Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries (review)

Despite its relatively small size, the Dutch-speaking world may be credited with producing one of the most important vernacular mystical traditions of the Middle Ages. It was no coincidence that Kurt Ruh devoted the entire fourth and final volume of his Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik (Munich, 1999) to Netherlandic mysticism of the late Middle Ages, after covering the thirteenth-century authors Hadewijch and Beatrijs van Nazareth in volume 2. Outside of Belgium, the Netherlands, Suriname, and South Africa, however, there are few who are able to read Dutch. There is, therefore, a great need for translations of mystic texts. The works of such greats as van Nazareth, Hadewijch, Jan van Ruusbroec, and Gerlach Peters are already available in English (and in some other languages as well). This is certainly not the case for the lesser poets among the Netherlandic mystics, and it is precisely this gap that Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries seeks to fill. The book offers a broad palette of texts by mystic authors from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. In this collection the reader may now have a taste of the work of many of those included in volume 4 of Ruh’s Geschichte.

Editors Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Robert Faesen, and Helen Rolfson selected four groups of authors and texts. The first is composed of mystics from the immediate circle of Jan van Ruusbroec and his monastery, Groenendaal, with the result that both Willem Jordaens’s high-minded The Kiss of Mouth and the unlearned (but good cook of Groenendaal) Jan van Leeuwen’s phillipic against Meister Eckhart are both available in English. The second group is composed of authors from the Modern Devotion. The editors have neglected to mention, however, that the work of Peters, the greatest mystic in this circle, appeared in the Corpus Christianorum, with an English translation by Rolfson. They do acknowledge the existence of John Van Engen’s ample anthology of the writings from the Modern Devotion, published in the same series as this book, and they seek simply to augment that collection here. It is for this reason that this group has only two entries—namely, Hendrik Mande and the Bedudinghe in Canticum Canticorum, a commentary on the Song of Songs that originated in circles of the devout. The third group encompasses Franciscan mysticism, which went through a period of great florescence in the Netherlands, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century. Here, too, is Gerard Appelmans’s treatise on the Ten Commandments, which is dated here, however, to the period 1250–1325. Although most of these texts are only briefly (and somewhat unevenly) introduced, a concerted effort is made in arguing that Appelmans was a Friar Minor. If that was the case, then he can hardly be associated with the later Franciscan heyday. The fourth category is composed of “female mysticism,” a label that remains somewhat amorphous. Represented here are such well-known authors as Alijt Bake and Sister Bertken, and such important anonymous works as The Evangelical Pearl and The Temple of Our Soul.

Most of these texts were translated by experts in mysticism from the Netherlands and Belgium, rather than professional translators. However, one of the editors, Helen Rolfson, is a professional translator. Did she check all of the translations and revise them in consultation with the translators? It would have been helpful if this point had been clarified.