Begin the beguines
In the Low Countries of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, large numbers of women were drawn to thriving new towns and cities to earn money; to escape arranged marriages; to live independently because they were orphans, or alienated from their families or because they wished to pursue a spiritual life.
The great abbeys, those unworldly enclosures for wealthy refugees, widows and visionary zealots wanting to follow a strict rule, were too exclusive or too few in number to accommodate them. Besides, an emerging intellectual climate that promoted vernacular learning, religious dissent and the virtues of hard, honest work was at odds with the crushing orthodoxy of what had become thoroughly patriarchal, elitist institutions. Disgust with materialism, usury and social exclusion and compassion for the sick, elderly and starving prompted some to reject a life of privilege. Women were marrying later and having smaller families; they needed a new focus for their energies, or were desperately poor and needed support outwith the family or village. In the cities they found common cause and opportunity.A very few of their stories give the general picture: the daughter of a tax collector, forced into marriage at the age of thirteen, bearer of three children, who was widowed by her nineteenth year and who, four years later in the 1180s, went to tend lepers in a community outside the walls of Huy, southwest of Liège. Another, an orphan who miraculously recovered from a near-fatal illness and was drawn to Liège as a sort of wandering prophetess. One woman was said to have persuaded her husband to join her in a life of celibacy and abstinence, like St Cecilia;# several were said to have rejected their families through disgust at their fathers’ commercial greed, while one precocious girl was taught to read at the age of five before her encouraging mother died and her father sent her away into the care of a beghinarum collegio, a community of beguines,∫ so that she might be taught a virtuous life.
What might have been remembered as no more than the personal narratives of a number of special holy women instead became a movement, as one of its champions, James de Vitry, recalled:
Many holy maidens had gathered in different places… They scorned the temptations of the flesh, despised the riches of the world for the love of the heavenly bridegroom in poverty and humility, earning a sparse meal with their own hands. Although their families were wealthy, they preferred to endure hardship and poverty, leaving behind their family and their father’s home rather than to abound in riches or to remain in danger amongst worldly pomp.6
Another admirer captured the novelty of these new communities, the beguinages, in the essence of their contradictions…
Although these [holy] women, whom we know to be very numerous in the diocese of Liège, live among the people wearing lay clothes, they still surpass many of the cloister in the love of God. They live the eremiticalΩ life among the crowds, spiritual among the worldly and virginal among those who seek pleasure. As their battle is greater, so is their grace, and a greater crown will await them.7
Two sorts of all-women lay communities were established: those calling themselves convents, often of a dozen or fewer women wishing to live together under voluntary rule, sometimes devoting themselves to the care of the poor and sick; and those that became known as court beguinages, endowed communities constructed close to towns and frequently sited on previously unproductive land. Some became very large indeed, housing several hundreds of women in walled, self-contained suburbs comprising a church, hospital, workshops and living quarters. The largest were established at Mechelen, Ghent and Liège. They attracted wealthy patrons – King Louis IX of France founded a beguinage in Paris – and were governed under magistrae, literally ‘female teachers’, the word reflecting a strong vocational drive to educate young girls.
Their sainted exemplar was Mary, the mother of Jesus, an equally paradoxical figure who was at once married and chaste, virginal and a maternal paragon.The women of the beguinages supported themselves by manual work, as nurses and domestic servants, or by growing produce on smallholdings; but primarily through the production, treatment and trading of cloth. The beguines moved among their wider communities mixing with townsfolk, sometimes only returning to the security of their courts at night. They adopted a semi-public function in hospice care and in the holding of wakes for the dead. Many wealthier women owned their own houses within the walls, took in the poor or disadvantaged, sought and distributed alms.
The beguinages were initially unsupervised by higher ecclesiastical authority; but after about 1230 they began increasingly to adopt regulations, perhaps sensitive to charges of irregularity, even of heresy – one woman’s charismatic prophesying and sermonising being another man’s uncanonical preaching. In an era when the first stirrings of Catharism and vernacular puritanism were being felt across the Holy Roman Empire, virtuous eccentricity might easily be read as a threat to orthodoxy and papal authority, to the exclusive preserve of a Latinate male clergy.
In the beguine life, heterodox as it was, one can detect echoes of the yearning for seclusion, separation and independence voiced so powerfully in the story of Christina of Markyate.≈ The beguinages might also, in some respects, be seen as an evolution of the chambres des dames,∂ the gynaecea of earlier times. Women’s traditional roles in the production of wool cloth had been curtailed by the introduction of the heavy loom, by international wool trading disputes and by the increasingly restrictive practices of men’s guilds. The beguines learned to specialise in linen.
The fortunes and workings of the beguinages are difficult to study. Many existed without records, lasted fleetingly or were absorbed into larger, more formal communities whose historians found no room for them in their annals.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century, many were suppressed by an increasingly nervous and defensive church. Beguinages and their women seemed to many professional religious as if they were bent on the triumph of the laity – constituting a sort of democratising and socially inclusive movement quite at odds with institutional fundamentalism. But among reformers and liberals they won admirers and defenders and, ultimately, the movement sustained itself.The beguinages, some few of which survived persecution and opprobrium to last into the modern era, prefigure exclusive women’s colleges and the need for women to foster discrete cultural, social and intellectual solidarity. In their women’s desire to pursue a life of simplicity, of hard-earned profit and charitable works, the beguinages anticipate elements of Calvinism. They – some 300 of them across what are now Belgium, Artois and the southern Netherlands – were a remarkable phenomenon, virtually unknown in England but paralleled in Germany, and in Italy by the Humilitate movement.π Some of the best preserved of their buildings can still be visited, at Ten Wijngaerde, Bruges∆ and the Groot Begijnhof in Leuven.