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Marguerite Porete was a beguine.

Beguines committed to live in simplicity, chastity, and charity, as long as they remained in the beguinage. They were free to leave at any time. Their pledges to each other have the ring of religious vows, with one big difference: beguines didn't vow obedience. They refused the rule of the Church. I loved them immediately. Here was the religious resistance. As you can imagine, the Church was very nervous about these ungoverned women. They read, they wrote, they taught, and some of them even preached on street corners, which was forbidden to women. It's suggested that a few dabbled in illegal translations of scripture from the Latin to local vernacular, a practice frowned upon (to put it mildly) by the Pope. These were medieval women forging their own way, taking risks, creating nonconformist communities. It made sense that Marguerite, with her impolitic and forthright Mirror, was a beguine. They were known for their mystical leanings and for dancing in church. Beguines existed on the edge of papal approval until, in 1311, the year after Marguerite died, Pope Clement V declared them heretics. And yet, like The Mirror of Simple Souls[2], they survived. The last beguine, Marcella Pattyn, died in 2013. She played the banjo for the sick. In their joy and courage, in their insistence on faith even as they defied the Church, the beguines were inspiring. They showed me what I was missing. Community. I wasn't yet ready to join one, but maybe I could write one.

• The Beguines - "Adult women during the Middle Ages were expected to live under the guardianship of a man, either within the household as a wife and mother, or dedicated to the Church and living in a convent as a nun. The Beguines questioned this concept and lived outside of these set boundaries. Women who entered Beguinages (Beguine houses and/or convents) were not bound by permanent vows, in contrast to women who entered convents. They could enter Beguinages having already been married and they could leave the Beguinages to marry. Some women even entered the Beguinages with children. Their piety was centered around the eucharist and the humanity of Jesus. Their origin is debated, but around 1150 C.E. groups of women, eventually called Beguines, began living together for the purposes of economic self-sufficiency and a religious vocation."
• The Birds and the Beguines - "The beguines refused to live as though marriage or monastery were the only places of purpose and belonging for women."

As much as they dared, by which I also mean served, they built and managed small cities themselves, and thus stand to be counted among history's civic, even political, housekeepers as well, despite lacking much of an archive, despite being considered external to the structures of the polis.

• The Beguines of Medieval Europe: Mystics and Visionaries - "The Beguine movement grew from the work of Mary of Oignies (1177-1213) a native of Belgium. She was drawn to the ideals of service to others and voluntary poverty, the attraction so strong that she renounced her marriage, gave away all her possessions, and worked for a time in a leper colony. Others were drawn to her; thus, the birth of the beguine 'community.'"

  Unlike religious orders of the day who answered to church hierarchy, beguines were not subject to clerical oversight nor did they follow an established ecclesiastical rule. These women did not live in convents, but while some chose to remain in their own homes or in the homes of relatives, most were housed in beguinages or 'God Houses,' (Gotzhaus) self-sufficient clusters of individual houses surrounding a central courtyard (Harrington, 2018).

• Being Beguine - "The Beguines thrived during the dark and middle ages. They were focused on helping the women. Their methods and order and spirituality drew women of all classes. They built housing and many devoted their lives to the enclaves and when they died, left their wealth to the enclave so more unfortunates could be brought in, taught a trade, put to work, given honorable lives. They didn't live in the same house, but clustered their homes. They owned businesses and houses, grew their own food and hemp and made clothing for themselves and to sell. They made medicines for themselves and to sell. They made jobs. That was their mission. That is ours."[3]

Right now, this planet has a lot in common with the dark ages. Just like back then, women and children suffer the brunt of the poverty stick. Just like back then, there is a certain hopelessness that sickens the spirit, when people cannot have gainful employment. There is a malaise that happens when the deck is stacked against you – born poor, die poor. We are reliving that again. I call it the castle syndrome. But we, the descendants of the Beguines, intend to occupy the castle and bring reform to it, as we know our ancient mothers did.

• The return of the Beguine - "The Beguine have returned. Today, they are scattered throughout the world and reliving the sororal and community experience that characterised the movement at its beginnings in the Middle Ages. In Saint-Martin-Du-Lac (France), lay and consecrated people have formed a monastic community dedicated to helping the needy. In the Roman suburb of Tor Bella Monaca (Italy), a group of former nuns is engaged in the recovery of families entangled in drugs and social distress. In the United States, the Companions of Claire, led by a woman who once belonged to the order of the Poor Clares, help farmers do business locally."[4]

These people are Christians who, like the historical Beguines, choose the freedom of experiencing faith without the need to take vows. Women who are no longer young, who make concrete the need to interweave a sisterhood and for this reason they live under the same roof, and are united by the living mission of a social commitment. A commitment that is also feminist, such as the new German Beguines in Essen who promote help for the sick, or the French Beguines in Montreuil who are united in a community that is also a retirement home where Christian spirituality is ecumenical and shared.

These examples flourish, quietly, and reawaken interest in the Beguines who were never an order and never had a rule or foundress, although they took the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty. They were anarchic but never heretical, the Beguines began to appear in 1200 in Flanders and the Netherlands and then spread to Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy where they took on different names according to the different places: humiliate, papelarde, mulieres religiosae, devotae. They neither got married nor became nuns; they were the first case in history of a women's movement freed from male domination, as Silvana Panciera recalls in her Le Beghine [Beguines]. Una storia di donne per la libertà [A Women's Story of Freedom], which Gabrielli has republished after 10 years in a new revised and expanded edition, with a preface by the scholar of speculative mysticism Marco Vannini.

• Herb-workers and Heretics: The Beguines An Overview of the Beguine Movement - "In conclusion, one sees that in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Sicily, the Beguine movement touched the lives of thousands of women from all classes of society. Its history is intimately connected with the rise of medieval industry, health care, and the education of women throughout Europe. By the end of the fifteenth century, after the destruction of the movement, the Beguine life style no longer was viewed as an acceptable alternative. Women could no longer live together freely for mutual support without being suspected of evil doing. After hundreds of years of persecution and suspicion of heresy, any unattached woman, young or old, who appeared to espouse the Beguine life style, was looked upon as a menacing being, almost as if she were a 'witch.' In the smaller towns, the populace often arbitrarily burned Beguines and women appearing to be Beguines, without waiting for the arrival of the Inquisition, such was their fear and antipathy toward them."[5]

a kind of popular dance of West Indian origin, from French colloquial béguin "an infatuation, boyfriend, girlfriend"