Beghards (also called Beguards) and Beguines (or Beguins) were Roman Catholic lay religious communities active in the 13th and 14th centuries, living in a loose semi-monastic community but without formal vows. They were influenced by Albigensian teachings and by the Brethren of the Free Spirit, which flourished in and near Cologne around the same time but was condemned as heretical.
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Over the centuries, the etymology of Beguines has been the subject of some controversy. However, by 1911 the Encyclopaedia Britannica concluded that the name derived from Lambert le Bègue, a priest of Liège who around 1170 preached the establishment of an association of women devoting themselves to a life of religion without taking the monastic vows - opponents of Bègue's idea called these women Beguines. The Encyclopaedia dismissed derivations from Saint Begga and from an imaginary old Saxon word beggen, "to beg" or "to pray".[1] In the course of the 20th century, still another explanation was put forward: Beguines would be a derivation of Albigenses.[2] Encyclopedias, when they mention this latter explanation at all, tend to dismiss it.[3]
At the start of the 12th century there were women in the Low Countries who lived alone, and devoted themselves to prayer and good works without taking vows. At first there were only a few of them, but in the course of the century their numbers increased. This was the age of the Crusades, and the land teemed with desolate women—the raw material for a host of neophytes. These sole women made their homes not in the forest, where the true hermit normally dwells, but on the fringe of the town, where their work lay, for they attended to the poor. About the beginning of the 13th century some of them grouped their cabins together to form a community, called Beguinage.
The Beguine were not nuns; they did not take vows, could return to the world and wed if they chose, and did not renounce their property. If one was without means she neither asked nor accepted alms, but supported herself by manual labour, or by teaching the children of burghers. During the time of her novitiate she lived with "the Grand Mistress" of her cloister, but afterward she had her own dwelling, and, if she could afford it, was attended by her own servants. The same aim in life, kindred pursuits, and community of worship were the ties which bound her to her companions.
There was no mother-house, nor common rule, nor common general of the order; every community was complete in itself and fixed its own order of living, though later on many adopted the rule of the Third Order of Saint Francis. These communities were no less varied as to the social status of their members; some of them only admitted ladies of high degree; others were exclusively reserved for persons in humble circumstances; others again opened their doors wide to women of every condition, and these were the most densely peopled. Several, like the great Beguinage of Ghent, numbered their inhabitants by thousands.
Such was this semi-monastic institution. Admirably adapted to the spiritual and social needs of the age which produced it, it spread rapidly throughout the land and soon began to exercise a profound influence on the religious life of the people. Each of these institutions was an ardent centre of mysticism, and it was not the monks, who mostly dwelt on the countryside, nor even the secular clergy, but the Beguines, the Beghards, and the sons of Saint Francis who moulded the thought of the urban population of the Low Countries. There was a Beguinage at Mechlin as early as 1207, at Brussels in 1245, at Leuven before 1232, at Antwerp in 1234, at Bruges in 1244, and by the close of the century there was hardly a commune in the Low Countries without its Beguinage, whilst several of the great cities had two or three or even more.
As the 13th century progressed they tended to become mystics and relied less and less on their own labour, often turning to begging instead. In some cases, this shift toward mysticism caused problems for the Beguines. For example, Marguerite Porete, a French Beguine and mystic, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 by civil authorities (heresy was against state law at that time). She was condemned by the Church for heresy and accused of being a Free Spirit. She was finally condemned and executed for reasons that are still not entirely clear. One reason may be her refusal to remove her book The Mirror of Simple Souls from circulation.
By the 14th century some communities were absorbed by monastic and mendicant orders, and others developed into Flagellants or other practices considered heretical. In 1311, Pope Clement V accused the Beguines of spreading heresy, and they were suppressed under John XXII, Urban V, and Gregory XI. They were rehabilitated in the 15th century by Eugene IV.
Most of these institutions were suppressed during the religious troubles of the 16th century or during the stormy years which closed the 18th, but a few convents of Beguines persisted until the early 20th century in parts of Belgium, among them those of Bruges, Lier, Mechlin, Leuven, and Ghent, which last numbered nearly a thousand members in 1905; the last Beguine of Belgium, Sister Marcella, 88, was living in a rest home in 2008, in Turnhout.
The community of the Amsterdam Begijnhof, credited with having considerably influenced the development of what was the city's southern edge in the late Middle Ages, survived the Reformation as a staunchly Catholic community, though their parish church was confiscated and given over to exiled English Puritans. The last Amsterdam Beguine died in 1971,[4] but the Begijnhof remains one of the city's best-known landmarks.
The widespread religious revival of which the Beguinage was the outcome brought forth also about the same time several kindred societies for men. Of these the Beghards were the most widespread and the most important. The Beghards were all laymen, and like the Beguines, they were not bound by vows, the rule of life which they observed was not uniform, and the members of each community were subject only to their own local superiors; but, unlike them, they had no private property; the brethren of each cloister had a common purse, dwelt together under one roof, and ate at the same board.
They were for the most part, though not always, men of humble origin—weavers, dyers, fullers, and so forth—and thus they were intimately connected with the city craft-guilds. Indeed, no man could be admitted to the Beghards' convent at Brussels unless he were a member of the Weavers' Company, and this was in all probability not a unique case. The Beghards were often men to whom fortune had not been kind—men who had outlived their friends, or whose family ties had been broken by some untoward event, and who, by reason of failing health or advancing years, or perhaps on account of some accident, were unable to stand alone. If, as a recent writer has it, "the medieval towns of the Netherlands found in the Beguinage a solution of their feminine question", the establishment of these communities afforded them at least a partial solution of another problem which pressed for an answer: the difficult problem of how to deal with the worn-out workingman.
Albeit the main object of all these institutions was not a temporal but a spiritual one, they had banded together in the first place to build up the inner man. While working out their own salvation they remained mindful of their neighbours in the world, and thanks to their intimate connection with the craft-guilds, they were able to largely influence the religious life, and to a great extent moulded the religious opinion of the cities and towns of the Netherlands, at all events in the case of the peasant, during more than two hundred years.
Bearing in mind the wretched and down-trodden class from which the Beghards were generally recruited, and the fact that they were so little trammelled by ecclesiastical control, it is not surprising that the mysticism of some of them presently became a sort of mystical pantheism, or that some of them gradually developed opinions not in harmony with the Catholic Church, opinions, indeed, if we may trust John of Ruysbroeck, which seem to have differed little from the religious and political opinions professed by anarchists of later centuries. Such heretical tendencies of the Beghards and Beguines provoked disciplinary measures, sometimes severe, on the part of ecclesiastical authority. Various restrictions were placed upon them by the Synod of Fritzlar (1259), Mainz (1261), Eichstätt (1282); and they were forbidden as "having no approbation" by the Synod of Béziers (1299). They were condemned by the Council of Vienne (1312), but this sentence was mitigated by John XXII (1321), who permitted the Beguines, as they had mended their ways, to resume their mode of life. The Beghards were more obstinate and during the 14th century they were repeatedly condemned by the Holy See, the bishops (notably in Germany), and the Inquisition. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia admits, on the other hand, that men of faith and piety were found among the Beghards. In their behalf Gregory XI (1374–77) and Boniface IX (1394) addressed Bulls to the bishops of Germany and the Netherlands. An echo of the theological position held by the Beghards is found in the doctrine of Quietism.
Before the close of the Middle Ages, Beghard communities were in full decline; by 1631 there were only 2,487 members of the Beghard communities. Their numbers diminished with the waning of the cloth trade, and, when that industry died, gradually dwindled away. The highest number of these medieval foundations in Belgium was 94, but in 1734 they had been reduced to just 34, and in 1856 to 20. Over the period of nearly two centuries, between 1631 and 1828, their membership had more than halved to 1,010.
A second wave of the Beguine Movement has been identified by Jean Hughes Raber. This occurred in the 17th century, being encouraged and supported by Archbishop Matthias Hovius. His involvement included helping improve the Great Beguines at Mechelen. In regards to the end of the Second Movement, Raber proposes that there is not a defined date, and offers such Catholic lay movements as those of Dorothy Day, the Company of Ursula and women communities initiated by Francisca Hernandez as extensions of the Beguines into the 20th century.
Raber suggests the Beguines response to social and economic forces in the 12th century offer a model that can meet the conditions of the current times. Economic uncertainty or worse, single women comprising a larger section of the population, loss of wealth in the form of deflated values of housing. A California based group named American Beguines is offered as an example of nascent revival of the Beguine Movement, with notable but not necessarily problematic differences.[5] In the last decades a new beguine-movement arose in Germany.[6] Recently, the Beguines of Mercy were founded, a contemplative, secular order of educated Catholic women, whose roots are in spiritual community and a heretical questioning of doctrine. Their affiliations are pacifism and the preservation of the earth, human dignity and well-being. The Beguines of Mercy are based in Vancouver, Canada[7]
In his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne narrated Corporal Trim's description of a Beguine.[8]
Françoise Mallet-Joris' first novel, The Illusionist, has as its French title Le Rempart des Béguines. This is the name of the street where Tamara, a courtesan, lives apart from the bourgeois and stultifying society of the Flemish (Belgian) town of Gers. Tamara is supported by an industrialist, who calls upon her occasionally, but her passion is for women, and the novel describes her seduction of the industrialist's 15 year-old daughter.
In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the Beghards are frequently mentioned among the heretic movements the inquisition has to persecute, and the difficulty in distinguishing among all the spiritual movements (as well as deciding which are heretical and which not) is pointed out.
Karen Maitland's novel, The Owl Killers centers on a group of Béguines in the fictional English village of Ulewic during the fourteenth century.