Nothing is new, it seems

I was chasing up some information about KU Leuven, the oldest Catholic university in Europe and the site of a major EU/US meeting on tech and trade.  In the process, I came across this description of the Beguines in the Belgian city of Leuven.

• Communities of beguines formed at the end of the 12^th century .
• Beguines were women who dedicated their life to God without retracting themselves from the regular, secular life.
• Distinctive characteristic of the Beguine movement was that it was not, unlike most convent orders, founded at a specific time by a specific person.
• Movement gradually grew as individual, religiously inspired women found one another, each of them practicing their religion without actual rule and initially also without generalized vows.
• At the end of the 18^th century some 300 Beguines lived here, and the last Beguine of the Great Beguinage in Leuven died only in 1988.

Struck me as an interesting business model for the kind of agile, emergent and networked model of organising we tend to think of as terribly modern.