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“Beguines In Time:  A Thirteenth Century Women’s Movement”

Lucinda Cunningham

Dr. Jim Ferguson

Burch Field Research Program:

Food and the Church in Medieval France

July 24, 2001

Introduction

            In Christian tradition, the number thirteen has been set apart as a number of misfortune, a call for suspicion and reservation, stemming from Judas as the thirteenth and deceitful participant of Christ’s Last Supper.  An ‘elimination’ of floor thirteen from elevator keypads, and of course, Friday the 13^th stands as the day of all misfortune in Western social tradition (Friday also being the day of Noah’s flood and the day of Christ’s Crucifixion).  But, for a day in time, a floor in History Hotel, thirteenth century AD stands as a significant segment in Christian religious, specifically women’s, history.  The thirteenth century, ending the High Middle Ages (into the 1300s of the Late Middle Ages, a possible contributor to the stigma of 13), was a summit in economic, religious, and social constructs for the Western world during the Medieval period, conducive to female participation in religious movements of society.

            The Beguine movement, rising in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, being the only female association conceived, run and populated by women and unaffiliated with any religious order of their time, can be posed a physical image of Church activity at large and specifically, the female religious status during and leaving the High Middle Ages.  In communities that were completely independent of each other throughout Western Europe, Beguines were not nuns, but bound only temporarily to the pledges of service, chastity, and poverty they took as members of the Beguine communities.  By the fourteenth century, the Beguine movement had come under siege by clerical authorities under heresy charges, leaving a grim echo of the female religious freedom previously experienced by the movement.

 

The High Middle Ages:  A Brief Overview

  The eleventh through thirteenth centuries in Western Europe was a time of growth; economically, technologically, culturally, even climatically, the High Middle Ages presented promise to many of its inhabitants.  Money as the new mode of exchange, record-keeping, elevated standards of living, agricultural surpluses, and urban growth brought new challenges and opportunities yearned for before this time.  Higher education came with cathedral schools and established universities.  Growing towns began building social order, placing the wealthy citizens at their governmental heads in a merchant, upper class, followed by regulators of industry, the craft guild. Religious communities unveiled new vocations and spiritual approaches.  The eleventh century also carried struggles between the Church and secular authorities for power.  The beginning of the Crusades in 1095 and continuing through the 13^th century brought increasing sensitivity to unorthodoxy and heresy, leading to the Medieval Inquisition in the fourteenth century. [1]

            With the boom of the economy and surplus came a religious reform amongst secular groups, and the renouncing of wealth by many of the aristocratic society upon their entrance into monastic living.  Within the Church, among the many progressions, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a leader in the Cistercian monastic movements, brought with him a wave of renouncing the worldly, elaborate way of living and taking on simple, reverent lives.  As the two reform movements merged, new Christian religious societies began to appear, many made up of former members of the aristocracy vowing to poverty, chastity and service.  Among these emerging groups were a flock of informal religious movements (i.e. independent from monastic orders), in particular, the Beguine movement.  Many of these new religious movements diminished at the dawn of the fourteenth century, due to the Medieval Inquisition’s heresy trials and the reform groups’ notoriety for “bypassing clerical authority.” [2]

 

Women of the High Middle Ages

  Women in the secular society of the High Middle Ages, depending on their economic status, were found in almost all occupational spheres; the three main spheres under the noble class being artisans (self-employed or employed by others), servants (under employers or lords), and peasantry (agricultural work). Although women were not allowed to participate in the higher education systems, noblewomen, those who would have access to such an education, contributed to society “serving as patrons and producers of music and poetry and shaping the codes of chivalry and courtly love.” [3]  

In religious society, women were not to participate in the authoritative realms of the Church, due to the “frailty of the female condition,” as the Council of Orange declared in 533. [4]   But their diminishing lot in clerical positions did not affect the prominent role women played in the religious fervor of the High Middle Ages.

            Pious women during this time were allowed only to be ‘enclosed,’ absent and distanced from worldly affairs, “since the medieval church considered them to be both more susceptible to sexual temptation and more likely to be a source of sexual temptation than a man.” [5]   Women that chose the religious life were stationed in or between three main bodies—nuns, hermitesses, and/or anchoresses (an expansion from the Early Middle Age choices of nun or Canoness.) [6]

Nunneries, as centers of education, and alongside the rise of religious fervor at the time, were a promising option to women of wealth.  Taking vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, many noblewomen chose, or had chosen for them, lives dedicated to prayer and manual labor away from worldly contact.  Women choosing withdrawal from all social contact would become hermitesses or anchoresses.  Hermitesses hid themselves in wilderness areas, in individual or group form, unaffiliated with the church organization (the eremitic age ending by the thirteenth century as a result of and contributor to the growth of urban areas, therefore hindering isolation.)  Anchoresses, another form of seclusionary, chose to live in cells—small rooms, often attached to a house or church, with few openings, simply for receiving the Eucharist and other survival essentials, equipped for the life-long obligation of its single inhabitant.

 

Entre Les Deux

  Religious and social transformation during this time provided a plane for the new and less restrictive female religious vocations surfacing, a platform for the Tertiary, Beata and Beguine movements.  Tertiaries were the Third Order of three-leveled communities (below the First Order friars and the Second Order nuns) found in southern Europe (mainly Italy), and organized by the mendicant religious orders in response to the rise in participation and power of the Church. [7]   This order was made up of laypersons, men and women, taking revocable vows of chastity with no standard intensity of religious living. Beatas, the Spanish equivalent of the Tertiary, were also a group of women devoting themselves temporarily, rather than giving life-long commitments, to chastity and service. [8]

            Labeled as the first women’s movement in Christian history, the Beguine movement was completely unattached to an existing order, and having females as founders and authorities.  Beguines took temporary vows, wore a simple habit and worked to bridge the gap between convent and secular living. [9]   The movement brought the previously unfathomable choice for women to live in association, under vows of service and chastity for a time and then, without scrutiny, resume secular living or marry.  (Tertiary and Beata vows were similar, but their authorities were male, not female.) [10]   Each Beguine community was run by a “great mistress,” and as the movement continued, communities of Beguines began to form Beguinages:  areas of female communal living, working and service. [11]

 

A Demand Established

 

“Daughters of respectable men, of both noble and ordinary birth…were received to preserve their chastity by vow or without vow and to provide themselves with food and clothing without embarrassment to themselves…” [12]

 

            Many pious women wanting to devote their lives to religious service in the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw diminishing opportunities to join convent living, which was, essentially, their only option outside of marriage.  The growing dowry requirement (a result of the thriving economy) was becoming too large for most women of craft and worker guilds to pay for their entry into nunneries.  There was also a decline in support among current monasteries to expand or develop new nunneries.  Specifically, Cistercian monasteries began forbidding the establishment of new convents after 1228; those that remained were disintegrating. [13]

            Those that had the monetary means or opportunity to enter into the nunneries faced the permanence of their religious commitments (breaking or leaving vows taken upon entry was considered “apostasic”:  turning from the faith.)  These vows also automatically eliminated married women, due to the vow of celibacy, leaving only young women (those who were too young to marry) and widows to the taking.  In many cases, the young women found in nunneries were not their by choice, but by default, due to reaching a certain age without marrying. [14]

Because noblewomen frequently married men perhaps twice their age—who had had more opportunities to die unmarried in tournament, war, Crusade, or from disease—there were substantially more noblewomen in the High Middle Ages looking for husbands than noblemen looking for wives.  The imbalance was further magnified because boys entered the church in much greater numbers than girls. [15]

            The female majority of the High Middle Ages also posed a question for society’s marriage-nunnery, two-sphere structure for women.  As nunneries were less and less an option and marriage was numerically impossible, a demand for reform and new facets for female vocation was established.

The Groundwork

            Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), as a leader in the Cistercian order, also lead a widespread reform movement of the Middle Ages called mysticism: a “combined practice of ascetic, contemplative devotion with efforts to attain personal union with the divine”—a concentration on the individual soul’s relationship with God.  Bernard’s writings introduced to the world the marital relationship between the human soul (the bride) and Christ (the Bridegroom), an obvious faculty for female mysticism of the twelfth century. [16]

            In its intense concentration on the soul, mysticism provided a foundation for distorting general lines.  The relationship between a person and God and person-to-person was now on a spiritual level.  “There is neither…male nor female” in Christ Jesus through one’s faith, and therefore, to acknowledge the two would be to refer to things physical and impure. [17]

            A second movement, the vita apostolica, or apostolic life—taking on poverty and simplicity for the task of preaching the Gospel, as Jesus and the Apostles lived—prospered alongside the broadening population of mystics.  Female mystics were increasingly anxious to take on the public, evangelical roles prohibited to them.

The Beguine Supply

“The thousand women living in Beguine communities in Cologne in 1320 accounted for about 15 percent of the adult female population (and this figure excludes beguines living alone.)” [18]

The origins of the first Beguine community are thought to have been the Premonstratensian nuns of the twelfth century, found in Liège, Belgium.  This nunnery, as the Beguine movement, allowed worldly contact to its inhabitants for charitable works; but the Premonstratensian order of nuns dissipated in 1198. [19]

            Mary of Oignies (1177-1213), recorded as the first Beguine, found support for her public religious life from Friar Jacques de Vitry (1170-1240) of the Dominican order.  Jacques did not hold views different from the prevailing gender-related regulations (identifying women as the “slippery and weak sex, not to be trusted too easily.”) [20] With these opinions, Jacques viewed Mary as having transcended physical norms, evident by her accomplishments, having “persuaded her husband to adopt a religious life, ministering in a public setting, and accepting both female and male followers.” [21]   Mary had proved her entrance into the spiritual, gender-absent realm of life.

            During the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the formation of new orders was barred, which would have included the Beguine order.  Jacques, being a newly elected bishop and in good standing, obtained approval from Pope Honorius III to let religious women in Liège, France and Germany “live in communal houses and encourage each other to do good by mutual exhortation.” [22]   Later, in 1233, Pope Gregory IX gave sanction specifically to “chaste virgins,” aiding and safe-guarding the Beguine movement due to their vows of chastity.

At the Beguines’ peak, the movement produced such famous female mystics as Hadewijch of Antewerp (early mid-thirteenth century) and Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212-1281).  Hadewijch’s is considered to have written the first “vernacular prose in the Low Countries” being “familiar with the Latin language, rules of rhetoric, numerology, Ptolemaic astronomy” and associated with the Church authorities and canonical writers of her time.  (Hadewijch was eventually banned from her Beguine community, but historians are unsure of the cause.) [23]  

Mechtild of Magdeburg, as one of the founders of German Mysticism, was the first of German mystics to write her works in Latin.  Mechtild’s flamboyant style of dismissing clergy in her writing ended in her fleeing to safety (from clerical authorities accusing her of heresy) in a German monastery at Hefta at the age of sixty-two. [24]

Beguine Downfall

            At the turn of the fourteenth century, Beguines no longer bore the freedom of moving back and forth between spiritual community and home/world as they had had before.  Beguines were living under stricter regulations and in homes, comparable to monastic units, called Beguinages.  A description of a Beguinage community in the late thirteenth century reveals the cloister-like conditions:

In the middle of [the Beguinage] is a church, and next to the church a cemetery and a hospital…Many houses were also built to…dwell together communally…having nothing but their clothing…By manual work…they earn enough money daily that, making thereby a single living, they also pay their dues to the church and give a modest amount in alms.  In each convent there is …working all day in silence…On Sundays…[no one] may leave the Beguinage without special permission from the principle mistress…No one may be away from the Beguinage for long or spend the night in the town without her permission.  Nor may anyone leave the Beguinage for an hour, without the special permission of the conventional mistress. [25]

The Beguinage described here opposes the initial movements of the vita apostolica with constraints on worldly contact and the absence of the mid-way between convent life and secular life.

            Marguerite of Porete was a French mystic, burned in 1310 under charges of heresy.  Her charges against clerical authorities and public persuasive efforts in her writings and evangelism drew attention to Marguerite and the Beguine movement, eventually contributing to the association of the Beguines to the Free Spirit heresy movement of the time. [26]

            In 1312, two years after Marguerite’s death, the Council of Vienna, with Pope Clement V condemned women “commonly known as Beguines who took no vows of obedience nor followed an approved rule.” [27]   Alongside the heresy charges, the Beguines also had the weakness of being an unorganized movement, unaffiliated with any of the orders (the orders being the understood ‘orthodoxy’) of the time.  Many Beguinages under the scrutiny of inquisitors in 1369, under Emperor Charles IV, were ordered to be sold and the profits divided among charities, town councils, and toward aiding the Inquisition. [28]   Beguinages were dismantled all over Europe unless individuals were identified as “women who stayed in their houses and did not dispute about the Trinity.” [29]   The religious constraints put on Beguines to pass orthodoxy inquisitions did not reflect the initial intentions of Beguines one century earlier.

Conclusions

            Between the narrow admittance for women into varied vocations in the Early Middle Ages and the Inquisition’s skepticism of heresy among female mystics in the Late Middle Ages, a window of time fostered alongside the religious, demographic, and economic changes of the High Middle Ages.  Within this window, the opportunity arose for an authoritative and influential female movement.  During the tenth to twelfth centuries, women were found in clerical roles.  Female sainthood rose proportionately from 11.8 percent to 22.6 percent from the twelfth to the thirteen centuries, an almost twofold increase. After this window, “collective biographies of women disappeared.  Fewer holy women wrote.  Male suspicion of visionary women was articulated…and holy women appear more isolated and male oriented.” [30]   The Beguine movement from its commencement to its fade during the thirteenth century stands as a memorial in a window of time, representing the possibilities of opportunities seen and taken.

Peanuts

            Thirteen:  lucky for some, unlucky for others.  The moral of the story:  When in doubt, ask Jim.