March is Women’s History Month!

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A Medieval Woman's Companion, A Poisoned Past, Defending the City of God, Elena Woodacre, Inventing Eleanor, Julie A Chappell, Medieval Women's Choir, Michael Evans, Perilous Passages, Queenship in the Mediterranean, Sharan Newman, Steven Bednarski, Susan Signe Morrison, Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris, Women's History Month

Last night, sublime music, women’s voices soaring in a Medieval Women’s Choir concert at Trinity Church. I was transfixed, transported by the voices. During the instrumentals I closed my eyes and watched all my beloved characters dancing to the vielle and harp. Members of the Medieval Women’s Choir will perform at my book launch on 4 May at the University Bookstore in Seattle!

***

When I began my career in crime writing, my library from graduate school was light on women. I scrambled for information about women in the 14^th century, sifting through mountains of books, documents and papers hungrily copying down the smallest of gleanings about women and their lives in the period. But as you know if you keep up with the field or if you’ve followed this blog, that has changed. Radically. Historians are writing brilliant books about women in the middle ages. Hurrah!

Where to begin?! If you’re just starting, I can’t think of a better introduction and overview than Susan Signe Morrison’s new book, A Medieval Woman’s Companion (Oxbow Books 2016). A few weeks ago, as a guest on this blog, Susan treated us all to a lively discussion about how we might make use of her new book in writing novels about medieval women. So you’ve already sampled Susan’s engaging style and the range of women she discusses.

Not only does Susan introduce the reader to a grand assortment of women from a wide variety of backgrounds, but she discusses the broader themes touching on women’s lives at the time—attitudes about women’s bodies; women’s occupations; religious movements; women in the arts, including playwrights and troubadours and Japanese writers. Each chapter includes a resource guide for further exploring the women and the topics. The resources include websites, videos, novels, as well as source documents.

Who can resist a book with chapter titles such as: “Textile Concerns: Holy Transvestites and the Dangers of Cross-dressing”? The chapter isn’t solely about cross-dressing, though that isn’t just a come on. Susan discusses the political implications of clothing including the sumptuary laws, how water-powered mills for grinding grain freed women to work in textiles—and all facets of that production, and, yes, the women who dressed as men to protect themselves or to protect their cities and kingdoms—women donning armor!

One of my favorite parts of the book is the final chapter, “Looking Forward” Contemporary Feminist Theory and Medieval Women.” Susan states at the beginning: “Medieval women’s lives and writings prefigure many issues that have arisen in more recent times. Indeed, the medieval period helped form current beliefs and attitudes toward women.” In this chapter Susan cites a wide assortment of writers on the importance of revising what we consider the “canon”, that is, the works considered worthy of study in schools and universities, as well as the necessity of questioning attitudes we’ve carried forward through the ages—women’s work is unimportant, women’s innocence is best protected by ignorance, how women have been considered the Other. The chapter is thought-provoking and engaging, not angry. If you are using this book for a class, this is the chapter I’d imagine inspiring the liveliest discussions with support from the earlier chapters.

As if all this weren’t enough, Susan has created a companion website for the book that will be continually updated—in fact, she’s already adding material.

If you’re writing about medieval women or teaching medieval history or literature, this book is an essential. What a resource!

Once you’ve begun, look back at the non-fiction I’ve featured on this blog:
A Poisoned Past by Steven Bednarski
Perilous Passages: the Book of Margery Kempe by Julie A Chappell
Inventing Eleanor by Michael Evans
The Beguines of Medieval Paris by Tanya Stabler Miller
Defending the City of God by Sharan Newman
Queenship in the Mediterranean by Elena Woodacre (be sure to look at part 2 as well)

My graduate school reading that was so light on women—that is happily a thing of the past.

 

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.

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[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.

 

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.

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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)