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3. The Contemplative and the Active Life Like many other religious movements—orthodox as well as heretical—that rose up after the eleventh century, the beguines demonstrated both a desire to withdraw from contemporary social life and a wish to be involved in it. These seemingly contradictory goals were embedded in the apostolic model that informed religious renewal and dissent in this age. The model celebrated the ideals of voluntary poverty, material asceticism, simplicity, and a more profound and introspective religiosity, all of which were favored by seclusion; yet it also emphasized the need for charity toward the weak and the sick, and advocated a greater attention to pastoral care in the world. In the male religious orders of renewal, like the Cistercians and the regular canons of Prémontre and Arrouaise, the conflict led to a fierce debate but was eventually resolved by decreasing the members’ involvement with outsiders or allotting the tasks of charitable care and agricultural work to lay sisters and brothers.1 The two tendencies, however, coexisted in the beguine movement throughout the Middle Ages. Beguines’ involvement with the world—what one might call their active apostolate—comprised three tasks: charity, manual work, and teaching. It was preceded by a conversion to a more contemplative life that, although it was not as definitive as the monastic vocation, nevertheless demanded a distinct break with social expectations. The Withdrawal from the World Beguines chose to turn away from the world to devote themselves to a life of prayer, contemplation, and study in a variety of ways. Those who lived in town and were deeply involved in charitable work might retreat at night to a beguine convent that offered little privacy or tranquility. At the other end of the spectrum , some led a strictly solitary life as an anchoress, often immured in a cell close to a church. The great beguine courts occupied the middle ground: surrounded by walls on the edge of the city or even outside the walls, they formed islands of contemplation and seclusion whose inhabitants often worked in town 62 Chapter Three and to which many outsiders had access during the daytime. No beguinage ever enjoined the kind of monastic seclusion imposed for women by the traditional religious orders. The beguines’ withdrawal from the world was thus more often the product of a mental construction than a physical reality, as Caesarius of Heisterbach so keenly understood,2 but it did provide individual beguines with the support of like-minded women who wished to escape the entanglements of secular life. Beguines were particularly eager, it appears, to evade two obstacles to the spiritual life: the lure of material possessions and the obligations of marriage.3 Material Simplicity The important social effects of the money economy in the newly urbanized southern Low Countries left their imprint on the vitae of the mulieres religiosae , which evoke a mental climate around 1200 that was increasingly sensitive to social differentiation, the pernicious influence of credit and business on social relationships, the rising divide between rich and poor, and the marginalization of the weaker elements in society, like lepers, the elderly, and the urban poor. Social change and the dangers of commerce feature in the very first pages of the Life of Lutgard of Tongeren. Thomas of Cantimpré explains that Lutgard came from a rather unusual family: her mother was a noble lady, but her father was a merchant and burgher of Tongeren. When Lutgard was still quite young, her father invested twenty marks in a business venture to generate a respectable dowry in anticipation of Lutgard’s life in the world. Her mother was wiser and wished her to become a nun. Thwarted by Providence, her father’s investment was soon lost, but her mother was able to reassure Lutgard that she could provide funding for admission to a ‘‘most distinguished monastery [monasterium honestissimum] if she decided to become the bride of Christ.’’4 In 1194, when she was ‘‘just over twelve years of age,’’ Lutgard joined the Benedictine monastery of St. Catherine’s near Sint-Truiden; in 1216–17 she moved on to the stricter Cistercian monastery of Aywières, where she died in 1246.5 The author of the Life, Thomas of Cantimpré, who wrote the book for the nuns of Aywières, thus presented Lutgard’s vocation as a triumph of noble values and her mother’s predilection for the monastic life over her father’s commercial drive and materialism. ForThomas...

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