I’ve often thought that the life of an average medieval woman would have been really awful. Legally being the property of first your father then your husband, no reliable birth control, dying in childbirth, and all the hard work in between. No thanks. But I recently came across a group of women who actually did have agency in their lives, and choices to marry or not. In his book “Edge of the World, a cultural history of the North Sea and the transformation of Europe,” Michael Pyle has a chapter devoted to the Beguines. Beguines lived in semi-monastic communities, but did not take any kind of religious vows. They promised…