Church, Gospel and Culture

In the thirteenth century, church structures were increasingly inaccessible to women; convents were overcrowded and entrance dowries were expensive; women's orders were scarce and subject to male oversight. At this time in Liege and Antwerp, on the peripheries of urban centers, self-supporting communities of women began to appear. They lived by the work of their hands, often caring for the poor, the sick and the dying, and carried on regular devotional practices.

They sought "an unstructured, nonhierarchical spiritual life that was both active (in the sense of ministering to the needs of others) and contemplative (in the sense that meditation and visionary experience were highly valued and developed)." This was the seed of what would become the beguinages. Groups of women outside convents, like the beguines, had to steer a narrow course in order to avoid "the shoals of anticlericalism and heresy that always threatened the spiritual creativity of women." The success and spread of the beguine movement would suggest it did answer a need felt among women for an independent expression of their own religious creativity.

The beguines fall under the more general designation of mulieres religiosae (religious women), an umbrella term which included nuns, recluses, and virgins living at home or in small groups? The appearance of the mulieres religiosae, who flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was a major religious development, possibly connected with factors like the Crusades, priestly celibacy. And harsh physical labor, which resulted in women outnumbering men in Western Europe; Religious motives, however, were perhaps even more important than socio-economic ones.

The beguine was a new creature, living in a pious community but free to leave at any time; not answerable to any man; self determined and self-supporting. The lifestyle of the beguines was, perhaps, the "first respectable alternative to binding monastic vows or marriage." Beguines may have been "part of a monolithic change in the lives of medieval women, a renewed impetus toward participation and leadership in public life." "Where the reformed Benedictine system increasingly linked male houses together, women were more apt to maintain ties with friends and family, to depend for their support on the immediate neighborhood, and to direct their pastoral impulses to local needs."

We have, first of all, met four groups of very engaging, very courageous women. And one of the most engaging things about them is that they would never have thought of themselves as courageous at all. They were simply women of their day, whatever that particular day happened to be, striving to find the best way possible to live lives that reflected their own convictions about God, about the gospels, and about society.

The beguines devised a lifestyle that combined religious and secular life in a new and unique way. In so doing, they embodied the true spirit of biblical theology that holds that all of life is, ultimately, religious because all of life is filled with the Creator. These "out-oforder" women challenged, however unconsciously, existing ecclesiastical and societal limitations, and created a new form ...