Building a Spiritual Economy: The Architecture of the Early Modern Beguinages

This paper examines the built space of the Court Beguinages of the Southern Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First established in the mid-thirteenth century, the Court Beguinages were large residential institutions for unmarried Catholic women whose lifestyles in some ways imitated traditional monasticism, but who did not take a vow of poverty or adopt enclosure. The religious wars of the sixteenth century decimated these communities, but they resurged after the restoration of Catholic power in 1585. From that point until the beginning of the French occupation in 1794 a few dozen Low Countries Court Beguinages were collectively home to tens of thousands of women. This fluorescence was only possible with the support of the male ecclesiastical hierarchy, which was granted despite the Counter-Reformation Church's general hostility towards unenclosed religious women after the Council of Trent.

Analyzing Beguine architectural complexes from a gendered viewpoint helps to explain how this was possible. By rejecting religious poverty and enclosure the Beguines were able to employ a remarkably stable and flexible financial system, one that combined personal and communal property ownership and allowed women a great degree of control over their own lives. The built components of the Court Beguinages were key components of this system. But they also served a symbolic function, making ideological arguments about Beguine identity that allied them with the monastic common life and with female enclosure, and participating in the Catholic Church's broader strategies of defense against Protestant attacks. In discussing the Beguines' strategies for managing these competing interests, I both demonstrate the rich possibilities offered by foregrounding spatial information in historical inquiry and offer new perspectives on the history of women and religion.