Walter Simons

Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565

In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as they came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines available in English in almost fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower and middle class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the regions expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted womens opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities. Based on the archival records left by about 300 beguine communities, Cities of Ladies illuminates the context of beguine writings, which are considered among the most significant documents of medieval womens mysticism. In updating and expanding our knowledge of the beguines, Simons makes a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, religious change, and gender in medieval Europe.

Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe

Spatial theorythe study of the relationship between material and discursive spatial practiceshas great potential for recasting our understanding of urban life in Europe during the late medieval and early modern period, a formative moment in the history of Western urbanity. Urban spaceand spaces acquired powerful, effective valences in this age, producing new social possibilities and new historical actors while simulataneously eliminating others. Examining spatial practices through the lens of legal space, ritual space, and textual space not only exposes the assumptions about early modern urbanity that underlay existing historiography on city space in the period but also points toward the spatial histories that have not yet been written on markets, gender, and the public.

Christians and heretics

This chapter discusses the principal archaeological remains, namely the large numbers of manuscript books which contain the churchs views of the topic. It also shows how these groups were fashioned and reshaped in these texts. During the twelfth century the texts proliferate. They combine the older language and themes with the notion that there were new heretics and heresies, and some contain the direct description or refutation of a specific new heresy. During the thirteenth century there is amplification, for example the 1184 decretal forms part of the section on heresy in Gregory IXs Five Books of the Decretals. The chapter explains a more direct description of the two major heresies of the period, those of the Cathars and the Waldensians, while continuing to use the churchs vocabulary. The chapter relies on these texts to access the two major heretical movements of the High Middle Ages, and finally provides comment on the main distortions of these texts.

The legal underpinnings

The legal underpinnings of the Western church experienced a major transformation during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This was a period in which papal legislation found its stride, in the form of conciliar decrees and papal decisions. Canon law collections provide a window into the rediscovery of Justinians compilations, because they incorporated snippets of Roman law as it became available. Later papal legislation appears in other similar collections, including the Liber sextus of Pope Boniface VIII. Law professors at Bologna and elsewhere lectured on the collections of decretals, producing commentaries and summas. Medieval legal procedure relied heavily on both Roman and canon law. With respect to the laws of the church, the move towards complexity was also a product of the encounter with Justinians Roman law. The thematic scope of canon law was in the main laid down with the Gratians Decretum, which took its cue from the wide range of matters that French bishop Ivo treated in the Panormia.

Christians and Jews

Like Muslims, Jews were outside the Christian faith but, unlike the Muslims, they were present within Christian society. The concept of boundary and that of the imagined Jew are both keys for deciphering the code of the relations between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages, particularly in the thirteenth century. Medieval ecclesiastical legislation upheld the rights of Jews to protection and to an existence with a modicum of honour in the Christian world, and several popes issued protective bulls. An important milestone in the attitude of the church towards the Jews was the Fourth Lateran Council, convened in the Lateran Palace in Rome by Pope Innocent III. In the Middle Ages conversion generally operates in a single direction, from Judaism to Christianity, and traditionally the church continued to oppose forced conversions. The first recorded instance of Jews being accused of the ritual murder of Christians is in the mid-twelfth century.

Monastic and religious orders, c. 1100–c. 1350

This chapter shows that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries manifest an embarrassment of riches: the number, variety and development of monastic and religious orders in this period is overwhelming. It also discusses traditional Benedictine monasticism, and considers the changes that came in the twelfth century. The Cistercians were one of the great historical enterprises of Western monasticism. The Premonstratensians belongs to the family of Augustinian canons. In the Augustinian mould the Premonstratensians combined community life with a pastoral mission. The Cistercians were more positive in their dealings with the Templars. In 1119 Hugh de Payns, a knight from Champagne, organised his companions into soldier-monks. Their founder Bruno, a teacher at Cologne, was fascinated by the stories of the hermits of the desert in Late Antiquity. The foundation of the Franciscans and the Dominicans shortly after 1200 resulted from a new surge of religious feeling and desire for vita apostolica, in imitation of the lives of the apostles.