A Woman's Movement in the High Middle Ages.

FEMINISTS, PROPHETESSES AND WITCHES:

LESSONS FROM A WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

by Abraham Van Luik, abevanluik@thoughtsandplaces.org

OVERVIEW

PART 1: This first part of a four part article describes a bona-fide women's movement that was part of a larger restorationist movement in the High Middle Ages, and how the female contribution to this movement was controlled through close relationships between spiritual counselors and confessors and women who were leaders in this new spirituality movement.

PART 2: The close, even intimate, relations that existed between the men and women leaders of this spiritual revolution of the High Middle Ages receives closer scrutiny in Part 2: This intimacy seems to have been both a direct consequence of the advent of a time of renewed spirituality and a tool through which traditional male hegemony over female spirituality was reinforced.

PART 3: The types of love-relationships described in Part 2 partly reflected the nature of the mystic vision that could be shared between mystics and also between a religious woman mystic and a sympathetic leader or confessor. It is the nature of this mystic experience, which allows a man like Francis to see Jesus as his spouse and a woman like Clare to see herself feeding at Francis' breast, that is given attention in this part.

PART 4: Not every prophetess of the High Middle Ages has had her revelations revered by her contemporaries, as will become evident in Part 4, which begins with the burning of Margaret Porete in Paris in 1310 and ends with a discussion of the witch craze and holocaust. Part 4 is a sobering exercise that follows the potentially euphoric discussion of much that is inspiring and spiritually delightful in Parts 2 and 3. Part 4 is a warning reminding us that hatred of women's spiritual power, or any other power challenging its authority, lies as magma below the crust of Christian theology. And the magma boils on.

REFERENCES: References follow, by Part, at the end of each Part. References in a later Part may refer to references more fully cited at first use in a previous Part of the paper.

PART 1: A WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

Europe in the high middle ages was a seedbed of socio-political and spiritual turmoil from which sprouted the institutions of modern civilization: the breakup of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, the breakup of Catholicism, the rise of the Reformed churches, and the separation of church and state. In every century from the tenth through the fifteenth, events occurred that could be cited to indicate the pending dawn of the modern age.

But some of the movements of the High Middle Ages did not presage the modern age, some flowered and died while others flowered and were transformed. These transformed movements, like Christianity itself, may have continued to flower, but whether they continued as the true incarnations of their founders' visions is debatable.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the flowering of a number of movements within Europe that could be called restorationist, meaning an attempt to return to what was perceived to be the type of life intended by the original Christian message. For example, Ronald A. Knox, of Trinity College, Oxford, once characterized some of the heretical movements of the Middle Ages as putting forward "the momentous claim" (1) characteristic of restorationists:

The disciples of Amalric, in l2l0, claimed to be the church of the Holy Spirit, destined to succeed an outworn dispensation. Dolcino similarly held that the power of Christ had been made over to himself and his fellowmartyrdom. (4)

Knox continues:

Such were the beliefs abjured by Peter Lucensis, a Spaniard who belonged to Dolcino's Apostolic Brethren. That when poverty was changed from the Church by St. Sylvester, then sanctity of life was taken from the Church, and the Devil entered into the companions of St. Sylvester in this world.... That there is a double Church, the Spiritual and the Carnal that the Spiritual Church is in those men who live in perfect poverty ... that the Carnal Church is of those who live ... in riches and honours ... such as are the bishops and prelates of the Church of Rome.... This Church he says is that carnal Church of which John speaks in the Revelation, which he calls Babylon.

Peter Dominicus, a Beguine examined by the same tribunal, adds that "the Roman Church, which under the name of Babylon, is to be damned, rejected, and exterminated by Christ, ... and ... that the Spiritual Church is to be begun and restored by the rejection of the Carnal Church, even as the old synagogue of the Jews was rejected by Christ!" (5)

This "rage for apostolic poverty" was a characteristic of the High Middle Ages, and especially of the thirteenth century. The movements of that century deserve special study not only because of their "rage for apostolic poverty," but because this rage was accompanied by a genuine "woman's movement" that produced a significant and unique feminist spirituality in that time.

Vita Apostolica

Part of the provocation for the "rage for apostolic poverty" was the political, social, and religious disorder brought about by centuries of Viking invasions, a couple of centuries of the appointment of church bishops and prelates by emperors and kings, and a number of long-standing abuses within the church. Pope Gregory VII (l073-l085) began an overdue reform within the church and a battle with secular authority over the right to appoint bishops and prelates that wasn't won by the popes until ll22. The cloisters, where monks and nuns lived lives of prayer and contemplation, were refuges for the surplus children of the well to do, and many basked in the relative affluence that feudal land control afforded. Although there were abuses within the monastic system, it is from the ranks of the monks that Gregory rose to reestablish the papacy's power and reform institutions to root out abuses. Gregory's reforms did not have either a sufficient or a lasting impact on abuses, however.

Meanwhile, among the parish priests and the laity, as well as among monks, nuns, and prelates, there were sincere and pious believers who were yearning for a return to the ways of the primitive church. Among the lower class of priest and laity especially, many yearned to live as the apostles lived, in poverty and evangelical purity. This Vita Apostolica, apostolic life, was being radically imitated by men and women discarding their positions and possessions so that they may more perfectly follow Christ. Some did this alone, others in small groups, others in conjunction with or in cooperation with established, cloistered religious orders, and some became the beginnings of new religious orders.

As an example of the interplay between the dark state of the church and the appeal of the gospel of simplicity and purity in the founding of new religious orders, it is instructive to look at Julien Green's assessment of these times and Francis of Assissi's reaction:

Any picture one draws of the Church in the year 1200 would have to be, by and large, very dark. There is no need to look for proof of this among the Church's enemies we have plenty of evidence from within Catholicism, beginning with the many papal bulls issued by Innocent III against the most scandalous abuses. But if the pope was worried about the general decay in Europe, his comminatory bulls could do little to stop the usury, the venality, the gluttony and sexual excesses of many priests, even in the monasteries. Scandal was everywhere.

There was unheard of luxury in the Church, luxury and lust. People sang songs mocking lecherous monks. Defrocked clerics gadded about and burst into song, blasting church dignitaries.... There were plenty of faithful Christians, to be sure. Francis knew some perfect priests, but was also aware that the Church was passing through a period of critical disturbances. If he hadn't noticed it himself, then the itinerant preachers from the north, from Lyon and Milan, would have enlightened him, with their constant complaints about the damage done to the episcopacy by the taste for riches, to which they opposed evangelical poverty. There was no gainsaying them on this point, but Francis held on for the same reason that the common people, for the most part, would not give in on the essential item: For all its excesses the Church still had the power of the keys, to open the gates of paradise by absolving sins. Francis remained unshakably Catholic all his life. (6)

Francis' call to action came in a sermon which had as its content the Vita Apostolica:

One time, on the feast of Saint Matthias, a priest read to him the passage from the Gospel where Jesus sends his apostles out to preach and gives them a rule of conduct. "Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff.... And preach as you go saying, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.'" Those words made Francis tremble as if a voice had fallen from heaven into his ear. When mass was over, he asked the priest to explain Jesus' discourse point by point and as the meaning of those brief, peremptory phrases became clearer, he felt enfolded in joy. The message he had waited so long for had finally arrived. And he cried out, "That's what I want that's what I desire with all my soul!"

Suddenly he threw away his walking stick, his sandals, his cloak, his leather belt. The Gospel had been revealed to him in all its dazzling brightness. At once he became a disciple of Christ. (7)

Elements of a self-supporting and spiritual ministry are stressed in Adolf Holl's biography of St. Francis. Holl describes Francis' early followers in the following romanticized words.

In those days the Franciscan ideal shone with something like the splendor of the dawn, gradually scattering the darkness of the emerging sects. The brotherhood was flourishing everywhere in Umbria. In towns and villages all across the region people saw these gay companions appearing, dressed in habits of coarse homespun, singing aloud or even performing tricks to attract crowds and announce the Good News to them.

We can almost hear the Salvation Army tambourine jingling in the distance. Francis called these alert missionaries God's jugglers, as if the Lord were snapping up souls through sleight of hand. Begging their bread, but offering their work in exchange--haying, sweeping, washing, or, if they knew how, making wooden tools--they never accepted money and lodged wherever they could, sometimes with the local priest, beneath a lean-to, in a hayloft or barn. Often enough they spent the night camping outdoors.

People got used to them. However warm or chilly the reception given them, they preached with the fervor of neophytes, and their faith stirred a responsive chord deep within their listeners. They were the prophets of a new world where disgust for riches and passion for the Gospel changed lives and brought happiness. What good was it to listen to the Waldensians and those strange Perfecti, whose language was becoming incomprehensible? Franciscan simplicity was wiping out heresy. Down the roads marched the new brothers, two by two, one following the other, the very men whose steps Francis had once heard in a proph who contrasted the Gospel with the pagan luxury of clerics who had lost the sense of their vocation or were unprepared for it, these Christians now followed new shepherds. No doubt there were exceptions. Saints were not lacking sometimes they could be found in isolated places, as if they were the true Church by themselves. There were even saints of a kind never seen before, who flourished all through the twelfth century, men and women--particularly women--who rank among the great visionaries and mystics. With the energy so characteristic of women, they stood fast for the whole century, like larger-than-life statues, from Saint Lutgard to Elizabeth of Thuringia, from Mechtilde of Magdeburg to Elizabeth of Schonau, in the depths of monasteries and next to the thrones, from Saint Hildegard to Elizabeth of Hungary.

Still, the general disorder made a picture so spectacularly vivid that the Church was threatened with disaster. But it was the only Christian church in the West recognized by the majority of the people. Breaking away from it because it was no longer truly evangelical would mean swelling the ranks of the heretics who appealed to the Gospel pure and simple, but without the Church. And what else did Francis want except the Gospel, with his rule made up of three peremptory verses?

Francis could see what everybody else saw. But as degraded as the Church was, he still considered it the house of Christ.

One day a heretic pointed out to him a priest living openly with a concubine and posed the insidious question whether a mass said by that man with polluted hands could be valid. Francis' only reply was to go up to the priest, kneel down before him, and kiss the hands that held the Body of the Christ at mass. This feeling for the Church kept Francis from drifting to anything like a nascent Protestantism, as happened with the "Brothers of the Free Spirit." (9)

Although Green focuses on St. Francis, he does put Francis into the context of the times: a time when women saw visions and became advisors to abbots, bishops, princes, and popes.

Green mentioned a unique development of Francis' time "saints of a kind never seen before, who flourished all through the twelfth century, men and women--particularly women--who rank among the great visionaries and mystics." (10) Like Francis, these mystics sought spiritual power through living the Vita Apostolica. One of these women, in fact, was St. Francis' disciple, and later became his confidante, nurse, and, especially, his spiritual companion and counterpart: St. Clare of Assisi.

In Herbert Roggen's biography of St. Clare of Assisi, he describes this woman as a follower of St. Francis and as the founder of an order for women dedicated to living contemplative and active lives in holy poverty. Roggen notes that she lived in a peculiar age:

This is the age wherein women's movements spring into fashion! There are suddenly women who are seen to be important, and this because of their followers, their taking part in the revolt against authority, or ... because they left their traditional responsibilities. (11, my translation of p. 17.)

Roggen continues to observe that heretical women's movements existed which strove against existing, male, authority structures. Secular and religious authority were characteristically difficult to distinguish in the Middle Ages, and for centuries the slogan concerning the choices available to women had been "aut maritus aut murus"--either a man [marriage] or a wall [monastery]. (12)

Roggen goes to some lengths to suggest Clare must have been familiar with the women's movements of the l3th century, which included the liberationist women of the Free Spirit, the women of the Apostolici, and the Beguines. Clare, however, rejected these heretical, or at least suspect, movements, and set out to follow the Vita Apostolica taught by St. Francis. (13) Her work created the opportunity for women, as Francis had created it for the men, to live the apostolic life and remain faithful to the church. Her struggle for acceptance of her order, however, occupied all of her life. Roggen details her very real, prolonged, and ultimately successful struggle with popes and bishops over her unwelcome insistence that her order for women be allowed to live in holy poverty. (14) Roggen also details her challenging papal authority by her modifications of the rules repeatedly given her by popes, which included such onerous provisions as the one, for example, "that forbids cloistered woman's ever being outside her cloister, except in case of fire, plague, or catastrophy." (15) Roggen explains that this provision, which kept cloistered women behind bars, was right and proper from a thirteenth-century social perspective. (16) That perspective was, simply, that there was only one sin that women could commit: being untrue to the established order. That order was the order of male authority: father, husband, or cloister. (17) If she is not under the authority of one of the above, she is a public woman--a category containing every possible nuance (18) of meaning.

Thus, Clare's struggle to be able to live the Vita Apostolica as a woman, and to remain unmarried, resulted in her being cloistered, albeit by her own rule. For many women, however, cloistered life was not available or desirable. They or their families were either not able to pay the requisite dowry or they did not want to live the rigorous and restrictive lives of nuns. For these women there were few options, including heretical sects or risking suspicion by, alone or in groups, rejecting marriage and living lives of seclusion, poverty, and benevolent service.

The heretical sects asked what were revelant questions raised in many minds during this time of restorationist thought: is the current hierarchy truly representing God, and what is the place of women? Radicals had their own inspiration and hence theiof women reflected a more enlightened theology, Eleanor McLaughlin's caution should be noted:

The historical evidence is overwhelming that Waldensian and Albigensian women played some leadership roles in those groups, teaching and preaching in the early years. After a century or so of the groups' existence, women disappeared almost wholly from the leadership as these "sectarian" groups developed a clerical hierarchy which mirrored the male clerical order of the Church and of feudalism. Unlike the Church, the "sects" retained no special vocation of holiness, sainthood or monastic community within their groupings to which women and men could be called equally. The perfectae disappeared as the perfecti became more like bishops than religious. Before the sixteenth century, it was in the Church, not in sects, that women found the most enduring and powerful roles. Rebellion in the context of obedience, the vocation of the saint, provided more space for women than did sectarian protest. (20)

From this overly flattering assessment of the opportunities for women in early-modern Catholicism, it is quite evident that these radical sects were responsive to the needs of women in their formative stages, but reverted to the cultural norm as they became more firmly established. "Rebellion in the context of obedience" is a powerfully compact way of describing the complex relationships between spiritually powerful women and the male leadership of Catholicism: as long as the rebellion did not undermine the fundamental authority of the established hierarchy and only challenged them to positive action in moral and administrative matters, these women prophets were revered and sainted, canonized. Those whose visions convinced them of the uselessness of the church's priestly hierarchy, or worse, however, were sternly dealt with.

A few pages above, the "Beguine" Peter Dominicus was cited as confessing his belief that the church was "Babylon." In this with or without the vow of celibacy, want to continue to live in community and apply themselves to penitence and to the humble service of the Lord, let them be permitted to do so. (23)

Olyslager interprets that:

This clause was the salvation of the beguines and bogards in the Low Countries. They did not consider themselves condemned and so went on as before. But not everyone understood it so favorably. All too zealous or antagonistic authorities continued to persecute the beguines and to seize their property. Their very existence threatened, the beguines of the Low Countries again appealed to Rome.

John XXII (l3l6-l334), the immediate successor of Clement V, ordered an inquiry into the morals and orthodoxy of the beguines in the dioceses of the Southern Low Countries. This investigation gave them a clean bill of ecclesiastical health, and John XXII became a great defender of the beguines of the Low Countries . . . . In his bull, Ratio recta, of l3 August l3l8, John XXII declared that his predecessor, Clement V, had meant the German beguines when he condemned the movement: "Since in addition to the condemned beguines, there are also in some regions other beguines who, although they are called 'beghinae', still lead irreproachable lives and do not adhere to heresies, the Church authorities must restore the property of the orthodox beguines to its former state. He (John XXII) tolerated the continued existence of these orthodox beguines so long as the Holy See did not decide otherwise, but would thereby not approve of their manner of life. The bishops must exercise stringent supervision over them and punish the refactory ones with spiritual censure." (24)

Olyslager interprets these ambiguous statements:

It was not an approval, but nor was it a condemnation. The fundamental problem seems to have been that the beguines were neither 'religious' nor 'laity', and thus did not fit into the otherwise neat categories of the Middle Ages. (25)

Fox's description of the Beguines emphasizes their resemblance to the traveling preachers: the friars of the new orders of Saints Francis and Dominic. He relates, as part of his introduction of the German Dominican friar and mystic, Meister Eckhart, that Eckhart preached to Beguines and learned from them in turn. Fox's somewhat romanticized account of the Beguine movement gives a useful overview of their rise, reception, and the economic, social and spiritual factors in society to which their existence was a response. Their dedication to the "Vita Apostolica" is also to be noted in the following description:

The Beguines were one chapter in a distinguished history of women mystics in northern Europe. Eckhart is a son--not a father --of that history, as Ancelot points out: "German mysticism has earlier representatives [than Eckart], the greatest of them being women." The first mystic to write in German was the great Mechtild of Magdeburg. Magdeburg was a town only l40 miles from Eckhart's hometown and novitiate in Erfurt. For fifty-two years of her life she was a Beguine and her spiritual directors were Dominicans. Her book, 'The Flowing Light of the Godhead,' is famous for its mystical bridal poetry after the style of Song of Songs, but the language and theology of its title are particularly significant. Eckhart also made an important use of the term "Godhead" in his spiritual theology .... Mechtild employs many images in common with Eckhart. Among them are the images of sinking, of dancing, of God's delight, of growth, of awakening, of letting go, of compassion, of God as a flowing stream, of the dialectic between isness and nothingness. Her work deeply influenced German mysticism and Eckhart in particular. Eckhart and the Dominican Order were involved in counseling and preaching to many women's groups along the Rhine, both nuns and Beguines. There was a great influx of women into these alternative life-styles in the latter half of the thirteenth century, perhaps because there seems to have been a precipitous decline in the male population and perhaps, too, for economic reasons, for as the population grew and the economy declined neither marriage nor living singly was always so viable an option. In l277 there were forty convents of Dominican nuns in Germany and ten years later there were seventy. By 1303 the city of Strassburg alone had seven houses of Dominican nuns. Each of these houses might comprise eighty to a hundred women. They were often very well educated persons. By the year 1267 this new ministry of preaching to women in the convents was felt so strongly by church administrators that Clement IV officially charged the Dominicans to direct these nuns. By the time Eckhart appeared on the scene it was a foregone conclusion that interaction with religious women was an important dimension to Dominican ministry.

The Beguines were not nuns. They could not be. For to become a nun meant you had to be of noble class and pay a dowry. They were groups of women who banded together to live a life of dedication to spiritual development and to ministering to others but who were not recognized officially as "religious" or nuns. They did not take formal vows and thus were free of church authorities--a freedom that, one can imagine, was not always relished by those same authorities. They made their living by their own hands, working as artisans and craftspeople. In an important study on the "Beguines in Medieval Strassburg," Dayton Phillips concludes that while some wealthy women distributed their money and joined the Beguines, "it is obvious ... that the beguine condition found its greatest following among the lower classes." He also observes that it was these women, who might be called the forerunners of the active Orders of religious women and who lived and worked and ministered to the world and not in cloistered convents, who "seem to have been almost a sister status of the friars. Living in the midst of the world, beguines, rather than nuns, were the true feminine parallel of the friarsle phenomenon in the spiritual life of the town." One effect of the decrees against the Beguines was to swell the ranks of Third Order Dominicans and Franciscans. By 1318 Rome made the distinction between heretical and orthodox Beguines on the basis of their being transients or being connected with a house. The transient Beguines were considered the heretical ones.

Joan Evans has observed that "the women of the Middle Ages tended to be anonymous, but they were not soft or sheltered. These strong and imaginative women known as Beguines, who sought a place in the world apart from the institution of marriage and a place in the church apart from the institution of the enclosed cloister, were a powerful force on Eckhart's own spiritual imagination. Furthermore, they and Eckhart have shared a similar fate in death as they did in life. Not only were they condemned by the same pope but the great majority of male historians--for example, Ronald Knox and Norman Cohn--have dismissed both the Beguines and Eckhart as rank kooks or heretics. In fact, they were persons seeking personal and collective renewal in a period of institutional decadence. " (27)

Two features of this woman's movement mentioned by Fox will be explored subsequently: The mysticism of the Beguines, and the relations between religious and lay women and the friars. First, however, the range of options available to women who wished to follow the Vita Apostolica, and yet remain orthodox, will be described. This range was explored by Brenda M. Bolton. Bolton uses Jacques de Vitry's "Life" of Mary of Oignies, a Beguine, as her primary source. She concludes that de Vitry's biography of Mary and other women was "propaganda to advance their interest":

In writing of the 'Life' his aim was to make the group which he had found and indeed which he himself had been eager to develop, known to a much wider audience, with the ultimate aim of establishing a tradition sufficient to allow for its possible inwn to have parallels world. Ivetta of Huy also came from a family possessed of considerable wealth. Her father was one of the creditors of the bishop of Liege and was appalled at her disregard of the family property which she gave away all too readily. That Margaret of Ypres's background was far from impoverished we may judge from the threat from the secular world which Siger [her confessor] recognized could corrupt her life. Lutgard too was from a sufficiently affluent background and we see the tension in her early life between her father's secular ambition and her mother's support of her vocation. Christina seems here to be the exception for her origins were far humbler than the others.

That these and many other religious women of the time were largely from the nobility or urban patricate groupings should not surprise us. These were the classes most accessible to the penetration of new ideas and we should remember that the ideals of charity, renunciation and mendicant poverty in opposition to the avidity for riches were still relatively novel at this period. (32)

Like Fox, Bolton mentions the closeness between the beguines and the Dominican friars. This closeness between men and women who had left the world to follow Christ is important because it appears to be inseparable from the unique, feminist spirituality shared by many of these dedicated imitators of the holy apostles.

It is the sharing of this peculiar spirituality between Eckhart and the German beguines that got both of them condemned by the Papal bull, and it is the sharing of the same vision of the best way to live in the imitation of Christ that caused Francis and Clara to be canonized, thus having their places in God's eternal presence made sure, according to their tradition.

It is the spirituality of these saints and heretics, their unique vision of who they were and who God is, that is potentially instructive to our day, and is examined next. As far as the survival of the Beguines of Catholic Flemish Belgium and Holland into the twentieth century, and their demise in German, French, Spanish and Italian speaking Europe are concerned, the lessons to be learned are that in only one part of Europe did the local clergy and the Dominican friars strive diligently to closely regulate and oversee these lay women. In other parts of Europe there was less control and less protection, and "heresy" and persecution took their toll. Olyslager listed the reasons why both clergy and lay people were unable to see the difference between Beguines and the overtly heretical Cathars and Apostolici. Olyslager first describes the demise of the Beguine movement in parts of Europe outside of the southern low countries where it flourished:

In other places, the struggle did not turn out so favorably. In 1318, in the Northern Low Countries, Fredrick II, Bishop of Utrecht, ordered the radical implementation of the decisions of the Council of Vienne (1311). The beguines had to disappear from his diocese. He was willing, however, to allow them to transfer to the Third Order of St. Francis after they had been thoroughly investigated.

In France, Philip the Fair enforced the Constitutions of Clement V with unremitting severity. He closed all beguine houses.... In the German countries, the beguine and bogard system was just as radically uprooted--not always without reason. Too many beguines and bogards in these countries had compromised themselves with the heretical apostolici, constructed their own theologies, and adhered to a very suspect myticism.

Pope Urbanus V (1362-1370) ordered in 1368 that the German bogards be suppressed with all rigor. He wrote: "Pestis illorum haereticorum qui Beghardi vacantur" (the plague of these heretics who are called bogards).

The Roman-German Emperor, Charles IV (l346-l378), followed the example of the Pope and issued an edict requiring the extermination of "the dangerous sects of beguines and bogards".

These drastic measures of the Pope and the Emperor still did not mean the end of the German beguines, who were particularly numerous in the Rhineland.

The Bishops of Cologne, Trier, Strasbourg, and Mainz (where there were 50 beguine convents!) applied the prohibition rather mildly and closed their eyes to the continued existence of beguines. But the vitality of the movement was broken. Many beguines sought shelter behind another religious name or transferred to the Third Order of St. Francis. At the end of the l6th century, there was no longer any trace of the beguines to be found in the German countries.

The obvious question is why the enemies of the beguines in the Low Countries continued to persecute these women so stubbornly in spite of the papal and episcopal pronouncements. There were, of course, a wide variety of reasons-- some well-founded, some dubious, and some malicious.

Though the papal pronouncements were always favorable, they were always weakened by the perennial reservation: "with this we do not wish to approve nor disapprove of your state". The popes never did want to go so far as to give official recognition of the beguine system.

The condemnation by Pope Clement V in l3ll, which was intended for the German beguines and bogards, was all too often applied to the beguines of the Low Countries, for the term 'beguine' covered several kinds of people. There were orthodox beguines and heretical beguines, with the latter particularly concentrated in German countries.

And not everyone was capable of separating the wheat from the chaff in this period of theological confusion, general ignorance (also among the clergy), and morbid fanaticism. Well meaning and generous men and women, being theologically unsophisicated or misled, were heretics without being aware of it.

Between the beguines and some heretical sects and particularly the Rhineland Apostolici, there were many, though superficial, similarities:

--Both the beguines and the Apostolici were lay people. Their movements grew spontaneously from the people like wild plants, without a particular founder or foundress and without papal or episcopal approval.

--Neither group lived in the context of a cloister. Sometimes they lived alone and sometimes in small groups or convents. They did not call their superiors 'abbot" or 'mother', but 'magister' or 'mistress', as did many heretical sects.

--The first beguines and Apostolici shared the same ideal of poverty, prized celibacy very highly, and wore the same raw wool clothing.

--They both held to daily recitation of the same prayers and to the same penitential practices. Each month they had a 'culpa' or public confession of faults.

--They both had infirmaries or hospitals for their sick and poor.

--The mystics among the beguines and the Apostolici were sometimes very close to each other in their spirit and aspirations.

--It was not a simple matter of chance that the beguines, the Apostolici, and the Cathars all had the same patroness, St. Catherine. She was the model for all pious women of the time.

Catherine--the name means 'the pure one" in Greek--was the chaste maiden who, equiped with an exceptional knowledge of the Scriptures, triumphantly debated with pagan philosophers and engaged in lay preaching, which was something that all Cathar women and sometimes the beguines were tempted to do.

--Then, too, these god-fearing women, living in penitence and poverty, were a constant reproach to those people, clergy among them, who were living too luxuriously.

There were also economic factors involved in the persecution of the beguines. In most of the begijnhofs [beguinages], the cloth and linen industry was their only source of income. The beguines worked cheaply and sometimes had the help of apprentice girls. The guilds naturally tried to suppress this competition and demanded restrictive regulations. (33)

To ensure Beguine orthodoxy in Low Country areas where the Beguines continued to flourish, the church ensured that Beguines, who were not nuns, came to live as nuns lived. In Olyslager's words, no doubt reflecting his own orthodox perspectives:

Only in the Low Countries could the beguines hold out. For this, they had to thank the wise vision of their bishops, who took the necessary measures in time to protect them from heretical aberrations, gave them stable and proper direction, and obliged them to live in a closed court, a 'hortus conclusus' or begijnhof. (Above the gate of the Diest begijnhof is inscribed: "Closed Court, Come to My Court, My Sister Bride"). Some begijnhofs were called vineyards (Bruges and Brussels), which was an allusion to the Canticle of Canticles [Song of Songs], 2:l5: "That the foxes not plunder the vineyard of the Lord". The foxes here were heretics and false dogmas....

Finally, only those who lived in such a 'closed court' were recognized as orthodox beguines. They were the 'beghinae clausae,' the 'cloistered beguines'. Only they could claim the 'privilegia beghinalia' and wear the beguine habit.

The Dominicans contributed a great deal to securing the orthodoxy of the beguines, primarily by establishing a number of begijnhofs in the Duchy of Flanders. Indeed, the Dominicans were the fiercest combatants of all heresies, and particularly the Albigensians. (34)

This returns us to the previous observation cited by Eleanor (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 109. 2. Ibid., p. 110.
3. Ibid., p. 111.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Green, Julien, "God's Fool: the Life and Times of Francis of Assisi," (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985), p. 93.
7. Ibid., p. 92.
8. Holl, Adolf, "The Last Christian," (Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980). Translated by Peter Heinegg.
9. Green, Op. cit., pp. 108-109.
10. Ibid, p. 108.
11. Roggen, Heribert, "Clara van Assisi, Zien Met Het Hart (Amsterdam, Lannoo, 1980), p. 17.
12. Ibid., p. 18.
13. Ibid., p. 31.
14. Ibid., pp. 109-158.
15. Ibid., pp. 143-144.
16. Ibid., pp. 142-143.
17. Ibid., p. 18.
18. Ibid.
19. Wessley, Stephen E., "The Thirteenth-Century Gugliemites: Salvation through Women," pp. 289-303. In Derek Baker, "Medevial Women," (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978), 289-303.
20. McLaughlin, Eleanor, "Women, Power and the Pursuit of Holiness in Medevial Christianity," Chapter Three, In: Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, "Women of Spirit, Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions," (New York, Simon and Shuster, l979), p. 124.
21. Fox, Matthew, "Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation," (Garden City, New York, Image Books, 1980), pp. 39-40.
22. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
23. Olyslager, W. A., "The Great Begijnhof of Leuven," (Leuven, University Press, 1983), p. 105.
24. Ibid., pp. 105-106.
25. Ibid.
26. Fox, Op. cit., pp. 36-40.
27. Ibid., pp. 39-40.
28. Bolton, Brenda M., "VITAE MATRUM: A Further Aspect of the FRAUENFRAGE," pp. 253-273, In Derek Baker, "Medieval Women," (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 255.
29. Ibid., p. 254.
30. Ibid., p. 256.
31. Ibid., p. 260.
32. Ibid., p. 260-261.
33. Olyslager, op. cit., pp. 110-112.
34. Ibid., pp. 112-113.
35. McLaughlin, op. cit., p. 124.
36. Undset, Sigrid, "Catherine of Siena," (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1954), Translated by Kate Austin-Lund, pp. 186-188.
37. Deen, Edith, "Great Women of the Christian Faith," (New York, Harper & Row Brothers, Publishers, 1959), pp. 328-329.
38. Ibid., pp. 329-330.
39. Ibid., pp. 330-331.
40. Ibid., pp. 331-333.
41. Ibid., pp. 331-334.

PART 2: BURNING LOVE: MYSTICS, SAINTS, CELIBATES

The close, even intimate, relations that existed between the men and women leaders of the spiritual revolution of the High Middle Ages deserve close study. This intimacy seems to have been both a direct consequence of the advent of a time of renewed spirituality and a tool through which traditional male hegemony over female spirituality was reinforced.

The lesson for modern religious feminist reformers may thus be a double-edged one: on the one hand greater spirituality may result in closer emotional and spiritual relations between men and women, which may be desirable. On the other hand, such closer ties can be used, in a setting where the men are the acknowledged spiritual authorities, to guide and control the spiritual development of women. The mechanism for allowing "rebellion in the context of obedience," which McLaughlin cited (1) as the key to survival of the Middle Ages' new women's roles in orthodoxy, may well lie in the close relations that were developed between the spiritual women and their male mentors. Indeed, Olyslager asserted (2) that the Beguines survived in the southern Low Countries precisely because they were closely supervised by their bishops and required to live in closed courts.

The history of women who responded to the spiritual call of these times to renounce the world, its pleasures and riches, and to seek a new life in the spiritual realm by loving God and serving humanity in poverty has been sketched by Olyslager, when he reports the following scenario for the beginnings of the Beguine movement:

Not all those eager for reform ended up in heretical, Cathar, or anti-Church groups. Far from it. Under Greek-Byzantine influence and after the example of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian monks, there developed after the First Crusade (around 1100) a movement in the West to flee the world and, by seclusion and poverty, to sanctify it.

Women, in particular seemed to be drawn to this ideal. But instead of withdrawing into the wilderness, they retired to cells or hermitages near a church, a chapel, or a cloister, and lived alone or with a few other women. These women were called 'reclusae' (recluses) or 'mulieres religiosae' (pious women). Their number increased rapidly and their hermitages soon grew into small agglomerations in and alongside abbeys.

They were the so-called double cloisters. But however good the intention, these double cloisters were far from the ideal solution. Between 1140 and 1200, the Norbertines decided to gradually remove these recluses from their abbeys. The Cistercians, of whom St. Bernard was the principal leader, concerned themselves with the fate of these women, but they did not repeat the double cloister experiment. Instead they allowed them to affiliate with their order, but this privilege was soon also abolished. These women found themselves literally in the street. And not all pious women or girls were so lucky as to be able to find a hermitage. Even a hut next to an abbey or in a secluded place cost money. Many women made a virtue of necessity and had their room in their family home converted into a cell. Thus in the middle of cities and villages, there were many women who wanted to live like recluses. One could call them 'quasi-hermitesses'. Soon, and particularly after the elimination of the double cloisters, they began to congregate in huts around chapels, hospitals, or leprosaria without binding themselves to a monastic order.

There were other reasons, too, for these women not being able or wishing to associate themselves with a monastic order. Entrance into an order required a dowry that not everyone could pay. Then, too, many did not feel they were strong enough to endure the rigors of monastic life, so the less restricted life of a recluse was more attractive. It is from the ranks of these quasi-hermitesses and groups of pious women that the first beguines came. (3)

Olyslager then describes the gradual institutionalization of this rather spontaneous movement:

As we mentioned above, there were many 'mulieres religiosae' (pious women) who could or would not live in a hut by an abbey and who lived in the city with their family or in their own houses. They were called the 'beghinae indisciplinatae' or non-organized beguines as well as 'beghinae in saeculo manentes' or beguines residing in the world. They would gather several times a day in a church or chapel for religious exercises under the direction of a priest. The constant contact with the secular world, however, was soon perceived to be not conducive for advance in the spiritual life. The first step to improve this situation was the gathering of a number of beguines in the same house, 'in eadem domo,' under the direction of their own house rules. These houses were preferably located ne