Contentious catalysts: beguines, place, and identity in late medieval Mainz

Abstract

ABSTRACT The identities and roles of women known as beguines in late medieval Europe have long been the subject of scholarly debate. Classic studies argued that beguines troubled a binary of heretical and orthodox movements, and that they were the object of clerical and lay suspicion. Recent work on medieval religious women has done much to enrich understandings of how diverse their roles could be. The records for the beguines of the central Rhineland, however, have not been the focus of examination in some decades. This paper draws on unpublished and understudied documents to examine how beguines were agents and catalysts of regional movement, and how their symbolic and physical emplacement in urban environments was understood. In doing so, it employs mobility theory, a lens heretofore little used by premodernists. This paper argues that the beguines of Mainz were neither exceptional nor marginal. Rather, they cultivated a distinctive identity while remaining integrated in local social and religious networks.