On Seven Ways of Holy Love presents Beatrice of Nazareth’s Middle Dutch treatise together with English, Dutch, and French translations. The translated texts are accompanied by an introduction, concise commentary on each of the seven manners, critical mysticological observations, a note on the manuscript tradition, and a selective bibliography.
The seven manners trace the movement of minne through desire for purity and spiritual growth ; service without motive or reward ; anguish at the inability to satisfy love ; spontaneous sweetness and ecstatic absorption ; tempestuous longing beyond rational measure ; freedom and ordered life under the rule of love ; and the final desire to pass beyond time into eternal union with God.
These manners do not form a merely external catalogue of mystical states. Together they disclose the inner work of minne as it draws the soul out of self-concern, transforms all its powers, and returns it toward the highest from which love proceeds.
By articulating mystical experience in the vernacular, Beatrice contributed decisively to the development of Middle Dutch mysticism. Her seven manners of love were later reworked in different forms by Marguerite Porete and John of Ruusbroec. She stands as one of the foundational authors of vernacular mysticism in the medieval Low Countries.
On Seven Ways of Holy Love