ABSTRACT
The scarcity of women's religious communities in medieval English towns forms a stark contrast with our perceptions of towns of the Low Countries, northern France, and the Rhine valley. Within the walls of Amsterdam, for example, women's houses accounted for fifteen of the eighteen monasteries built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Carasso 1985: 11). True, these houses are considered to have been only semi-monastic; they were beguinages established by, or for, lay-religious women. This spiritual movement grew from the thirteenth century onwards, when groups of secular women banded together in order to serve the poor and sick (Neel 1989: 322). They established informal communities supported through their own labours and begging for alms (Lawrence 1984). The voluntary poverty embraced by these women represents a female form of the Vtta Apostolica (Devlin 1984: 184). Even granted the quasi-monastic commitment which the continental beguinages appear to represent, the scale upon which they were established appears, at first sight, to be appreciably larger than anything to be seen in Britain.
