Abstract
When Heylwijck Ansens, a beguine living in Mechelen’s Great Beguinage of St Catherine, wrote her will in 1556, she bequeathed several valuable items to Anneke Ansens, one of her nieces that lived with her. These goods included furnishings such as her tresoer (cupboard), her bed and its best bedding, and three of her blue cushions in addition to clothing such as her coats, best bodice and all of her beghijnen rocken (beguine dresses).1 Marieke, the niece of beguine Kathelijne van Brecht, would also inherit a bed and other important pieces of furniture, in addition to clothing. Yet in her (undated) will Kathelijne explicitly linked these gifts to the condition that Marieke became and remained a beguine herself. It is therefore most likely that with their generous gifts, Heylwijck and Kathelijne primarily wanted to provide their nieces with a dowry of sorts, one that would enable them to start their own beguine household.
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Notes
See on the importance of clothing as identity markers in late medieval and early modern European cities amongst others: Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence. Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
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Author’s translation of: “dejongh mans ofte dochters tegen den dank van hare ouderen inde kloosters locken [...] haar wijsmakende datiergeen hope der saligheyd buyten de kloosters is”, Desiderius Erasmus, Colloquia Familiaria. Dat is, gemeensame tsamensprekinge van Erasmus van Rotterdam uyt het Latijn vertaelt (Utrecht: published by Dirck van Ackersdyck and Gysbert van Zyl, 1654), 19–20.
Judith M. Bennett and Amy Froide, “A Singular Past”, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 6.
This calls to mind the fact that especially in artisanal milieus, wives and daughters often helped the master in nearly all stages of production. Moreover, in this period many women supported their family by domestic activities such as spinning and weaving. Evidence from probate inventories points to the fact that many households in late medieval cities in the Low Countries possessed a weaving loom for this purpose. See: Mary Wiesner Wood, “‘Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants?’ Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 12:2 (1981), 4
Peter Stabel, “Women at the Market. Gender and Retail in the Towns of Late Medieval Flanders”, in Wim Blockmans, Marc Boone and Thérèse de Hemptinne (eds), Secretum Scriptorum. Liber alumnorum Walter Prevenier (Leuven: Appeldoorn, 1999), 260.
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Overlaet, K. (2015). To Be or Not to Be a Beguine in an Early Modern Town: Piety or Pragmatism? The Great Beguinage of St Catherine in Sixteenth-Century Mechelen. In: De Groot, J., Devos, I., Schmidt, A. (eds) Single Life and the City 1200–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406408_7
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