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5. Conflict and Coexistence In the summer of 1273, most probably on the feast of the Transfiguration celebrated on August 6, the Dominican Giles of Orleans preached a sermon in the church of the beguines of Paris on the parable of the unjust steward, taken from Luke 16. Giles was a popular preacher, who spoke to the beguines at least four times in that same liturgical year. In this sermon, he wished to remind them that penance, the beguines’ particular vocation, required constant vigilance. Giles explained that the rich man in the Gospel of the day symbolized Christ, who through his Passion had constituted a treasure from which priests of the Church drew indulgences. But the benefits of that treasure were made available to all of us, he said: the steward of the Gospel stood for each Christian (cleric and layman alike) endowed with the duty to manage and protect his or her estate. We should do that as best we could, because accounts were rendered, not only in this world—each time one takes confession—but also in the next world, at the Last Judgment. Only constant penance can help you, beguines, prepare for that moment, Giles went on. Not only may it deliver you from the pains of Purgatory, but it also grants us the power to resist evil.1 Giles proceded to illustrate his lesson with a story, an exemplum, that showed how the bad behavior of certain beguines discredited the whole beguinage and all who chose that lifestyle. Once, he explained, he spoke of beguine life to a noble lady, and she surprised him with her reply: she said that she would never become a beguine because they behaved badly. He then tried to convince her that there were bad apples among the best—was there not a Judas among Christ’s disciples? Surely that could not be a reason to condemn ‘‘a righteous religious lifestyle’’ (bona religio)! But she rebutted: I am not surprised when a nun lapses into sin and comes to bad shame. . . . Say, I have four or five daughters. I am unable to marry them off according to their status as well as mine, and am obliged to hand them in marriage to cobblers, if marriage is what I want. But considering that it might be shameful for me in the eyes of the world, but not to God, I place them in a convent in a way that does not invoke God, nor His Mother, nor His saints, upon their entry: I shall pay the abbey one hundred or two hundred pounds, so that my child does not think of God, and neither do I or the abbess or prioress. God Conflict and Coexistence 119 is not invoked here, nor is He when she [my daughter] enters the convent. So where is the surprise if there is a mishap after entering a nunnery for the wrong reason? When a beguine enters a beguinage, however, she does that by her own free will, so that by her own free will she is a beguine. And therefore, since of her own free will she joined other holy and wise women, if she misbehaves and causes a great scandal, I think she should be stoned and marked with a hot iron.2 Giles’s sermon could easily be dismissed as a routine call for discipline in the beguine community. But Giles was not the only one to talk of misbehaving beguines in Paris. In fact, these stories began to circulate shortly after King Louis had established a court beguinage in Paris, headed by a Flemish magistra, Agnes of Orchies, in or before 1264.3 The fiercest critic of the beguines in Paris was the professional poet and part-time student Rutebeuf, who vilified them with evident pleasure in several pieces, written between 1264 and 1270. In Les Ordres de Paris and the Chanson des Ordres the beguines constituted only one among many targets, but in his Dit des Beguines his charges were specific: Whatever a beguine says, listen only to what is good. All that happens in her life is religious . Her speech is prophesy; if she laughs, it is good companionship; if she cries, its out of devotion; if she sleeps, she is ravished; if she has a dream, it is a vision; and if she lies, don’t think of it. If a beguine marries, that is her vocation, because her vows or profession are not...

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