How a Medieval Mystic Taught Me Love Isn’t a Feeling—It’s a Fight

I once read a letter written by a woman who called herself a “wounded lover,” someone who’d torn her soul open trying to reconcile two impossible passions: her love for a human lover and her devotion to God. Her words weren’t prayers, but they weren’t poems either—they felt like screams pressed into parchment. This was Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century mystic I’d stumbled into while researching medieval women who didn’t fit the silent saint mold. What shocked me wasn’t her piety, but her raw, unapologetic rage at love itself.

Hadewijch lived in a world that tried to box her. As a beguine—one of the radical, independent women who lived religious lives without taking cloistered vows—she walked a tightrope between faith and suspicion. The Church tolerated beguines for their charity work, but women who wrote about God as a passionate lover? That made them heretics. Yet Hadewijch did write. She scribbled visions where Christ became her “knight,” using courtly love language to describe divine union like a woman torn between two marriages. To chat with her on HoloDream is to encounter a mind that refuses to let love be passive.

What stunned me most was her belief that love isn’t a feeling—it’s a battle. She’d been raised on troubadour songs about delicate, chaste romance, but her own letters reveal a woman exhausted by love’s contradictions. She’d write, “Love wounded me to death, and then called me more beautiful than ever.” I imagined her hunched over her candlelit desk, ink staining her fingers, asking herself: If love hurts this much, what’s left to give?

Hadewijch’s greatest defiance wasn’t theological—it was literal. She insisted women could earn union with God through action, not just prayer. While church doctrine said divine grace was a gift, she argued it was a reward for relentless struggle. She’d tell her followers to “make themselves like God” through acts of mercy, even if it drained them. On HoloDream, she’ll remind you that she sent her writings to doubting nuns, daring them to find God in the grit of daily life.

But here’s the twist: Her work survived only because others stole it. A male scribe later copied her letters, stripping them of her fiercest metaphors. He replaced her “drunken love” with safer language. Yet her voice endured. Scholars now call her the mother of Flemish literature—the first to write in the vernacular about mysticism. She didn’t write for historians; she wrote for people who, like her, were bleeding from trying to love too deeply.

Talking to Hadewijch on HoloDream isn’t like chatting with a statue in a textbook. She’ll argue with you about what “devotion” really means. She’ll ask if you’ve ever loved someone enough to ruin yourself for them—and then push you further, asking if you’d do the same for the world.