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

By Walter Simons (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xv plus 335 pp. $65.00).

The medieval Low Countries are comparatively little known to Anglophone scholars, who have long studied the histories of medieval England, France, and Italy, and in recent years and to a lesser extent Germany and Spain, but generally not the antecedents of the modern Benelux countries. (Art historians are probably the single biggest exception.) If for no other reason, many scholars may have been intimidated by a historiography written largely in Dutch. Yet the southern Low Countries (corresponding roughly to the northern tip of modern France and to modern Belgium, a country created only in the nineteenth century) were a crucial part of medieval Europe, being the center of cloth production, one of Europe's most highly urbanized regions (along with northern Italy), and a crossroads for political, religious, and intellectual currents as well as for trade. In this book Walter Simons, originally from Belgium but now an American academic, makes it clear how much Anglophone scholars have been missing.

Although his title evokes the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, a late medieval writer who celebrated extraordinary women from history and literature, Simons concentrates on the mostly inconspicuous and ordinary women who became beguines in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. Beguinages (the "cities" of the title) provided a home for women who wished to live chastely and piously with other women--for shorter or longer periods--while also working in the urban economy, and who chose not to take permanent religious vows. Thus, they remained a part of the world even as they withdrew from it. In spite of a burgeoning scholarly interest in religious women overall, beguines have been widely neglected, with the exception of some studies of their spirituality and connection to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Simons in contrast places beguines squarely within their social, political, and ecclesiastical context, refusing to simplify their history into a response either to a shortage of available husbands or to a shortage of spaces in traditional nunneries. As he argues throughout, beguines have to be understood in terms of religion, of the urban economy, and of gender.

Beguines appeared originally in the cities of the Low Countries at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as women moved to town in large numbers to work in the cloth industry or as servants or nurses or even teachers--a number of public schools were established in the cities, serving girls as well as boys and needing teachers of both sexes. Many of these women clustered together informally, in a semi-religious setting. The region, Simons argues, had a long-established tradition of religious dissent and criticism of the church hierarchy, and these women's efforts to follow a religious life without accepting the cloistered regime of a nun were, he argues, part of this. It is significant that when their way of life became distinctive enough to take a name, beguines were named after Lambert le Begue ("the Stammerer"), assumed from the 1250s on to be their founder, even though he was not, being instead an inspiring priest who died in the 1170s accused of heresy for his criticism of his ecclesiastical superiors and for doubts about all the teachings of the church.

After rather informal beginnings in a context of religious independence and women's work, beguinages became large, well-established institutions by the fourteenth century, complete with regulations and large property holdings. But their institutionalization also corresponded to new difficulties, as the general economic crisis of the fourteenth century reduced the jobs available to beguines and as the ecclesiastical hierarchy became increasingly disapproving of those--especially women--who did not fit conveniently into the command structure. Then the Dutch revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century broke the continuity of beguinages, even though some were later repopulated and persisted through the nineteenth century. But the beguines' most important period was the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when they first flourished in a growing urban economy, at a time of strong lay interest in religious issues, and then were increasingly mistrusted during a period of economic shrinkage, when the hierarchy felt anxiety about self-proclaimed chastity outside the cloister and about women's--especially lay women's--intellectual ambitions.

This book will immediately become a classic, especially for its extensive appendix in which Simons identifies the various beguine communities of his region. He has looked at an impressive number of archival manuscripts from some 300 communities, and further research on beguinages will have to begin with his findings. Assuming that the book becomes available in paperback, it should also quickly find a home in graduate seminars, where the first 150 pages will be read for their clear, thoughtful, and nuanced discussion of women's religious life in an urban context. (One does, however, wish the notes could have been at the bottom of the page.)

Constance B. Bouchard

University of Akron