| Popis: |
‘Wees tactvol in gezelschap en vraag niet wie er één versregel van Hadewijch memoreeren kan’ [Be tactful in company and don’t ask who is able to remember one line of Hadewijch’s]. In a 1938 newspaper column, a Flemish literary critic bemoaned the fact that the public did not keep the memory of the medieval mystical author Hadewijch (c. 1240) alive by learning her writings by heart. Also Francophone newspapers voiced the opinion that the mystic was ‘hélas trop peu connue’ [alas too little known]. From her discovery in 1830 onwards until well after editions and anthologies of her works had been printed by major publishing houses, a recurrent trope in the memorial cult developing around the medieval mystic in modern Belgium would be that she and her oeuvre were in urgent and permanent need of being actively ‘unforgotten’, which was pictured as a collective project that needed to be provided with new fuel at various instances. To this day, Hadewijch’s biography is practically unknown. Most probably, she operated in the mid-thirteenth century in the Duchy of Brabant, where she taught the workings of minne or mystical love to a circle of followers. To that end, she compiled a mystical oeuvre that disappeared from view after the fifteenth century, only to be rediscovered during the 1830 Belgian revolution. Belgian cultural actors with diverse ideological profiles, mother tongues, social backgrounds and confessional outlooks endeavoured to construct a collective memorial cult around the faceless author, shaping an image of her that proved porous to the burning issues of their time. Both hindered and stimulated by Hadewijch’s lack of biography and the opacity of her writings, the mystic’s memory travelled across segments of Belgian society, engendering a wide array of mnemonic practices that flourished in parallel yet at times communicating circuits. Drawing on insights from cultural memory studies and cultural transfer studies, this dissertation investigates why and how Belgian memory-makers attempted to make Hadewijch memorable to the modern-day public. Rather than tracing the linear transmission of a stable figure of memory with predetermined characteristics, it scrutinizes the performative uses that have been made of Hadewijch’s memory in the very process of shaping it. In doing so, it studies how the mystic’s memory travelled across Belgium’s confessional, linguistic, political and social fault lines and, how, after traversing the country’s borders in translation, it returned back ‘home’ in new guises. In following the ‘mnemonic routes’ travelled by Hadewijch’s memory in modern Belgium, the dissertation focuses on the multiple transfer strategies developed by cultural mediators in inscribing ‘their’ Hadewijch(s) in cultural memory. Covering sources ranging from scholarly editions and popularizing publications to sculpture, poetry and encyclopaedias, from newspapers and speeches to the correspondence of academics, town officials and translators, the cases covered in the six chapters provide the first study of Hadewijch’s cultural remembrance in Belgium from the discovery of her oeuvre in 1830 – when Belgium gained its independence – to the late 1970s – when the country rapidly federalized and secularized, which coincided with the gradual detachment of Hadewijch’s memory from the Belgian context. The first two chapters focus on pivotal moments in Hadewijch’s reception. Chapter 1 focuses on the philological confusion Hadewijch’s manuscripts engendered upon her discovery and on the first attempts to interpret, edit and monumentalize them. Chapter 2 turns to the efforts of the philologist Jozef van Mierlo to overwrite nineteenth-century accounts of Hadewijch’s legacy, studying his attempts to have Hadewijch remembered as a ‘middlebrow’ mystic by a broad Flemish public. The next four chapters examine mnemonic practices that are indebted to the mediating efforts analyzed in the first two chapters. Chapter 3 concentrates on the impact of translation on Hadewijch’s remembrance in Belgium, focusing on the entangled transfer history of the French translation of Hadewijch’s First Vision in Hermès, a periodical founded by cultural actors with ties to the Brussels-based circle of Surrealists. Chapter 4 studies how Hadewijch was canonized as a stock feature of the memorial universe of the radicalized Flemish Movement, focusing on how she was mobilized as a role model for Flemish Catholic women and girls. Chapter 5 examines the ‘Reninca case’ which manifested itself in Flemish literary criticism in the late-1940s and early-1950s, a polemic revolving around the question as to whether a certain young female Flemish Catholic poet could be considered as a ‘new Hadewijch’. Chapter 6 examines the gradual obsolescence of Hadewijch’s memory in Belgium as of the 1960s through the prism of the oeuvre of Suzanne Lilar, a Flemish Francophone author who assigned Hadewijch a central place in her writings. The analysis of the case studies shows that despite its fuzziness, Hadewijch’s memory proved so mobile in Belgium that it was repeatedly re-embodied by (a collective of) bodies living in the present. That was made possible by transferring a set of mnemonic soundbites to new target audiences while varying on how and in which context Hadewijch and her oeuvre were presented: co-texts and paratexts were key to keeping the mystic on the move. Importantly, this study shows that the transfer of Hadewijch’s memory did not follow a unidirectional but an entangled course: the Hadewijch image constructed by the philologist Jozef van Mierlo was incessantly modulated by other mediators, who at times revitalized alternative identifications. Together, the chapters demonstrate that across divergent mnemonic practices, Hadewijch’s memory was formatted according to a narrative template of ‘reconnection’, in which the malleability of the mystic’s minne, her medieval and supposedly knightly personality and the ‘mnemotechnology’ of her mystical oeuvre played a central role. Lastly, the dissertation shows that Hadewijch’s memory did not function as a catalyst in the historical developments that marked modern Belgium, but that remembering her nevertheless proved functional against those changing contexts. As a result, studying Hadewijch’s travelling memory grants access to previously hidden zones of transcultural exchange which otherwise would remain unvisited, and reveals a patchwork of porous points of connection between cultural repertoires and mnemonic communities. |
