Orewoet’s Journey: The Reuse of a Medieval Mystical Term in a Contemporary Novel

After centuries of oblivion, the Middle Dutch neologism
orewoet [madness of love] – a key term in the writings of the medieval
mystic Hadewijch of Brabant (c. 1240) – has made a striking comeback
in the contemporary cultural field of the Low Countries. This article
situates the resurrection of orewoet in the broader context of the religious
turn of the 21st century and the ‘affective dominant’ evident in contemporary
literature, taking the novel Orewoet (2016) by Dutch author Emy
Koopman as a case study. Using the methodology of Cultural Transfer
Studies, we analyze the semantic field of maddening desire in, first,
Hadewijch’s mystical love lyrics, and second, Koopman’s novel. This
comparative analysis reveals that, in the secular love story Orewoet, only
one aspect of Hadewijch’s orewoet is appropriated: the lover’s suffering
from unrequited love as a destructive force. The deifying potential of
orewoet as a painful yet transformative force for self-annihilation that
propels the lover into spiritual maturity, did not survive its journey from
Hadewijch to Koopman.