A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [207]
The Beghards, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace without benefit of priest or sacrament, spread not only doctrinal but civil disorder. One of the sects of voluntary poverty that perennially rose against the establishment, they had flourished for over a century in Germany, the Low Countries, and northern France, sometimes fading or driven underground by persecution but re-stimulated in the 14th century by the worldliness of Avignon and the mendicant orders. Because the Free Spirits believed God to be in themselves, not in the Church, and considered themselves in a state of perfection without sin, they felt free to do all things commonly prohibited to ordinary men. Sex and property headed the list. They practiced free love and adultery and were accused of indulging in group sex in their communal residences. They encouraged nudity to demonstrate absence of sin and shame. As “holy beggars,” the Brethren claimed the right to use and take whatever they pleased, whether a market woman’s chickens or a meal in a tavern without paying. This included the right, because of God’s immanence, to kill anyone who forcibly attempted to interfere.
If the Brethren’s habits came to be less pure than their precepts, the impulse was nevertheless religious. They were in search of personal salvation, not social justice. Medieval heresies were concerned with God, not man. Poverty was embraced not only in imitation of Christ and the Apostles but in deliberate contrast to the avarice that corrupted men of property. To be without property was to be without sin. Dissent was not a denial of religion but an excess of piety in search of a purer Christianity. It became heresy by definition of the Church, which recognized in the mystics’ renunciation of property the same threat as in Wyclif’s disendowment.
In monk-like robes deliberately ragged, the Brethren of the Free Spirit cluttered the towns like sparrows, preaching, begging, interrupting church services, scorning monks and priests. Drawn from clerks, students, dissenting clergy, and from the propertied class, especially women, they were articulate and usually literate. Women, out of their frustrations and search for ecstasy, were prominent among the mystics. In the Béguines they had a sect of their own, a lay order that followed its own religious rule of good works and, when nunneries had no room, provided a place for unmarried women and widows, or, as a bishop wrote in criticism of the Béguines, a retreat from the “coercion of marital bonds.” Members joined the Béguines by taking an oath of dedication to God before a parish priest or other cleric, but the movement was never quite sanctioned by the Church. At street meetings the Béguines read the Bible translated into French.
While the Brethren of the Free Spirit admitted both sexes, its two major gospels were written or formulated by women, one a shadowy figure known only as Schwester Katrei, the other named Marguerite Porete, who wrote The Mirror of Free Souls and was excommunicated and burned along with her book in 1310. Following her, the daughter of a rich merchant of Brussels known as Bloemardine attracted fervent disciples by her preaching. In 1372 the movement was condemned by the Inquisition, its books were burned in Paris on the Place de Grève, and a woman leader of the French group, Jeanne Dabenton, was burned at the stake together with the corpse of a male associate who had died in prison. Like the heresy