The last lay religious movement under review here, the beguines, combined many of the features noted above, but also stands out as unique because it consisted almost entirely of women. Indeed, the gendered characteristics of beguine existence, so remarkable for contemporaries and modern scholars alike, go a long way towards explaining both their successes and struggles.
The origins of the movement are diverse. Women such as Mary of Oignies (1177-1213) lived with their family - in her case, in a chaste marriage - and devoted themselves to good works, prayer and penance, much in the manner of the Italian penitents; others, like Juetta of Huy (1158-1228), served as spiritual beacons to the urban community from their anchorholds, following in the tradition of recluses. StiU others, like Christine Mirabilis of Sint-Truiden (1150-1224), acted as ambulant miracle workers and informal preachers. Many more such women of the southern Low Countries and adjacent territories of France and Germany remained anonymous. Their clerical and lay supporters regarded them as 'religious women' (mulieres religiosae), even though they did not lead a monastic life or, indeed, enjoy religious status. Their lack of a monastic rule did not prevent James of Vitry (c. 1170-1240) from describing his female heroes of the diocese of Liege in terms that could have applied to cloistered women:
They scorned the temptations of the flesh for Christ, despised the riches of the world for the love of the heavenly kingdom, devoted themselves to their
Christus: De tweede religieuze vrouwenbeweging in Leiden en Zwolle, 1380-1580 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2004), 141-74 and Hildo van Engen, De derde orde van Sint-Franciscus in het middeleeuwse bisdom Utrecht (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), 244-96.
24 The Dominican Penitents' rule is edited in Meersseman, Dossier, 143-56, where it is erroneously dated to 1285 and attributed to Munio de Zamora, Dominican master general from 1285 to 1291. For their Third Order, see Martina Wehrli-Johns, 'L’Osservanza dei Domenicani e il movimento penitenziale laico: Studi sulla “regola di Munio” e sul Terz’ordine domenicano in Italia e Germania’, in G. Chittolini and K. Elm, eds., Ordini religiosi e societa politica in Italia e Germania nei secoli XIV e XV (Bologna: il Mulino, 2001), 287-329; Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner et al., Dominican Penitent Women (New York: Paulist Press, 2005).
Heavenly bridegroom in poverty and humility, and earned a sparse meal with
Their hands although their families abounded in riches.646
For another great supporter of the early beguines, Caesarius of Heisterbach, 'they even surpass[ed] in the love of God many of those who live in the cloister. They live the eremitical 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.'647
This concept of religious life 'in the world', without formal vows or rejection of individual property, followed naturally out of the twelfth-century emphasis on inner spirituality, personal relationships with the divine, and growing criticism of formalism. What was new, however, was that women practised it in such great numbers and gradually organised themselves without much male or clerical supervision. From about 1230 onwards, beguines who lived together informally began to acquire property jointly, elect one of their group as their superior, and make arrangements with local priests to ensure regular (and preferably exclusive) access to church services. Thus came into being the first 'beguinages', which by the 1270s encompassed entire neighbourhoods, walled off from the rest of the city, where beguines lived in small houses or larger units gathered around a church, and where they taught school, ran their textile businesses and, importantly, set up hospitals for poor or elderly women. Some of these communities in the Low Countries housed several hundred beguines at various stages of the medieval and early modern eras. The largest of all, St Catherine's of Mechelen, was home to more than 1,500 beguines in the first half of the sixteenth century.648 In other parts of northern and central Europe, they usually resided in small convents dispersed over the city, but there, too, the total number ofwomen who chose to live as a beguine could be quite impressive.649 Nevertheless, as a movement that grew largely spontaneously and in many ways resisted institutionalisation, there never was an 'order' of beguines; each local beguine community remained in principle autonomous, and fewbeguinages entertained close relations with each other. Communities of men who imitated the lifestyle and were called beghards (beguini, beghardi) developed independently but remained of modest size.
The rapid spread of the beguine ideal was in no small part the work of a few, influential clerics who promoted beguines as living examples of orthodox piety against the apparent progress of heretical movements and of Catharism in particular. James of Vitry belonged to a circle of friends who took up the priesthood or joined the new religious orders in the first decades of the thirteenth century and were keen on a vigorous apostolate among the laity. They comprised his one-time mentor, John of NiveUe (d. 1233), the latter's companion and teacher John of Liroux (d. after 1216/17), Guido of NiveUes (d. 1227) and, one generation younger, the famous hagiographer and scholar, Thomas of Cantimpre (c. 1200-c. 1272).650 Ah of them studied at Paris, where they were exposed to the new pastoral theology associated with Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and his proteges, the preacher Fulk of Neuilly (d. 1202) and the later Pope Innocent III (1198-1216); all served as priestly advisers to beguine communities in the Low Countries or wrote vitae recording the exploits of individual beguines. They, and quite a few other religious men (the Cistercians of ViUers and various Dominican friars come to mind), legitimised beguines regionally and on an international scale, securing oral papal approval and numerous episcopal charters of support for individual beguinages.651
Yet the popular appeal of beguinages was also rooted in broader social and cultural changes. The burgeoning urban economies of the Low Countries and the Rhineland offered single women unprecedented avenues for employment as textile labourers, hospital workers or as teachers. City magistrates and feudal overlords in Flanders, Brabant and Holland sometimes aided in setting up beguinages because the women fulfilled real social needs while providing cheap labour.652 For the women, beguinages gave the promise of a safe haven in a dangerous environment, mutual support by like-minded women, and the option of expressing their religious aspirations at mass and the daily hours, in devotional exercises, in song and dance, and in writing. Hadewijch of Brabant (thirteenth century), Mechtild of Magdeburg (c. 1208-c. 1282) and Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) are the best known - but surely not the only - beguine authors of a rich, diverse mystical literature in the vernacular that originated in this milieu.653
Where churchmen favourable to these developments perceived a harmonious complementarity between priestly functions and lay, female devotion, opponents saw potential for heresy, scandalum and subversion of church authority. Popular sentiment was initially sceptical, too. The name 'beguine' was not derived, as was sometimes thought, from Albigensis (a Latin term for heretics in the thirteenth century) or from the name of the Liegeois priest Lambert li Begue (erroneously considered the founding father of the movement) but rather from the root begg-, meaning to mumble or mutter prayers. A beguina thus denoted a fake devotee, a woman who claimed to be devout but whose utterances were indistinct and therefore not to be trusted. Although beguines eventually wore the insult as a badge of honour, the original meaning was kept vividly alive in controversies over the beguines' informal preaching aimed at exhortation, teaching, visionary powers and mysticism. The profound suspicion of female authority in these fields burst to the foreground in the early fourteenth century and led to the execution of Marguerite Porete for alleged heresies in 1310 and the condemnation of insubordinate beguines at the Council of Vienne (1311-12). Not coincidentally, urban economies experienced a decline in this period, reducing the need for female labour and hardening social policies. In many parts of northern Europe, beguine communities closed their doors; a few adopted an 'official' religious rule, for instance that of the Franciscan Third Order. In the Low Countries, however, the larger and well-connected beguinages survived virtually intact - some of them even until the twentieth century - while beguine forms of organisation inspired such new experiments as the Devotio Moderna.654
World History
