ancient cities

66 Béguinage
Beguinage Amsterdam in its renovated state
a “chaste marriage.” They received help from a few
male clerics who were inspired by new thought on
pastoral theology developed around the turn of the
century at the University of Paris and who publicized
their efforts, ultimately securing Church backing
in the form of episcopal charters of protection
and occasional papal support. Béguines never
formed a single religious order but congregated
locally to form independent béguinages that acquired
and rented out property to individual women,
elected their own superiors, and by the end of the
thirteenth century also adopted local rules or statutes
to regulate internal life. At that time, the movement
had spread to a large area of continental
northern Europe, from Marseilles in southern
France to the Baltic coast. The beatae of Spain and
the pinzochere or bizzoche of Italy were comparable
to béguines but usually formed smaller communities
more closely associated with recognized religious
orders such as the Third Order of St. Francis.
Types and History of
Béguine Communities
In most parts of northwestern Europe, béguines lived
in single-residence communities known as “convents,”
each headed by its own “mistress” and dependent
on parish clergy or monasteries, especially those
of friars, for their religious services.
In Belgium and the Netherlands,
however, the béguinage often took
the form of a walled compound for
several hundreds of women in
which béguine church, hospital,
and residences were laid out in a
grid or arranged around a central
open square. These became de facto
single-sex neighborhoods governed
by béguines, supervised by the local
clergy for their religious observances,
and supervised by the secular,
urban authorities for their
charitable work. St. Catherine’s of
Mechelen, Belgium, possibly the
largest of these “court beguinages”
(Dutch: begijnhoven; Latin: curtes
beguinarum), counted more than
1,500 béguines in the early sixteenth
century.
“Court” béguinages, more
influential and of lasting importance
to many cities in the Low Countries, grew
through a combination of push and pull factors
that reflect the ambivalent position of such women
in medieval urban society. Unlike nuns, who took
solemn religious vows governing their life until
death and were strictly cloistered and could not
hold property individually, béguines were required
only to promise obedience to their superior (“the
grand mistress”) and chastity for the duration of
their stay in the béguinage, which they could leave
at will; in most cases they were expected to provide
for their own living, either through their labor or
on the basis of rent income. Under these circumstances
it was imperative that béguines freely exercised
a profession within the béguinage or outside
it, unhindered by strict rules of enclosure. Béguines
are mentioned in the sources as nurses, teachers,
merchants, but most often as workers in the textile
industry, as spinsters or carders of wool, as weavers
of linen and sometimes of woolen cloth. Many
if not all of these tasks demanded a relatively free
flow of people and goods between béguinages and
the city. It was precisely because of their economic
services that city authorities in the Low Countries
collaborated with béguines to acquire large
expanses of urban territory on the city’s outskirts
for the establishment of a béguinage. Evidently
béguines delivered the right kind of inexpensive