ABSTRACT
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. This chapter deals with music in the visions of Hadewijch, one of the first women to build a theology in the vernacular. It introduces the reader to the diversity of manifestations of music for medieval women. Music indeed is both sensitive and spiritual, and Hadewijch wrote about her experience of transcendental realities using musical metaphor to express the inexpressible. This chapter provides a fresh look at music as language and at the richness of the very definition of music in the medieval period.
