Around the year 1200, communities of women who pursued active lives of Christian devotion began to appear in number in Western Europe. The best known are probably the beguines of Flanders and Brabant, but as Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) noted, there were similar groups known by other names in France, Italy, and the German lands. Jacques, an early advocate and author of vitae of some of these women, also referred to them more generally as “penitents.” They served the poor and sick, taught, and sought personal connection with the divine. The phenomenon caused alarm among some churchmen because these women did not fit into any canonical category, being neither nuns nor ordinary lay folk. In the late thirteenth century, the Franciscan Guibert of Tournai complained that “there are among us women whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or nuns, because they live neither in the world nor out of it” (2). The problem, as Guibert and his ilk perceived it, persisted for centuries as communities like beguines continued to thrive. Alison More's original and deeply researched book tells the centuries-long story of the ecclesiastical response to what she calls “quasi-religious” women and communities, a term whose limitations she acknowledges. It also highlights their activities and aspirations while carving out a “liminal” state, space, or position (3, 14, and 38). Male endeavors to categorize the quasi-religious, then, and the actual practices of women who largely ignored such attempts are the intertwined themes of this book, which draws on premodern Latin and vernacular sources as well as modern scholarship in six languages.
Proceeding more or less chronologically, the book pivots from medieval canon law and its elaboration in chronicles and normative documents to writings, some by the women themselves, that provide “sideways glimpses” (14) into the lives and practices of these quasi-religious. The fictive narratives of the title are stories men have been telling about these women since the thirteenth century in order to place them into categories. To take the example that comes up most frequently, in 1289 Pope Nicolas IV issued the bull Supra montem, which provided a rule for the “order of penitents.” Nicolas manufactured history by falsely attributing the origins of the order of penitents to none other than Saint Francis. The so-called Rule of Saint Francis contained in Supra montem was widely adopted by communities of quasi-religious women across Europe, giving rise to the conception of a coherent and unitary “Franciscan third order” that still persists today. More than a century later, there emerged statutes for penitents under the care of Dominican friars, long since referred to as the “Dominican third order,” even though most communities under Dominican supervision followed the Augustinian Rule and are often referred to as “Augustinian tertiaries” (51).
These third orders, More argues persuasively, are myths, fictions meant to impose uniformity on a great variety of communities that were in fact quite diverse and had little if any institutional connection with one another. And with the myths of orders came more myths. Raymond of Capua, Master General of the Dominican Order from 1380 to 1399, was also the spiritual advisor and hagiographer of Saint Catherine of Siena (d. 1380). Raymond identified Catherine as a member of a Dominican “order of penitents,” a term that “did not have any real meaning for the Dominicans before the early fifteenth century” (76). The lay holy woman Elizabeth of Thuringia (d. 1231) ended up retroactively enrolled in the ranks of Franciscan tertiaries. Attempts to categorize quasi-religious women using the myths of uniformity and coherence continued as variations on a theme into the early modern period.
Across this era, the women themselves simply had priorities other than the boxes clerical authors of bulls, chronicles, and prescriptive literature wanted to put them in. Their practices and approaches to a holy life both in and out of the world did not entail attention to what More calls order identity, a concern of even sympathetic male observers and advisors. Rather, these women were interested in active spirituality that was “often a dynamic response to emerging social needs” (88), including the threat of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. Using the tools of close reading and manuscript analysis, More shows that quasi-religious women were literate and intellectually sophisticated, recasting sermons by clerics and copying them in both Latin and vernacular languages. They were also committed to education and the pursuit of mystical knowledge outside the purview of the institutional church. One such seeker was Alijt Bake (d. 1455), a spiritual autobiographer and theologian who tartly remarked that “God does not wear a blue veil” (15). Experts in the history of premodern women will find the existence of independent-minded and three-dimensional female Christians something other than a complete surprise. The traditional notion of female compliance with male dictates, though, collapses in the face of such rich evidence of socially and intellectually engaged individuals and communities.
Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities will surely advance its author's stated hope that by abandoning the focus on binaries like “clerical” and “lay” and by recognizing that “identity” is neither unitary nor fixed—hence the plural identities of the title—we can understand better the women here and those who defy ready categorization in other times and places. It also demonstrates, once again, that relying on men to tell us what women were, thought, or did is a grave mistake. Women's self-descriptions must be treated carefully, too. Alijt Bake claimed that “I have never studied any other book than the loving open heart of our beloved Jesus Christ or of his mother Mary,” but her writings show her to have been familiar with theologians from Augustine to Jan van Ruusbroec (122). We should not put any more faith in women who underplay or dismiss female accomplishment than in men who do the same.
