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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
Medievalists are seldom granted a gift as rich as the record of the interrogations of the beguines of Świdnica (Schweidnitz) in 1332. Here we have examinations of sixteen witnesses concerning life in a female community implicated in heresy, with responses numbering 183 articles. The document not only draws back a curtain on a secret society, but offers a trove of fascinating details and sometimes even allows us to hear authentic voices from the long-distant past. Half a century ago I touched upon the Świdnica beguines in my Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, but there I allowed myself only seven pages for consideration of the subject. Now Fr Tomasz Gałuszka OP and Paweł Kras offer an exemplary full-length study, together with a meticulous, unsurpassable edition. The appearance of this splendid book thus offers me an opportunity to refresh some points I had previously made and call attention to others that I had neglected.
To say that the document ‘draws back a curtain’ is not quite right, for the stage is still veiled by a skrim. By this I mean to refer to methodological issues that often leave uncertainty as to what we may really be seeing. The sixteen women spoke in German but their answers were translated by the notary into Latin, and we must rely on his choices. Then too, a substantial amount of the questioning was based on formularies – the papal decrees Ad nostrum and Cum de quibusdam mulieribus – meaning that examinees may have responded to leading questions with answers that the inquisitor wanted to hear. Thus in the case of a witness who stated that she heard another say ‘those women who are in such a state of perfection and freedom of spirit are not required to obey anyone’ (I.I.11), and ‘those women who have achieved perfection are not subject to human obedience’ (I.II.28), these are close repetitions of article 3 of Ad nostrum, which the witness most likely learned from the inquisitor or perhaps were based on independent German answers translated by the notary into Latin words that came from the formulary.
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