Consorority

As with the poor who joined the Humiliati, the poor women of Netherlandish towns could find economic security, social stability, and a deep sense of spiritual fulfilment in the urban religious confraternity or consorority of the Beguines.

Women’s exclusion from the collective flagellation characteristic of battuti groups was based on more than just the shame of exposing their bodies or mixing male and female flagellants, since it continued through the period when those bearing the cords wore robes and hoods which obliterated their individual identity. More importantly, even the few “flagellant” consororities in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy may not have practised the exercise.

Midwives are deliberately kept as subordinate members of the guild of surgeons, “to whose policing they must submit,” and have historically been deprived of a separate, recognized voice. There is “absolutely no community among them,” gloats the surgeon Louis in the Encyclopédie with obvious relief, reassuring himself and his readers, as if an independent consorority of these women would be a nightmare.