Women in Community–& a preview!

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A Twisted Vengeance, Beguines, Bess Merchet, Kate Clifford, Magda Digby, Margaret Kerr, Medieval Women's Choir, Owen Archer, The Service of the Dead

Ever since the Women’s March on Washington I’ve been thinking about the power of women in community.

I’ve been writing about strong, clever, resourceful women throughout my career. Even in the Owen Archer series I surround my male sleuth with strong women–Lucie Wilton, the Riverwoman Magda Digby, Bess Merchet, Dame Phillippa…  But it wasn’t until I was writing the Margaret Kerr novels that I realized how much I believe women’s power lies in their wisdom about the importance of community–in the middle ages and today. That was Margaret’s Achilles heel–even before she left her home in Perth she had no such community. Gradually she learned to appreciate the help of her serving woman Celia, her mother Christiana, her friend Ada, and, as we left her, she was on her way to seek the help of her Great-Aunt Euphemia. Margaret’s path to wisdom and power.

In between writing about Margaret and creating Kate Clifford I became fascinated with the Beguine movement–communities of lay religious women. [See two guest posts about Beguines here and here.]

You will recall that toward the end of The Service of the Dead Kate’s mother, Eleanor, arrives in York in the company of three Beguines from Strasbourg. Eleanor returned when she did so that I might use her as the catalyst for Kate’s cathartic outburst at the end. The Beguines are merely her companions. But Dina, Clara, and Brigida move to center stage in A Twisted Vengeance. In the US and Canada it will be published in hardcover and ebook on 9 May. (And The Service of the Dead will come out in trade paperback.) Here’s a sneak preview of the further adventures of Kate Clifford & community.

 

Prologue

York, second week in July, 1399

The terror of the dream never abated. She opened her eyes in the dark prison of her childhood bedchamber. Heard his ragged breathing, smelled his breath—cloying sweetness of wine, rancid stench of bile—as he leaned down, reaching for her, whispering of his need, his hunger. She opened her mouth to scream, but she was mute. She struggled to push him away, but her arms were limp, heavy, dead to her.

Why do you not strike him down, my Lord? How can you abide such abomination, my Savior? Are you not my Savior? Is he right, that I deserve this?

It is a dream, only a dream, now, tonight, it is truly only a dream, he is dead, he can no longer hurt me, it is a dream, wake up wake up wake up.

She sat up, panting, her shift clinging to her sweat-soaked body. A noise. Someone moving about on the other side of her door, in the kitchen. Outside her window it was the soft gray of a midsummer night. Who would be moving about the kitchen in the middle of the night? Why had Dame Eleanor lodged her here, across the garden from her sisters, all alone? But they did not know she was alone. They thought Nan, the serving maid, would be here. Perhaps it was only Nan she heard, returning early.

He had sworn that he would find her, rise from the grave and take her, that they were bound for eternity. Whoever it was, they were at the door. The dagger. She slipped it from beneath her pillow. The door creaked open. Not Nan—much too tall for Nan. A man’s breath, a man’s smell. He took a step in. She leapt from the bed, throwing herself on him, forcing him to fall backward into the kitchen. Stabbing him, stabbing, stabbing. Not speaking. Never speak. Never make a noise. He will kill me if I wake the others.

“God have mercy. Have mercy!” he wheezed.

She stopped. This voice was soft. Frightened. God forgive me. It is not him. Not Father.

She dropped her dagger in the doorway as she backed into her room. Heart pounding, fighting the fear and confusion clouding her mind, she dressed, stumbling in her haste. She must think what to do. Berend. He was strong and kind. He would help her. She would go through the gate to Dame Katherine’s kitchen and wake Berend.

She retrieved her dagger. Bloody. Slippery. Wiped it on her skirt. Tucked it in her girdle. Stepped to the door, lifting her skirts to step over his body. But there was no body. God help me!

A hand over her mouth. He spun her round and clutched her so tightly she felt his blood flowing, soaking the back of her gown, the warmth of it. She gagged on the sickly sweet smell of it, like her father’s wine-breath. He dragged her outside into the garden. The great wolfhounds began to bark. Salvation? She struggled, but he did not lose his grip; even when he stumbled he grasped her so tightly she could not breathe. Her feet skimmed the grass, the packed mud of the alley. I am dying.

A jolt. She was pulled free, falling forward.

“Run to the church.” It was the soldier who watched all night from the street. More than a soldier, a guardian angel. He kicked the wounded man in the stomach.

She curled over herself, gasping for breath.

“Get up. Run to the church. Do not stop. Do not look back.” He nudged her, gently. “Run!” Suddenly there were more men. They rushed at her savior.

She rose and ran, her breath a searing knife in her throat and chest, but she ran, ran for her life. She heard the men attacking the soldier, bone against flesh against bone. Surely an angel could not suffer mortal wounds. But she would pray for him. To the church across Castlegate. Door locked. Stumbling round to the side, where the sisters entered. Footsteps coming her way. She fled, and there it was, the door, opening, the candle by the lady altar. She crumpled to the floor, the cool tiles. She stretched out upon them, bloodied, cursed, saved.

___________

If you’d like a chance to win one of three galleys of A Twisted Vengeance, sign up for my publisher’s giveaway on Goodreads (giveaway runs 7 Feb – 7 Mar).

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The Beguines of Medieval Paris—guest post by Tanya Stabler Miller

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Beguinages, Beguines, Jeanne Brichard, longreads, Marguerite Porete, Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris

First, I’d like to thank Candace for inviting me to discuss my book. I’m so pleased to have discovered her work, as well as her blog (through fellow beguine-scholar Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane!)

The study of beguines represents a significant challenge for historians of women and gender. In the beguines, the historian is confronted with a gendered label (“beguine” as French historian Nicole Bériou has observed, might refer to a way of being perceived by others) as well as the experiences of real women who chose to live religious lives in the world.[1] Women who wore humble garb and stood apart as living a religious life above and beyond the ordinary practice of their peers might be labeled “beguine,” perhaps admiringly, perhaps derisively. At the same time, some women consciously joined communities of like-minded lay religious women, adopting the label “beguine” by virtue of entering a recognized community.

The remaining wall of the beguinage of Paris ( which was actually the wall of Philip Augustus in the Marais).

The beguine communities of medieval Paris—heretofore unstudied save for a single article published in the late nineteenth century—usefully illustrate these complexities.[2] Upon returning from crusade in 1254, the French king Louis IX (also known as Saint Louis) founded a house—or beguinage—on the eastern end of Paris to house “honest women called beguines.”[3] The Paris beguinage was modeled on the court beguinage of St. Elizabeth in Ghent, giving the French king’s house a useful boost as a solid community of lay religious women. The Paris beguinage was surrounded by walls, governed by statutes, and eventually overseen by the Dominican prior (it should be noted, however, that the Paris beguinage was quite porous, with residents and visitors regularly entering and leaving the enclosure). Its residents wore a distinctive habit and enjoyed the support and projection of the French kings until the house was turned over to a community of Observant Poor Clares in 1485.

Even with the existence of this more “official” beguine community, Paris was home to dozens of households of women who self-identified, and were recognized in their local communities, as beguines. These households are known to us thanks to the tax assessments compiled during the reign of Louis IX’s grandson Philip the Fair (r. 1285-1314) and represented another possibility for Parisian lay religious women. Significantly, some religious and secular authorities insisted on approximating beguines to nuns, denying the beguine “status” to women who did not reside in an officially-recognized, enclosed, and regulated beguinage.

One of the more noteworthy—though perhaps obvious—points here is that beguines were women who stuck out. People noticed them. As a mostly urban phenomenon, beguines made a visible claim to live a life apart—in the sense of living a distinct, even superior Christian life—while residing and working among their fellow Christians. Thus, the term might be used to describe someone’s deportment, without necessarily referring to her “status.” Some viewed the voluntary adoption of the beguine label as opportunistic—a way to gain the admiration and favor of others. The thirteenth-century Parisian satirist Rutebeuf for example ridiculed the beguines’ claims to live a religious life, asserting that the “Order of Beguines,” as he mockingly called it, was easy. To enter the “order,” all one has to do was bow one’s head and wear a wide garment.[4] Even more troubling, a woman could leave the “Order” any time to marry, since she had taken no vows. Clearly, for Rutebeuf and many of his contemporaries, religious commitment was not a true commitment without the permanent pledge of self and property. Those who claimed otherwise were self-serving opportunists, seeking to hide their sin under the veil of sanctity. As Rutebeuf quipped, “We have many beguines who have wide garments; whatever they do beneath them, I cannot tell you.”[5]

Jeanne Brichard, one of the mistresses of the Paris beguinage (a sketch of her tomb, which was located in the Dominican convent in Paris).

On the other hand, admirers such as the secular cleric Robert of Sorbon (d. 1274) noted that beguines exhibited far more devotion to God than even the cloistered, since they voluntarily pursued a religious life without vows and walls, surrounded by the world’s temptations. Robert was a contemporary of Rutebeuf and he was a close friend of Louis IX. He was also the founder of the famous Parisian college for secular clerics, the Sorbonne. Robert’s opinions of the beguine life clearly reflected his personal views on community, public perception, religious sincerity, and the secular clergy’s mission in the world. He was not alone in this tendency to interpret the beguine phenomenon in light of personal concerns. Beguines, in a sense, were all things to all people.

Clerical opinion of the beguines was quite mixed. For some, it was too flexible, too dynamic. Yet, it was the flexibility and dynamism of the beguine life that encouraged thousands of women all over medieval Europe to take it up in the first place. Inspired by the new apostolic piety of the thirteenth century, with its emphasis on poverty, preaching, and imitation of Christ, beguines found ways to pursue their spiritual ambitions, in spite of contemporary prohibitions against women’s participation in these central features of the vita apostolica (that is, the apostolic life).

My interest in these communities reflected my preoccupations with the ways in which the term “beguine” was wielded, adopted, or disavowed, as well as with the lived experiences of lay religious women. Integrating these interests was an important aim of my book, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. In many ways, this integration effort represented the conflict medieval historian Dyan Elliott so eloquently described in her important contribution to an AHR forum on Joan W. Scott’s seminal article “Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis.”[6] Discussing transitions in medieval historiography on “Women” and “Gender,” Elliott noted contemporary concerns about medievalists “turning away from the study of real women in favor of gender analyses.” Deftly exploiting literary sources, such studies have gone a long way toward uncovering gender categories in medieval thought, but there is so much more to learn about “real women.”

The power of the label is evident in the “watershed” moments of beguine history, from its first appearance in the sermons of James of Vitry (the beguine movement’s earliest and perhaps most famous promoter), to its reference in the trial of the doomed mystic Marguerite Porete (who was burned at the stake in Paris on charges of heresy in 1310), to its centrality in the condemnation of lay religious women at the Council of Vienne in 1311-1312.[7] Nevertheless, the Paris community continued to exist, with its residents unabashedly referred to as “beguines.”

To reconstruct the world of Paris’s beguine communities, I needed to tell the story from a multiple perspectives. Parisian women who decided to live as beguines did so under specific social, cultural, and economic conditions. As a historian attempting to understand these conditions, I found myself grappling with the categories and labels with which medieval observers discussed the beguine phenomenon. I needed to understand why medieval people adopted or applied the label “beguine” and what they meant when they used the term.

At the same time, I could hardly ignore the lived circumstances of women who were known in their communities as “beguines.” The tax rolls—perhaps considered among the driest of documents—were, and are, an incredibly exciting treasure trove of information, since they help illuminate the world of women’s work and friendships. Testaments and property records helped fill the gaps, fleshing out women such as the beguine and silk merchant Jeanne du Faut, who made frequent mention of her “beloved” business partner and fellow beguine Beatrice la Grant in her testament. A wealthy silk merchant with a broad social network, Jeanne bequeathed her entire estate to Beatrice, in spite of the existence of several male relatives. Medieval Paris was home to many other women just like her.

The beguines living in Paris’s beguinage forged productive and enduring ties to clerics studying and teaching at the University of Paris. While there are still many who assume a hostile—or at least tense—relationship between religious women and clerical authority, sermons and pastoral literature produced by scholars affiliated with the medieval college of the Sorbonne paint a far more complex picture. Masters and students of the Sorbonne frequented the beguinage of Paris, following the example of the college’s founder Robert Sorbon. Sermon collections contain dozens of sermons preached at the beguinage of Paris, as well as several excerpts preached by the mistress of the beguinage herself.

Bringing these threads together, the book seeks to uncover the history of communities of women who were at the center—not the periphery—of economic, social, political, and cultural life in medieval Paris.

_______

[1] Nicole Bériou, “Robert de Sorbon, le prud’homme et le béguin,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, (Paris:1994) 474-82.

[2] Léon Le Grand, “Les béguines de Paris,” Mémoires de la société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 20 (1893) : 295-357.

[3] As reported in Geoffrey of Beaulieu, “Vita ludovici noni” Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, (henceforth RHF), ed. Martin Bouquet et al. vol. 20(Paris, 1840), 12.

[4] Rutebeuf, “Les ordres de Paris,” Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Michel Zink (Paris: Garnier, 1989), 1: 227.

[5] Rutebeuf, “La Chanson des ordres,”Oeuvres completes, 1: 332. Beguines were a frequent target in French literature; see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Satirical Views of the Beguines in Northern French Literature,” New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 237-249.

[6] Dyan Elliott, “The Three Ages of Joan Scott,” American Historical Review (2008):1390-1403.

[7] An early attempt to discuss the power of the label is found in my article “What’s in a Name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines (1200-1328).” Journal of Medieval History 33, no. 1 (2007): 60-86.

New Book on Beguines and forthcoming guest post

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Beguines, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Sorbonne, Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris

The University of Pennsylvania Press has just published The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority by Tanya Stabler Miller http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15228.html, and tomorrow Tanya will be a guest on this blog! My thanks to Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, who was my guest in December, for alerting me to Tanya’s book.

Tanya Stabler Miller received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007. She is a historian of medieval Europe, focusing on the social, cultural, and religious history of the High Middle Ages (1000-1400), with a particular interest in communities, intellectual authority, material culture, and gender. Currently, her research has turned to the medieval college of the Sorbonne and the interplay of learned and popular traditions in devotional literature, which led to the new book as well as several articles.

In tomorrow’s post she provides a brief history of the beguines in Paris, how they were received–they inspired some controversy, and how her particular interests led to writing the book. You’re in for a treat!

I’m delighted to continue the dialogue about these remarkable women.

 

Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New

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A Rumor of Wolves, A Triple Knot, Beguines, Chris Nickson, Ellie Woodacre, Jennifer Deane, Julie A Chappell, Margery Kempe, Queenship in the Mediterranean

I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your companionship this past year. I enjoy sharing with you my fascination with the writing life and all things medieval.

I thought it would be fun to share with you some highlights from the year end summary WordPress puts together for bloggers.

A Writer’s Retreat was viewed 5900 times in 2013!

The busiest day was 12 December, with 111 views–the most popular post that day was Julie Chappell’s The Perilous Passage of the Book of Margery Kempe, though for the year it came in at #5, just behind Jennifer Deane’s Beguine Communities and Medieval History: An Unexpected Treasure?. Considering that both were posted in December, I’d say such posts are a hit. Which is great news, because I enjoy them as well.

What were the three most viewed posts? #1, Lincoln Green and Robin Hood (July 2010); #2 Richard I’s Heart Analyzed (February 2013), and The 11th Owen Archer (February 2012).

Top commenter is Sandy Neal (thanks, Sandy!), followed by Chris Nickson, Jennifer Deane, Chris (from Yorkshire), and Bob Newman, for the top 5. Thank you for participating–I love engaging with you.

Coming up is a Q&A with Ellie Woodacre to celebrate the publication of Queenship in the Mediterranean. And Chris Nickson and I are kicking around an idea for a Shop Talk “conversation” about writing historical crime.

This coming year will see the US publication of Emma’s novel of Joan of Kent, A Triple Knot (29 July)! And Candace really is focusing on the 11th Owen Archer now, A Rumor of Wolves.

Warmest wishes for a New Year filled with wonder (and books)!

Candace and Emma

Upcoming Events

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Anthony Goodman, Beguines, book signings, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Julie A Chappell, Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe and Her World, Pacific NW Writers Association, Perilous Passages

For those of you in Seattle/Bellevue/Issaquah, Emma and I will be signing books alongside fellow members of the Pacific NW Writers Association on Saturday, 14 December, at the Writers Cottage in Gilman Village (The Cottage is located near the southeastern corner of the Village shopping center, just off Juniper Street (behind White Horse toys and next to the Boarding House Restaurant). The event runs from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, and Emma and I will be there for the last two hours, 2-4 pm. We’d love to see you!

* * * * *

And coming up on this blog, tomorrow I host yet another inspiring historian, Julie A. Chappell, who will give you a taste of her book Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her book is in the genre of scholar adventures, an account of how she tracked this important medieval manuscript from 15th century King’s Lynn to the early 20th century, when it was “discovered.”

Who was Margery Kempe? Here’s a succinct description from the back jacket of Anthony Goodman’s book (which I’m currently rereading), Margery Kempe and Her World (Longman 2002): “Margery Kempe is one of the most extraordinary figures in English medieval history. Daughter of a mayor of King’s Lynn, wife of a burgess and mother of fourteen children, she was also the author of the first surviving autobiography composed by an Englishwoman. The Book of Margery Kempe, dictated in the 1430s, survives in a single manuscript which was discovered in the 1930s. It is an uninhibited…outpouring of impassioned religious emotions. The Book comprises an account of the mystical intimations of a lady born into Lynn’s stately but troubled elite. Visionary episodes are interlinked with equally dramatic accounts of mundane experiences, in Margery’s home town, in other parts of England, and as far afield as Jerusalem, Rome and Brandenburg.”

* * * * *

And remember to ask questions of Jennifer Deane on Beguines in the comments section of her post, Beguine Communities and Medieval History from last Thursday, the 5th.

Beguine Communities and Medieval History: An Unexpected Treasure?

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Beguinages, Beguines, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Marcella Pattyn, Tanya Stabler Miller

It is my pleasure to welcome Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota, Morris, as my guest blogger this morning. Feel free to pose any questions as comments, and I’ll post Jennifer’s responses!

A little background on Jennifer: “I am a historian of medieval Europe, although my reading and teaching interests extend both to the ancient and the early modern. My research focuses on medieval religious movements and communities, the emergence and application of the construct of heresy, inquisitorial procedures, and gender. I am also interested in lay female religious communities across and beyond the medieval centuries, and in the relationship between spirituality, discipline, gender, institutions, and the social order.” She’s the author of A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), co-editor (with Letha Böhringer and Hildo van Engen) of Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Brepols, forthcoming 2014), and the author of Sisters Among: Beguine and Lay Religious Women’s Communities in Medieval Germany (monograph in progress), as well as many articles.

*********

On April 27, 2013, The Economist magazine was among dozens of news outlets reporting the death of a 92-year-old Belgian woman named Marcella Pattyn, ‘the last beguine.’ For those who study beguine history, encountering the topic on the evening news was a surprising and yet bittersweet moment.  For a few short days, an international spotlight shone on the relatively obscure realm of beguine history, if only to reflect upon the apparent demise of an 800-year-old way of life.

For any visitor to Belgium, the surviving structures of beguinages are indeed (as The Economist put it) an ‘unexpected treasure.’ The description has lingered with me since April, the image of unexpected treasure evoking the very roots of Marcella’s life and that of her thousands of unnamed sisters: that is, the broad and dazzling historical constellation of lay religious women’s communities in medieval Europe. Far from being limited to the Low Countries, hundreds of beguine-like gatherings independently cropped up between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries across what is today France, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Spain.  Particularly since Walter Simons’ landmark study of beguines in the Low Countries (Cities of Ladies, 2001) researchers have been reapproaching beguine history from new angles and having conversations across many of the traditional boundaries of language, region, and national history.

Because of Marcella Pattyn’s life and death, news editors in Europe and North America suddenly had to address the following: what was a beguine, anyway?  The question seems simple enough, yet the answer has been surprisingly difficult to pin down – not only for journalists in 2013, but also for historians over the past several decades.

Why is that?  One could point to several reasons, starting with the challenge of defining our terms. For example, beguines inhabited a space that blended secular and spiritual roles in a way that does not easily square with traditional categories.  As a result, many influential 19^th- and 20^th-century historians (whether writing in German, Dutch, or English) defined beguines in negative terms that primarily reflected the concerns of medieval clergy about beguines’ relationship to the Church:  thus one still frequently finds beguines depicted as ‘not-nuns,’ ‘lacking a formal rule,’ ‘not affiliated with orders,’ etc.  Newer research has been trying to develop a more sociological approach to beguine history, considering instead what being a beguine meant to the women themselves, and what their communities meant to the local clergy and laity who supported them across time and space. For although beguines outside of Belgium are sometimes thought to have disappeared by the end of the Middle Ages, many communities survived deep into the early modern period and beyond.

Another problem is that the terms used by and applied to beguines have varied so much over time and place that it has been very difficult to establish any kind of broad framework or systematic comparison.  For example, a woman termed a ‘beguine’ in one region might be called a ‘begutta’ in another, or a ‘bizzocha’ or ‘pinzochera’ in yet another.  Some terms designated a lay religious woman by the precise color of her garb, such as the ‘Black Sisters,’ ‘Grey Women,’ or the ‘Blue Beguines’ of northern Germany. And yet other terms that appear in medieval documents by and about the women include vernacular and Latin variations on ‘sister,’ ‘virgin,’ ‘widow’, ‘good woman’, ‘spiritual sister’, ‘soul woman’, ‘holy woman,’. . .and often combinations of the above! As a result, we are still trying to figure out a way to talk about lay religious women’s communities through this swirl of language.

Yet even as we struggle with our terms and categories, it becomes clear that (to adapt the famous phrase) medieval people ‘knew a beguine when they saw one’. Thus one of the exciting directions in new research has been comparative work establishing some common themes across lay religious women’s communities while still recognizing their tremendous elasticity of size, recruitment, relationship to other institutions, and so on.

So: what was a beguine? Today one might offer a definition along these lines: beguines were single women of any life stage enacting visibly pious and chaste lives of Christian service and community; they took simple oaths of chastity and obedience, lived according to a specific but local house rule, and were under the supervision of a house mother, elder sisters in the community, and an array of parish and civic authorities; and finally, beguines received charitable donations in exchange for prayers, memorial services, and other caritative services.

And yet apart from these consistent underlying features, there were endless possibilities for variation and local adaptation. Beguines could be affiliated with mendicant orders such as the Franciscans or Dominicans, for example, either through pastoral care, routine interaction, or by formally taking on a Third Order rule. They could also be linked to care within a hospital institution, whether as formal residents, or providers of health care during the day, and even tending to the bodies and burial of the dead. Beguine communities might provide a safe and respectable home for wealthy widows, an equally safe and respectable home for impoverished women. . . or they could combine all of the above, depending on the local context.  Defined by their fundamentally local quality (rather than being shaped by an overarching institutional organization), beguine communities were historically flexible and enduring, deeply woven into the fabric of medieval society.

Although beguine communities were certainly independent from each other, their members were never independent of parish and civic authority.  Nor did they seek to be, since connections and exchange were evidently in the women’s best interest as well as strategically productive for the environments in which they flourished.  Indeed, one of the many intriguing aspects of beguine history is the wide range of people who invested both spiritual hope and financial resources into their foundations: archival material speaks to a centuries-long certainty among laymen, laywomen, married couples, nobility, priests, canons, and bishops in the power of beguines’ prayers and their value to local communities. Even the saintly King Louis IX of France (d.1270) supported beguines, as Tanya Stabler Miller discusses in her wonderful new book (The Beguines of Medieval Paris, 2014). All of these new publications and conversations suggest that although ‘the last beguine’ may have passed, we are not through discovering the unexpected treasures of beguine history.

Selected Readings:

Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)

Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “’Beguines’ Reconsidered: Historiographical Problems and New Directions” Monastic Matrix (2008)

Romana Guarnieri, “Beguines Beyond the Alps and Italian Bizzoche between the 14^th and 15^th Centuries,” translated by Roberta Agnes McKelvie, O.S.F. Greyfriars Review 5, No.1 (1991):  91-104

Penelope Galloway, “’Discreet and Devout Maidens‘: Women’s Involvement in Beguine Communities in Northern France, 1200-1500,” in Medieval Women in their Communities, edited by Diane Watt (University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp.92-112

Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2014)

Letha Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Hildo van Engen, eds. Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Brepols Press, forthcoming, 2014)

Copyedit’s Off! and Coming Soon….

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A Triple Knot, Beguines, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane

Yesterday I returned the copyedit of A Triple Knot. Hurrah! Those of you familiar with the publishing process know the significance of this stage. As the cover letter from my publisher reads: “This is the last time you will have the opportunity to make extensive changes. You will see page proofs after the book is typeset, but changes in proofs must be kept to a minimum. Otherwise you may incur charges for author’s alterations and jeopardize the schedule and publication date for your book.” Doomsday. Last chance. On the ledge. Suffice to say, except for Thanksgiving Day, I have worked over the manuscript for the full fortnight allowed. I am exhausted, but happy.

So, much cause for celebration!

And part of my first day off has been spent reading with great pleasure the guest post I’m putting up here later this week, a companion to an earlier post (May 2013), “The Last Beguine”. With Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane’s permission, I provided a link in that post to her article giving some background on beguines, and while I was contacting her I asked if she might be interested in writing a guest post for this blog. And Jennifer has. So stay tuned!

The Last Beguine

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Beguines

The spiritual community I find most inspiring and appealing in the middle ages is that of the Beguines. I’d no idea they still existed–or did until last month. Here is a beautifully composed tribute to the last of the Beguines. Perhaps this quiet obituary will resonate with some contemporary women looking for peace in our troubled world.
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21576632-marcella-pattyn-worlds-last-beguine-died-april-14th-aged-92-marcella-pattyn

Just continued reading on the medieval feminist forum this morning that she is not the last Beguine, there are still members of the community in Germany. http://www.dw.de/sisterhoods-make-a-comeback-in-germany/a-171906
At least as of 2005.

For a deeper look at the issues surrounding research on Beguines, read Jennifer Deane’s article here.
http://monasticmatrix.org/commentaria/beguines-reconsidered-historiographical-problems-and-new-directions
Jennifer would welcome feedback on the issues she presents. And stay tuned–she’s tentatively agreed to write a post for this blog later this summer.