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marcantel's review
3.0
With the exception of Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium and Tuckman's A Distant Mirror, there is very little in English on the medieval religious movement surrounding the Beguines, the Beghards, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. This work, translated from French by the former Situationist International author should have adequately filled the gap. Unfortunately, The Movement of the Free Spirit is too inconsistent to do so. Considering the fact that this was a labor of love for Vaneigem, the book fails on a number of levels. Vaneigem fails to make the case that the movement of the Free Spirit was a revolutionary movement; this is partly because he casts the movement as mainly concerned with attaining sexual liberation (i.e., pleasure) and undermining Church authority. It is too bad because a case could be made that the Beguines were a self-organized movement against poverty and gender discrimination, and represented a genuine mutual aid society with a spiritual dimension. The same claim might also be made Beghards, who imitated the Beguines in their spiritual outlook, but organized along labor lines. Vaneigem also fails to consider the movement as an authentic spiritual movement, since he has such contempt for religion, especially Christianity. What he is left with is the view that the movement of the Free Spirit was an atheistic and hedonistic movement dressed up in theological trappings, which strikes me as too reductionistic and self-serving to ring true. That said, Vaneigem does give a good overview of connecting the major figures, the orthodox and heterodox influences on and of the movement, as well as the responses of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to the movement. Vaneigem has done a tremendous amount of research. Some of his insights into the underlying motives of both "heretics" and Church authorities are really great (although others are too simplistic). Unfortunately, Vaneigem's thesis that "the middle ages were never Christian" sets the direction of the book, which is fine, but its a thesis better suited to a book like La Resistance au Christianisme.
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