The Beguines were women who lived a religious life without taking permanent vows and without entering an order. They gathered in houses and, in the Low Countries, in whole walled courtyards, supported themselves by work, kept chastity while they remained, and could leave and marry. The arrangement was popular, it was female led, and it was regarded with suspicion by churchmen who disliked unsupervised women teaching each other about God.
Hadewijch was one of them, and that is nearly all that is securely known about her life. Her letters show her guiding a group and later separated from it, apparently under pressure and possibly expelled, and she refers to hardship and to opposition without ever explaining the circumstances. There is no reliable record of her dates, her family, her house, or her death, and the identification with Antwerp rests on the manuscript tradition rather than on documents.
Her works then went quiet for centuries. The manuscripts survived, were copied, and were read at a distance by later writers, but her name dropped out of general circulation until scholars working on Middle Dutch manuscripts in the nineteenth century brought the material back into view. She is now normally read as the strongest of the vernacular love mystics and as a probable influence on the later Rhineland writers, though influence in that period is easier to assert than to demonstrate.