Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200–1600 by Alison More (review)

This book aims to correct the historical record regarding lay women who led religious lives collectively without taking traditional monastic vows. In the thirteenth century, when their numbers started to grow, canonists struggled to fit them into conventional categories: were they "religious" (i.e., did they observe a monastic or canonical rule?), or "lay"? Beguines, penitents, and others devoted to religious life without solemn vows explored new avenues of thought and action, but their liminal status also drew criticism. Alison More argues that pressure to conform to monastic norms generated artificial associations between the women and religious orders, associations which she calls "fictive orders." The Third Order of St. Francis ("Tertiaries") is probably the most famous example. By adopting those false markers, she maintains, Church officials and historians have ignored the "rich and dynamic role that women played in all sectors of society" (3). More intends to "provide a context for hearing the voices of women who have been silenced by [fictive histories]," and she suggests that "[t]he picture that begins to emerge is not the image of the pious, humble, and obedient nun that dominates ideas of pre-modern religious life, but something more spirited and socially conscious" (15).

Chapter 1 examines the "institutionalization" of beguines and (female) penitents, resulting in the bull Supra montem (1289), which prescribed a rule for penitents. Chapter 2 shows that suspicion of heresy weighed on some of the women in the fourteenth century. From about 1378 onwards, chapter 3 explains, Observant Franciscans tightened control of penitential communities, generating a monastic historiography that situated such groups within the Franciscan framework. Chapters 4 and 5 explain that despite attempts in Franciscan, Dominican, or "Augustinian" hagiography to present Clara of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Monica, the mother of Augustine, as role models for Tertiaries, penitent women drew inspiration from a wider range of sources that were not tied to a particular religious order. In chapter 6 and the epilogue, More concludes that although canonical vows became the norm for female Tertiaries in the sixteenth century, the women did not always accept full enclosure.

The ambiguous position occupied by nonmonastic religious women in Catholic history has been treated in partial studies; this is the first scholarly monograph offering a comprehensive look at them over a long period of time and covering most of Western Europe. More deserves praise for undertaking this ambitious project, made all the more daunting by past mystification and confusion. It is doubtful, however, that she succeeded in rendering this complex history accessible to the uninformed reader. In fact, in some important ways, her book adds even more layers of misrepresentation.

Problems arise early on, when More introduces the various forms of religious life for lay women. She states that ecclesiastical regulation on beguines began with Pope Gregory IX's Gloriam virginalem (1233), which "approved the beguines' right to live in community, but only if they lived within the enclosure enclosure [sic] and lived a suitable religious life" (30). In fact, that bull extended papal protection to "virgins who take a perpetual vow of chastity in Germany"—hardly a definition of beguines—and did not discuss enclosure or end active life for beguine communities. More maintains that Pope Urban IV (1261–1264) expanded an early episcopal rule for beguines in the diocese of Liège to women in the diocese of Cologne, "creating the illusion of a unified order of beguines throughout Europe" (31, 35, with an erroneous attribution to Innocent IV). That papal decree does not exist, and no such effort occurred. More's source, Miraeus-Foppens's Opera diplomatica et historica, vol. 1 (Louvain: Typis Aegidii Denique, 1723), 430, cap. XIX, is a simple confirmation of the pope's prior protection of beguines (and recluses) in the diocese of Liège. It does not refer to a rule, enclosure, Cologne, or any other part of Christendom. More chides historians for falsely situating hospital...