Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 12-1565

1. Women, Work, and Religion in the Southern Low Countries

1. Women, Work, and Religion in the Southern Low Countries The Southern Low Countries in the High and Late Middle Ages Medieval visitors to the southern Low Countries would have been struck first by the variety of the landscape unfolding before them as they crossed the region from west to east. In a journey of a mere 150 miles, they would have traveled from the marshy lowlands of coastal Flanders to the gently rolling wheat fields of Brabant—immortalized by Pieter Brueghel in the sixteenth century—to the Haspengouw, the area of rich farmland between Louvain and Liège settled since the Roman era, or to the Meuse valley with its cities and towns dating from the early Middle Ages. Further to the south and east of Liège they would find their progress hampered by the Ardennes forest, with a few villages scattered along river valleys; turning north they would enter the Kempen, only marginally more hospitable. This territory was divided into several principalities of diverse size, institutions , customs, and, above all, political allegiance. Theoretically, their rulers— counts, dukes, or bishops—owed fealty to the king of France or Germany: Flanders and the Artois in the west were fiefs of the French crown, whereas the other principalities recognized the German king oremperoras their suzerain (Map 1).1 By the twelfth century, however, neither the French king nor the German emperor held effective control over these frontier lands. Intensive traffic between the various principalities and the staunch independence of its main cities further weakened the ancient feudal ties with the greater neighboring powers. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Burgundian dukes established their personal rule over a large part of the southern Low Countries, paving the way for their Habsburg successor, Charles V of Spain (1500–1555), to unite them with additional northern principalities to form the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, which he ruled in virtual independence from the Empire. This short period of unitycame to an end during the Dutch Revolt (1565–1648), which divided the lands again between a northern, Dutch republic and the southern, now ‘‘Spanish’’ Netherlands. Along with the prince-bishopric of Liège, these would form modern-day Belgium in 1830.2 2 Chapter One Map 1: The Southern Low Countries in the Thirteenth Century Throughout the medieval period, customs, law, and institutions varied not only as one crossed the border between principalities but also within each province , as one moved from city to countryside; time, money, and foodstuffs were measured differently in each region, even in towns only a few miles apart.3 At the end of the period examined here, subjective identification with the larger Burgundian ‘‘state’’ (and its centralizing efforts) must have been very rare indeed. As Wim Blockmans observed, ‘‘people around 1400 did not harbor national feelings on the scale of the whole Netherlands; even within each principality such feelings of community remained weak unless an acute outside danger presented itself. One was above all a citizen of a particular town or a member of a village community; widerassociations coalesced onlyaround the personalityof the prince or the leader of a political party.’’4 This explains, historians have argued, why the Burgundian and Habsburg efforts to create a unified state, powerful as they were, met with such strong regional and local resistance.5 Despite such regional diversity and deeply entrenched local particularism, Women, Work, and Religion 3 the southern Low Countries did share important traits.6 They were first of all inhabited by people who were multilingual, or at least, in close contact with both the Romance and Germanic cultural worlds; they were dominated by powerful and independent-minded cities; their population enjoyed a high level of literacy. Together, these key features distinguish southern Netherlandish society from its neighbors to the north, south, and east—largely monolingual, rural, and less advanced—and created a unique and complex, mostly urban environment that determined its social fabric. These features also help us, I would argue, to understand fundamental aspects of gender and religion in the region during the late Middle Ages. With the exception of Namur, thinly populated Luxembourg, and the small ecclesiastical territories of Tournai and Cambrai, each of the southern Netherlandish principalities was bilingual in the sense that it was populated by both Dutch-speakers and French-speakers. The border between the two languages did not coincide with political...