This is the theological side of Hadewijch’s “courtly love” theme of resignation and unfaith: as the lover suffers in her wait for the beloved, she is vividly aware that she deserves nothing better (Letter 8). Mechthild similarly returns again and again to the idea of estrangement or abandonment (verworfenheit). For her the greatest form of minne is the one that abandons all expectation that the beloved will arrive, the “love that lets go of love” (§2.23). This is the frame of mind that leads Mechthild to say, not once but twice, that she would “as soon die of love” (§2.2, 2.4). In a
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