Broadly speaking, beguines were devout laywomen who, through their humble garb, pious demeanor, and acts of care and service, were recognized by contemporaries as living a religious life above and beyond the ordinary practice of laypeople. The term’s appearance in early thirteenth-century sermons indicates that “beguine” was initially used to mock laywomen who, rejecting both marriage and the cloister, lived lives of chastity and prayer in the world. Beguines, therefore, stood out in their communities, even as they remained deeply embedded in their urban contexts.
Beguine communities emerged in the early thirteenth century within the context of urban growth, socioeconomic inequality, and lay interest in the apostolic life. The charitable revolution of the thirteenth century, a response to urban wealth, poverty, and developing connections between almsgiving and salvation, led to a surge of hospital and charitable foundations, institutions that overlapped and intertwined with nascent beguine communities.
Beguine gatherings both shaped and were shaped by these new expressions of lay piety, embracing apostolic poverty and service in the world, particularly healthcare work, which was regarded as “women’s work” and was in demand in the growing cities of thirteenth-century Europe. Although ecclesiastical policy favored enclosure for religious women, local socio-spiritual structures and demands, as well as women’s own aspirations and needs, encouraged the push and pull of fluidity and formalization on the ground. With the support of local bishops and secular authorities, then, these gatherings of devout laywomen gradually coalesced into locally recognized beguine convents or “beguinages.”
The Emergence of the Beguines
Print of a beguine in Des dodes dantz of Matthäus Brandis, Lübeck 1489 – Wikimedia Commons.
While modern scholarship tends to locate the “beguine movement” in the southern Low Countries (the geographical region encompassing parts of modern-day northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), the social, economic, and religious conditions that facilitated the emergence of beguine communities in western European cities were particularly and uniquely developed in medieval Paris. Indeed, women “commonly known as beguines” gathered near chapels and hospitals in the early thirteenth century, decades before King Louis IX (1214–1270) established an official residence – or beguinage – for these women sometime before 1260.
This royal foundation, located in the parish of Saint-Paul on the eastern end of Paris’s Right Bank, was an expression of King Louis’ personal piety, his interest in promoting religious reform in the realm, and his charitable concern for the vulnerable. Upon returning to Paris in the summer of 1254 after his first failed crusade, Louis established no fewer than eight mendicant houses in the city, built a house for the blind, gave generously to the Filles-Dieu (a house for reformed prostitutes), and founded a beguinage. In these efforts, Louis both spiritually and materially transformed medieval Paris.
Thus, while recognizing that the Paris beguine communities reflected the broader forces animating devout laywomen all over western Europe, they must be understood in their local context. Some of the most important early supporters of the beguine status – secular clerics, friars, and bishops – cycled in and out of the city, converging at the university and departing again to take up positions in other northern European cities. Paris’s unique position as site of the royal government and the University of Paris, which amplified the city’s political, cultural, and economic importance, shaped the beguines’ spiritual ideals, work opportunities, and support base, while entangling these communities in the religious controversies of their time.
What it meant to live a religious life was a hotly debated topic in thirteenth-century Paris, the very city where small beguine households dotted the streets around the Franciscan and Dominican convents, as well as the emerging Sorbonne. University masters and students counted beguines among their neighbors on Paris’s Left Bank and reacted to these women with both admiration and concern. Parisian theologians were frequent visitors at Paris’s royal beguinage, where they preached to the women and even copied down sermons preached by the mistress of the beguinage into their own sermon collections.
Abutting the walls of Philip Augustus on its eastern end, the beguinage of Paris was located in what is today known as “the Marais,” bordered by the rue Charlemagne to the north, the rue de l’Ave-Maria to the south, and the rue du Fauconnier to the west. On the east side of the beguinage, the walls of Philip Augustus served as part of the enclosure, remaining to this day the best-preserved remnant of the old medieval walls. The enclosure encompassed a variety of residential and communal spaces.
Wealthier beguines could live in private homes, sometimes with one or two companions. Poorer beguines lived in the communal dormitory, which may have accommodated dozens of women. The royal beguinage also had its own chapel, a hospital, and a school where young girls from the city, and perhaps beguine residents, were taught the fundamentals of reading and writing. Although the walls surrounding the beguinage protected the women from threats to their bodies and reputations, the beguinage was quite porous. Its chapel attracted royal patrons, bourgeois supporters, and preachers.
Paris’s beguines could leave the enclosure to visit friends, care for the sick, sit with the dying, and conduct business. Paris’s beguinage was overseen by a magistra, or mistress, who was charged with managing the community’s finances, regulating the everyday activities of its residents, enforcing the house’s rules, and organizing the community’s spiritual direction. The mistress was likely appointed by the king himself or his clerical advisors and seems to have been chosen from the city’s most important merchant families.
The Paris beguinage’s chapel was served by the parish priest of Saint-Paul, who was obliged to say Mass, hear confession, and preach sermons. However, Paris’s university clerics were also deeply involved in the beguines’ pastoral care. University masters and students frequently preached to the beguine community, possibly at the invitation of the mistress of the beguinage herself. Louis’ successor, King Philip IV, later charged the Dominican prior with spiritual and financial oversight of the royal beguinage, but the community continued to be tied to the city’s Franciscans, secular clerics, and regular canons. Residents of the beguinage wore a distinctive habit, heard Mass daily, and observed a monastic routine of prayers and vigils.
Criticism of the Beguines
Beguines at work. Detail of a larger panel of 44 images of the daily activities of beguines in the Grand Beguinage of Mechelen. The beguines here are depicted doing various tasks. Anonymous, 17th century. Museum Hof van Busleyden / Wikimedia Commons
Beguines, however, also attracted criticism from local observers for their seemingly presumptuous claim to live as religious in the world without enclosure and permanent vows. The Parisian jongleur Rutebeuf (†1285) frequently ridiculed the beguine life, noting that, to be a beguine, all one needed to do was wear a beguine habit. In his poem “Li diz des beguines,” Rutebeuf claimed that whatever the beguines did, however ordinary, gullible Parisians celebrated and supported these charlatans as truly religious women.
Moreover, since the beguines’ promises to remain chaste were not formal, binding vows, they could potentially abandon their vocations at any time to marry. In this poem, Rutebeuf hints at the resentment some Parisians may have felt towards these women and their royal patron by warning, “But do not speak ill of her. The king will not tolerate it.” For Rutebeuf and many of his contemporaries, religious commitment was not a true commitment without a binding pledge of self and property.
Indeed, the beguine life raised important questions about religious status and privileges. As ecclesiastical officials sought to channel religious enthusiasm into existing orders and prohibit the creation of new orders, secular and regular clergy in medieval Paris had much to say about the beguines’ ambiguous status and unregulated spirituality. The Paris-trained theologian and Franciscan Gilbert of Tournai (1200–1284), for example, complained that beguines, who were neither nuns nor wives, evaded canonical distinctions between “religious and lay.” More alarmingly, the beguines of Paris, Gilbert claimed, possessed error-ridden translations of the Scriptures, which they read in common in their workshops. Gilbert’s concerns about the women’s unclear status and dangerous intellectual activities reveal that some medieval thinkers believed that the beguines’ spiritual ambitions could lead them into heresy and doctrinal error.
Although the beguinage offered devout laywomen a space to pray, work, and serve in common in relative security, not all devout laywomen lived in the beguinage. Parisian fiscal records, specifically tax records compiled during the reign of Philip IV, reveal the existence of dozens of beguine households dotting the streets of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris. These women, whether out of choice or circumstance, lived as beguines outside of the royal beguinage, yet were still recognized and labeled as “beguines” in their neighborhoods.
Many of these informal beguine households supported themselves through Paris’s emerging silk industry, which provided unmarried women with unique opportunities to support themselves and their fellow beguines. Paris’s nascent silk industry therefore offered devout laywomen an alternative to the beguinage. This is important because the beguines living outside the Paris beguinage were vulnerable to accusations of mendicancy, sexual promiscuity, and even heresy, not to mention physical danger. Paris’s silk industry allowed beguines to survive, and even prosper, from their specialized skills and to establish important connections as a result of their work.
Residents of the Paris beguinage could expect certain privileges by virtue of belonging to a royal foundation, but such protections were local and ad hoc. As beguine communities all over western Europe learned, they could end up on the defensive should they find themselves under new bishops or secular powers with less sympathy for their way of life. This change in local conditions seems to have led to the condemnation of Marguerite Porete, a beguine from Valenciennes and author of a controversial mystical treatise called TheMirror of Simple Souls.
Local conditions, too, led to her trial and execution in Paris on June 1, 1310. Marguerite’s life and work reflected widely held notions about beguines as actively engaged in theological discussion. At the same time, her ideas and contentious relationship with ecclesiastical authority refracted back upon living communities of lay religious women; one year later, a church council met in Vienne, issuing two anti-beguine decrees. Parisian authorities could not have helped but to discern connections between Marguerite Porete, a beguine publicly executed in their city, and the beguines residing in the Paris beguinage, and, for at least a few years, the residents of the beguinage faced inquiries and suspicion. As it was a royal foundation associated with their sainted forebear Louis IX, however, the French kings soon exonerated their beguinage.
Thus, while never canonically recognized as religious women in the strict sense of the word, beguines were locally regarded as religious. Paris’s university clerics generally praised the city’s beguines for their spiritual and charitable works. Parisian families supported the city’s beguine communities as effective spiritual intercessors and essential providers of essential services. The French kings likewise supported the beguines as models of lay piety, cherished recipients of royal patronage, and important symbols of Capetian power and sanctity. Deeply embedded in the economic, intellectual, and political life of medieval Paris, beguines shed important light on the history of this important medieval city.
Stabler Miller, Tanya. Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Field, Sean L. The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
Böhringer, Letha, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, editors. Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe. Brepols, 2014
By Tanya Stabler Miller
Broadly speaking, beguines were devout laywomen who, through their humble garb, pious demeanor, and acts of care and service, were recognized by contemporaries as living a religious life above and beyond the ordinary practice of laypeople. The term’s appearance in early thirteenth-century sermons indicates that “beguine” was initially used to mock laywomen who, rejecting both marriage and the cloister, lived lives of chastity and prayer in the world. Beguines, therefore, stood out in their communities, even as they remained deeply embedded in their urban contexts.
Beguine communities emerged in the early thirteenth century within the context of urban growth, socioeconomic inequality, and lay interest in the apostolic life. The charitable revolution of the thirteenth century, a response to urban wealth, poverty, and developing connections between almsgiving and salvation, led to a surge of hospital and charitable foundations, institutions that overlapped and intertwined with nascent beguine communities.
Beguine gatherings both shaped and were shaped by these new expressions of lay piety, embracing apostolic poverty and service in the world, particularly healthcare work, which was regarded as “women’s work” and was in demand in the growing cities of thirteenth-century Europe. Although ecclesiastical policy favored enclosure for religious women, local socio-spiritual structures and demands, as well as women’s own aspirations and needs, encouraged the push and pull of fluidity and formalization on the ground. With the support of local bishops and secular authorities, then, these gatherings of devout laywomen gradually coalesced into locally recognized beguine convents or “beguinages.”
The Emergence of the Beguines
While modern scholarship tends to locate the “beguine movement” in the southern Low Countries (the geographical region encompassing parts of modern-day northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), the social, economic, and religious conditions that facilitated the emergence of beguine communities in western European cities were particularly and uniquely developed in medieval Paris. Indeed, women “commonly known as beguines” gathered near chapels and hospitals in the early thirteenth century, decades before King Louis IX (1214–1270) established an official residence – or beguinage – for these women sometime before 1260.
This royal foundation, located in the parish of Saint-Paul on the eastern end of Paris’s Right Bank, was an expression of King Louis’ personal piety, his interest in promoting religious reform in the realm, and his charitable concern for the vulnerable. Upon returning to Paris in the summer of 1254 after his first failed crusade, Louis established no fewer than eight mendicant houses in the city, built a house for the blind, gave generously to the Filles-Dieu (a house for reformed prostitutes), and founded a beguinage. In these efforts, Louis both spiritually and materially transformed medieval Paris.
Thus, while recognizing that the Paris beguine communities reflected the broader forces animating devout laywomen all over western Europe, they must be understood in their local context. Some of the most important early supporters of the beguine status – secular clerics, friars, and bishops – cycled in and out of the city, converging at the university and departing again to take up positions in other northern European cities. Paris’s unique position as site of the royal government and the University of Paris, which amplified the city’s political, cultural, and economic importance, shaped the beguines’ spiritual ideals, work opportunities, and support base, while entangling these communities in the religious controversies of their time.
What it meant to live a religious life was a hotly debated topic in thirteenth-century Paris, the very city where small beguine households dotted the streets around the Franciscan and Dominican convents, as well as the emerging Sorbonne. University masters and students counted beguines among their neighbors on Paris’s Left Bank and reacted to these women with both admiration and concern. Parisian theologians were frequent visitors at Paris’s royal beguinage, where they preached to the women and even copied down sermons preached by the mistress of the beguinage into their own sermon collections.
Organization and Royal Privileges
Abutting the walls of Philip Augustus on its eastern end, the beguinage of Paris was located in what is today known as “the Marais,” bordered by the rue Charlemagne to the north, the rue de l’Ave-Maria to the south, and the rue du Fauconnier to the west. On the east side of the beguinage, the walls of Philip Augustus served as part of the enclosure, remaining to this day the best-preserved remnant of the old medieval walls. The enclosure encompassed a variety of residential and communal spaces.
Wealthier beguines could live in private homes, sometimes with one or two companions. Poorer beguines lived in the communal dormitory, which may have accommodated dozens of women. The royal beguinage also had its own chapel, a hospital, and a school where young girls from the city, and perhaps beguine residents, were taught the fundamentals of reading and writing. Although the walls surrounding the beguinage protected the women from threats to their bodies and reputations, the beguinage was quite porous. Its chapel attracted royal patrons, bourgeois supporters, and preachers.
Paris’s beguines could leave the enclosure to visit friends, care for the sick, sit with the dying, and conduct business. Paris’s beguinage was overseen by a magistra, or mistress, who was charged with managing the community’s finances, regulating the everyday activities of its residents, enforcing the house’s rules, and organizing the community’s spiritual direction. The mistress was likely appointed by the king himself or his clerical advisors and seems to have been chosen from the city’s most important merchant families.
The Paris beguinage’s chapel was served by the parish priest of Saint-Paul, who was obliged to say Mass, hear confession, and preach sermons. However, Paris’s university clerics were also deeply involved in the beguines’ pastoral care. University masters and students frequently preached to the beguine community, possibly at the invitation of the mistress of the beguinage herself. Louis’ successor, King Philip IV, later charged the Dominican prior with spiritual and financial oversight of the royal beguinage, but the community continued to be tied to the city’s Franciscans, secular clerics, and regular canons. Residents of the beguinage wore a distinctive habit, heard Mass daily, and observed a monastic routine of prayers and vigils.
Criticism of the Beguines
Beguines, however, also attracted criticism from local observers for their seemingly presumptuous claim to live as religious in the world without enclosure and permanent vows. The Parisian jongleur Rutebeuf (†1285) frequently ridiculed the beguine life, noting that, to be a beguine, all one needed to do was wear a beguine habit. In his poem “Li diz des beguines,” Rutebeuf claimed that whatever the beguines did, however ordinary, gullible Parisians celebrated and supported these charlatans as truly religious women.
Moreover, since the beguines’ promises to remain chaste were not formal, binding vows, they could potentially abandon their vocations at any time to marry. In this poem, Rutebeuf hints at the resentment some Parisians may have felt towards these women and their royal patron by warning, “But do not speak ill of her. The king will not tolerate it.” For Rutebeuf and many of his contemporaries, religious commitment was not a true commitment without a binding pledge of self and property.
Indeed, the beguine life raised important questions about religious status and privileges. As ecclesiastical officials sought to channel religious enthusiasm into existing orders and prohibit the creation of new orders, secular and regular clergy in medieval Paris had much to say about the beguines’ ambiguous status and unregulated spirituality. The Paris-trained theologian and Franciscan Gilbert of Tournai (1200–1284), for example, complained that beguines, who were neither nuns nor wives, evaded canonical distinctions between “religious and lay.” More alarmingly, the beguines of Paris, Gilbert claimed, possessed error-ridden translations of the Scriptures, which they read in common in their workshops. Gilbert’s concerns about the women’s unclear status and dangerous intellectual activities reveal that some medieval thinkers believed that the beguines’ spiritual ambitions could lead them into heresy and doctrinal error.
Although the beguinage offered devout laywomen a space to pray, work, and serve in common in relative security, not all devout laywomen lived in the beguinage. Parisian fiscal records, specifically tax records compiled during the reign of Philip IV, reveal the existence of dozens of beguine households dotting the streets of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris. These women, whether out of choice or circumstance, lived as beguines outside of the royal beguinage, yet were still recognized and labeled as “beguines” in their neighborhoods.
Many of these informal beguine households supported themselves through Paris’s emerging silk industry, which provided unmarried women with unique opportunities to support themselves and their fellow beguines. Paris’s nascent silk industry therefore offered devout laywomen an alternative to the beguinage. This is important because the beguines living outside the Paris beguinage were vulnerable to accusations of mendicancy, sexual promiscuity, and even heresy, not to mention physical danger. Paris’s silk industry allowed beguines to survive, and even prosper, from their specialized skills and to establish important connections as a result of their work.
Residents of the Paris beguinage could expect certain privileges by virtue of belonging to a royal foundation, but such protections were local and ad hoc. As beguine communities all over western Europe learned, they could end up on the defensive should they find themselves under new bishops or secular powers with less sympathy for their way of life. This change in local conditions seems to have led to the condemnation of Marguerite Porete, a beguine from Valenciennes and author of a controversial mystical treatise called The Mirror of Simple Souls.
Local conditions, too, led to her trial and execution in Paris on June 1, 1310. Marguerite’s life and work reflected widely held notions about beguines as actively engaged in theological discussion. At the same time, her ideas and contentious relationship with ecclesiastical authority refracted back upon living communities of lay religious women; one year later, a church council met in Vienne, issuing two anti-beguine decrees. Parisian authorities could not have helped but to discern connections between Marguerite Porete, a beguine publicly executed in their city, and the beguines residing in the Paris beguinage, and, for at least a few years, the residents of the beguinage faced inquiries and suspicion. As it was a royal foundation associated with their sainted forebear Louis IX, however, the French kings soon exonerated their beguinage.
Thus, while never canonically recognized as religious women in the strict sense of the word, beguines were locally regarded as religious. Paris’s university clerics generally praised the city’s beguines for their spiritual and charitable works. Parisian families supported the city’s beguine communities as effective spiritual intercessors and essential providers of essential services. The French kings likewise supported the beguines as models of lay piety, cherished recipients of royal patronage, and important symbols of Capetian power and sanctity. Deeply embedded in the economic, intellectual, and political life of medieval Paris, beguines shed important light on the history of this important medieval city.
Tanya Stabler Miller is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority.
Further Readings:
Stabler Miller, Tanya. Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Simons, Walter. Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Field, Sean L. The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
Böhringer, Letha, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, editors. Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe. Brepols, 2014
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