The Begijnhoven: Analysis of Other Hybrid Types in the Medieval City

This research explores the paradoxes of domesticity in the Begijnhof. These architectural ensembles can be analysed as a different medieval hybrid type, as cities in their own right as well as cities within cities. They emerged in the European medieval cities in the thirteenth century and were inhabited by the Beguines for almost eight centuries. This research aims to move towards a more architectural and gender perspective by retrieving, revising and relating this to the work done by other researchers. It is possible to find in the past, the emergence of a new situation where women break with the way of life based on the nuclear family and who have the will to transform the spatial conditions they inhabit —the house and the city that they have inherited from established urban form. This research intends to demonstrate how women were effective in this and the fact that the Begijnhof human-space relationship occurred with a gendered perspective. Two issues are analysed which reinforced each other: the changes they made in the spatial properties of the places they lived in; and the multiple uses that were in the Begijnhoven. This research shows how women updated the existing domesticity by means of the Begijnhof in the Middle Ages. Some of the architectural strategies employed in the Begijnhof contribute to delving into the complex genealogy of the domesticity of the house and the Western city, and conclusively to human thought so that it is not only construed from the masculine experience. The Begijnhof is a paradigmatic case of transformation of the existing city – becoming more than a gated community, whereby women introduced other ways of inhabiting within the city: the space of intimacy extends from the house to the city, within the city. These complexes might be placed as a precedent for these institutions that emerged In the Enlightenment grouped by the notion of heterotopias, such as prisons and hospitals, which are connected genealogically to monasteries and convents.