Honouring the Beguinage

Over the past year, I have been holding the question of women’s authority in European history, and their exclusion following the long, almost imperceptible layering of laws, habits, and institutional frameworks that steadily narrowed the space in which women’s knowledge, voice, and spiritual presence could move.

One of the early fulcrums came with the rise of the medieval university. From the late eleventh century, centres of learning began formalising medicine as a clerically sanctioned field, defined by degrees and male gatekeeping. Knowledge that had once circulated through households, apprenticeships, and kinship lines was absorbed into institutions women could not access. Women continued to tend the sick and prepare remedies, but their work was no longer counted as authoritative.

It wasn’t until 1865 that Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in England formally recognised as a doctor, by which point medicine, to a professionally recognised degree, had already defined itself, thoroughly, through exclusion.

Childbirth followed a similar arc. For most of European history, birth was attended by women whose knowledge was embodied, relational, and local. By the seventeenth century, however, obstetrics had begun its transformation into a male-dominated medical specialism. Birth was redefined as a site of danger and risk, requiring institutional oversight. Women were displaced from a domain they had long held.

This reorganisation of knowledge took place alongside far more violent forms of erasure.

In the late fifteenth century, the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, supported by papal decree, offered a theological and legal architecture for identifying women as inherently dangerous. Its authors insisted that women were more susceptible to heresy, temptation, and diabolic influence.

Over the next two centuries, tens of thousands were executed as ‘witches’. Many more were imprisoned, tortured, exiled, or socially destroyed.

These persecutions were not isolated acts. They coincided with the enclosure of common lands, the erosion of feudal systems, and the breakdown of traditional economies. Women’s access to shared resources diminished. Their autonomy was reduced.

The so-called witch trials shattered trust within communities, replacing kinship and cooperation with suspicion and silence.

I say so-called because many of those accused did not identify as witches, nor did they necessarily fit any cultural or theological definition of one. Often, they were simply women upon whom the gaze of mistrust had fallen.

And these ruptures were not borne by women alone. Men lived through them too. Generations inherited the fear and loss of social coherence and the painful disappearance of ancestral knowledge. What happened was not only an attack on women’s bodies and lives, but a dismantling of the social fabric.

And yet, within this history, there were also other stories. Traces of resistance, alternative forms of life that persisted outside the dominant structures. Among them was the Beguine movement.

The Beguines began to appear in the late twelfth century in regions that now form Belgium, the Netherlands, northern France, and western Germany. These were laywomen drawn to a life of prayer, work, and spiritual contemplation, but who refused the terms of traditional monastic life. They did not take permanent vows and retained the right to leave.

They lived in small communities known as beguinages, often situated near urban centres, where they supported themselves through weaving, teaching, nursing, and other forms of skilled work. Many were literate, some copied manuscripts, and others became writers in their own right.

Hadewijch of Brabant remains one of the most enduring voices from the mystical landscape of the Middle Ages, a poet, visionary, and mystic who chose the living language of Middle Dutch over the formal confines of Latin, weaving letters, luminous visions, and ecstatic poems that placed the longing for divine union at the very heart of spiritual life.

In one of her visions, she describes being taken into full union with God:

“He came in the form of a child, noble and tender, and placed his mouth on mine,

and we were one.

No difference remained between us.

In that moment,

I knew the taste of eternal life.”

Her language moves through flesh and breath, through touch and sensation, through a devotion that knows the body as a place of meeting. The divine appears not as a far presence, but as the beloved who draws near, intimate and entwining, dissolving the distance between lover and source. For the Church, this way of speaking carried a quiet disturbance. The imagery unsettled, and beneath it lay something more unsettling still, the suggestion that the soul might arrive at union directly, without mediation, without priest or sacrament, guided only by its own longing and its capacity to receive.

Hadewijch speaks often of Minne, or Divine Love, as both gift and fire.

She wrote:

“To be consumed by Love

is to be remade.

Nothing of self remains,

yet in that nothing,

all becomes clear.”

Such language was not easily tolerated. The idea that spiritual authority might arise not from doctrine or ordination, but from direct experience, threatened the hierarchical order. The Church had room for mystics, but only if they remained within defined bounds, obedient, humble, supervised.

The Beguines, by contrast, governed themselves.

As the movement grew, it attracted suspicion. In 1311 and 1312, at the Council of Vienne, the Church formally condemned certain Beguine teachings.

Bishops and inquisitors were given power to investigate communities. Some beguinages were closed. Others were absorbed into more traditional religious structures.

The free-floating, independent Beguine life became harder to sustain.

Marguerite Porete, a Beguine from northern France, had already been arrested by then. Her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, spoke of a soul so surrendered to divine love that it transcended moral categories altogether.

She wrote:

“This Soul is so nobly free

that she cares nothing for virtue nor for vice,

for she is wholly melted into Love.”

The Church ordered her book to be destroyed. She refused to retract it. In 1310, after a year-long trial, she was burned at the stake in Paris.

After this, the word “Beguine” itself became dangerous.

Women who lived similarly began using other names. Some beguinages endured, but as charitable institutions, stripped of spiritual independence.

The words of women such as Hadewijch and Marguerite continued to move through the world, passing hand to hand, sometimes unnamed, sometimes held in secrecy, carried by those who recognised their truth before it could be sanctioned. This piece is offered as a gesture of remembrance, a bow toward the Beguines, and toward the many women whose lives unfolded through devotion, labour, and an unwavering fidelity to conscience.

Their sensing of a life shaped by inner authority, one that does not wait for permission to arise, has not disappeared. It still breathes beneath the surface, a quiet inheritance, a living possibility that continues to murmur. It speaks wherever a soul listens for ways of living that allow wholeness to remain intact, and presence to be honoured without surrender.