This chapter examines a diverse but important group of people who defy easy categorisation yet were all loosely associated with religious life. As hermits and recluses, lay 'penitents', beguines and beghards, their status was ambiguous, straddling the border between the lay and monastic categories of society. Antecedents to this way of life reach far back, to the sacred widowhood of early Christian women, for instance, and hermits stood of course at the basis of monasticism itself. By the fourteenth century, when male eremitical life began to decline, female solitaries had become a common sight in many cities and towns, primarily those of the Low Countries, England, France and Germany. Groups of 'brothers and sisters of penitence' in the Romagna adopted common customs known as the Memoriale Propositi in 1221. The natural tension between institutional and informal sources of power has always been a creative source of reflection and rejuvenation in Christian religious life.