A Community of Women Vowed Without Becoming Nuns

A beguinage was a walled or otherwise enclosed community of beguines, laywomen in the medieval Low Countries and neighbouring Rhineland who lived a communal, religiously disciplined life without taking the permanent, binding vows of a nun and without belonging to an established monastic order. Beguines could and did leave to marry, and they supported themselves largely through their own labour, above all textile work and lacemaking, along with nursing and teaching, rather than depending on a dowry or endowment the way many convents did, which gave the beguinage an economic independence unusual among medieval women's religious institutions.

Simons' history of Beguine communities describes the movement's rapid growth from the early thirteenth century onward across cities such as Bruges, Ghent and Leuven, where beguinages took the physical form of a self contained enclave of small individual or shared houses arranged around a courtyard and a communal chapel, subject to the local bishop rather than to any monastic superior, several of which survive intact today and are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites. The beguinage offered thousands of women a respectable, semi religious life outside both marriage and full monastic enclosure, an option with no exact equivalent elsewhere in medieval Christian Europe.