The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement by Laura Swan, and: Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe ed. by Letha Boehringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen (review)

The Wisdom of the Beguines is a general introduction to beguine spirituality written for a general readership; the edited volume Labels and Libels brings together eight studies by specialists on problems of terminology and identity of medieval beguines.

Laura Swan, in her introductory study, proves to be well-read in recent scholarship, although in English only; German scholarship eludes her. She writes an emotive history of beguine spirituality into which she weaves exquisite passages from beguine authors. She is clearly on the lookout for authentic voices of medieval women authors. Although she follows the expert Walter Simons in his study of the label beguine and its connotation of praying laywomen, and although she also states herself that beguines were lay, she is not held back by her own definition and incorporates all kinds of religious women “who gave voice to their own experience of the Divine” (p. 7). She includes monastic women such as the Cistercian nun Lutgard of Aywières and the Dominican sister Maria de Santo Domingo, the Mantellata Catherine of Siena, and female authors who never lived in beguinages. For this reviewer, a European academic, her selection is questionable, but for an American general readership it yields a compelling introduction to female spirituality in the Middle Ages.

For Swan, beguines are those women who “lived lives of profound simplicity, generosity to the poor, taking care of lepers, and daily attendance at prayer in church” (p. 18). Beguines lived on their own or in informal communities and devoted themselves to teaching and preaching. Their “profound experience of the divine presence impelled them to serve the hurting and defenceless around them” (p. 83). But they had a keen business sense as well and earned their own living. The author concludes: “The story of the beguines affirms that women have contributed far more to spirituality and culture than history books have traditionally acknowledged. Their voices proclaim a divine presence that yearns for relationship with each of us” (p. 179).

Labels and Libels is the first publication in the new series Sanctimoniales: Religious Women—Geistliche Frauen set up by AGFEM, the Research Group of German and American Medievalists for the Study of Religious Women (composed of members both inside and outside monastic orders). This first volume collects eight studies on problems concerning the name and status of beguine women, in which the authors search for characteristics of the beguine way of life but do not cover their beliefs and spirituality.

A few general observations can be drawn from their diversified studies. First, it is clear from their work that beguines had no formally recognized canonical status; they did not form an ecclesiastical institution. If popes and canonists proclaim decrees on beguines (such as at the Council of Vienne in 1311), it is because they are afraid that beguines claim ecclesiastical status without complying with resulting obligations (wearing a habit but not promising obedience, not renouncing possessions or professing a rule). Nonetheless, scholars still linger over church-historical and institutional questions (see the essays by Elizabeth Makowski, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, Letha Boehringer, and Koen Goudriaan).

Second, scholars would do better to start their research from a socio-historical and socio-religious angle, asking which women called themselves beguines or were called so by others, and why. What were the characteristics of their way of life? And why did common believers value them so much? As Sean Field notes, beguines had “a reputation for unique access to divine knowledge, . . . the beguina...