This chapter examines a diverse but important group of people who defy easy categorisation yet were all loosely associated with religious life. As hermits and recluses, lay 'penitents', beguines and beghards, their status was ambiguous, straddling the border between the lay and monastic categories of society. Antecedents to this way of life reach far back, to the sacred widowhood of early Christian women, for instance, and hermits stood of course at the basis of monasticism itself. By the fourteenth century, when male eremitical life began to decline, female solitaries had become a common sight in many cities and towns, primarily those of the Low Countries, England, France and Germany. Groups of 'brothers and sisters of penitence' in the Romagna adopted common customs known as the Memoriale Propositi in 1221. The natural tension between institutional and informal sources of power has always been a creative source of reflection and rejuvenation in Christian religious life.

Poverty, whether spiritual or material through renunciation of wealth, lay at the core of the twelfth century's search for religious perfection and its embrace of apostolic ideals. Monks, nuns, canons, canonesses, lay people and dissidents espoused the same scripture-based ideals. Lay people also aspired to lead a life marked by poverty, preaching, chastity and manual labour. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians at times dominate the telling of twelfth-century religious history and overshadow Benedictine monasticism. The Cathars, as criticised by Evervin of Steinfeld and later writers, demonstrated remarkable austerity and command of Scripture. An anonymous chronicler of Laon, writing around 1180, compared the Humiliati and the Waldensians for their rejection of oath-taking. Walter Simons' study of beguines in the Low Countries signals the region's advanced level of urbanisation and literacy and women's contribution to economic production. The ideals of poverty and religious perfection motivated twelfth-century Christians across Europe.