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On Tuesday we went to Darlington, where our client Karen Maitland was doing a couple of library talks: we met her after her early afternoon event, enjoyed a chat and something to eat, and then went along to sit in the audience of her evening talk. It was a pleasure to meet Karen again, and to catch up with each other's news, and both talks, formal and informal, were full of interesting information. So I thought I would be posting something about it - yet somehow that post has failed to happen, it refuses to gell, I can't get a grip on it.
But here's the raw material: Karen was talking about her new book, The Owl Killers, and explaining how the initial idea came from visiting Bruges, and learning about the medieval beguinages.* (You can hear her on Woman's Hour, telling the story, and talking about the béguinages). The Béguines were women who dedicated their lives to God without retiring from the world. In the 13th century they founded the béguinages, enclosed communities designed to meet their spiritual and material needs (according to the UNESCO listing which recognises thirteen of the Belgian béguinages as a World Hesritage site; more information about this here, and here's what Wikipedia has to say).
You could take this in a variety of directions. Karen's book came out of wondering why this movement had been so successful in Belgium, spreading to the north of France and the Netherlands, but had never reached England. The real answer appears to be that in fact there were beguinages in England, but they have been largely forgotten, and are only now being rediscovered through the work of local historians. Some of the women in the audience wanted to pursue precisely this aspect of the story: how could these institutions have been forgotten? Or rather, since women's history has a tendency to get forgotten, why had they not been rediscovered by the women's movement? (I heard one woman telling another something along the lines of 'I was at Greenham, and I'd never heard of them!')
I had heard the name, and I suppose assumed from the context that they were some sort of convent. Given that they were actually some sort of anti-convent, my main feeling is surprise that they got away with it: that a group of women were able to stand outside the authority of the church, and of the guilds too, and not be suppressed immediately - that's unexpected. Also that as anti-monasteries go, these women created something far more practical than Rabelais' Thelema.
*Have I remarked before that authors are unanimous in their mockery of the question: "Where do you get your ideas from?", yet they can almost always tell you where the idea for this particular book came from - and do. And it's usually interesting, and sometimes quite illuminating about the book. But the question that never gets answered is, why do writers get ideas in the form of stories? I have lots of ideas, but they are never stories...
But here's the raw material: Karen was talking about her new book, The Owl Killers, and explaining how the initial idea came from visiting Bruges, and learning about the medieval beguinages.* (You can hear her on Woman's Hour, telling the story, and talking about the béguinages). The Béguines were women who dedicated their lives to God without retiring from the world. In the 13th century they founded the béguinages, enclosed communities designed to meet their spiritual and material needs (according to the UNESCO listing which recognises thirteen of the Belgian béguinages as a World Hesritage site; more information about this here, and here's what Wikipedia has to say).
You could take this in a variety of directions. Karen's book came out of wondering why this movement had been so successful in Belgium, spreading to the north of France and the Netherlands, but had never reached England. The real answer appears to be that in fact there were beguinages in England, but they have been largely forgotten, and are only now being rediscovered through the work of local historians. Some of the women in the audience wanted to pursue precisely this aspect of the story: how could these institutions have been forgotten? Or rather, since women's history has a tendency to get forgotten, why had they not been rediscovered by the women's movement? (I heard one woman telling another something along the lines of 'I was at Greenham, and I'd never heard of them!')
I had heard the name, and I suppose assumed from the context that they were some sort of convent. Given that they were actually some sort of anti-convent, my main feeling is surprise that they got away with it: that a group of women were able to stand outside the authority of the church, and of the guilds too, and not be suppressed immediately - that's unexpected. Also that as anti-monasteries go, these women created something far more practical than Rabelais' Thelema.
*Have I remarked before that authors are unanimous in their mockery of the question: "Where do you get your ideas from?", yet they can almost always tell you where the idea for this particular book came from - and do. And it's usually interesting, and sometimes quite illuminating about the book. But the question that never gets answered is, why do writers get ideas in the form of stories? I have lots of ideas, but they are never stories...
