This volume is part of a new Brepols series: Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, overseen by an extraordinary board of editors who are experts on the topic. They have placed into print once again the important documents concerning Mary of Oignies, often considered the founder of the Beguines: The Two Lives of Marie of Oignies with its translation by Margot King of the Life of Marie by Jacques de Vitry and those by Hugh Feiss of the Supplement to the Life by Thomas of Cantimpré, as well as The Anonymous History of the Church of Oignies. To these are now added an edition of The Liturgical Offices for Mary, also translated by Hugh Feiss. All this is accompanied by a scholarly apparatus made much more useful in that the expanded notes are now located at the foot of pages.
This publication provides us with all the relevant medieval texts about this remarkable early thirteenth-century saintly woman, Mary of Oignies or Mary of Nivelles, who was the spiritual advisor of the famous Churchman, Jacques or James of Vitry, a woman who not only prayed, but read and worked, and described by Anneke Mulder-Bakker in her General Introduction (13) as one who "always had a Psalter within arm's reach, even when she was weaving." Mulder-Bakker in that introduction not only describes the bands of holy women with whom Mary was associated, but the holy men who recorded their lives and otherwise supported them. In discussing these groups Mulder-Bakker has shown how the modern scholarly assumptions that such independent women would eventually develop into monastic communities, or that the practices of their lives were "stop-gap" measures for women who really wanted to be nuns, have seriously distorted our understanding of these women who were fundamentally part of the laity. As Mulder-Bakker argues on pages 21-24, more recent work has attempted to show that these women's "common" or "vernacular" theologies must be given serious attention.
In her introduction to the texts reproduced from the earlier volumes, Margot King again asserts on page 35 that "the Life of Mary of Oignies by Cardinal James of Vitry is...one of the more important documents in the history of early thirteenth-century spirituality," and that the life is "central to an understanding of the beguine movement, a specifically female apostolate which had as its goal a recreation of the vita apostolica."
The text itself begins with a prologue in which the cardinal describes being urged by Fulk of Marseilles, bishop of Toulouse, to set down this life; it is then followed by two books, the first describing Mary's religious life and her complete conversion to God, starting with childhood, marriage, the conversion of her husband and how they lived chastely, and among other things her tears, her fasting, her prayers, her appearance, and her manual labor. Book two describes Mary's life in terms of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, then her arrival at Oignies, her visitors, her illnesses and her death. The Supplement by Thomas of Cantimpré is rather surprising since it is taken up primarily with berating James for having abandoned Lotharingia and Mary's community to pursue his ecclesiastical career.
The History of the Foundation of the Church of Oignies included here and a study of Mary of Oignies: A Friend to the Saints by Brenda M. Bolton discuss the relics at Oignies and the beautiful reliquaries made for the church by Hugh of Oignies. A discussion by Susan Folkerts of the manuscript tradition of the life of Mary in the Later Middle Ages shows the popularity of the text in the libraries of houses of monks, including Cistercian monks. This and the references in the peripheral descriptions of the text to Cistercian monks and nuns may provide a clue as to why Mary is sometimes misidentified by scholars as a Cistercian nun. While clearly certain Cistercian monks and abbots were very supportive of these bands of holy women, this does not mean that those women were Cistercian nuns. Beguines like Mary had aims as religious laywomen that were considerably different from those of the women who were flocking to enclosed abbeys of Cistercian nuns in the same decades of the early-thirteenth century. The editors are to be commended for the fine presentation of this text; it is hoped that demand for classroom use will eventually allow it to appear in paper.