This paper is addressed especially to young readers. Anyone who thinks today about alternative ways of living, about solidarity-based housing, about self-organisation beyond family and market, has a historical predecessor they have probably never heard of. It is called the Beguine and Beghard movement. In the 13th century it was one of the largest social movements in Europe. Over seven centuries it was persecuted, marginalised and finally forgotten. The last Beguine died in 2013 — thirteen years ago — in a care home in West Flanders. Anyone who had wanted to visit Marcella Pattyn could still have done so in our own lifetime.
What the Beguines and Beghards have to tell us today is not a pious tale from the Middle Ages. It is a political story. It shows that a particular form of living together in solidarity — one we can today only imagine with difficulty — was once lived on a mass scale. It also shows what happens when such a way of life comes into conflict with the dominant structures of its time. The medieval Megamachine — the Catholic Church, the urban guilds, the universities, the secular rulers — recognised this way of life as a threat and systematically crushed it over several centuries. What appears to us today as "the Middle Ages" was a highly developed steering structure that worked with the veto mechanisms we recognise from today's Megamachine papers.
We tell the story in three parts. First, what the movement was — how it arose, how it lived, what it achieved economically, theologically, socially. Then, how it was crushed — the waves of persecution, the show trial of Marguerite Porete, the Council of Vienne, the dissolution of the beguinages, the long process of dying that lasted into the 21st century. And finally, what can still be seen in this history today — which mechanisms repeat themselves and why the question of solidarity-based ways of life is topical today.
I. How the Movement Arose
In the late 12th century a movement began in the towns of north-western Europe — in today's Netherlands, in Belgium, in the Rhineland, in northern France — that no one had invented and no one coordinated centrally. Women and men, often from urban burgher families, often single, found one another and developed a new way of life. They wanted to lead a religiously motivated life — that is, a life of prayer, contemplation, help for the poor and the sick — but they did not want to enter a monastery or convent to do so.
Entering a monastery in the 13th century was a decision with grave consequences. Whoever became a monk or nun took a lifelong vow — poverty, chastity, obedience — and could not go back. Whoever entered gave up their property, gave up their civil existence, gave up the possibility of marriage and family. Whoever discovered after a few years that they had been mistaken had no way of correcting it. Monastic life was a one-way street. The monasteries were moreover bound into a hierarchy — the abbot or abbess decided, the bishop supervised, the pope regulated. Whoever lived in a monastery lived under supervision.
What the Beguines and Beghards were seeking was a different possibility. They wanted a religious life, but without a lifelong bond. They took no vow in the strict sense — at most a simple promise that they could withdraw at any time. They kept their property. They could marry if they wished — no longer be a Beguine, but go their way as a former Beguine. They could join and leave again, several times, without moral condemnation. They could work at whatever they wanted — weaving, spinning, nursing, teaching, copying, book illumination, running hospitals. They could live in their own houses or in one of the Beguine or Beghard communities that became established in the towns.
This openness and freedom of movement was what fundamentally distinguished the movement from the monastic orders. It was not a preliminary form of the monastery, not a half-solution for those not ready to take the full step. It was a way of life of its own, coherent in itself. It trusted people to make their own decisions and to correct them when necessary. It regarded the religious quest not as an act of once-and-for-all commitment, but as a path that is allowed to change in the course of a life. It was, in a language it would not itself have used: respectful of the autonomy of the individual.
The Beguines were the more numerous group and the one more visible in history. The Beghards — their male counterparts — were less numerous, but they existed in parallel and belonged to the same movement. In some towns there were Beghard houses next to beguinages. In some sources they are named together. They shared the same way of life, the same relationship to the Church, the same fate in persecution. If in what follows this paper often names only the Beguines, it is not because the Beghards are forgotten, but because the historical sources on the women are richer. Whoever says "Beguines" should think of the movement as a whole, in which women and men developed their own form of living together in solidarity.
II. How They Lived
Architecturally, the beguinages were a form of their own. They were not monasteries — they had no cloister, no central church, no enclosure. Nor were they simple dwelling houses. They were typically laid out so that a number of small houses were built around a shared inner courtyard, often with a simple chapel, a well, sometimes a garden. Each resident had her own house or her own flat — and so privacy, her own household, her own property. But she lived in a community, with shared rooms, shared devotions, shared meals, if she wanted.
This architecture corresponded to the inner structure of the movement. Privacy and community were not opposites but complements. Whoever wanted could live alone. Whoever wanted could take part in the community. Whoever wanted could switch between the two according to their circumstances. Some of the historic beguinages still exist today as architectural monuments — the one in Bruges is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as are those in Amsterdam, Leuven and Mechelen. Anyone who visits them can see how this way of life was conceived in space.
Economically the Beguines were astonishingly successful. They had no families to feed, no inheritance claims to satisfy, no landlords to pay — the beguinages were endowments or held in common ownership. They could offer their work at low prices. In the cloth trade of Bruges, Ghent and Cologne they became significant competitors of the guilds. The guilds were medieval trade organisations that had the right to determine who was allowed to practise a particular kind of work and at what prices. They saw the Beguines as unfair competition — not because the Beguines worked badly, but because they could offer their work cheaply. The guilds' complaints against the Beguines are documented in the city archives of Cologne, Bruges and Ghent. They are the first indications of the structural competition that was later to contribute to the persecution.
Theologically the Beguines developed a tradition of their own that we today call women's mysticism. Women such as Hadewijch of Brabant (early 13th century), Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207–1282 or 1294), Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–1268) and Marguerite Porete (c. 1250–1310) wrote theological works in the vernacular — in Dutch, in German, in French, not in Latin. They were thereby readable by anyone who could read, not only by learned clergy. They also translated parts of the Bible and liturgical texts into the vernacular, long before the Reformation did so.
In substance they advocated a mysticism of the immediate experience of God. The soul, they said, can live with God in a union that no longer needs any mediation — no priest, no sacrament, no hierarchy. This thesis was not necessarily a heresy in the strict sense — great male mystics such as Meister Eckhart advocated it too. But when women advocated it, without clerical protection, without academic defence, it was dangerous. It was a direct challenge to the Church's power of mediation.
III. How Large the Movement Was
It is hard to put an exact figure on the size of the movement. Medieval sources are not systematic like modern censuses. But the estimates based on the urban sources available today give a clear picture.
In Cologne, at the height of the movement in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, between 1,000 and 2,000 Beguines lived — in a total population of about 35,000 people, that is, three to six per cent of the town's population, or to put it another way: a considerable share of the adult women. In Brussels and Bruges the proportions were similar. In the more than a hundred towns of north-western Europe in which Beguine communities are attested, there probably lived, taken together, several hundred thousand Beguines. If one adds the women who were Beguines for a time and then left again — that is, the turnover — then over the two or three generations of the movement's flowering, millions of women lived this way of life.
This order of magnitude is important if the movement is not to be underestimated as a marginal phenomenon. It was not a small sect. It was a mass movement — possibly the largest autonomous women's movement in European history before the 20th century. It had economic weight, a theological voice, social visibility. That is precisely what made it a threat.
IV. Why It Was a Thorn in the Megamachine's Side
Medieval society was built on three pillars. They assigned women — and men in certain positions too — a particular role that was not to be questioned. The Beguines and Beghards questioned all three pillars at once.
First pillar: the patriarchal family. The medieval woman had three phases of life, each under male guardianship — daughter under the father, wife under the husband, widow under the son or male heir. A woman who submitted to none of these guardianships was an anomaly. There was one approved exception — the convent, in which the woman lived under the abbess, who in turn was under the bishop. The Beguines lived neither under father nor husband nor son nor abbess. They lived as independent adults.
Second pillar: the mediation of the Church. The medieval Christian reached God through the Church — through the sacraments the priest administered, through the confession he made, through the sermon he heard. The priest was the indispensable mediator. The Beguines and Beghards held — with varying sharpness, some more, some less — the view that the soul could also experience God directly, without this mediation. They preached themselves, they interpreted the Bible themselves, they prayed themselves. They did, without the Church, what the Church understood as its monopoly.
Third pillar: economic integration. The medieval economy was organised in guilds. Whoever wanted to practise a craft had to be a member of the guild. The guild regulated who trained, who worked, how much was earned. Women were mostly not independent members of the guilds — they were wives, daughters or widows of guild members. The Beguines had no place in this system. They worked around the guild system — and they did so successfully.
Each of these three pillars would have been bearable on its own. The Beguines combined all three negations in a single way of life. They were not only without male guardianship, not only without Church mediation, not only outside the guilds — they were all of this at once, in an integrated, coherent, lived form. For the medieval Megamachine that was intolerable.
Added to this was the openness of the movement. Anyone who today creates a way of life that functions without a lifelong bond, that allows people to join and leave, that respects property and autonomy, that organises women and men in parallel — would provoke today's Megamachines much as the Beguines provoked the medieval one. For the Megamachine, whether medieval or modern, has a deep aversion to ways of life that one can join and leave without needing its mediation. Whatever the Megamachine wants to control must have an entry gate and an exit barrier. The Beguines had neither.
V. Marguerite Porete — the Show Trial as Prelude
The liquidation of the movement began with a show trial. Marguerite Porete was a Beguine from Hainaut, born around 1250. She had written a book entitled "Le Mirouer des simples âmes" — The Mirror of Simple Souls. It was written in Old French, in dialogue form, theologically borne by the mysticism of the immediate experience of God. The soul, Porete wrote, could reach a state in union with God in which it no longer needed any outward mediation — not the sacraments, not priests, not works of virtue. It was then "annihilated", dissolved into God.
The book circulated in copies. It was examined by the Bishop of Cambrai, who had it publicly burned around 1306. Marguerite nevertheless went on disseminating the book afterwards, which was construed as a violation of an episcopal prohibition. In 1308 she was arrested and held in Paris in the inquisitorial custody of William of Paris.
During the eighteen-month proceedings she remained silent. She refused to take an oath. She refused to make a statement. She refused to recant the book. This silence was not defiance in the modern sense — it was a theologically grounded refusal to take part in a system whose legitimacy she did not recognise. It was one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in medieval history.
On 1 June 1310 she was burned alive at the stake on the Place de Grève in Paris. She was thus one of the first people in Western Europe to fall victim to the Inquisition on account of a mystical-theological position. The eyewitnesses — we know of them from the chronicles — reported that she went to her death with dignity and that the onlookers were impressed by her bearing.
Her book was supposed to be destroyed. It survived only because some copies went on circulating under a false or anonymous author. Only in 1946 — 636 years after her death — did scholarship attribute "The Mirror of Simple Souls" to Marguerite Porete again. Today it is recognised as one of the most important works of medieval women's mysticism. Marguerite Porete herself has never been officially rehabilitated. The Catholic Church has not revoked her condemnation.
What matters about this show trial is not only the person of Marguerite. It is the function the trial had for the movement as a whole. It was a signal. It said: whoever writes theology independently as a Beguine can burn. It said: a woman without clerical protection has no chance in the proceedings. It said: the medieval Megamachine is prepared to use its most extreme form of violence — the stake — against Beguines.
VI. The Council of Vienne 1311/1312 — the Legal Liquidation
A year after Marguerite's burning the Council of Vienne convened. From 16 October 1311 to 6 May 1312, Pope Clement V, 20 cardinals, 122 bishops and 38 abbots sat in Vienne in southern France. It was the 15th general council of the Church. Several topics were on the agenda — the dissolution of the Order of the Templars (politically motivated, at the urging of the French king Philip IV), the question of taking interest, and, at the request of the Rhenish prelate, the question of the Beguines and Beghards.
The Council passed two decrees that were to seal the fate of the movement. The first, "Cum de quibusdam mulieribus", banned the wandering Beguines altogether. It declared that the Beguines as an estate were "women who appear under the guise of piety but bring confusion into the Church". Their "habit" — that is, the dress they wore — was forbidden on pain of excommunication. The settled Beguines and Beghards who were still tolerated were stripped of their privileges — the right to preach, the right to hear confession, the pastoral care of women.
The second decree, "Ad nostrum qui", condemned eight heresies allegedly held by the "Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit" — a collective label that was partly aimed at the Beguines and Beghards. Some of the propositions were taken from Marguerite Porete's "Mirror of Simple Souls". The condemnation of these propositions gave the Inquisition, over the following centuries, a legal tool for proceeding against individual Beguines and Beghards whenever local occasions arose.
There was one exception. Pope Clement V allowed himself to be persuaded to exempt the southern Netherlands — that is, Flanders and Brabant — from the general condemnation. That was the reason why some beguinages there were able to continue and survived into recent times — the beguinage of Bruges, of Leuven, of Mechelen. In Germany, by contrast, the beguinages were largely dissolved in the wake of the Council. In Toulouse the Inquisition had already begun from 1307, that is before the Council, to condemn Beguines and Beghards as heretics to immurement and burning.
The Council of Vienne was thus the legal date on which the movement as an organised form received its death blow. What followed was not a sudden extinction, but a liquidation in waves lasting seven centuries.
VII. The Long Waves of Persecution
The first great wave of persecution took place in the 14th century. Between 1320 and 1380, in the German episcopal sees — Cologne, Strasbourg, Mainz, Trier — Beguines and Beghards were interrogated, some burned, many driven out. The city of Cologne, where the movement was particularly strong, saw over the course of the century a gradual dissolution of most of its Beguine communities. Those who survived did so either by joining a recognised order — mostly the tertiaries of the Franciscan or Dominican order — and thereby giving up their independence, or by submitting to the supervision of the local parish.
In the 15th century the second wave came after the Council of Constance of 1414/1418, which confirmed and in part sharpened the condemnations of Vienne. In the 16th century the third wave came with the Reformation. In the Protestant territories the beguinages were dissolved as "papist" institutions — their residents were forced to leave, often on the pretext that they were living "idolatrously". Here an important distinction becomes apparent: the persecution of the Beguines was not only a Catholic affair. Protestantism too, which saw itself as a reformer against the Catholic hierarchy, perceived the Beguines as competition and liquidated them. What the Reformers could not bear was a way of life that did not fit into their own order — that of the family, of the bourgeois occupation, of the parish congregation under the pastor's supervision.
In the Catholic territories the persecution continued differently. The Beguines were increasingly converted into regulated communities of tertiaries — that is, communities which were not full convents but stood under the supervision of an order. The original openness — joining and leaving at any time, one's own property, one's own work, theological independence — was pushed back step by step. What survived as a Beguine was often a Beguine in name only.
The French Revolution of 1789 brought the next wave. The Revolution nationalised the Church's institutions, including the Belgian beguinages, which were under French rule. Some were destroyed, others converted to other uses. In the 19th century, at the time of the Kulturkampf (the Prussian state's struggle against the Catholic Church) in Germany and of secularisation in several European states, further beguinages came under pressure. In the 20th century only a few hundred Beguines still lived in a handful of remaining beguinages in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Marcella Pattyn, the last Beguine, died on 14 April 2013 in Kortrijk in West Flanders, aged 92. She had been born in 1920 to Belgian missionary parents in what was then the Belgian Congo. In 1941 she had taken her Beguine vow — the last of a tradition that had begun in the 12th century. She lived for 72 years as a Beguine. With her death ended a movement that at its height had perhaps comprised a million women and men and in its last decades had shrunk to a single person.
VIII. What This Case Teaches About the Megamachine
Anyone who looks at the whole process sees three mechanisms that we recognise from today's Megamachine papers.
First, the liquidation was not a single act. It was a process over seven centuries, in many individual proceedings, each of which had a different justification. Marguerite Porete was condemned for heresy. The Council of Vienne acted for reasons of ecclesiastical order. The German bishops acted against the wandering Beguines with the argument that they endangered public order. The Protestant Reformers acted against the Catholic inheritance. The French revolutionaries acted against the feudal order of property. Each individual justification could be defended legally or politically. Together they add up to a liquidation that no one had explicitly decided on and for which no one personally answers.
Second, several veto powers worked together without coordinating with one another. The Church had a theological interest in controlling the Beguines. The universities had an academic interest in retaining their authority of interpretation. The guilds had an economic interest in eliminating the competition. The secular rulers had a fiscal interest in transferring the self-governing beguinages into regulated structures. The patriarchal families had a normative interest in forcing single women back into the order. Five veto powers from five different spheres, independently pursuing the same goal. That is exactly the structure that we today describe as the Megamachine in the DMG Mori, Index-Makino and Colombia papers.
Third, the memory was erased. The Beguines are hardly known today. Those who know of them mostly know nothing of Marguerite Porete, nothing of Hadewijch, nothing of Mechthild of Magdeburg. They do not appear in school textbooks. In historical accounts they are played down as a "pious women's movement". Whoever hears the word "Beguine" thinks of picturesque beguinages in Bruges rather than of a mass movement that was persecuted for seven centuries. This suppression is not an accident — it is part of the way the Megamachine works. What it has liquidated is not to be remembered, because the memory makes the mechanism visible.
IX. What Is Especially Moving About This Case Today
What is especially moving about the Beguines and Beghards today is not their otherness. What is moving about them is the question of what we have lost.
We live today in a society in which most ways of life are heavily formalised. Whoever wants to live in a shared flat needs a tenancy agreement, a registration, a contact person, often a management. Whoever founds a cooperative needs articles of association, a register entry, a supervisory board. Whoever lives in a city as a single person typically lives alone, in a self-contained flat, with individual insurance, an individual tenancy agreement, individual provision for long-term care. The loneliness of older single people is one of the great social problems of the present. High rents make housing a principal economic problem. The difficulty of reconciling work, family and personal development is a perennial topic.
The Beguines had an answer of their own to many of these problems. They lived as single people, but not alone. They had their own space, but a shared structure. They worked for their living, but in a community that at the same time provided care in old age, company and meaning in life. They could change their circumstances — marry, leave, rejoin — without it being a moral crisis. They had found a form in which individual autonomy and collective solidarity did not exclude but complemented each other.
We sometimes say today that this is the model we are missing. Housing projects with communal spaces. Multi-generation houses. Cooperative forms of ownership. Co-housing in the Danish tradition. Trailer communities and communes in the German tradition. The cohousing movement in North America. All of these are attempts to recreate in the present what the Beguines had for centuries — a way of life between family and loneliness, between commitment and freedom, between I and we.
Today, in several German cities, there are new Beguine initiatives. In Tübingen, in Dortmund, in Cologne, in Berlin, women — mostly older and single — have joined together to live in Beguine-like forms of housing. They call themselves Beguines or refer explicitly to the historical tradition. They are seeking their way in a present in which the legal, economic and social structures hardly resemble those of their predecessors any more. These initiatives are small, often precarious, often dependent on municipal funding, often in dispute with authorities and landlords. They show that the longing for the Beguine way of life is not historically dead. But they also show how hard it is today to revive it.
X. What the Megamachine Does With Alternative Ways of Life Today
The medieval Megamachine crushed the Beguines and Beghards with the stake, edicts and decrees of dissolution. Today's Megamachine proceeds more subtly, but at its core with the same mechanisms.
It regulates. Whoever wants to found an alternative form of housing today needs a multitude of permits, contracts, insurance policies. Whoever wants to found a cooperative needs articles of association, which in turn have to be audited by an association. Whoever sets up a self-managed project needs a sponsoring body, a board, a management — structures that follow the logic of the Megamachine, not the logic of self-management. What begins as alternative is integrated into the structures of the Megamachine to the degree that it grows.
It economises. The medieval Beguines could live in the beguinages because the property was held in common and no one had to pay rent. Today, in most European cities, land prices are so high that a cooperative or communal form of housing is possible almost only in exceptional cases — through old squats, through fortunate inheritances, through municipal funding programmes. The Beguine initiatives in Tübingen or Cologne report years of negotiations with city administrations, with banks, with property developers. What the medieval Beguines simply did — build a house and live in it together — is today a legal and financial obstacle course.
It individualises. Today's social order — social insurance, health insurance, long-term care insurance, the pension system — is built on the individual as the smallest unit. Whoever wants to live in a community in which people stand up for one another must do so in a form that does not replace the formal structures of individual insurance but supplements them. A Beguine-like way of life in which the community carries care in old age is today hardly conceivable without additional long-term care insurance. The Megamachine does not recognise the solidarity that runs beyond its formal structures.
It forgets. The history of the Beguines and Beghards is not in the school textbooks. It is not in the general historical accounts. It is in the specialist academic literature, in a few popular books, in the tourist guides to the beguinages. A young person thinking about alternative ways of life today has no visible historical predecessor to orient themselves by. That is precisely the function of forgetting: whoever does not know the history thinks they are the first to ask a particular question — and thereby makes once again all the mistakes that were already made seven centuries ago.
XI. What Young People Can Take From This History
If this paper has a message that is especially important for young people, it is this: your longing for a way of life beyond isolation, beyond the family as the only structure of solidarity, beyond lifelong contracts is not new. On the contrary, it is very old. It has already once found a concrete, lived, mass form in European history. That form was not destroyed because it did not work. It was destroyed because it worked too well — it was too strong a competitor for the dominant structures of its time.
There are three things you can take from it.
First, that solidarity-based ways of life without a lifelong bond are possible. For seven centuries the Beguines showed that a community can rest on trust, openness and mutual respect for autonomy. They showed that joining and leaving are not the end of a way of life but its strength. Whoever today is considering moving into a shared flat, joining a cooperative, living in a commune — stands in a tradition that is much older than the first shared flats of the 1968 generation in the 1960s.
Second, that the Megamachine — today as then — does not simply tolerate such ways of life. It regulates them, it economises them, it forgets them. That is not malice but the logic of how it functions. Whoever builds an alternative way of life must expect the formal structures to make life difficult for them. The medieval Beguines found two answers to this: they built their own structures (the beguinages), and they survived by being concentrated in space (large beguinages in large towns, with their own economy, their own administration). These answers cannot be transferred one-to-one today, but they show the direction.
Third, that remembering such predecessors matters. Whoever knows the history of the Beguines knows that a different form of living together is not a utopian fantasy but a historically lived reality. Whoever knows the history of their liquidation knows with which mechanisms the dominant structures react. Whoever knows both can set up their own attempts more wisely — conscious of the difficulties, knowing the strategies, with the dignity of standing in a long tradition.
The Beguines were not a pious fringe phenomenon of the Middle Ages. They were a mass movement that lived a way of life between commitment and freedom, open to women and men alike, and that in its openness was a genuine alternative to the dominant order. They were crushed because they worked too well. Whoever knows their history knows that the question of solidarity-based ways of life is not new today but age-old — and that the answers we are looking for today have a tradition that reaches back much further than the textbooks tell.
XII. Conclusion — What Remains
Marcella Pattyn, the last Beguine, died in 2013 in a care home in Kortrijk. She was an old, blind, friendly woman who played the accordion and liked to sing. When asked about her occupation, she answered: "I am a Beguine." She knew that she was the last. She said it without pathos, almost matter-of-factly. A tradition is coming to an end, she evidently thought, and it was her tradition. She carried it to the very end.
What remains are the beguinages in Bruges, Amsterdam, Leuven, Mechelen — as tourist destinations, as museums, as architectural monuments. What remains are the writings of the mystical Beguines — Hadewijch, Mechthild, Beatrice, Marguerite — in academic editions, hardly read. What remains are a few new Beguine initiatives in German cities, small, precarious, searching. What remains is the possibility of remembering this history.
Whoever remembers the history gives the movement a form of afterlife that the Megamachine did not foresee. It planned to forget the Beguines. It did not plan that one day someone would write them down again, that one day someone would read them again, that one day someone would be inspired by them. That is the small power of memory against the great power of liquidation.
We live today in a time in which many people — young and old — are looking for ways of life that do not end in isolation. The Beguines and Beghards are not the only historical model. But they are one that has a great deal to say — precisely because they were so completely forgotten. Whoever learns their history has gained a tradition. Whoever passes it on gives it a future that it cannot fight for itself, because its last bearer died thirteen years ago.
The Megamachine works quietly. It needed seven centuries to liquidate a movement that once comprised hundreds of thousands of people. It succeeded. What it did not succeed in doing is erasing the history completely. As long as individual people remember the Beguines, tell their story, think of their way of life as a possibility, the liquidation is not final. That is little. It is more than nothing.