The Great Beguinage of Mechelen stood in the city's northwest corner, near a fork in the Dyle River. It was far larger than the Beguinage of Bruges. It had once been completely separated from the town by walls, but after Joseph II ordered Mechelen's city walls torn down, the nunnery's outer barrier no longer served any purpose.
Beguinages were probably especially common in northern and northeastern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and western and northwestern Germany. Their success was connected to wars, military campaigns, and paramilitary actions that forcibly claimed the lives of many men, leaving large numbers of women with no choice but to seek help from wealthy benefactors.
There were so many children here that even Georgiana, who had built a shelter in Paris and seen such scenes before, found it harrowing. The younger infants and their mothers had been sent to convents in the city. Conditions there were poor as well, but at least they were indoors. Here, there were only crude-looking wooden houses.
She had expected dreadful sanitation, like the industrial districts along the Seine, but the streets were kept very clean. She could even smell malt in the air.
"There's a brewery nearby," the archbishop said, pointing in one direction. Yet instead of taking her inside for an "inspection," he led her to a very small church beside the chapel of the Great Beguinage. It looked like a little sparrow beside some colossal beast.
"This is St. Catherine's Church," the archbishop told Georgiana. "Do you know who Saint Catherine was?"
Georgiana was somewhat surprised, because the Saint Catherine she knew was the nun from Siena who had persuaded Gregory XI to return to Rome.
There was another Saint Catherine as well, the patron saint of most St. Catherine's Churches built before the fourteenth century. She had