Travelling Feminist: Beguines

The Beguines were a movement of women that started around the 12th and 13th century, starting in present day Belgium and spreading to the nearby parts of the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg.

This period was the time of the Crusades, and of fairly constant warfare as borders were constantly changing depending on which King, or Duke had managed to exert his power over the region. So there was a surplus of women, despite their own risks of childbirth at the time. And it was also a time of religious fervour, partly because at a time of flux, with movement towards towns, and a movement from a barter economy to a market economy. This led to more obvious divides between rich and poor, many were repelled by what they saw as the lure of Satan from the fortunes that could be made.

But the only religious opportunities for women at the time lay in very rigid female monastic orders, or else in living in a cell attached to a church. The Beguines sought a less extreme religious community. Each community was different, but they were broadly groups of women living together in order to live a religious life. Early on, the religious life was mostly one of helping the community, with the spiritual part being more secondary, but gradually they became centres of religious worship and mysticism. They supported themselves with the assets they brought into the community, and the work that they did, things like lacemaking, nursing, gardening, teaching, most of the occupations that were open to women at the time. Some were married, and left their marriage for a time, but most were single, either because they hadn’t married, or because they were widowed.

Brugge Beguinhof

Going into a Beguinage was not the lifelong commitment that most other groups were, which made them more attractive to the women of the time. They became a major part of the cities and towns they formed part of; Ghent, for example, had several Beguinages, and some of them numbered in the thousands.

But after a while, the church became more and more suspicious of a group it could not control. Their very informality made them suspect. Several famous Beguines began publishing works of mysticism, with some translating the scriptures into the venacular, and reading it in public squares. Simultaneously, their economic powers began to annoy the merchants of the towns, as they were increasingly performing work associated with the cloth industry that the various cloth guilds wanted to reserve for themselves. The guilds didn’t have any economic control over the Beguines.

They reached their heights in the late 13th century, but gradually both the secular and the ecclesastic opposition became stronger, and they were brought under formal control of the church. The communities kept going for much longer, but they were always regarded suspiciously by the church, with the taint of heresy coming from their practices of worshipping god in their own way, by themselves. There are still a few alive today, but the communities are no longer extant.

It was fascinating to come across this story of communities of women living very much under their own control and governance 800 years ago, when visiting the beautiful Beguinhof of Brugge. These women were very much in control of their own lives, and supported each other, and the communities they lived in, in their worship of their God. Women at the time were simultaneously revered and feared (the classic God’s Police and Damned Whores archetypes), but the women of the Beguinages followed a third path of forming their own part of society, which was not completely removed, but enabled them to engage much more on their own terms.

Most of what I have written here is from this article by Marygrace Peters, who writes of the spiritual and feminist significance of the Beguines.