Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565

Walter Simons's Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200 to 1565, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2001, is a standard scholarly study of the Beguines, laywomen who lived in religious community without taking permanent vows, tracing their communities across the medieval Low Countries from their thirteenth century emergence to their sixteenth century decline. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed university press monograph drawing on archival research across multiple Beguinage records. Its limit is that its geographic focus is the Low Countries specifically, so a claim about Beguine communities elsewhere in medieval Europe needs a source addressing that different regional history.