The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority by Tanya Stabler Miller (review)

Tanya Stabler Miller’s monograph examines the lived experience of lay religious women known as ‘beguines’ in Paris from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Beguines lived and worked outside formal monastic communities, following their own personal vows of chastity and poverty, and combining spiritual contemplation with active engagement in the world. Such women led relatively autonomous and flexible lives and exemplified the new apostolic ideals of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe.

Miller notes that modern researchers have often focused on the foundation and composition of beguinages, and have created a picture of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ beguines, with the ‘good’ living in officially recognised communities with less freedom to move and more spiritual oversight, and the ‘bad’ risking heresy, like Marguerite Porete who was burned at the stake in 1310. Miller argues that beguine communities created and offered a unique, rather than ‘second-best’ space for women. Importantly, inheritance laws in Paris allowed unmarried women to keep independent control over property and beguines were not compelled to give up their property to the beguinage in which they lived. Thus, they could choose to invest in business (in Paris, mainly in the silk industry) or to employ other beguines, creating space for women of all socioeconomic groups. These varied activities allow Miller to trace Parisian beguines through tax, guild, and property records, as well as via more traditional Church sources.

Miller begins by looking at lay religiosity and the climate in which Louis IX founded his royal beguinage following his return from crusade in 1245, arguing that his own appreciation of the difficulty of living a spiritual life outside the cloister led him to identify with beguine spirituality. She then considers the composition and workings of this beguinage, contrasting its beguines’ lives with those of beguines in unenclosed communities, including their occupations, social networks, and contributions to the silk industry. Later chapters consider the mutually beneficial relationships beguines formed with university clerics, with these women contributing fruitfully to spiritual debate and Parisian intellectual life. Nevertheless, there were strident critics who debated women’s right to give religious instruction or even demonstrate a holy way of life, leading to Porete’s heresy trial and Church council decrees which tried to limit beguines’ lives. Finally, Miller examines the way in which French rulers used the royal beguinage to enhance their political authority.

Miller’s book is creatively and painstakingly researched, and represents an important contribution to beguine historiography, while pointing to further research possibilities.