Selected by Choice magazine in 2002 as an Outstanding Academic Title

"Destined to become the standard work in beguine history."--Renaissance Quarterly

"A tour de force."--David Nicholas, Clemson University

"A vivid, valuable portrait."--History

"Comprehensive and authoritative."--Medium Aevum

"Walter Simons has written a thorough, scholarly study, long on careful research, to the point on analysis, and without theoretical trappings. Cities of Ladies is a most welcome contribution to the study of medieval religious life and women's place in the life of the Low Countries."--Speculum

"Indispensable for students of medieval religion and women's history."--Journal of Religion

"The definitive study. . . . A learned, lively, and highly readable book, now the essential introduction to the subject."--Choice

"This fine work reveals medieval religion as a web of overlapping interests. . . . Simons has thus both provided a detailed study of the movement in the Low Countries and place it in its wider religious, social, and economic context."--Ecclesiastical History

In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers.

In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.

Walter Simons is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College.