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c h a p t e r 3 Beguines, silk, and the City sometime before 1292, Jeanne du Faut left her home in the Paris beguinage to take up residence on the rue Troussevache, a street dominated by wealthy mercers and located at the center of Paris’s silk-producing sector. Although her reasons for leaving the beguinage are not known, she left in good standing .1 Moreover, Jeanne continued to live as a lay religious woman, supporting herself through her own labor and income from various properties she owned throughout the city.2 leaving behind the security and prestige of the royal foundation for lay religious women, she seems to have found companionship and spiritual fulfillment—along with economic success—outside the beguinage. A successful mercer by the early 1290s, she cultivated relationships with silk workers, many of whom also lived as lay religious women. One of these women was Jeanne’s neighbor Marie Osanne. Both beguines lived and worked with female spinners, weavers, and factors, and they engaged in business transactions with nobles, italian merchants, and Parisian elites. On a nearby street in the parish of saint-Merry, the well-to-do beguine mercers isabelle of Cambrai and Marguerite of Troyes lived among a larger cluster of beguine silk workers, many of whom they employed as spinners and weavers in their workshops. This combination of economic success and lay religiosity was not unusual in medieval Paris. dozens of similarly constituted households are referred to throughout the sources of the time period. These home workshops—centered on beguine entrepreneurs and composed of beguine silk workers—underscore the diversity of lay religious communities in medieval Paris. As recent scholarship has noted, the beguine life was one pursued in a wide variety of contexts, both formal and informal.3 in medieval Paris, the existence of the royal beguinage undoubtedly complicated understandings of what it meant to identify as a beguine, but it was not the 60 chapter 3 only recognized framework in which lay women might pursue their spiritual aspirations, even if some Parisian preachers insisted otherwise.4 some medieval authorities, for example, sought to affix the label firmly to residents of a beguinage, calling into question the authenticity of women who claimed to live as beguines outside the institution’s walls.5 For others, however, the label referred to any woman who lived a religious life in the world, whether in her own home or in a more formal setting.6 Fiscal and property records are peppered with references to women identified by the descriptor “la beguine ,” women who lived alone, with family members, or with other lay religious women. some of these women took up residence in the beguinage for a time—as Jeanne du Faut had. some may have entered any one of Paris’s formally-recognized institutions for lay religious women, such as the hospital founded by stephen haudry, whose members had close ties with the beguines of the royal beguinage. Understandings of what it meant to live as a beguine were multiple, and medieval Paris was home to dozens of small households whose residents were known as “beguines.” These households were usually set up in close proximity to one another, as religious and temporal concerns drew lay religious women to particular streets and neighborhoods. A look at these independent households of beguines— composed of like-minded women who pooled their resources and trained one another in textile work—offers some glimpses of the female initiative that led to the creation of lay religious communities while underscoring the importance of local factors and support networks. Certainly, a close examination of these households provides a more nuanced picture of the development of beguine communities than is possible to glean from sources concerning the foundation of the beguinage, which, of course, tend to portray the institution as a project conceived and executed on the initiative of saint louis alone. Although not without significant limitations, fiscal and property records demonstrate that even as louis was “collecting” women to populate his beguinage, Parisian women who aspired to live religious lives were grouping together in households and supporting themselves by their own labor. For many clerical and secular observers, the legitimacy of the beguine life depended on the degree to which these women avoided mendicancy and wandering the towns. Although in some cities beguine houses forbade women to work, preferring that they support themselves from private incomes, manual labor was an important component in the ethos—as well as the success—of...

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