Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. .

Walter Simons. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xvi + 335 pp. index, append. illus. map. bibi. $65. ISBN: 0-8122-3604-1.

The devotional writings and mystical spirituality of the beguines have recently inspired much scholarly activity in the fields of history, art history, literary studies, and religion, thanks largely to the ground-breaking work of Caroline Walker Bynum and others who have brought the study of female religious life in the Middle Ages into the mainstream of academic scholarship. Valuable as these studies are, what has been lacking in the field of beguine scholarship is a dedicated work of social history aimed at situating beguine religious life squarely in its historical context. The English-speaking world has had to make do with Ernest McDonnell's rather our-of-date and unwieldy, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ, 1954). The product of massive archival research, Walter Simons' Cities of Ladies has at last remedied this situation. By focusing on about 298 beguine communities in 111 towns of the southern Low Countries beginning around the year 1200 and moving all the way through 1565, the date of the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt (an event that marks not so much the end of beguine history but rather a significant rupture in it), Simons' enterprise is to demonstrate that beguine institutions must be viewed both as a significant component of the lay religious movements of the Middle Ages and as an integral part of the urban history of the southern Low Countries. No less important, however, is the beguines' place in gender history as they represent "the only movement in medieval monastic history that was created by women and for women" (143). Chapter 1, a synthetic introduction to each of these subject areas, establishes the beguines in the highly urbanized, highly literate, southern Low Countries where women married late, outnumbered men in the cities, and were widely involved in economic production, particularly in the textile industry.

Chapters 2 and 4, however, constitute the centerpiece of the book. Here, through careful quantitative and demographic analyses of diplomatic materials culled from about forty archives of the southern Low Countries, Simons painstakingly reconstructs the social history of the beguines. He uses evidence from documents of practice such as wills, obituary books, hearth censuses, cartularies, and guild records to show when formal beguinages were founded, whether they were of the convent or court type, how many beguines inhabited these communities, how beguines were employed in the community and urban workforce, and, perhaps most revealingly, the socioeconomic status of both founders and members of beguine institutions.

Chapter 2, "The Formation of Beguinages," is an important revision of the Flemish historian L.J.M. Philippen's four-stage model of the developmental stages of beguine communities. Originally posited in 1919, it was later popularized in the Anglophone world by McDonnell. Simons forcefully rejects this model, arguing convincingly instead for two stages, the first of which he terms the pre-institutional movement, or the spontaneous movement, that began circa 1190, the evidence for which is found in a handful of beguine vitae, the most celebrated being that of Mary of Oignies (d. 1213). The second stage, between 1230-1320, is when, he argues, most formal beguinages came into existence. Although the most common form of beguinage was the convent type, which housed an average of 14.7 inhabitants, it was actually the great court beguinages--cities within cities which often contained private dwellings, a chapel, a brewery, and an infirmary--that were most prevalent during the first fifty years of the second stage. Am ong Simons' valuable findings are his population statistics for the courts: in the thirteenth century he found that one-third of the court beguinages had populations between thirty-five and 100; one-third had populations between 100-400; but other beguine courts in the same period such St. Elizabeth in Ghent and Sr. Christophe in Liege housed between 610-1000 women, astonishing figures considering the average convent in northern France housed about thirty-five nuns. For comparative purposes it would have been interesting to know whether beguine communities--like Humiliati houses in northern Italy, for example--were composed mainly of family groupings.

Chapter 3, "The Contemplative and the Active Life," shows the beguines both in their contemplative mode as anchoresses and recluses and in their active mode as teachers, as cheap labor in the textile industry, and care givers for the living and the dead. In this last category, Simons shows how wills of the laity demonstrate that beguines were in high demand to perform funerary functions which included not only the laying out of the body but reciting prayers and reading psalms for soul of the deceased.

Chapter 4, "The Social Composition of Beguine Communities," is perhaps Simons' most important contribution to the scholarship on female religious movements. Simons' research supports recent historiography that suggests that beguine social composition changed over time; i.e., in the first stage, noble and aristocratic women dominated the movement but were slowly replaced by women of lower social origins. His work adds the nuance, however, that there was always a significant presence of women from the lower classes, even in the pre-institutional phase of the movement. Significantly, what this chapter starkly reveals is that many if not most beguines after the mid-thirteenth century were poor, many of them teetering on the edge of poverty, if not destitution. Simons suggest that from the late thirteenth through the late sixteenth centuries, anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of beguines were moderately well-off, but disturbingly, anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of beguines, those who relied on manua l labor for their material support, were on the "brink of poverty" (104). He does not explicitly address the question of whether this impoverished condition was deemed to constitute the state of holy or voluntary poverty, but his implicit answer seems to be that in fact it was not. More likely it was deemed to be no more than inescapable, everyday, grinding poverty. Either way, it is a corrective to Herbert Grundmann who argued that beguines came from the well-to-do middling and upper classes and who as part of their religious vocation renounced their wealth to live in voluntary poverty.

Where the previous chapters show the beguines thoroughly enmeshed in the urban lay society of the southern Low Countries, chapter 5 examines the movements uneasy relationship with the church hierarchy, beginning with the condemnation and execution of Marguerite Porete in 1310, the Council of Vienne's ambiguous denunciation of beguine life in 1312, and the episcopal examination of beguine communities that followed in the wake of the Vienne decrees. The beguines' semireligious life, their lack of solemn vows, their ability to cross back and forth between secular and religious life put them at risk, but above all it was their intense mystical spirituality and writings that made them suspect in the eyes of a church that was accustomed to establishing firm rules and cloistered boundaries for religious women. This chapter might have benefited from a more extended synthetic overview of beguine spirituality and mysticism, since it was precisely their mystical writings and teachings--potentially heretical--that explai ns much of church's hostility to the beguines after 1310. In addition, such a discussion would have had the great merit of transforming this admirable work of social history into a "one-stop" reference work on the beguines. But of course that was not the book Simons set out to write. What he has written is no small achievement. Grounded in meticulous scholarship and accompanied by useful maps, tables, plates, and derailed appendices which both explain and disguise an enormous amount of research, Cities of Ladies is destined to become the standard work in beguine history; for in addition to casting new light on demographic questions, it shows just how the beguines' unique communities left an indelible mark on the landscapes of both urban and religious life in the later medieval and early modern periods.