La nuit des béguines by Aline Kiner (review)

In the fourteenth century, the béguines are a community of pious women founded by Louis IX and still protected by his successor Philippe le Bel. They are literally defended in the royal béguinage with its high walls in the Marais section of Paris. These women need protection from the men in their lives, do not take formal vows, and enjoy free circulation in separate houses and among the populace. They find ways to take care of their own both inside and outside the walls of the cloister. Among them, Ysabel, an elderly béguine widow, manages the community's hospital in 1310 and invites Maheut, an angry young beggar woman, to a hospital bed and counsels her to regain her composure and health. Ysabel learned from her grandmother Léonor in Burgundy about herbal cures as well as clues regarding the needed temperament to survive as a medieval woman and now passes what she learned to her young protégée in a matriarchal order of salvation. Those herbal remedies and the plant life associated with them allow the young Maheut and the elderly Ysabel to bond by sharing the lessons of the calm Marais wetlands in contrast to the raucous wild life of the city. Ade, a cultivated noble woman, also survives in the béguinage as a battered widow after her husband was killed in the battle of Courtrai (1302). She teaches in the community's school and sings in its choir. Contemporaneously, this epoch is the time of the Inquisition, the violent end of the last Templar grand master James of Molay, the struggle between the French Pope Clement V and the French monarch, and other medieval inventions that impact the women within the walls of the béguine community. The Inquisition, for example, is actively suppressing heretical alternatives to the Church's authority. Public challenges, trials, and burnings at the stake affect the women within these walls because, as they move outside the walls of their cloister, they risk losing the refuge that their community offers. Marguerite Porete, a béguine from Valenciennes, writes Le miroir des simples âmes, a popular book on mysticism that is banned by a Parisian Inquisitor and leads to her being the first woman to be burned at the stake for writing a heretical book. Her case causes much commotion both inside and outside the béguinage. Stories are shared during meals at the community cafeteria about life outside the walls of the béguinage. On the outside, secular women are constantly threatened emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. The hooded grey overcoat of a béguine offers a recognizable sign that the wearer belongs to the community. But so long as the béguines are outside the walls, medieval attitudes toward women prevail, leading these women to seek the support of their peers within the walls. Rape, unwanted pregnancies and children, battered women, and sexual aggression are common problems that the béguines encounter and address. An informative bibliography guides the curious reader in learning more about the medieval historical context of this entertaining tale.