Colleen
M. Seguin
Book
Review
Tanya
Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval
Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. University of Pennsylvania
Press (Philadelphia, 2014), 293 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4607-0
1> Tanya Stabler Miller
examines tax, guild, and property records, royal account books, wills, sermons,
and didactic literature in order to argue that beguines were central players in
the religious, intellectual, and economic worlds of Paris in the Middle
Ages. Beguines have always been hard to
place—for their contemporaries and for historians— since they belie stereotypes
of medieval women. How should one
classify independent religious women who took no formal vows, blended
contemplation and action, might effortlessly leave their celibate status and choose
to marry, and engaged freely in property transactions and silk production
without male supervision? Not
surprisingly, some medieval people viewed them with considerable
suspicion. Perhaps more surprising is
the degree to which beguines became religious role models for Parisian
university clerics, some of whom came to pay great heed to the spiritual
teachings of the beguine mistress. The
burning of the beguine Marguerite Porete for alleged heresy in 1310 has cast a
long shadow over beguine history, obscuring the degree to which most beguines
were accepted, even embraced, in their communities before that time. As Miller indicates, their lives were tightly
woven into the very fabric of cosmopolitan, dynamic medieval Paris, Western
Europe’s largest city in the thirteenth century.
2> Miller expands scholarship
on beguines beyond the common focus on the Low Countries, persuasively arguing
that scholars have focused too much on either hagiography or heresy. Studies that focus on men’s hagiographical
writings about individual beguines make much of the mysticism of this handful
of women, a far from universal religious experience among beguines. In contrast, scholarly focus on Robert
Lerner’s and Richard Kieckhefer’s work has overemphasized the persecution of beguines. Miller paints a more complicated picture and
shifts the focus of the academic discussion.
She demonstrates that women who became beguines were not “settling,” not
enduring a vocation that they saw as second-best to marriage or the
convent. Rather, the hallmark of their
experiences was a rewardingly flexible religiosity focused on service that met
their emotional, intellectual, and economic needs.
3> Parisian beguines owed many
of their freedoms and much of their success to the saintly Louis IX (r.
1226-70) who founded a beguinage in Paris c. 1260, a foundation which endured
until the late fifteenth century. The
King’s personal religious renewal was met with hostility in some quarters. (25,
33) Miller suggests he may have seen
both mendicant friars and beguines as models for his own religious quest. The pious Louis was aware of the struggles of
maintaining religious probity in a world teeming with temptations and may well
have felt a special affinity with women who freely chose to face the same
spiritual challenges and commit to the vita
apostolica. Miller places particular
emphasis on Louis’ royal beguinage (housing approximately 400 beguines), while
still incorporating the experiences of the untold numbers of Parisian beguines
outside of that institution. Parisian
beguines derived considerable long-term benefits from Louis’ early involvement
with the beguinage. The French royal
family came to view the foundation as emblematic of their piety and power,
protecting the women at times when opposition to their way of life became
heated.
4> Criticisms of the beguines,
levelled by secular clerics such as William of Saint-Amour, were
predictable. In this view, beguines were
destitute, ostentatiously pious, probably hypocritical women who maintained
inappropriately close relationships with mendicant friars. Vulnerable both to the mendicants’
intellectual and sexual seduction, beguines were loose women who took advantage
of their lack of religious enclosure for their own nefarious purposes. Such scurrilous accusations against medieval
and early modern religious women are both typical and tedious. For early modernists, many of the critiques
of beguines resonate powerfully with later censures of Mary Ward’s Institute of
the Blessed Virgin Mary.
5> What is especially
interesting in Miller’s analysis are the genuine ways in which beguines’ lives
always complicated and at times challenged their hierarchical, patriarchal
world. The inheritance system of
medieval Paris allowed unmarried women like beguines to “inherit, invest, and
donate property.” (36) They could and
did choose how to bequeath their assets, at times to other single women. They developed social networks both among
themselves and beyond the beguine communities.
The beguine mistress and her council vetted applications to the community;
although the beguinage did not erase distinctions of social status, it welcomed
all women of good reputation who valued a shared pursuit of lay sanctity. The beguinage was markedly self-sufficient
and secure, possessing its own chapel (where the beguines’ mistress at times
preached), a hospital for ill or elderly members, living accommodations that
included both dormitories and private homes, and eventually a girls’
school. Miller characterizes this area
of women’s urban space as a “remarkably porous” “magnet” (37) that attracted a
variety of visitors as well as allowed the beguines sustained free access to
the world outside its walls. Even men
could enter the beguinage with permission if the meetings occurred in public
areas. (39) Although no women under the age of thirty
could live alone, there were few other restrictions on housing arrangements
among the women. Some women became
weavers; many became silk workers.
Understood as “culturally feminine,” Paris’ silk industry emerged in the
late thirteenth century. (61) Lucrative
silk work proved crucial in helping many beguines attain economic
independence. This respectable “women’s
work” could serve as lifelong employment for women. The industry attracted highly skilled
laborers (some of whom were immigrants) who could belong to guilds and work as
apprentices. Beguine entrepreneurs were
permitted to manage home workshops as “female masters.” At times, beguine merchants invested their
earnings in annuities, which they could pass on to fellow beguines, some of
whom might be their servants or other employees. As Miller points out, examination of the
lives of beguine silk workers broadens scholarly understandings of medieval
household production by moving us beyond the image of the patriarchal workshop
to incorporate lay religious women’s all-female economic communities.
6> Miller’s most significant
contribution to the largely unknown story of Parisian beguines is her
meticulous reconstruction of the manifold links between the secular clerics of
the early Sorbonne and the beguines. The
vitriol of seculars like William of Saint-Amour notwithstanding, beguines and
the Sorbonne’s priests forged mutually beneficial relationships in which
religious counsel flowed in both directions.
The clerics considered their ability to preach well to a receptive
audience of beguines to be important pastoral work. Furthermore, the beguine mistress’ sermons,
remarkably, were included as part of a collection of preaching models housed at
the Sorbonne. As heightened interest in
and emphasis on effective preaching peaked in the early thirteenth century,
clerics like Robert of Sorbon pointed to the idealized beguine’s humility and
propensity for exhorting others to live good Christian lives as models of
conduct for pastorally minded clerics. A
steady stream of preachers—mendicant and secular alike—passed through the
chapel of the beguinage, exposing the beguines to what was au courant in the
world of the medieval church, an extraordinary opportunity for a community of
laywomen to obtain broad and deep exposure to the burning theological questions
of the day. Their shared devotion to an
active spiritual apostolate provided zealous clerics committed to a preaching
mission and theologically inquisitive beguines living in a “book culture” with
much common ground. (109)
7> The end of Miller’s book
documents how suspicion about lay preaching, fear of heretics, and ongoing
tensions between the secular and mendicant clergy created an environment
hostile to the thriving, fluid, collaborative milieu that the beguines had
created. Soon after Marguerite Porete
was executed in Paris as a relapsed heretic the Church’s Council of Vienne
(1311-12) met. Among other business,
they pondered what they saw as the lessons of the Porete case. The Council issued “two confusing and
contradictory decrees” (142) on beguines, demonstrating the ways in which some
clerics understood Porete’s ideas (perceived as antisacerdotal and antinomian,
144) as representative of the beliefs of all beguines. The first decree, Cum de quibusdam, accused
some “women commonly known as beguines” of possible “insanity” by preaching
erroneous doctrines, leading “simple people” into sin, and doing much evil
“under the veil of sanctity.” (143)
Consequently, beguines’ status was to be “perpetually prohibited and completely
abolished” on pain of excommunication.
(143) A loophole that excluded
good, “faithful women” notwithstanding, the directive wreaked havoc on the
lives of northern European beguines. A
period of confused, erratic local investigations and enforcement of the Vienne
decrees and the succeeding Clementine decrees ensued, temporarily forcing the
Parisian beguines out of their beguinage. King Charles IV (r. 1322-28)
promulgated new statutes for the royal beguinage, insisting that the
praiseworthy beguines of his Parisian establishment were not those whom the
Vienne decrees had targeted. (163)
8> Although the eventual
decline of the beguinage is beyond the scope of Miller’s analysis, she briefly
sketches the details of its demise. A
variety of factors contributed: changes in urban property laws that favored
men, periodic famine and plague, and dwindling royal support for all charitable
foundations due to the unrelenting fiscal pressures of the Hundred Years’
War. Although French kings long had
supported the institution financially, requested the inhabitants’ prayers,
asserted their doctrinal orthodoxy, and, crucially, emphasized the
institution’s intimate connection to their royal predecessor St. Louis, the
closing of its school in the mid-fifteenth century was a blow from which the
beguinage could not recover.
9> Thus beguine life in Paris
ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Yet before it disappeared it was a distinctive, flourishing element of
vibrant medieval Paris. Life as a
beguine was deeply appealing to many fervently religious elite women with
aspirations to cultivate their spirituality, teach, tend to the indigent and
ill, and/or develop thriving businesses—all while maintaining the flexibility
to cease any of those activities at will and marry. Miller’s evocative study paints a compelling
picture of the lost world that these women created. Her engaging book moves beyond a focus on the
mystical musings of exceptional beguines like the undeniably important Porete
to the quotidian realities of life for the majority of beguines who were
integral parts of the religious, intellectual, and economic landscape of
fourteenth-century Paris.
_____
Colleen
Seguin
is an Associate Professor of History at Valparaiso University, where she
teaches European history and humanities classes. Her research focuses on early
modern Catholic Englishwomen. Seguin's article "Ambiguous Liaisons:
Catholic Women's Relationships with their Confessors in Early Modern England"
(Archive for Reformation History, 2004) won the American Society of Church
History's Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize.
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APPOSITIONS:
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Eight (2015): Dialogues
& Exchanges
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