A distinctive element of medieval Flemish/Low Countries Christianity is the Beguines, communities of lay women who sought to serve God without retiring from the world. In 1998 thirteen Flemish Béguinages were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Their serenity has made them well known and they are often characterized as devotional enclaves surrounded by contrasting modern city life. The Béguinage generally comprises a central church with an open square, set within a network of streets of uniform, often whitewashed dwellings. Their long histories often mean that their original medieval church interiors also display baroque exuberance, following extensions and renovations during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. For many visitors, entering a Béguinage provides a profound sense of time stopping still. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth: the UNESCO recognition coincided with the closure of the last active Béguinage, in Ghent, and even before that new uses have had to be found for the Béguinage houses. These have so far included convents, student housing, hospitality businesses and publishing companies, with some of the churches still in use for worship.

Amongst the protected Flemish Béguinages, Sint-Truiden (or, in French, Saint-Trond), in Limburg, Belgium, remains an outstanding example, and is the subject of this comprehensive new monograph, for which the English translation of the title is: ‘Living in Purity’. The St Agnes Béguinage at St Truiden: the court, the church, the wall paintings. Although the emplacement of St Truiden does not survive, a significant proportion of the surrounding urban environment (now blended with a twentieth-century housing estate) does. In date it is substantially seventeenth and eighteenth century but notably with two houses retaining late sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century elements. The most significant survival, however, is the church and in particular its unique and impressive range of medieval wall paintings, which were uncovered in 1860. It is thanks to their presence that the church was rescued from destruction in the late nineteenth century and again in the 1970s.

The paintings survive in three areas: the choir, and the eastern and western parts of the nave, built respectively around 1258–65, 1295–1310/1313–60 and 1489–1511. The subject matter of the paintings includes thirteenth-century consecration crosses, early fourteenth-century apostles, the life of Mary and many early sixteenth-century images of saints. Other saints and scenes from the Passion of Christ, the Seven Works of Mercy and rosary images were added in the second half of the sixteenth century at the west end of the nave. At the time of the 1860 discovery an early fourteenth-century Last Judgement on the chancel arch was recorded, but this has since disappeared.

Both editors of the volume contribute chapters: Bergmans one on the wall paintings and Coomans two – on the church’s complex building history and on the turbulent history of the Béguinage since the departure of the Beguines. Coomans is also noticeably responsible for the drawings and photographs of this lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced book. Other chapters are provided by Mireille Madou, on the costumes depicted in the wall paintings, and Marjan Buyle, on the conservation and restoration history of the wall paintings. Leon Smets gives dramatic accounts of the completely dismantled and partly restored interior and Patrick Roose contributes a shorter essay on the organ of 1646–64. Marc Laenen analyses the structure of the court, Roland Dreesen discusses the building stone used for the Béguinage and Hanne van Herck charts the history of the Béguinage from around 1250 until its dissolution in 1798.

To these stimulating papers are added appendices on the medieval and post-medieval aspects of the Béguinage, including statutes, a list of the names of the Beguines from the thirteenth up to the late eighteenth century and an inventory and report on the complete dendrochronology of the church roofing framework. Indexes on personal and place-names as well as an English summary conclude this absorbing Béguinage monograph.