The Religious Women of Liège at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century

SynopsisAmong the most notable features of the religious revival in western Europe in the early thirteenth century was the development of mysticism among the nuns and religious women of the lowlands. As scholarly attention becomes increasingly focused on this group of remarkable women, the question arises whether a psychiatric viewpoint has something of value to offer to the understanding of such individuals and the culture in which they struggled. The methodological and intellectual problems inherent in examining the life of a thirteenth-century mystic with a twentieth-century empirical frame of reference are illustrated in this study of the adolescence of Beatrice of Nazareth. Beatrice's stormy asceticism, ecstatic states and mood swings lend themselves to potentially competing hypotheses regarding the spiritual and psychopathological significance of her adolescent development and eventual life-course. Common grounds for reconciling these alternative models are discussed.

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Annihilation and Deification in Beguine Theology and Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls

Harvard Theological Review ◽

10.1017/s0017816009990320 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 103 (1) ◽

pp. 89-109 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Juan Marin

Keyword(s):

Thirteenth Century ◽

Moral Duty ◽

Original Form ◽

Religious Women ◽

Free Spirit ◽

Marguerite Porete ◽

Theological Discourse ◽

Mirror Of Simple Souls ◽

Disproportionate Number

In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.”1 They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.”2 In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.”3 Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines.4 Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.”5 He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.”6 Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls.7 It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.

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Thirteenth-Century Religious Women. Further Reflections on the Low Countries “Special Case”

Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts - New Trends in Feminine Spirituality ◽

10.1484/m.mwtc-eb.3.4734 ◽

1999 ◽

pp. 129-157 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Brenda Bolton

Keyword(s):

Thirteenth Century ◽

Low Countries ◽

Religious Women ◽

Special Case

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Agnes of Harcourt, Felipa of Porcelet, and Marguerite of Oingt: Women Writing about Women at the End of the Thirteenth Century

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640700101933 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 76 (2) ◽

pp. 298-329 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Sean L. Field

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Thirteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Early Middle Ages ◽

Religious Women ◽

Clemence Of Barking ◽

Anglo Norman ◽

Women Writing ◽

European Women

Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's FrancienVie d'Isabelle de France(ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's ProvençalVida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina(begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-ProvençalVia seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu(between 1303 and 1310). Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Middle Ages, and a few twelfth-century women such as Clemence of Barking had refashioned existing Latin lives of early female martyr-saints into Anglo-Norman verse, the works of Agnes, Felipa, and Marguerite are the first extant vernacular biographies to have been written by European women about other contemporary women. Just as strikingly, after the three examples studied here, few if any analogous works appeared until the later fifteenth century, with most writing by women about other religious women in the intervening period instead being found in “Sister Books” and convent chronicles.

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FLUIDITY IN STILLNESS: A READING OF HADEWIJCH'S STROFISCHE GEDICHTEN/POEMS IN STANZAS

Traditio ◽

10.1017/tdo.2018.11 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 73 ◽

pp. 179-211

Author(s):

ANITA MIR

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

Thirteenth Century ◽

Dynamic Structure ◽

Christian Tradition ◽

Gender Perspective ◽

Religious Women ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Marguerite Porete ◽

Non Linear ◽

Dutch Language

That women felt and men thought has long been the predominant lens through which medieval Christian writing has been analyzed. The work of the religious women vernacular theologians, or Beguines, who emerged across North Europe from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries has therefore often been dismissed as affective mysticism. Recent scholarship has begun to re-appraise this work and re-evaluate its place within the Christian tradition. This paper looks at the work of Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century mystical poet from Brabant in the Netherlands who, though less well known than other Beguines such as Hildegaard of Bingen and Marguerite Porete, may, as John Arblaster and Paul Verdeyen argue, “rightly be called the greatest poetic genius in the Dutch language.” It is probable that her work was not widely known during her lifetime (not, that is, directly), but research is strengthening the argument that her theology was transmitted via the works of John of Ruusbroec. This paper will attend both to Hadewijch's poesy and her theology and ask what the dynamic structure in her verse — its shifts of perspective, gender perspective, and non-linear narrative — might lead us to grasp about her theology.

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