"Little is known about Hadewijch, one of the greatest women of the "New Mysticism". Her intensely personal writings reveal that she was of noble birth, highly educated, an ecstatic, a profound mystic, and a subtle and daring mystical theologian - but little of the particulars of her life...She was highly esteemed one century later by the great mystic and theologian John Ruusbroec...His contemporary, Jan Van Leeuwan - also a not insignificant theologian and mystic - deemed her the equal of any of the evangelists! Yet only in the twentieth century have her mystical riches come to be appreciated on a broad scale."