge for women? While on the
one hand this is an open question, on the other, analyzing several examples
6 Laurence Wuidar
of musical visions allows us to deepen the very idea of music in pre-modern
societies from the angle of musicology.
The question is not to find out whether women had access to musical educa-
tion in the Middle Ages, nor if they participated in musical performance, nor if
they composed and in what form. These musicological questions were touched
upon in the Quadrivium and in university teaching, in the world of the trou-
badours, and in music for the Church, each of them having to do with math-
ematical rules of musical science and with music for the senses.13 Visionary
literature displaces these pursuits and thereby opens up other musical angles.
The importance of the musical phenomenon in its sensual and spiritual dou-
ble nature is emphasized by the Fathers of the Church. In his Confessions,
Saint Augustine analyzes, on the one hand, the effect of music on body and
soul (thus its pastoral and moral consequences) as well as the impossibility for
reason to state the essence of music; on the other, the effect and the gnoseo-
logical, even revelatory, significance of an extrasensory music (we recall that a
divine song descended in his soul).14 In visionary narratives, the second aspect
is envisioned, often exclusively, to perceive music as an extrasensory element.
Hadewijch is no exception.

The Voice
Music appears in several ways in Hadewijch’s visions. The instruments resound
first, serving as an image to describe the power of the celestial voice. This
musical analogy illustrates the source of a new understanding that is rationally
and sensually inaccessible, touching realities deemed impenetrable:

When the Angel had struck thus with his wings and caused silence, he
emitted a voice like thunder or like the mighty trumpet with which the
highest command is commanded. And then he said: “All you who have
been brought to a standstill in your service, and all you who, having been
served thereby, appeared, be herewith witnesses to me of what I shall
reveal to this soul, who is in wonder and fear of you that stand here!”
At that instant I was encompassed in his wings and in the midst of his
kingdom that was himself. Then he said to me: “You, unknown to all your
friends and to all your enemies! You, ever loved as I myself! Choose now
one of the two heavens you saw as kingdoms!” Then I sank into him as
encompassed by a sweet new fidelity that was full of knowledge with the
taste of veritable Love.15

Hadewijch constructs her vision after the model of Saint John’s apocalyptic
one—“I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice
like a trumpet”16—and she develops contrasts between silence and sound. The
fiery angel strikes his wings seven times to be heard by the heavens: the moon
stops in its course to obey the order of silence followed by the sun, the stars, the
hosts of paradise, the crystalline heavens, the saints, and the angels.17 All obey
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 7
the angel, stop, and remain silent—or stop and therefore quiet their celestial
music all the same, the sound of the celestial spheres being a result of their
movement—to bear silent witness to the message received by Hadewijch. The
horns or trumpets represent a first allegorical level where the instrument, by the
power of its sound, serves as an image of the power of the voice to complete a
picture of contrasts: a thunderous voice orders the silence, the implicit music of
the spheres, the choir of saints and of angels ceases, the heavenly hosts become
immobile and fall silent. They all look at the individual in a state of stupor and
trembling. The vision is anything but silent, however; even if it takes place in
the secret space of the interior being, it apprehends a sonorous universe made
of noise and thunder.18
The voice also signifies a primal element of origin. Like the human voice
as the origin of all music and the first instrument, according to Hadewijch,
the primal voice becomes synonymous with divinity. To say “voice” is to say
“God,” which is enough to illustrate the importance of the voice, and from that
the importance of song in Hadewijch’s visionary imagination. In Vision 10, she
writes: “The Voice embraced me with an unheard-of wonder, and I swooned in
it, and my spirit failed me to see or hear more.”19 To no longer be able to see nor
hear, such is the condition of the one who experiences the divine embrace. An
embrace that is one of a voice whose quality cancels the hearing and represents
the gift given to the soul that has joined its original principle: “She shall see her
repose, and the voice of power shall be wholly hers.”20

Music: Sign of Fear and Celebration

A second mention of a brass instrument is found in Vision 9:

Before the queen walked three maidens. One had on a red cloak of state
and carried two trumpets in her hands; and she blew on one of them and
said: “Whoever does not hearken to my Lady will be eternally deaf to hap-
piness and nevermore hear or see the highest melody and the wonder of
powerful Love.” And the other trumpet sang and said: “Whoever flies and
goes the ways my Lady loves shall be powerful in the kingdom of Love.”21

The queen, allegory of Reason, resembles the figure in Revelations who wears
a dress full of eyes.22 She is an omniscient divine figure: her eyes penetrate
everything, a sign of an awareness synonymous with clear, piercing, and trans-
parent vision capable of seeing beyond the opacity of existence to gather the
essence. She is accompanied by three followers: the first (Sacred Fear) holds
two trumpets, the second (Discernment) two palm leaves, and the third (Wis-
dom) a lantern.
The role of the first musical element is to transmit the speech of Sacred
Fear. The first maiden threatens or promises with the sound of the trumpet.
Her function is to invite the queen to listen, and she does it with the most
powerful sound she can. The temporal primacy of listening—starting with fede
8 Laurence Wuidar
ex auditu—and hearing over sight, typical of Christianity, is established by
the order of the maidens. First the trumpets, then the view represented by the
third maiden dressed in black holding a lantern in daylight. The second maiden
dressed in green, protects the queen from the dust of days and nights with two
palms. The three maidens each present an opposition: beatitude and hell, day
and night, abyss and ascent.
The second musical element is found in the message of the maiden with the
trumpets. It associates eternal beatitude with “the highest of melodies” and
with seeing all-powerful love; in the spiritual domain, the two higher senses
are equivalent. The goal of the believer is thereby represented with a musi-
cal metaphor. Beyond the signaling function of trumpets conveying important
words and inviting listening, music represents the concept of eternal beatitude
that neither the imagination nor reason can grasp. As Gregory of Nyssa pointed
out, eternal beatitude as eschatological reunification with divinity—this union
of which mystics have a temporal foretaste—is unimaginable because it over-
takes reason and imagination.23 The musical metaphor “the highest of melo-
dies” illustrates that which escapes the faculties of the soul, going beyond via
the representative power of music. It is not the imitative capacity of music
but of its potential representation that makes the musical metaphor a tool of
knowledge.
Vision 11 brings in a new musical analogy:

There I saw a very deep whirlpool, wide and exceedingly dark; in this
abyss all beings were included, crowded together, and compressed. The
darkness illuminated and penetrated everything. . . . In it I saw the Lamb
(cf. Rev. 5:6) take possession of our Beloved. In the vast space I saw fes-
tivities, such as David playing the harp, and he struck the harp strings.
Then I perceived an Infant being born in the souls who love in secret, the
souls hidden from their own eyes in the deep abyss of which I speak.24

This abyss simultaneously represents the depths of the soul dear to mystics
of the Rhine and the most intimate place of Trinitarian life, where the Father
begets the Son in the meeting place of humanity and divinity as well as the
place where everything is eternal in eternity.
In this abyss, Hadewijch sees three divine realities that are not as disparate
as they may seem at first: the Lamb taking the Beloved, David playing his
instrument, and the Infant being born in the souls. The Lamb of the Revelations
and the Beloved of the Song of Songs, David and the music accompanying the
celebrations of joy in the Old Testament,25 as well as the generation of the Son
in the souls—all three connect the prefiguration of Christ as David, the birth
of Christ in the soul (a theme from the Greek Fathers reclaimed by Rhineland
mysticism), and the vision of Revelations. In this ensemble, music, the middle
element, is a sign of joy and shows celebration during a daily “Christmas” of
the soul as well as in the future.
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 9
In Visions 4, 9, and 11, music essentially plays a signaletic role: it is a sign
of celebration or a sounding sign of warning; it is a sign of union in the cel-
ebration and of future separation in it (those who are chosen/those who are
damned). It is not the same in Vision 13, which is situated around song and
lends it depth of meaning.

Seraphic Praise
There I saw and heard how the songs of praise resounded, which come from the
silent love humility conceals. . . . There I saw and heard how the songs of praise
resounded and adorned the Love of all loves. In this hour was revealed to me a
new heaven (Rev. 21:1), which never appeared to me before, and the Allelujah
song of the Seraphim. And one Seraph cried with a loud voice and said: “See
here the new secret heaven, which is closed to all those who never were God’s
mother with perfect motherhood.”26

In just a few lines, the sound dimension of the vision runs the gamut from
silence to high volume. From the outset, a song emanates from silent love,
bringing together opposites—silence/sound—that do not cancel each other out
in the spiritual domain. And this love is decorated with song. The angels sing
“Allelujah,”27 the new heaven opens for Hadewijch, and an angel breaks away
from the choir to declare: “See here the new heaven.” This is a like a well-
paced set design that seeks to render the aural and visual dimensions of the
vision. Indeed, the musical vision can be compared to a medieval drama: the
designs in the exterior scenes mirror what happens in the visionary’s interior
scenes.
Finally, the new heaven opens at the moment of the “Allelujah” of the choir
of angels, and silent love gives itself to the soul, having engendered in it this
same love. The phrase “closed to all those who never were God’s mother with
perfect motherhood” echoes “I perceived an Infant being born in the souls who
love in secret” of Vision 11 and expresses the patristic idea of the generation
of the Son in the soul. What Origen said in his commentary on the psalms
Hadewijch says in her visions. For example, in his commentary on Psalm
84:12, the Greek Father of the Church, universalized the Incarnation: Mary is
each individual who is ready to bear the Son. Hadewijch takes this idea and
accentuates the necessary temporality of the bearing of the Son (the gestation
period of the child).
Hadewijch’s vision offers a perspective of salvation linked to continual
incarnation and invites us to a daily conversion: the conversion of the gaze. To
transform the gaze is to be able to see the new heaven and the new earth—not
from the point of view of the corruption of beings but of their eternity.

After the song and after this voice, the new heaven was opened. There
revealed itself that Countenance of God with which he will satisfy all the
10 Laurence Wuidar
saints and all men for the full length of his eternity. The Countenance
had six wings (cf. Isa. 6.2; Rev. 4:8); they were all closed outwardly, but
within they were ceaselessly in flying motion. . . . After that I saw a great
throng of Seraphim, who all sang: “Allelujah! Amen!” They brought a
great number of adorned spirits with them, each Seraph bringing the one
that was his.28

The wings of the Countenance of God, closed by seals that the angel will
gradually open for Hadewijch in the course of the vision, represent the divine
attributes that human beings can acquire in their progression through humility
and love.29 The first open seal, that of the middle wings, unveils the victorious
in love.30 Hadewijch sees that the race ends in silent love and that spirits and
seraphim rejoice in reaching it.

And they also rejoiced there with that mysterious song which, in love, in a
mysterious way, has always cried out with a loud voice.
(Mark 13:37)31

The song comes back not as a glory song or a simple “Allelujah” of the sera-
phim but in its secret dimension and in its connection with knowledge. The
song is no longer a manifestation of joy—allelujah—or prayer—amen—but an
object of celebration. Having access to silent love, the victorious in love access
the secret, hidden song reserved for those who have been mother of God.
Therefore, to delight in the secret song is to rejoice in the vision of God. Com-
posers’ musica reservata: a secret song received by an individual in solitude.

The Sad and Uncertain Song

At the moment when the spirits and the angels are delighting in the secret song,
the Seraph who guides Hadewijch lifts her up to the vision of the throne where
love sits.

The crown that rested on her head was adorned with the high works of the
humble, who pay homage to veritable Love and suppose it true that they
are not serving and loving Love; this their veracity continually swears, for
they know themselves to be nothing, and they know Love alone to be all.
For this reason their sad, outgoing song of praise reverberates through the
amplitude that was never flown through. And this praise gave adornment
and joy with a new song, which no one shall ever understand except those
who, through their humility, had hidden all love.32

Characteristic of mystical literature, which inverts traditional points of view to

magnify them, the road toward self-awareness is to apprehend it through a lack
of understanding, and the summit of love is to lose it. It is better not to have
so as not to be able to lose. To have God, to possess God, means not only the
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 11
possibility to lose Him but also to perceive Him as an object other than oneself.
Hereby, the mystic aspires to a primordial state of eternity, one that precedes
the creation of the human being, when God and the individual were not distinct
but one. The central notion of this passage is that of humility. It introduces
another music, in contrast to all the music presented so far in the visions (sign/
trumpets, celebration/harp, glory/allelujah, prayer/amen, love/secret song).
A new song that is beyond comprehension is next added to the love or the
new heaven that was accompanied by songs of praise; it cannot be understood
except by the one who is humble like a God descended to earth whose love
carries Him to the heart of humility and who accepts to die by crucifixion. If
there is an understanding of the new song, it is not through an accumulation of
knowledge. Those who sing a sad and uncertain song, a new musical category
in the visions, are those who recognize their limits, their non-understanding
and non-being, for only God is a being; human beings are by participation.33
This sad and uncertain song permits the human being to participate in love.
Next unifying the opposites on a musical level, the sad and uncertain song
blends into beautiful and joyous praise. The hesitant song is beautiful in its
humility and the sad song is joyous in its accomplished ambition (it “reverber-
ates through the amplitude that was never flown through”). It is not a conversion;
it is not the sad song transformed into a joyous one, grief overcome, or imper-
fection perfected in beauty. A distinctive characteristic of the sound universe of
Hadewijch’s visions is the juxtaposition of opposite sonorities. If the deafening
sound often borders on the murmur, it is to evoke in a sonic way the overcoming
of the oppositions: for mystical knowledge operates as a dialectical synthesis. In
the union of the sad and the joyous, Hadewijch also exhibits musically a char-
acteristic of Christianity in which those who are sad are beautiful and those who
are uncertain, joyous. For it is humility and not strength or glory that leads to
victory, and humility leads to divinity because the humanity of Christ resolves
itself in humility on the cross to fulfill the deification of the human being.
The new song is beyond all human comprehension, concludes the earlier
passage, “no one shall ever understand except those who, through their humil-
ity, had hidden all love.”34 The new song carries the message of deified human-
ity whenever humility is at the center of knowledge. It is therefore understood
by those who have lost love through the perfection of humility, even those who
“never were God’s mother with perfect motherhood.” The theme of humility
recognizing its insufficiency in love and that of the generation of God in the
soul are unified, both revolving around the notion of the understanding and
revelation of the new song.

A Very Sweet Voice—A New Sound

The purely resonant dimension comes into play as a penultimate musical
development in Hadewijch’s Vision 13. When opening the last seals, the idea
of a new sound now takes the place of the new song. The two last musical pas-
sages are placed after the direct vision of love, an extraordinary moment that
12 Laurence Wuidar
bestows a particular insight on Hadewijch: “Behold, this is Love, whom you
see in the midst of the Countenance of God’s Nature; she has never yet been
shown here to a created being.”35 The angel finishes his mission; it is no longer
he whose voice can reveal new knowledge to Hadewijch; rather, he invites her
to know, looking at the attributes of love that appear to her in the vision. With-
out his mediation, the voice seems to have been totally substituted by the gaze
contemplating the divine attributes.
Hadewijch asks the angel to open the last lower and upper seals of wings for
her. The opening of the two upper seals of wings shows her those who, in the
perfection of humility, do not think they are able to love love but that thereby
perfect the modality of love. They sing in a way that Hadewijch, offering a new
musical description, had not yet heard:

Their song sounded with so sweet a voice that praise flowed upward with
new veins of song, and the flames were so fanned with new enkindlement
that they might have caused an eternally new conflagration.36

A new adjective characterizes the song of those “annihilated by humility.”37

The song is no longer joyous (blijheid) but sweet (zoet). It is no longer a ques-
tion of resonating loudly, as in the analogy of a trumpet (de bazuin klonk),
seen in Vision 9, but to resonate sweetly. This praise that resounds sweetly is a
performative song in that it gives birth to a flame that is synonymous with love
towards love. The same attention is brought to the sound in the second musical
part of the description of those “annihilated by humility.” Always dependent
on newness—of love, of ardor, of flame—these are the metaphors of fire that
consume the object in a blaze that is like the kiss of the Song of Songs. With
the perpetual revival of the praise provoking the flames (ardor, fire), the impor-
tance of sound (more than the possible words of this praise) reappears.

And in the abyss of Love resounded both a new noise, which set every-
thing in motion, and an amazing and unheard-of song of praise; and a new
rushing flood surged upward with new storm to fill the new arrivals, who
there took fire.”38

The idea of a performative sound returns: from the new sound comes a song of
praise. Again, music is part of an ensemble that tends to describe a complete
experience, the flames of ardor and of fire that consume the entire being are
transformed into a violent flood that in turn overwhelms those who are humble.
New sound, new flood, new violence: the individual comes to know new states
of being corresponding with the second modality of love.

“The noise of the highest unfaith is the most delightful

voice of Love”
The opening of the third seal of lower wings corresponds with a third and last
musical level. To the sad, uncertain, beautiful, and joyous song and to the very
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 13
sweet sound of praise (zo zoet) succeeds the highest, most luminous, most
agreeable, and sweetest voice (de zoetste).

Behold, everything is fulfilled! . . . Through this, and on account of

your lofty power, is this secret heaven thus made known to you. Love,
as you see her here, is thus adorned and praised with this song. For the
denial of Love with humility is the highest voice of Love. The work of
the highest fidelity of reason is the clearest and most euphonious voice
of Love. But the noise of the highest unfaith is the most delightful voice
of Love.39

Silent love, object of the entire vision, is expressed at this stage by the highest,
most luminous, most agreeable, and sweetest voice. It is no longer the song of
the Seraphim nor the praises that decorate love but the voice of love perceived
by the beings of the third seal, those who abandoned humility to be in liberty.
They enjoy God without an intermediary. It is also in this finale that the oppo-
sites are juxtaposed one last time: the noise is the most delightful voice (“the
noise of the highest unfaith is the most delightful voice of Love”).40
A series of conclusive reflections can be made on the three modalities of
love that become more and more intense throughout Vision 13 and that corre-
spond to the three musical representations detailed in the quotations provided
earlier. The three modalities, represented by the three pairs of seraphic wings,
are in a hierarchy but equally united in the individuals of the third seal. More
than a progression, perfection includes the diverse ways to love and there-
fore to know, and Hadewijch, according to her own narrative, incarnates this
union of modalities. These three modalities are each qualified by one of the
three terms of space—height, width, depth—that represent the understanding
of everything. According to the apostle, “I pray that you may have the power
to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height
and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you
may be filled with all the fullness of God.”41
Saint Paul, and Hadewijch repeating him, do not say the height, the width,
the depth of what; they imply of everything because no dimension of the cre-
ated escapes the deified human gaze. Width corresponds with the opening of
the first seal, to the humble, those who proclaim that love is everything and
sing a sad, uncertain, and joyous song. Height corresponds with the opening
of the second seal, with those annihilated by humility, and with the advent of
a sweet sound and a noise that generates an unheard-of song. Finally, depth
corresponds with the opening of the third seal, to the free who hear the voice
of love, the highest, most luminous and agreeable, sweetest voice that there
is. The modalities of love, like types of music and corresponding voices, join
together to attain the perfection that will be found in hearing the Allelujah
of the celestial choirs, to sing a new song (een nieuw gezang), a sad, joyous,
and uncertain song, to generate a marvelous and incredible song (wonderlijke,
ongehoorde) at the beginning of a new sound so as to hear the highest, most
luminous, agreeable, and sweet voice of love.
14 Laurence Wuidar
The omniscient gaze finds its counterpart in the simultaneity of hearing
and song. Musical perfection is created by the union of the width of the sad,
uncertain, and joyous song, with the height of the new sound generating an
unheard-of song, and with the depth of the highest, most luminous, agreeable,
and sweetest voice. The four qualifiers therefore reflect width, length, height,
and depth to describe aurally the completeness of Saint Paul’s passage.

Conclusion
Musical works, their reception, contexts of production, and participants con-
stitute several of the major axes of musicology. Mystical literature offers a
particular angle of approach to the interior listening to extrasensory music, to
a musical experience that takes place exclusively between the individual and
the spiritual universe, and to a musical moment that transports listeners outside
of time and their own bodies. In this way, mystical literature adds much to the
musicological enterprise. With this inaudible music, and because it is spiritual,
the participants are in part invisible, and the musical phenomenon is uncon-
strained by the materiality of sound. Nevertheless, questions of sound and
therefore the connections between music and text, the narrative of the musical
experience, and the search for the meanings of the music form integral parts of
mystical literature.
To study music in pre-modern European societies is also to study its multi-
ple representations in mystical literature. The foregoing analysis of the musical
elements of Hadewijch’s visions identified a series of musical questions and as
such is one example of the relationship between the female universe and music
in pre-modern societies. If Visions 4, 9, and 11 essentially make an allegorical
use of music, Vision 13 gives it a role in the progression towards unity, in the
stages moving toward the goal of the mystical path.
The first stage used musical images in a semiotic way, by way of analogy,
such as the powerful sound of the trumpet signaling that of the voice, the fes-
tive sound of musical instruments, celebration, and so on. The development of
the biblical notion of a new song, its meanings and qualities, were important.
New song, corresponding with the new man—the one who loves the new life
sings the new song, said Saint Augustine42—is not only the spiritual man but
the one who incarnates Christ today, the one who carries in him the redeemer
because he is capable of seeing the essence of heaven and earth. The new song
encompasses the new gaze. It represents the one who is made mother of Christ
on a daily basis.
The descriptions of this song, differentiated according to the degree of love
in the subject, bear witness to other aspects of the evangelical message, essen-
tially as long as it is a question of the performativity of the sad and uncertain
song. This uncertainty, parent of the defiance that permits the subject to know
his size and insignificance, “reverberates through the amplitude that was never
flown through.” Uncertainty and defiance, unfaithfulness, and the sense of
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 15
proportion and therefore limits—all run through that which separates humanity
from divinity in a religion in which glory is born from humiliation on the cross.
With the characteristics of song, Hadewijch shows the futility of arming
oneself for the conquest of the inaccessible but that instead, for the Christian,
only bare humility echoes that of Christ. She reminds the reader that uncer-
tainty is the guarantee of the certainty of neither being able to fully know one-
self nor being able to give back the love of the One who loved first in the
same measure as He did.43 From the sadness of this song finally sounds joy,
Hadewijch accomplishing the union of opposites in a sonic inflection of the
pain-redemption of Christianity. Music is the art that makes this union mean-
ingful: language and the visual arts cannot help but separate them. Language
must use several words and the painting several images. Music has the distinc-
tive feature of being able to unite opposites—such as the bass and the treble—
also a union that is the result of the mystical experience.
This idea of union attests to the presence of the many musical metaphors
that describe certain aspects of the ecstatic and visionary experience in medi-
eval mystical narratives. This is explained of course by the presence of music
in the visions of Revelations—new song, harp or zither of the old men, and
the other angels playing the trumpet—to which implicitly or explicitly the
authors refer but also, and maybe even more fundamentally, by the pure nature
of music. Music, no matter the style, has the capacity to express both joy and
pain together, touching the body invisibly. Music shares this last aspect with
divinity in the visionary experience: it touches the senses, infiltrates itself into
the body through hearing, and allows itself to be penetrated by the invisible
body of sound, just as the Invisible who embraces Hadewijch with His voice.
Music not only accompanies key moments of certain visions (music splits
and enforces the warning pronounced by Sacred Fear), but it also represents
those who, in assimilation with principle, see that everything is God in God;
those who are mothers of divinity; those who have heard the new song, having
taken a new look at earth and heaven.
The function of extrasensory music in pre-modern societies takes place
through mystical literature, of which women are the principal representatives.
The women anticipate roles and questions that will recur in the history of music
in other contexts and in other texts and literatures. A number of questions that
will become part of a musical aesthetic or of a musical semiology have their
cultural roots in mystical literature, becoming the site of an archeology of
musicological knowledge. To say if the musical elements present in mystical
literature composed by women are fundamentally different than those present
in the male visionary universe would require comparative studies. However,
it is certain that the music heard by women and the story of what they heard
as messages conveyed by this music—not a message of imitation or of ethos
but of the performance and transmission of a knowledge relative to the divine
world and eschatological time—is part of the history of the many relationships
between women and music in pre-modern Europe.
16 Laurence Wuidar
Notes
1. For a recent work on the interest in Hildegard since her death in 1179 to an increase
in this interest linked to the authentication of her relics and to a new veneration, as
well as the rediscovery of her music in the nineteenth century, see Jennifer Bain,
Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of a Medieval
Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For the visionary
angle, see William C. Zehringer, “The Sound of Praise and Bliss of Life: The Place
of Music in the Visionary Art of Hildegard of Bingen,” American Benedictine
Review 46, no. 2 (1995): 194–206.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II, II, q. 97, art. 92, arg. 2.
3. For music and mysticism in the Middle Ages, see René Wetzel and Laurence
Wuidar, eds., Mystique, langage, musique. Exprimer l’indicible au Moyen Âge
(Scrinium Friburgense 43. Fribourg: Reichert, 2019); the first chapters of Pieran-
gelo Sequieri, Musica e mistica (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005);
from the perspective of gender studies, see Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and
Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001) (Hildegard but also Saint Mechtilde of Hackeborn and
Gertrude of Helfta); or, on Hadewijch, Veerle Fraeters, “Gender and Genre: The
Design of Hadewijch’s Book of Visions,” in The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy
in a Men’s Church, eds. Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 2004), 57–81. Independently of single authors, I try to explain Why
music in mystical experience (vision, ecstasy. . .)? and Why musical metaphor to
describe mystical experience in words? in a series of articles, such as “La metafora
teologico-musicale. Nomi divini ed esperienze mistiche nella tradizione del Corpus
Dionysiacum,” Rivista di ascetica e mistica 40, no. 1 (2015): 5–48; “Conversione
ed ebrietas musicali: il potere d’alterazione della musica in alcuni mistici medi-
evali e rinascimentali,” Rivista internazionale di musica sacra 1–2 (2015): 11–42;
“Ineffability and Music in Early Christian Theology,” in Language and Religion,
eds. Robert A. Yelle, Christopher I. Lehrich, and Courtney Handman (Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 215–42.
4. Vision-by-vision commentary has been offered by numerous authors. See Frank
Willaert, ed., Hadewijch, Visioenen (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996); Esther
Heszler, Der mystische Prozeß im Werk Hadewijchs. Aspekte der Erfahrung—
Aspekte der Darstellung (Ulm: Universitätsverlag, 1994). For more on the specific
importance of sound and music in Hadewijch’s works, see Aniko Daroczi, Groet
gheruchte van dien wondere: spreken, zwijgen en zingen bij Hadewijch (Leuven:
Peeters, 2007); see the subsection “Licht en klank als communicatiemedium”
(pp. 62–68), but mainly the chapters “Muziek: een soepel begrip” (pp. 81–93) that
first deal with harmony then musical grammar, “Melodievormende woorden: van
spreken naar zingen” (pp. 157–74), and “Woordvormende melodieën: zingend
spreken, sprekend zingen” (pp. 175–204, on the songs of Hadewijch). For the
Visions and the Poems in Stanzas in English, see Mother Columba Hart O. S. B.,
trans., Hadewijch: The Complete Works (New York, Ramsey and Toronto: Paulist
Press, 1980); all quotations from the Visions come from this translation.
5. See Jacqueline Kelen, Hadewijch d’Anvers ou la voie glorieuse (Paris: Albin
Michel, 2011); Rudi Malfliet, De andere Hadewijch (Antwerpen: Garant, 2013).
6. L. P. Grijp, “De zingende Hadewijch. Op zoek naar de melodieën van haar Strofis-
che Gedichten,” in Een zoet akkoord. Middeleeuwse lyriek in de Lage Landen, ed.
Frank Willaert (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1992), 72–92. See, too, Patricia Dailey,
Promised Bodies: Times, Language, and Corporality in Medieval Women’s Mysti-
cal Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), chapter 4.
7. Maja Trochimczyk, “Hadewijch: A Mystic in the Cathedral,” in Music of Louis
Andriessen, ed. Maja Trochimczyk (New York: Routledge, 2002), 191–208.
 Music in the Visions of Hadewijch 17
8. Veerle Fraeters, “The Mystic’s Sensorium. Modes of Perceiving and Knowing
God in Hadewijch’s Visions,” in Mystical Anthropology: Authors from the Low
Countries, eds. John Arblaster and Rob Faesen (London and New York: Routledge,
2017), 28–40.
9. Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, III, 2, 6.
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Teologiae, II, II, q. 171–74.
11. Fabien Guilloux, Saint François d’Assise et l’ange musicien: Thème et variations
iconographiques dans les collections du Museo Francescano de Rome (Rome:
Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 2010); Andrew dell’Antonio, Listening as Spir-
itual Practice in Early Modern Italy (London: Chicago University Press, 2011),
17; Fabien Guilloux, “Saint François d’Assise et l’ange musicien: Un topos
iconographique et musical chrétien,” Imago Musicae: International Yearbook of
Musical Iconography 25, no. 1 (2012): 29–75.
12. A broad theme but see Raoul Manselli, “L’inquisizione e la mistica femminile,”
in Temi e problemi nella mistica femminile trecentesca, 14–17 ottobre 1979, Con-
vegni del centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale (Todi: L’Accademia tudertina,
1983), 209–26.
13. Among many others, see Edith Borroff, “Women and Music in Medieval Europe,”
Mediaevalia 14 (1988): 1–21; Georgette Épiney-Burgard and Emilie Zum Brunn,
Femmes troubadours de Dieu (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988).
14. Saint Augustine, Confessions X, 33, 49–50 and IV, 15, 27.
15. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 4, 273–74.
16. Rev. 1:10, see also Rev. 4:1 and Rev. 8:6.
17. Rev. 10:1 and Rev. 10:3.
18. Rev. 8:6–9:13.
19. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 10, 288.
20. Ibid., 287.
21. Ibid., 285.
22. Rev. 4:6.
23. See Gregory of Nyssa, Inscriptiones Psalmorum, I, IX, 27–28. Other writings of
Gregory of Nyssa offer rich sources for musicological studies as well. See Laurence
Wuidar, “La musique dans l’Inscriptiones Psalmorum de Grégoire de Nysse,”
Revue belge de musicologie 71 (2017): 5–32; “Le corps musical. Musique et méde-
cine chez Grégoire de Nysse,” Medicina & Storia 15, no. 8 (2015): 81–108.
24. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 11, 289.
25. Judith 3:7: “The people in the towns and in the surrounding countryside welcomed
Holofernes by wearing wreaths of flowers and dancing to the beat of drums.”
26. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 13, 297.
27. Rev. 19:1.
28. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 13, 297–98.
29. See Ibid., 297: “All the wings were straight (cf. Ezech. 1:23) and smooth on the
Countenance; the seals that, outside the wings, closed themselves about the Coun-
tenance are the veritable attributes of the mighty Godhead, in the perfection of
which no one can himself participate unless he wishes to live God and Man.”
30. See Ibid., 298: “because they have conquered in love so that they are conquered (cf.
Gen. 32:24–31) as the invincible power of growing Love.”
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Simone Weil still makes this classic distinction in La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris:
Plon, 1998), 88.
34. Hart, Hadewijch, Vision 13, 298.
35. Ibid., 299.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
18 Laurence Wuidar
38. Ibid., 299–300.
39. Ibid., 301.
40. To be unfaithful or mistrusting (ontrouwe and wantrouwen are sometimes syno-
nyms, see “Lexique de Hadewijch,” s.v. “ontrouwe,” Kelen, Hadewijch d’Anvers,
256) is to recognize the human modality in relation to fidelity or to faith in God.
41. Eph. 3:18–19.
42. Saint Augustine, Sermon, 34, 1.
43. 1 John 4:19.

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