“Beguine” is pronounced as in Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine“. But there the resemblance ends. Follow the links below to learn more about the historical beguines, beghards (the male counterparts) and the beguine movement. Links open up a new window. The sites listed below are not affiliated with the American Beguine Community. If you have a Beguine page or know of one, please contact us and we’ll add it to the list.

An excerpt from Catholic Encyclopedia: Beguines and Beghards

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02389c.htm

As early as the commencement of the twelfth century there were women in the Netherlands who lived alone, and without taking vows devoted themselves to prayer and good works…..About the beginning of the thirteenth century some of them grouped their cabins together, and the community thus formed was the first Beguinage.

The Beguine could hardly be called a nun; she took no vows, could return to the world and wed if she would, and did not renounce her property. If she was without means she neither asked nor accepted alms, but supported herself by manual labour, or by teaching the children of burghers. During the time of her novitiate she lived with “the Grand Mistress ” of her cloister, but afterwards she had her own dwelling, and, if she could afford it, was attended by her own servants…. There was no mother-house, nor common rule, nor common general of the order; every community was complete in itself and fixed its own order of living…. There was a Beguinage at Mechlin as early as 1207, at Brussels in 1245, at Louvain in 1234, at Bruges in 1244…. [A] few convents of Beguines still exist in various parts of Belgium.

The Beguines by Elizabeth Knuth
http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~eknuth/xpxx/beguines.html

An excerpt from The Beguines by Elizabeth Knuth

Beguine Spirituality

As mentioned earlier, the Beguines, like many of their contemporaries, were drawn by the ideal of the vita apostolica. Partly through choice and partly through coercion by the hierarchy, the Beguines did have a communal life. But the Beguines sought to live with a minimum of bureaucratic complications. The goals were simplicity and freedom. This applies as well to their understanding of evangelical poverty. Jacques of Vitry, an ardent supporter of the early “holy women,” charged that financial success had vitiated the monastic ideal (McDonnell 90). For the first hundred years or so, the Beguine movement drew many members from the wealthier classes; these women, for religious and political reasons, found voluntary poverty very attractive (McDonnell 96-98). However, the Beguines did not obligate their members to poverty (McDonnell 129-30). Manual labor was valued as the way to humility, apostolic poverty, and the ability to serve the needy (McDonnell 143-46). Thus criticisms of the Beguines as lazy and opportunistic beggars are inaccurate. The Beguines were “expected to live modestly, and an annual visitation by the grand mistress to each of the houses and convents determined that its inhabitants lived neither too luxuriously nor, interestingly, too simply. While reacting against the wealth and ostentation of secular society, the beguines did not see poverty as an end in itself” (Bowie 24).

An excerpt from Sisters Between by Abby Stoner

Gender and the Medieval Beguinesby Abby Stoner

There are among us women whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or nuns, because they live neither in the world nor out of it. – Franciscan Friar Gilbert of Tournai, 1274

The Beguines of northern Europe have been called the first women’s movement in Christian history.[1] This group of religiously dedicated laywomen, who took no permanent vows, followed no prescribed rule, supported themselves by manual labor, interacted with the “world,” and remained celibate, flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries–a time when the Church had defined two legitimate roles for pious women: cloistered nun and keeper at home. With their freedom of movement, economic independence and spiritual creativity, the Beguines carved out an unusually expansive–and controversial–niche for female religious expression.

Although the Beguine way of life has been of considerable interest to feminist scholars and women’s historians, few researchers have approached the subject with a focus on gender.[2] Yet notions of “femaleness” and its boundaries–conceived by the devout women themselves and the male clerics with whom they came in contact–played a central role in creating, fostering, and restricting the religious development of the Beguines. Their position as “sisters between” the two sanctioned spheres of home and convent was both the source of their success and the cause of their downfall: they derived power and freedom from their ill-defined gender space, but the ambiguity of their place as women in the Church proved ultimately too unsettling for the male authorities to tolerate.

An excerpt from Katrien Straeten’s Beguine Page

Katrien Vander Straeten’s Beguine Page

http://www.cns.bu.edu/~satra/kaatvds/

In my home country, Belgium, you can still visit many beguinages (Dutch: “begijnhoven”). Many of these are tourist places now, or have received other secular functions, like the one in Leuven, which houses the university’s students and professors. But some still have “live-in” beguines. I remember that as a child my grandmother took me on a visit to “de begijntjes” of St. Amandsberg near Ghent.  My grandfather tells me that at present there are still 6 beguines in Belgium. By the way, in Dutch beguines were and are always mentioned in that diminutive – “begijn-tjes” -; no ridicule is thereby intended (any more), and also Dutch scholarly works refer to them like that.