The High Medieval Era · c. 1190-1310 · Low Countries, Rhineland
The Beguines
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About This Movement
From the late twelfth century, women in the towns of the Low Countries and the Rhineland began living religious lives without joining any order: no lifelong vows, no rule, no enclosure. They kept their own property or worked — often in cloth — lived alone or in walled courtyard communities called beguinages, prayed, and nursed the sick and the dying. Some of them wrote, and that is what makes them extraordinary on any map of medieval Christianity: Hadewijch's visions and letters, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls are among the very few medieval accounts of a religious life told from the inside by the women actually living it. Because they fitted no category, they attracted suspicion: Porete was burned in Paris in 1310, and in 1312 the Council of Vienne moved against the beguine life itself.
Sources
- Hadewijch, The Complete Works (trans. Mother Columba Hart, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1980) (primary) — Visions, letters, and poems in Middle Dutch - a beguine directing other women's formation, in her own voice.
- Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead (trans. Frank Tobin, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1998) (primary) — Begun as a beguine, finished at Helfta; includes her defense of writing as an unlettered woman.
- Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (trans. Ellen Babinsky, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1993) (primary) — The movement's boldest theology, and its martyrdom — Porete was burned in 1310 — carried in the fate of one book. Her theology of the soul's freedom also overlaps with the Free Spirit heresy of the same period.
- Jacques de Vitry, Life of Marie d'Oignies, in Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation (ed. Mulder-Bakker, Brepols, 2006) (primary) — A sympathetic outside view from a churchman, and the account that won the movement its first toleration — written, though, in the idealizing frame of a saint's life.
- Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Penn, 2001) (secondary) — The standard social history - courtyards, labor, and rents behind the mystics.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 20 'On the margins of religious life... beguines and beghards' (Simons); cf. ch. 19 'Mysticism and transcendence' (Hollywood) (reference) — The volume's co-editor writes on this exact movement.