“One of the first women to be condemned by the inquisition for her visions, the French-speaking prophet Marguerite Porete, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310. The religious milieu in which she functioned, that of the lay convents known as beguinages, reveals much about the motivation of female lay mystics; its history informs us of the heritage of independent lay spirituality available to Joan [of Arc], whereas its face explains the paucity of the religious options left to women in her time. For about a century before Marguerite’s time there had been a noticeable spiritual restlessness among the urban women in northern Europe. Either unable to enter convents because they lacked the necessary dowry, or unwilling to submit themselves to the increasingly rigid control and narrow life style of those institutions, large numbers of spiritually gifted women had begun to form lay communities of their own. A lay, middle-class response to the great religious revival of the High Middle Ages, beguinages began to appear around 1200 in the cities and towns of Flanders and spread across northern France and the Rhineland. These devout women owed no obedience to outside authority, neither to abbess, priest, nor bishop, an independence they sustained through their economic self-reliance; being entirely voluntary and non-institutional, their spirituality stressed inner, personal forms… Out of this movement emerged a distinctive female spirituality and…a female subculture. When women created a space in which they could function autonomously, they did not simply replicate male culture but built distinctive communities…these female communities were less authoritarian, less structured by legal concepts and hierarchical roles than the male orders; conversely they placed more value on “the experiences of the heart,” on what we call mystical gifts. They produced leaders whose authority came from their visions, whose spiritual life was more mystical than that of men in religious life, with strong emphasis on paranormal experiences - visions, voices, stigmata, miraculous cures, even levitation and return from near-death. …these women’s mystical visions rendered them “chains linking others to God, mediators in whose merits others may participate…[who] are convinced of the necessity of teaching others the truths revealed to them in visions…” In short, they saw themselves as entirely orthy to be channels of divine messages, and as seers, fully capable of revealing to others the desires of their hearts. And many persons, including priests and the nobility, came to these gifted diviners for counsel. We can say there was, from the early thirteenth century on, a role in European society for the spiritually graced woman, whether lay or religious.”