Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (review)

274 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) world, described, amongst others, by Montaigne and Bacon, guarantees sovereignty, a kind of individual liberty affirming and enhancing homosocial bonds, imagined in the metaphor of ‘two souls in one body’. Kingship, by contrast, relied upon the doctrine of ‘one person in two bodies’ which employed the sovereign’s body as a metaphor for sovereignty itself. While the classical ideal of friendship might laud a pair of friends as governing a world as two sovereigns, friendship for a king, as this book’s discussion of Edward II and Shakespeare’s Henriad plays demonstrates, could only lead to mignonnerie, a type of misrule in which the sovereign effectively refuses his office and the state is left ungoverned. Taking its name from Montaigne’s oxymoronic phrase, this book acknowledges and explores the potency of the friendship ideal but, in so doing, reveals an extensive and surprising preoccupation with the contradiction itself in early modern literature. On the cover of Sovereign Amity David Bevington describes it as a study which ‘does for friendship what Stephen Greenblatt has done for selffashioning ’– given the scope of the study, its adept use of complicated and diverse theory, and its lucid argument, it is difficult to dispute the claim. Shannon has managed to draw together political theory, approaches to gender and sexuality, and philosophies of friendship, making them matter to each other. While the study is by no means exhaustive, it will doubtless prove a challenging and invaluable read for anyone working in the field of Early Modern studies. Alison V. Scott English Department Macquarie University Simons, Walter, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xv, 328; 10 b/w illustrations; US$65.00; ISBN 0812236041. Cities of Ladies is the welcome fruit of more than a decade’s research and writing by Walter Simons on the semi-religious women known as the beguines. Its geographical focus is the southern Low Countries, where the beguine movement began and where it found lasting popularity, surviving to the present day. Beguine life is examined from its inception around the year 1200, to the Dutch revolt of 1565; it is, however, the first two centuries of the movement which receive most attention. Cities of Ladies also includes a precious repertory Reviews 275 Parergon 20.1 (2003) of all the region’s beguine communities founded before 1565. Simons’ primary concern in the City of Ladies is with ‘beguine life’ seen as the conceptual equivalent of ‘monasticism’, that is, as a social and religious institution which has an ongoing institutional character and aims beyond its individual members or houses. He is consequently interested in identifying the key elements of the environment from which beguine communities sprang, in exploring the nature of the remarkably novel institutional form those communities developed, and in examining the reasons for the rapid success of the new movement. In all of these areas, Simons examines the history of the beguines as a religious movement of the laity, shaped by its urban environment and by the gender of its female members. Cities of Ladies does not present a chronological narrative, but contains five thematic studies in five chapters. Although Simons’ interest in beguine life as an institution provides a unifying framework for much of the book, the book is a series of studies rather than a systematic investigation of a single topic. The studies lack strong connection to an overarching argument or problem, but they all offer substantial, often definitive, contributions to important areas of beguine scholarship. In the first chapter, Simons offers an extremely useful synthesis of research on the southern Low Countries in the twelfth century to delineate the distinctive environment out of which the beguine movement grew. Simons describes a highly urbanised, often bi-cultural and precociously literate society, whose women were accustomed to work. Simons argues that the region’s educated, urban laity, including its women, gave momentum to the many forces of reform, heresy and dissent that were active in the southern Low Countries throughout the twelfth century, and to which the church hierarchy was ill-equipped to respond. The second chapter uses evidence from hagiographical...