BEDFORD MASTER
. An anonymous artist named after a book of hours (B.L. add. 18850) that he illuminated
for John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford and regent of France, between 1422 and 1435. He
also began a breviary for the duke known as the Salisbury Breviary (B.N. lat. 17294),
which remained unfinished. His style is close to that of the Boucicaut Master of about a
decade before.
Robert G.Calkins
[See also: BOUCICAUT MASTER; MANUSCRIPTS, PRODUCTION AND
ILLUMINATION]
Spencer, Eleanor. “The Master of the Duke of Bedford: The Bedford Hours.” Burlington Magazine
107 (1965):495–502.
——. “The Master of the Duke of Bedford: The Salisbury Breviary.” Burlington Magazine 108
(1966):607–12.
——. The Sobieski Hours: A Manuscript in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. London:
Academic, 1977.
BÉGUINES
. Pious laywomen who chose to live a holy life, but not in a convent as members of a
regular ecclesiastical order. Béguines emerged in the 12th century as part of a new form
of piety that sought to imitate the poverty of Christ and the earliest Christians. These
women lived either in groups or alone, mostly in urban centers; by the early 13th century,
a strong women’s movement had evolved in Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
Exemplifying religious zeal for a Christian life of chastity and poverty, they lived either
from alms or from the work of their hands. Early on, such work often involved the
carding of wool, spinning, and weaving. Later béguine occupations included the teaching
of children, care of the sick in hospitals, and prayers for the souls of the dead.
In the late 12th and early 13th centuries, these women were called “béguines,” a
derisive term conveying the suspect, even heretical, character of their piety in the
judgment of their social peers and ecclesiastical authorities. By the second half of the
13th century, however, the term was applied, with a positive connotation, to women who
lived a religious life together in a house, most often called a béguinage, or to women who
lived as religious solitaries. The solitary béguine could live as a recluse, mendicant,
itinerant teacher, or preacher. The name was also given to those suspected of heresy. The
béguines were thus viewed with both suspicion and admiration.
The problems attending the béguine life surfaced as early as 1215, when the Fourth
Lateran Council forbade the founding of new religious orders; the béguine houses had no
existing general ecclesiastical structure. Legitimate recognition would be available if the
houses were somehow understood to be annexes of male monasteries, or if the women in
the houses could support themselves in strict enclosure without depending on alms, that
is, if the women were wealthy enough themselves or if the houses found a wealthy patron
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