Dismantling the Medieval: Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent's Past 9782503593470, 250359347X

Table of contents :
Front Matter
I. Introduction
II.1833: A Gift for an Emperor
III. 1801: St Gozelin’s (Im)mortal Remains
IV. 1784: The Death of a Medieval Convent
V. 1766: Retooling Religious Space and Identities
VI. 1692: Old and New Memories of Origins
VII. Conclusions
VIII. Appendices
Back Matter

Citation preview

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Steven Vanderputten

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© 2021, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium This is an open access publication made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission of the publisher, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. ISBN 978-2-503-59347-0 E-ISBN 978-2-503-59348-7 DOI : 10.1484/M.STMH-EB.5.122603

Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2021/0095/145

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of illustrations | 7 List of tables | 7 Acknowledgements | 9 Abbreviations | 13 Introduction | 15 Chapter 1 1833 A  Gift for an Emperor | 43 Chapter 2 1801 St  Gozelin’s (Im)mortal Remains | 77 Chapter 3 1784 The Death of a Medieval Convent | 105 Chapter 4 1766 Retooling Religious Space and Identities | 139 Chapter 5 1692 Old and New Memories of Origins | 165 Conclusions | 193 Appendices | 195 Bibliography | 219 Index of people and places | 241

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Watercolour Painting of the Hill of Bouxières | 16 2. Wash Painting of the Ruins of Bouxières Abbey | 20 3. Gozelin’s 938 Foundation Charter | 46 4. Inventory of Ex-canoness Caroline Delort’s Properties in Bouxières-aux-Dames | 52 5. Chest Said to have Held Gozelin’s Evangeliary and the Trésor des chartes | 68 6. Gozelin’s Paten and Chalice from Bouxières Abbey’s Relic Treasure | 83 7. Plan of Bouxières Abbey and the Hill of Bouxières | 116 8. Plan of the New Convent at Bon Secours | 122 9. Letter by Abbess de Messey to the Pope, January 1791 | 129-131 10. Portrait of Former Abbess de Messey | 134 11. Ink Drawing of the Abbey Site in 1770 | 141 12. The Pelouse at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century | 146 13. Reconstruction of the Abbey Site in the Eighteenth Century | 147 14. Eighteenth-Century Seal of the Chapter of Bouxières Abbey | 151 15. Painting from the Abbatial Church of Bouxières | 183

LIST OF TABLES 1. Original Documents in Archival Folders Cha. Li. 1–4 | 58 2. Charters from Fondation as Listed in the Late 17th-century Mémoire | 188

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this book originated while I was working on a research project called ‘Re-evaluating female monasticism’s “ambiguous identity” in the ninth- to eleventh-century West‘, which was funded by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO). At the time I did not have any plans to extend my investigations into the early modern period. Indeed, my main focus was on researching a monograph titled Dark Age Nunneries. The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–1050, which was published in 2018 by Cornell University Press. But while I was tracking down and analysing the primary evidence for that study, I  was time and again struck by the sheer extent to which scholars’ ability to retrieve and study the source record from the early and high medieval eras depends on how early modern groups of women religious viewed and handled those legacies, saw their own place in the history of these ancient foundations, and sought to reconcile past identity narratives with their own experiences and expectations. Nor did this process always stop with the dissolution of a religious institution, as former members and their associates often continued to have an impact on how various legacies from the medieval past were perceived and treated. The present study investigates these phenomena through a micro-historical analysis of Bouxières abbey in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. I am pleased to acknowledge my debt to many individuals who made this book possible. Nicole Cadène provided useful references to her research on Marie-Edmée Pau’s diary. Laura Giuliacci allowed me access to her dissertation on the Collegio delle Fanciulle. Gemma Betros advised me on where to look for documentation on Bouxières abbey’s end stage in the early 1790s. Corinne Marchal shared several of her unpublished papers on noble canonesses in the early modern period. Klaas Van Gelder helped me to decipher Von Khlobeyer’s note to Emperor Francis of Austria. Maxime Gelly-Perbellini volunteered to go and take pictures of Marie-Rose de Lort’s post-mortem inventory at the Archives Nationales on the same afternoon that public institutions in France were about to go into lockdown, in March 2020. And shortly afterwards Katrin Siebler sent me scans from Norbert

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Backmund’s study while all libraries remained closed. A  special mention should also go to Jean-Luc Colombat and Jean-Luc Manneville of the historical society Connaissance et Renaissance du Vieux Bouxières. Both of these gentlemen responded to my many queries for information about their village’s past with unwavering enthusiasm. I  was fascinated each time they sent me another batch of scanned documents and images, many of which had never before been seen by scholars. Likewise crucial was the support of librarians. The staff of Ghent University’s Central Library and Faculty Library of Arts and Philosophy never complained about my endless requests for interlibrary loans and high-quality scans of documents. Friedrich Simander of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek patiently answered my queries about the original of Gozelin’s foundation charter and the mysterious box in which it was originally delivered to his institution. And Mireille François and her colleagues at the Bibliothèque Stanislas in Nancy could not have been more helpful when I consulted the library’s holdings on Bouxières abbey on two occasions in 2019. This generosity extended into the Covid-19 crisis, when they sent me scans of key documents and various artworks. Another staff member of the library, Claire Haquet, helped me track down a bibliographical reference to the elusive seventeenth-century booklet of the Bouxières canonesses’ office for St Gozelin. And when it became obvious that the pandemic and the resulting impact on international travel would last longer than originally thought, adjunct head librarian Iseut de Kernier of the Médiathèque Verlaine in Metz kindly agreed to send me a scan of the unpublished reference in question. Finally, I am also grateful to François De Vriendt of the Bollandist Society in Brussels for looking for additional resources on St Gozelin’s cult in the Society’s archives. Early versions of chapters from this book were presented as keynote lectures at a 2019 conference at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and a workshop that was held in the same year at the University of Düsseldorf. I wish to extend my thanks to organizers Laura Gathagan, Charles Insley, and Eva Schlotheuber for inviting me and for offering their feedback on my work-in-progress. Also to Ben Pohl, who as guest editor of The Downside Review invited me to submit a paper on Bouxières abbey’s evolving narrative of origins. Jirki Thibaut of Brepols Publishers expertly guided this book through the reviewing and editorial processes. The two anonymous readers of the manuscript provided many useful commentaries and reassuring words of praise. And Susan Vincent carefully read through the manuscript and provided many helpful tips to improve the argument. Through the years she has become a trusted reader and critic of my work.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The story of this book is also that of a personal journey, some stages of which I shall fondly remember and others not so much. I was – and still am – immensely fortunate to make that journey together with my wife Melissa. Her unstinting support makes every professional challenge worthwhile, every setback tolerable, and every triumph relative. And her steadfast refusal to chauffeur me to remote libraries and archives taught me a valuable lesson about how research always involves a degree of suffering, in the form of unseasonal bicycle rides and overlong train journeys. Finally, our son Hugo is a formidable companion in every respect. For his quiet bemusement and implied encouragements I remain deeply grateful.

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ABBREVIATIONS ADMM AMB AN ANL BNF BSt ÖNB

Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle Archives municipales de Bouxières-aux-Dames – Fonds CRVB (Connaissance et Renaissance du Vieux Bouxières) Archives Nationales Archives Nationales du Luxembourg Bibliothèque Nationale de France Bibliothèque Stanislas Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

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INTRODUCTION Public outreach was not an foreign concept to nineteenth-century French scholars, including to Henri Lepage (d.  1887).1 In the mid-1860s the noted historian took a break from his work as an archivist at the Archives Départementales de la Meurthe and as president of the Société d’archéologie lorraine to write a guide for walkers titled Promenade dans Nancy et ses environs.2 The booklet’s explicit aim was to tempt readers to explore France’s north-eastern region of Lorraine and its capital of Nancy, enticing them to visit the principal sites and monuments of his native area while teaching them how to appreciate its natural beauty and picturesque ruins. As such, it is of its time, fitting within the context of wider developments in contemporary society. Rapid urbanization and industrialization marked an increasing contrast with the region’s historical sites and surrounding rural landscape, while the expansion of transport networks now meant that these same sites and that same landscape could be accessed with relative ease. The rising middle classes took up this opportunity, engaging in cultural tourism and, in counterpoint to unfolding modernity, a self-conscious quest for spiritual and physical recreation, enjoying the region’s natural landmarks and panoramic vistas.3 Promenade’s implicit aim, however, was to train people’s emotional and intellectual response to Lorraine’s principal historical locations, including those that had been stripped of reminders of an illustrious past. One of those ‘empty sites’ was the hill overlooking

1  Charles Guyot, ‘Bibliographie de Henri Lepage, précédée d’une notice sur sa vie’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 16 (1888), i–lxxii. 2  Henri Lepage, Promenade dans Nancy et ses environs (Nancy: N.  Grosjean and Lucien Wiener, 1866). 3  Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, La roue et le stylo. Comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999); Susan  C. Rogers, ‘Which Heritage? Nature, Culture, and Identity in French Rural Tourism’, French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 475–503; and Marc Boyer, Histoire générale du tourisme, du xvie au xixe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).

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the village of Bouxières-aux-Dames, some two kilometres to the northeast of Lorraine’s capital of Nancy: Before us appears, stretched out the flank of a steep hill of which the foot is drenched in the Meurthe River, Bouxières-aux-Dames, which is named thus because of the abbey that St Gozelin founded there for humble Benedictine nuns, and that subsequently turned into a noble chapter of canonesses who were proud of their eight heraldic quarters. All that remains are a mere few foundations of their church. Even though the amateur of history has nothing to harvest on the site where the abbey used to be, ramblers can head towards the lawn that crowns the village and has seasonal trees, and compensate [for the lack of historic monuments] by taking a delightful walk in the woods and enjoying one of our region’s finest panoramas.4

In a learned article from 1859 for the Memoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, Lepage had already explained in detail how, shortly after the dissolution of the abbey at the hands of the French revolutionaries in early 1791, the medieval church, cloister, and chapter room had been confiscated, sold off at auction, Illustration 1. Watercolour Painting of the ‘Empty’ Hill of Bouxières, facing the Side of the Former Abbatial Church. Nancy, BSt, Fonds Iconographique, FG7 BOU 1. Nineteenth Century. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy. Compare with the 1770 view in Illustration 11 at p. 141.

Lepage, Promenade, pp.  60–61: ‘En face de nous apparaît, étendu sur le flanc d’une colline escarpée dont le pied baigne dans la Meurthe, Bouxières-aux-Dames, ainsi surnommé à cause de l’abbaye qu’y avait fondée saint Gauzlin pour d’humbles bénédictines, et qui se transforma, dans la suite, en un aristocratique chapitre de chanoinesses, fières de leurs huit quartiers héraldiques. Il reste à peine quelques vestiges de leur église; mais, si l’antiquaire n’a rien à moissonner sur l’emplacement qu’occupa l’abbaye, en revanche, le promeneur peut, en gagnant la pelouse, aux arbres séculaires, qui couronne le village, se dédommager par une course délicieuse dans les bois et par un des plus beaux points de vue de nos environs’.

4 

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INTRODUCTION

and for the most part dismantled.5 The disappearance of these structures and the religious community that had used them left a permanent scar on the physical landscape, while the impact on village society (on account of the need for the village council to substitute a school for young girls, a charity for the poor, and other social services that the eighteenth-century convent members had sponsored) was still obvious too. But from the perspective of the Nancy historian, this disappearance had also reified the abrupt end to an 853-year past during which generation after generation of women religious had perpetuated the mission that their founder, Bishop Gozelin of Toul (922-62), had entrusted to the earliest convent members. Although there had been major changes in the community’s observance and troubled episodes during the abbey’s long life, in his view these were less significant than the continuities: in the veneration of St Gozelin and his relic treasure, his legacy as founder of a female religious community, the composition of the abbey’s estate, and finally also the site’s continuous occupation by a community of women religious. Perceptions of the past of this institution – of its narrative, archival, spatial, material and immaterial legacies – centred on notions of familiarity and continuity, and on the need for permanently renewing ties with its former inhabitants. The dissolution, he implied, had abruptly ended those perceptions and had turned the abbey’s past and its manifold legacies into things that belonged to a ‘lost’ and deeply unfamiliar world. As a consequence, this dramatic event had marked not just the end of a venerable convent, but had also cut through one of the ties that bound Lorraine to the medieval and early modern past.

Henri Lepage, ‘L’abbaye de Bouxières’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 1  (1859), 129–301, at pp.  232–42. Further comments on the dismantling of these structures may be found in Lucien Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames et son abbaye. Etude historique (Saint-Nicolas-de-Port: Star, 1978), p. 181.

5 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Continuity and Disruption in Early Modern Memory Cultures

Observers from the middle decades of the nineteenth century onwards indicated that while the former abbey and its occupants continued to intrigue some visitors of the hill site, most of their contemporaries felt little connection to the world in which these had existed.6 One such example dates from late summer 1869, when the aspiring young novelist Marie-Edmée Pau (d.  1871) recorded in her diary a fascination with the hill as a site of memory of a then-lost form of female freedom. Unlike other women, she mused, canonesses had enjoyed financial security and legal protection without the need to make religious vows or enter into marriage. Furthermore they had managed their own affairs and handled their own finances, owned their own homes, travelled frequently, and freely received visitors. And they had organized their daily routine largely in accordance with their own preferences, reading, studying, praying, and conversing with likeminded women and men. All these things Marie-Edmée deeply longed for. And presumably she also idealized the domestic life of the Bouxières canonesses as one that had allowed some of these individuals to explore (as she longed to do) their attraction to women without drawing the suspicion or disapproval from their peers. ‘Wandering like abbesses’ between the abbey’s ruins during one of several day visits to the old convent site and the adjacent landscaped area known as the Pelouse, in her imagination she and her friend Marie-Paule Courbe (d.  1895) temporarily traded their probable destiny as dependent bourgeois women for an imaginary one in which they enjoyed legal, socio-economic, and possibly even sexual freedom.7 Yet, despite the exuberant joy and For a theoretical perspective on the perception by local communities of dissolved monasteries, see Marcin Jewdokimow and Barbara Markowska, ‘Study of the Heritage of Dissolved Monasteries in Local Collective Memories’, Hereditas Monasteriorum, 2  (2013), 19–34. And for a case study of the way in which the nonacademic memory of the abbey of Cluny was kept alive following the dissolution in the late eighteenth century, refer to the volume Cluny après Cluny. Constructions, reconstructions et commémorations, 1790-2010, ed. by Didier Méhu (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 7  Nicole Cadène, “Mon énigme éternel”. Marie-Edmée…, une jeune fille française sous le Second Empire (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2012), 6 

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INTRODUCTION

empathy that speaks from Marie-Edmée’s account, the pair knew all too well that these escapist day trips had offered them but fleeting moments of happiness. They also knew that the canonesses’ freedom was utterly unattainable to women of their generation. ‘I am certain’, the diarist wrote, ‘that if I had asked Mary at that moment, she would have told me, crying as I am now: “No Marie, we were not happy”’.8 A decade-and-a-half after the diarist’s death Courbe (who went on to be a prolific novelist and polemicist) published a short story titled Les orphelins de Bouxières in which she implicitly recalled her trips to the hill site with Marie-Edmée. Alienation from the former inhabitants defines her argument when she refers to ‘the mysterious walks of the canonesses of the abbey of B.’, and associates these women with the ghostly eighteenth-century aristocratic ladies ‘who still smile at us in  […] half-erased pastel portraits’.9 Arguably these lines were Marie-Paule’s way of coming to terms with her personal memories of her trips to Bouxières with MarieEdmée and with the latter’s fascination with the aristocratic women who used to live there. And presumably they also allowed her to give her own, less optimistic interpretation of the site as a lieu de mémoire of women’s freedom. Modern women, she found, would not be able to find much inspiration in their quest for emancipation in a mysteriously religious but above all aristocratic cohort of ‘old pretty ladies’, since they belonged to a lost pre-revolutionary world. Their legacy, she indicated, now consisted of little more than fading pastel portraits.

pp.  224–25; also the discussion in the same, ‘L’invention du genre dans le journal de Marie-Edmée…’,  in Ecriture, récit, trouble(s) de soi, ed.  by Isabelle Luciani and Valérie Piétri (Orléans: HAL. Science de l’homme et de la société, 2012), pp. 231–46 (online publication at https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01784067, accessed 30 October 2020). 8  Cadène, “Mon énigme éternel”, p.  224: ‘je suis certaine que si j’interrogeais en ce moment Mary, elle me dirait en laissant couler des pleurs pareils à ceux que je refoule: “Non Marie, nous n’étions pas heureuses”.’ 9  Gisèle d’Estoc, Les Bannis et autres récits. Contes et nouvelles de Gisèle d’Estoc, ed.  by Nicole Cadène and Gilles Picq (s.l.: Edition des Commérages, 2015), pp.  25–26: ‘mystérieuses promenades des chanoinesses de l’abbaye de B…’ and ‘ces jolies vieilles qui nous sourient encore dans leurs pastels à demi-effacés’.

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Illustration 2. Wash Painting of the Ruins of Bouxières Abbey. Nancy, BSt, Fonds Iconographique, FG7 BOU 4. Early Nineteenth Century. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

Male commentators were more blunt about the hill’s thencurrent perception as a lost world. In an August 1888 issue of the weekly La Lorraine Artiste, journalist F.  Jacquot published a piece titled Archéologie bachique (‘bacchic archaeology’), in which he complained about the way a Bouxières-aux-Dames distillery had recently been advertising its new herb liqueur La Chanoinesse.10 Labels and publicity posters spuriously claimed that the drink was made according to the canonesses’ old recipe from 1670 and depicted them happily involved in its production. But what sense did it make, the journalist wondered, to market a modern product on the back of ‘the canoness and abbey of Bouxières-aux-Dames [both of whom] have long been sleeping in the nothingness of the

The liqueur won several international prizes and medals at exhibitions in the 1880s and 90s; Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 189. Two publicity posters from the 1890s can be viewed at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53127804b.r  = Bouxièresaux-Dames?rk  = 21459;2 and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90114238.r  = Bouxières-aux-Dames?rk = 42918;4# (accessed 21 December 2020). 10 

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INTRODUCTION

past’?11 Publicity stunts such as this one were bound to reflect modern views, tastes, and expectations, and in doing so were also bound to cast an inaccurate light on the canonesses’ legacy. And in yet another commentary from 1899, the Nancy schoolteacher and travel writer Emile Badel (d.  1936) dismissed the religious and their convent as ‘gone  […] and  […] dead  […] buried forever in the dust’. Young people had no interest in the site’s religious past, he added.12 While the lack of material remains on the hill was certainly a contributing factor, in his view the main underlying cause was that the entire concept of an elite convent like that of Bouxières was deeply alien to their experience. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of modernity theorized the perceptions of the past that Lepage and countless others had anecdotally described. They argued that, between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, attitudes to the past had changed dramatically. In their understanding, episodes of profound social, economic, and ideological upheaval in this period gradually conditioned individuals and communities to see the past as non-repeatable, linear, and discontinuous. Anxiety about the relationship between past, present, and future presumably became acute during the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century, when relations with the past were radically disrupted. These circumstances, they argued, put pressure on the pre-modern view of the past as a continuous and cyclical development, during which past structures, relations, and experiences were subject to adjustment and temporary disruption but were never fundamentally challenged. From that point onwards the focus of historical perceptions was on change and on the past and its various legacies as a ‘foreign country’.13 La Lorraine Artiste 6/29 (12 August 1888), p. 112: ‘Il y a longtemps que chanoinesse et abbaye de Bouxières-aux-Dames, dorment dans le néant du passé’. 12  Emile Badel, A  travers la Lorraine. Excursions et souvenirs (Nancy: A.  GrépinLeblond, 1899), pp. 259–265, at p. 262. The relevant passage from this publication is edited and translated in Appendix 1 of this book. 13  Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, ‘Introduction. On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory’, in Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed.  by Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (Brill: Leiden, 2013), pp.  1–23; Brecht Deseure and Judith Pollmann, ‘The Experience of Rupture and the History of Memory’, in Memory Before Modernity, ed. Kuijpers, Pollmann, Müller, and van der Steen, pp. 315–29; Judith Pollmann, Memory 11 

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Over the past decade a number of early modern scholars have challenged this notion of a link between modernity and a radically new form of historical consciousness, by indicating that it derives from preconceived and overly simplistic notions about early modern perceptions of the past in particular. In a critique of earlier discussions, Brecht Leseure and Judith Pollmann pleaded for the ‘need to abandon linear histories of memory in favour of a history that leaves more room for the coexistence, both before and after 1800, of different ways of negotiating the relationships between past and present’.14 During the early modern period too, perceptions of the past were profoundly shaped by experiences of rupture and discontinuity.15 What is more, the resulting feelings of alienation from the past were strikingly similar and arguably often as profound as those that we can ascribe to people living in the later eighteenth century and beyond.16 In their analysis of the journal of an Antwerp citizen named Jan Baptist Van der Straelen (d.  1817), Leseure and Pollmann showed how this front-row witness to the ravages of the Revolution was deeply upset by the dismantling and destruction, on a massive scale, of objects, buildings, and landscapes of memory.17 In his view, this disappearance not only led to a breakdown of historical continuity but also indiin Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Kate Chedgzoy, Elspeth Graham, Katharine Hodgkin, and Ramona Wray, ‘Researching Memory in Early Modern Studies’, Memory Studies, 11 (2018), 5–20. 14  Deseure and Pollmann, ‘The Experience’, p. 318. 15  On ruptures as triggers of historiographical production and archival reorganization, refer to Judith Pollmann, ‘Archiving the Present and Chronicling for the Future in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, 230, Suppl 11 (2016), 231–52. Also Thomas Fuchs, Geschichtsbewusstsein und Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung. Städtechroniken, Kirchenbücher und historische Befragungen in Hessen, 1500 bis 1800 (Marburg: Hessisches Landesamt für Geschichtliche Landeskunde, 2006); Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1525–1635 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Hans Medick, ‘The Thirty Years’ War as Experience and Memory: Contemporary Perceptions of a Macro-Historical Event’, in Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany. Cross Disciplinary Perspectives, ed.  by Lynne Tatlock (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 25–49. 16  Chedgzoy, Graham, Hodgkin, and Wray, ‘Researching Memory’, p.  8. For a perspective from the study of emotions, see Alicia Merchant, ‘A Landscape of Ruins: Decay and Emotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Antiquarian Narratives’, in Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder, ed. by Susan Broomhall (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 109–25. 17  Deseure and Pollmann, ‘The Experience’.

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INTRODUCTION

cated that memory of the past itself was at peril. But at the same time his commentary reveals awareness of how a crisis of this nature was hardly unprecedented, by referring to the Protestant Reformation and the devastating impact of its iconoclasm.18 Van der Straelen’s anguish was fed by memories of that and other crises in which society had struggled to maintain a meaningful connection with the past. Leseure and Pollmann further pointed out that early modern individuals and communities were not simply aware of major ruptures in memory culture, but also adapted their understanding of the past to changed circumstances and refashioned it so as to reconcile it with their present situation.19 This process of refashioning of memories is most famously documented for regions where the Reformation gained a foothold and as a consequence drastically transformed relationships with the past. The new narratives that emerged from these dynamics not only used legitimizing memories to ground the identities of reformers.20 They also creatively addressed the survival, re-use, and re-interpretation of landscapes, buildings, objects, and the social and cultural roles of the phenomena the reformers had sought to overthrow.21 But On the impact of iconoclasm on memory culture, e.g. Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Koenraad Jonckheere, and Ruben Suykerbuyk, ‘Beeldenstorm: Iconoclasm in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries’,  BMGN – The Low Countries Historical Review, 131 (2016), 3–14. 19  H. M. E. P. Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann, ‘Turning Sacrilege into Victory: Catholic Memories of Iconoclasm, 1566–1700’, in Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture, ed.  by Eva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William G. Pooley (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 155–70. 20  Charles  H. Parker, ‘To the Attentive, Nonpartisan Reader. The Appeal to History and National Identity in the Religious Disputes of the Seventeenth-century Netherlands’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 28 (1997), 57–78 and Jesse Spohnholz, ‘Archiving and Narration in Post-Reformation Germany and the Netherlands’, Past & Present, 230, Suppl 11 (2016), 330–48. 21  Richard Cahill, ‘The Sequestration of the Hessian Monasteries’, in Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-economic Impact of Religious Change, c. 1470–1630, ed.  by Beat  A. Kümin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp.  39–56; Nicholas Doggett, Patterns of Re-use: The Transformation of Former Monastic Buildings in Post-Dissolution Hertfordshire, 1540–1600 (Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2002); Duane  J. Corpis, ‘Losing One’s Place: Memory, History, and Space in Post-Reformation Germany’, in Enduring Loss, ed. Tatlock, pp.  327–67; and Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape. Religion, Identity, & Memory in Early Modern Britain & Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18 

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in Catholic parts of Europe too, disruptions and transformations over the course of the early modern period compelled individuals and communities to address the loss of memories and the fact that former narratives of past identity were rapidly becoming foreign to their own experiences and expectations.22 Like their Protestant contemporaries they addressed these challenges by working creatively with legacies from the past, and by adapting their interpretation to changed circumstances. Religious institutions and their members were obviously not immune to these phenomena. The high significance these groups awarded to lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’, an expression that was coined originally to designate specific places, but now covers any document, object, building, locus, and landscape that can carry memories of the past)23 in the construction of a shared identity made them particularly vulnerable to memory crises. Across Europe, groups of both religious men and women of the early modern period were forced to temporarily or permanently abandon their former residence and/or face the confiscation or outright destruction of archives and manuscripts, inscribed objects, pictures and statues, and sacred and communal spaces.24 But it did not take such drastic events to compel them to revise their relationship with the past. The accidental loss of memorial markers; reform attempts by the Church hierarchy; changing expectations and perceptions by the secular world; alterations to the legal status of institutions and their inmates; demographic, geographic, and other shifts in the recruitment of new members; personal relations and internal dynamics within a community: all Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder. European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23  Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1982–94). 24  Two of the better-known examples are the communities (both male and female) that faced extinction at the time of the Dissolution in England and the English nuns who settled on the Continent in the seventeenth century. On the former, see Mary Carpenter Erler, Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Nuns and Friars 1530–1558 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013). And on the latter, Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe. English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Also refer to Walker’s study of the Bridgettines of Syon in ‘Continuity and Isolation: The Bridgettines of Syon in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c.  1400–1700, ed.  by E.  A.  Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 155–76. 22 

24

INTRODUCTION

these and a host of other factors necessitated minor and major adaptations to the narrative of the communal past and to the way in which various legacies of that past were viewed and handled. The closer one is able to look at the ways each generation in religious houses related to their immediate and more distant predecessors, the more it becomes obvious that this relationship was in an almost continuous state of flux. However, for obvious reasons major and drastic transitions and the response to these are far easier to detect in the primary evidence than smaller and gradual ones, and also far more attractive to describe and analyse. This is reflected in the current state of scholarship on memory cultures in institutions of women religious. By far the most popular focus has been on historiographical narratives,25 including the way in which foundation accounts were revised in response to changing conditions of convent life.26 But studies also abound on how female convent members viewed and treated their medieval archives, saints’ cults, and other traditions. Likewise, we can see how they went about revising regulations and statutes in light of new circumstances and expectations,27 and how they lived in and remodelled their medieval living quarters. Specific objects, such as relics and inscriptions, were also adapted or treated differently with the passage of time,28 as well as the religious and secular landscape in which institutions were situated.29 Typically though,

25  Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Kate J.  P.  Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); and Erika Kuijpers, ‘‘O, Lord, Save us from Shame’: Narratives of Emotions in Convent Chronicles by Female Authors During the Dutch Revolt, 1566–1635’, in Gender and Emotions, ed. Broomhall, pp. 127–46. 26  Cynthia  J. Cyrus, Received Medievalisms: A  Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women’s Convents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 27  Barbara Lawatsch Melton, ‘Loss and Gain in a Salzburg Convent: Tridentine Reform, Princely Absolutism, and the Nuns of Nonnberg (1620 to 1696)’, in Enduring Loss, ed. Tatlock, pp. 259–80. 28  Helen Hills, ‘Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Naples’, in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe. An Interdisciplinary View, ed.  by Cordula van Wyhe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 11–38. 29  On the importance of place in early modern identity narratives, Chedgzoy, Graham, Hodgkin, and Wray, ‘Researching Memory’, pp. 11–12.

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publications that illuminate such activity work from a short-term perspective, or rather concentrate on a specific transition or a specific era of major transitions and look at responses to this. While this approach allows for in-depth contextualization, it offers relatively few opportunities for observing less dramatic, longterm processes of change, or for reconstructing how successive responses to ruptures and transitions had, for successive generations of convent members, a cumulative effect on the perception of the past. Early Modern Canonesses: A ‘Black Hole’ of Memory Research

A second major lacuna in scholarship on perceptions of the past by groups of women religious derives from the fact that most studies so far have focussed on cloistered communities of nuns and (to a lesser degree) regular canonesses and that in contrast, very little research is available for so-called secular canonesses.30 Unlike those former groups, secular canonesses were not bound by enclosure, were free to abandon their calling in order to marry or enter another religious community, often lived in their own house on or near the convent site, owned private property, and received an allowance (also known as a prebend). In some places they did

For France, see Les chapitres de dames nobles entre France et Empire, ed. by Michel Parisse and Pierre Heili (Paris: Editions Messene, 1998); Corinne Marchal, ‘Définir et inventorier les chapitres nobles de la France du xviiie siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 99 (2013), 115–26; and (by the same) ‘La circulation du modèle séculier de chapitre noble par les relations entre les compagnies de chanoinesses (Franche-Comté–Lorraine,  fin du xviie  siècle–xviiie  siècle)’, in Entre ciel et terre: Oeuvres et résistances de femmes de Gênes à Liège (xe–xviiie  siècle), ed.  by Marie-Elisabeth Henneau, Corinne Marchal, and Julie Piront,  2  vols, forthcoming. An important recent publication for the Low Countries is Chanoines et chanoinesses des anciens Pays-Bas: Le chapitre de Maubeuge du ixe au xviiie siècle, ed.  by Jean Heuclin and Christophe Leduc (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2019). And for the Empire, refer among many other studies to Studien zum Kanonissenstift, ed. by Irene Crusius (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001); the volumes in the series Essener Forschungen zum Frauenstift, 15  vols (Essen: Klartext, 2002–18); and Helmut Flachenecker, ‘Damenstifte in der Germania Sacra. Überblick und Forschungsfragen’, in Räume und Identitäten. Stiftsdamen und Damenstifte in Augsburg und Edelstetten, ed.  by Dietmar Schiersner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 17–43. 30 

26

INTRODUCTION

not have to profess vows, although they were expected to observe chastity and obedience to the abbess as long as they were convent members. The distinct status of their institutions was heightened by the growing emphasis, over the course of the later Middle Ages and especially throughout the early modern period, on recruiting individuals with a noble background.31 These features determined how such communities were perceived within early modern and modern culture.32 Alphonse de Lamartine, a nineteenth-century poet and son of a former canoness, famously described these places as ‘what one might call free cloisters where the door was halfway open to the world; a form of imperfect secularization of yesterday’s religious orders; an elegant and tender transition from the Church to the world’.33 To him and countless other observers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these places seemed more like secular female institutions given legitimacy for contemporaries by an external structure and governance that was only nominally religious.34 As a result of this, secular canonesses very much remained a fringe interest in the study of early modern society and culture. It was only in the 1980s that these women were put on the agenda as a major research focus. Scholars began to document the changes that institutions of noble canonesses (a miscellaneous 31  Admittedly this is a trait that these places shared with a number of houses of regular canonesses, especially in France; Corinne Marchal, ‘Les chapitres nobles de dames lorrains et comtois au xviiie siècle: Les caractères uniformisateurs d’une identité nobiliaire d’exclusion’, in Lorraine, Bourgogne et Franche-Comté. Mille ans d’histoire. Actes du colloque tenu les 13 et 14 novembre 2009 au Conseil Régional de Lorraine, ed.  by François Roth (Moyenmotier: Comité d’histoire régionale, 2001), pp. 271–88 and (by the same) ‘Définir’. 32  Corinne Marchal, ‘L’éducation et la culture des chanoinesses nobles dans la France du xviiie siècle’, in Mélanges offerts à Roger Marchal. De l’éventail à la plume (Nancy: Presses Universitaire de Nancy, 2007), pp. 181–94. 33  Alphonse de Lamartine, Confidences (Paris: Perrotin, 1850), p.  31: ‘Des espèces de cloîtres libres  […] dont la porte restait  à demi  ouverte  au monde; une sorte de sécularisation imparfaite des ordres religieux d’autrefois; une transition élégante et douce entre l’Eglise et le monde’. 34  Refer among other commentaries to the gently satirical description of the life of a noble canoness in Alexandre Dumas’s novel Mémoires d’une aveugle: Madame du Deffand (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867), p.  107 and to the outright damning judgement in Cardinal François-Désiré Mathieu’s study L’Ancien Régime en Lorraine et Barrois, d’après des documents inédits (1698–1789) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1907 (third edition)), p. 73.

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cohort that encompassed groups of secular canonesses and some regular ones) had experienced over the course of the later medieval and early modern eras: in governance and administration; in the social and financial status of members; in their occupation and appearance; and in the way communities and individuals interacted with lay society.35 And since the later 1990s these research interests have been amplified with studies that have looked at the response to various reform trends;36 leadership practices and challenges;37 aspects of devotion and daily life;38 the arrangement and rearrangement of religious and secular space;39 the role of Among others Françoise Boquillon, Les chanoinesses de Remiremont (1566–1790). Contribution à l’histoire de la noblesse dans l’église (Remiremont: Société d’histoire locale de Remiremont et de sa région, 2000). For a perspective on the Empire, refer to Ute Küppers-Braun, ‘Zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Hochadelsstifte im Nordwesten des Alten Reiches im 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Studien, ed. by Crusius, pp.  348–94 and Flachenecker, ‘Damenstifte’. For a comparative outlook on the situation of a Protestant community of noble canonesses, see Renate Oldermann, Kloster Walsrode – vom Kanonissenstift zum evangelischen Damenkloster. Monastisches Frauenleben im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Bremen: Temmen, 2004). 36  Boquillon, Les chanoinesses and Corinne Marchal, ‘Le coutumier de l’abbaye de Baume-les-Dames (1685) de la Bibliothèque Nationale’, Mémoires de la Société d’émulation du Doubs (2015), 357–71. An earlier case study is that by Michel Pernot, ‘Catherine de Lorraine, abbesse de Remiremont. Réflexions sur l’échec d’une réforme’, in Remiremont, l’abbaye et la ville. Actes des journées d’études vosgiennes, Remiremont 17–20 avril 1980, ed.  by Michel Parisse (Nancy: Publications de l’université de Nancy II, 1980), pp. 95–127. 37  Sabine  Klapp, Das Äbtissinnenamt in den unterelsässischen Frauenstiften vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert: Umkämpft, verhandelt, normiert  (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012) and Teresa Schröder-Stapper, ‘Fürstäbtissinnen im Alten Reich. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen politischen Handelns (Essen, Herford, Quedlinburg)’, in Neue Räume – neue Strukturen. Barockisierung mittelalterlicher Frauenstifte, ed.  by Klaus-Gereon Beuckers and Birgitta Falk (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014), pp. 347–68. 38  Jean Heuclin, La vie quotidienne des chanoinesses de Sainte-Aldegonde à Maubeuge du viie au xviiie siècle  (Maubeuge: Les Amis du Livre, 2000); Françoise Boquillon, ‘La religion des chanoinesses nobles à travers leurs écrits’, in L’écriture du croyant, ed. by Louis Châtellier and Philippe Martin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp.  93–100; and Corinne Marchal, ‘L’utilisation du temps libre par les membres des chapitres nobles de Franche-Comté au xviiie siècle’, in Mélanges offerts au professeur Maurice Gresset. Des institutions et des hommes, ed.  by François Lassus, Paul Delsalle, Corinne Marchal, and François Vion-Delphin (Besançon: Presses universitaires de FrancheComté, 2007), pp. 485–94. 39  Raphaël Tassin, ‘L’oeuvre architectural des chanoinesses de Remiremont: Un chapitre de Dames nobles dans le rôle de commanditaire’, in Bâtir au féminin? Traditions et stratégies en Europe et dans l’Empire ottoman, ed.  by Sabine Frommel (Paris: A&J Picard, 2013), pp.  249–62; Neue Räume – neue Strukturen. Barockisierung mittelalter35 

28

INTRODUCTION

lay agents and clerics in these communities;40 and the perception by outsiders of canonesses and their lifestyle. But despite this proliferation of research interests, the way in which these groups engaged with the past remains something of a ‘black hole’ in specialist discussions, for three major reasons. One is that there has been little interest by those working on the early modern life of these communities in considering the relationship – whether institutional or of perceptions – with their medieval incarnations. Another is the common notion that these women did not engage in the same intense manner with the communal past as their cloistered peers – or indeed did not identify as strongly with the community to which they belonged in the present. And the third reason for the occlusion of their relationship with memory derives from the idea that noble canonesses had on average little interest in spiritual or intellectual activity. Alongside reports about low-witted and ill-educated individuals,41 anecdotal accounts of groups of such women that left their archives in disarray, refused outsiders access to their records, or indicated that they had no interest in the distant past of their institution seemed to give credence to the scholarly view that looking into the subject would not yield particularly interesting results.42 Nevertheless, a number of recent studies have indicated that the engagement of early modern canonesses with the communal past is less of a non-subject than previously thought. They have done so indirectly, by looking at how Clarisse nuns (a strand of religious life for women with many similarities to that of noble canonesses) in Germany processed feelings of rupture and loss of licher Frauenstifte, ed. by Klaus G. Beuckers and Brigitta Falk (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2015); and Julia von Ditfurth, ‘Stilcollage – Zur Ausstattung der gotischen Stiftskirche in Thorn zwischen Renaissance und Klassizismus’, in Fragen, Perspektiven und Aspekte der Erforschung mittelalterlicher Frauenstifte. Beiträge der Abschlusstagung des Essener Arbeitskreises für die Erforschung des Frauenstifts, ed.  by Klaus  G. Beuckers and Thomas Schilp (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2018), pp. 219–65. 40  Corinne Marchal, ‘Le clergé et la vie religieuse à Baume-les-Dames au xviiie siècle’, Mémoires de la Société d’émulation du Doubs, 47 (2005), 111–48 and (by the same) ‘La place des hommes d’Eglise dans la défense des intérêts des chapitres nobles féminins à la cour au xviiie  siècle (Franche-Comté, Lorraine, Pays-Bas français)’,  in Entre ciel et terre, ed. by Henneau, Marchal, and Piront, forthcoming. 41  Marchal, ‘L’éducation’. 42  Alexis Donetzkoff, ‘Les archives du chapitre de Sainte-Aldegonde de Maubeuge’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp. 349–55, at p. 350.

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memories during the Reformation.43 And they have also started taking an interest in how outsiders in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to see houses of noble canonesses as a legitimate subject of historical enquiry.44 But a handful of studies have also considered the issue directly, for instance by looking at canonesses’ commemorative practices or at the way they handled and perceived their medieval archives.45 And in recent years there has also been a trend to consider how these women reshaped communal narratives of the past in response to the Tridentine reform movement.46 All these developments in scholarship have helped put the subject on the scholarly agenda and have yielded opportunities for comparative analysis across institutional, regional, and even confessional boundaries. But, as with studies of women’s religious communities in general, they also have their limitations. Most tend to look at one or a few specific moments of rupture and revision of the past; consider memorial cultures from the viewpoint either of outsiders or of insiders; rely on a limited range of sources; and finally also make a rigid distinction between the period before and after the dissolution of their sites of study.47 Susanne Knackmuss, ‘Ein Glaube und ein Schaafstall… oder cuius regio – eius monasterium? Überlegungen zur Implementierung des Stiftsgedankens im Nürnberger Klarissenkloster St  Clara’, in Reform – Reformation – Säkularisation. Frauenstifte in Krisenzeiten, ed.  by Thomas Schilp (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2004), pp. 123–54. 44  Refer for instance to the French nobleman Ferdinand Ignace Malotau de Villerode’s (d.  1752) unpublished monograph on the history of all houses of noble canonesses (Douai, Biblothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 938); see Gilles Deregnaucourt, ‘Un document inédit sur les chapitres de chanoinesses nobles: Le manuscrit de Ferdinand Ignace Malotau de Villerode conservé à la Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai (ms. 938, 1750)’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp. 209–14. 45  Thomas Schilp, ‘Memoria: Kultur der Erinnerung und Vergessen. Überlegungen zur Frauengemeinschaft Clarenberg bei Dortmund-Hörde im 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Reformations and their Impact on the Culture of Memoria, ed. by Truus van Bueren, Paul Cockerham, Caroline Horsch, Martine Meuwese, and Thomas Schilp (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 121–40. 46  Corinne Marchal, ‘Les abbayes de chanoinesses nobles de Franche-Comté confrontées à la réforme post-tridentine’, in Entre ciel et terre, ed.  by Henneau, Marchal, and Piront, forthcoming. 47  A  rare example of a study that looks at post-dissolution memories is Christoph Fasbender, ‘Die Aufhebung des Frauenstifts Wetter bei Marburg. Eine Fallstudie zu 43 

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INTRODUCTION

As a result it remains difficult for us to get a view of long-term continuities and disruptions in the memory culture of communities of noble canonesses. And another consequence is that it remains hard for us to see how various perceptions and practices as they emerged during these episodes influenced not only later generations of women who lived in these places, but also the clerics and the laymen and -women who worked for them, the outsiders who interacted with them, and even the people who (literally or metaphorically) wandered a convent’s site after it was dissolved. These unanswered questions relate to bigger ones, two of which must be singled out here. One is about the supposed contrast between early modern and modern memory cultures and about arguments of continuity and disruption in both of these. And another is about the gendered dimension of early memorial cultures, in particular women’s agency in the politics of memory work and memorialization. There are different ways in which we can address these gaps in research. This book employs one of them, which is to look at how perceptions of the past of a single institution of secular canonesses and the handling of its various legacies evolved over the course of several hundred years, from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the second quarter of the nineteenth. Some might object that the choice of Bouxières abbey for this type of investigation is far from obvious. The convent was small, had a (comparatively speaking) tiny estate, and did not yield any leaders, authors, or artists whose work resonated beyond the convent’s walls. And on account of their status as secular canonesses, convent members typically spent much less time on site than cloistered monastics and regular canonesses and engaged far less in communal activities, both of which presumably made them less inclined to take much of an interest in the communal past. Against the idea that Bouxières might not be an ideal pick for this research speaks the fact that the source record for this institution comprises a large and extraordinary diverse range of testimonies, by insiders and outsiders, on how the early modern convent members engaged with legacies and narratives of the communal past. These

den Folgen der Reformation für das kulturelle Erbe des Mittelalters in Hessen’, in Reform – Reformation – Säkularisation, ed. Schilp, pp. 155–74.

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accounts provide us with a detailed view of how they read, lived in, and adapted convent space; handled and interpreted memorial objects and documents; viewed and reviewed the convent’s medieval narrative of origins; created new memories and discarded others; and shaped outsiders’ perceptions of all this. And an added advantage of this multiplicity of testimonies is that we get glimpses of how some of these objects, documents, narratives, and spaces acquired – and subsequently lost – a profound biographical significance for individual members.48 Two further things make the evidence for this institution even more compelling. The first is that it allows us to reconstruct the Bouxières canonesses’ paradoxical relationship with the past. On the one hand, they were deeply preoccupied by the need to argue a continuous link between their convent and the abbey’s tenth-century origins: various objects and accounts that referred to those origins and early history remained a crucial presence in their lives. But on the other hand, the canonesses relied on these same legacies to pursue and justify drastic changes in the identity narrative, organization, activities, and even geographical location of their institution. As such, their memorial culture corresponds with a series of transactions described by Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith as a complex dynamic between past and present, individual and collective, public and private, recall and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, conscious and unconscious fears or desires. Always mediated, cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit memory. Acts of memory are thus acts of performance, representation, and interpretation.49

The evidence for the Bouxières community in the early modern period yields an image of a creative and highly elastic memorial culture, located in moveable objects rather than (as outsiders and modern commentators often assumed) in a fixed place. This elas48  Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles, ‘A Feeling for Things, Past and Present’, in Feeling Things. Objects and Emotions Through History, ed.  by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 8–23. 49  Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, ‘Feminism and Cultural Memory’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2002), 1–19, at p. 5.

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INTRODUCTION

ticity explains why that memorial culture lived on throughout a series of profound crises and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even beyond the abbey’s dissolution. A  second additional reason for focussing on Bouxières abbey is that analysis of its unusually rich and diverse evidence holds the promise of extending more broadly our current understanding of the gendered nature of early modern memorial cultures. More specifically, this focussing has the potential to build a significant argument on how the production of cultural memory took place in simultaneous interaction with gendered identities and ‘other forms of socio-cultural organization (such as social rank, religion, politics)’.50 To once again quote Hirsch and Smith, ‘gender, along with race and class, marks identities in specific ways and provides a means by which cultural memory is located in a specific context rather than subsumed into monolithic and essentialist categories’.51 Actions and episodes from the convent’s last two and a half centuries allow us to observe the canonesses’ efforts to control and transform their physical environment, objects, and narratives in order to manipulate the convent’s memorial culture. And they also offer us glimpses of the factors that enabled the women to do this: their institutional authority (most notably as abbesses); social standing (as members of the regional and national aristocracies); their religious and social identity as part of this exclusive convent; and finally also their access to various resources and networks. And for nearly half a century beyond the dissolution, we can observe how some of the ex-canonesses included various reminders of the former convent in their narratives of self – narratives that, like the story of their convent, were shaped by a complex convergence of factors. This study therefore offers notable evidence to build Chedgzoy, Graham, Hodgkin, and Wray, ‘Researching Memory’, pp.  13–14. The authors argue that ‘approaches to early modern memory often continue to locate women as cultural memory’s marginalized ‘other’ in a dynamic which reflects and re-enacts a division between memory as technique and memory as affect’. See however Katharine Hodgkin, ‘Women, Memory and Family History in SeventeenthCentury England’, in Memory Before Modernity, ed. Kuijpers, Pollmann, Müller, and van der Steen, pp. 297–313. 51  Hirsch and Smith, ‘Feminism’, p.  6. A  publication that applies these notions to a concrete case study is Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World. Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 50 

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on, and give added depth to, pioneering scholarship on women’s memory politics and its embedding in texts, objects, and spaces.52 None of what will be said in the following pages is intended as an argument about how all groups of canonesses (let alone all groups of women religious) looked at the communal past. Rather, this book relies on the micro-historical approach precisely to argue, one, how memorial cultures in female religious contexts of the early modern period were marked by extreme plasticity. And two, that we can only understand this plasticity if we are prepared to study it at the intersection of a range of local and supra-local dynamics, the sheer complexity of which is partially lost if we take a more general view. A Very Short History of Bouxières Abbey53

Like so many religious institutions of the early and high medieval periods, the origins of Bouxières abbey as a religious community are somewhat obscure. What we do know is that before the creation of a Benedictine nunnery the hill was occupied by a small group of women who pursued a quasi-eremitical lifestyle.54 Susan Broomhall’s work on women, power, and materiality explores aspects of these themes, e.g. ‘Imagined Domesticities in Early Modern Dutch Dollhouses’, Parergon 24 (2007), 47–67; ‘Materializing Women: Dynamic Interactions of Gender and Materiality in Early Modern Europe’, in The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Amanda L. Capern (London: Routledge, 2018), pp.  311–34; and ‘Making Power: Gender, Materiality, Performativity and Catherine de’ Medici‘, in Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400–1800, ed.  by Elise  M. Dermineur, Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, and V.  Langum (New York:  Routledge, 2019), pp. 145–68. 53  The only full account of the abbey’s history is in Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’. Two unpublished master’s theses provide a description of (respectively) the abbey’s medieval estate and its institutions and membership in the early modern period; Anne Mougenot, L’abbaye de Bouxières-aux-Dames au Moyen Age (Université Nancy  II, 1981) and Christelle Poirier, Le chapitre de dames nobles de Bouxières-aux-Dames (Université Nancy II, 2001–2). 54  The abbey’s origins and earliest history have enjoyed by far the most attention from historians; Augustin Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Lorraine, 4  vols (Nancy: Jean-Baptiste Cusson, 1728), 1, col. 890–94; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 129–46; Les origines de l’abbaye de Bouxières-aux-Dames au diocèse de Toul: Reconstitution du chartrier et édition critique des chartes antérieures à 1200, ed.  by Robert-Henri Bautier (Nancy: Société d’archéologie lorraine, 1987); Klaus Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung 52 

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INTRODUCTION

According to a note in a 1560 archive inventory, a now-lost charter by Bishop Gozelin of Toul dated 8 March 930 described several such individuals living in a chapel situated at the hilltop, and that Bishop Gozelin was giving them some orchards, fisheries, and the tithes of a local church to build a few small dwellings and establish a cemetery.55 At this point Gozelin probably acted as proxy for a widowed noblewoman named Hersendis, who had donated parts of her dower to the bishop with the express purpose of sponsoring the Bouxières women. By doing so, she apparently succeeded in her goal of consolidating this religious settlement without triggering a claim by her husband’s heirs. Assisting her in the earliest stage of the community’s existence were a number of relatives, including her widowed daughter-in-law Countess Eva of Chaumontois, and Eva’s son (and Hersendis’s grandson) Odelric, who later became lay abbot of Bouxières and later still archbishop of Reims. Other widows from aristocratic families in the area likewise used their dowers to support the community: several of them received a burial in the later abbey church or had one or several of their daughters enter the community.56 All these individuals were personally connected, either via family ties or otherwise, to Bishop Gozelin. Less than a decade after the settlement was first established, Gozelin himself stepped in to claim control over this informal community and turn it into a consolidated monastic institution that followed, to a greater or lesser extent, the Rule of St Benedict. To mark the creation of the new convent he issued a charter, which is dated 13 January 938.57 The text of that prestigious document

des Benediktinerinnenklosters Notre-Dame de Bouxières. Eine wiedergefundene Urkunde des 10. Jahrhunderts’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 110 (2002), 182–90; John Nightingale, Monasteries and Patrons in the Gorze Reform. Lotharingia, c. 850–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.  148–66; Michel Parisse, ‘Un évêque réformateur: Gauzelin de Toul (922–962)’, in Ad Libros! Mélanges d’études médiévales offerts à Denise Angers et Joseph-Claude Poulin, ed.  by Jean-François Cottier, Martin Gravel, and Sébastien Rossignol (Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2010), pp.  69–82; and Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries. The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800–1050 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 95–102. 55  Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 3, pp. 67–68. 56  Nightingale, Monasteries, pp. 148–64. 57  Edited in Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung’, pp. 188–190.

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begins by recounting how the bishop was on a pastoral tour of the parishes in his diocese when he found ‘an old sanctuary dedicated to the Mother of God Mary, which was very dilapidated due to a lack of care  […] where those who are suffering from various infirmities are healed by [her] prayers and where the common people often gather to worship [her]’.58 He enlisted the help of Abbot Ercambold of Saint-Evre, an abbey of which Gozelin had overseen the Benedictine reform in 934, to assist him in the task of installing a community of Benedictine women.59 By the foresight of God, the charter text continues, he found a few religious women already on site, who were ‘wandering like sheep in search of the pasture of eternal life, [and] were burning with love for God and who wished to serve that remote place’. Moved by commiseration, he subjected them to a Benedictine regime, established a ‘cell’ for them to live in, and gave them an abbess named Rothildis.60 He then confirmed the community’s properties (including those donated by Hersendis) and added a few more, ordained that the women owed nothing to future bishops as long as they handed over two pounds of candle wax annually, and awarded them the freedom to elect their own abbess. Finally, he also arranged for the sisters to sing two psalms for his salvation daily, and to give him a place of honour in their commemorative prayers after his death.61 To add further weight to his goal of Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung’, p.  188: ‘repperimus quandam antiquam basilicam honore Dei genitricis Mariae dicatam, sed per incuriam valde neglectam, sitam quoque in quodam montis devexo ad cuius radicem est villa posita quae dicitur Buxeria, ubi, quia eiusdem Dei genitricis precibus sanabantur infirmi diversis detemptis langoribus et vota vulgaris populi ibidem confluebant sepius, divina inspirante clementia, id statuere dignum duximus ne diutius divinis careret cultibus […]’. 59  Robert-Henri Bautier speculates that Gozelin and Ercambold had been looking to establish a female subsidiary institution of Saint-Evre; Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 18. On other possible motives, see Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, pp. 95–102. 60  Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung’, p.  188: ‘Deo preordinante, invenimus quasdam sanctimoniales, velut oves errantes sed tamen aeternae vitae pascua querentes, Dei dilectione ferventes et ad serviendum illi locum remotum desiderantes, quarum miseratione permoti, consultu praedicti abbatis ceterorumque Deum timentium nostrorumque fidelium, iam dictam cellulam eis ad habitandum delegavimus, praeficientes illis unam earum, Rothildim scilicet, abbatissam, quae illarum regeret vitam’. 61  Gozelin’s instructions for the sisters’ intercessory and commemorative prayers in his honour closely mirror those which he presumably inscribed in a 936 charter for Saint-Evre. The text of that document (the authenticity of which is uncertain) was edited in Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, Preuves, col. 342. 58 

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INTRODUCTION

becoming the focus of the community’s commemorative prayers, on his death Gozelin also left to the abbey a substantial collection of personal items, including a chalice, paten, evangeliary, and an ivory comb. These later became part of the abbey’s famous relic treasure (discussed in Chapter 2 of this book). Gozelin’s aristocratic and ecclesiastical connections and the abbey’s strategic location in the former middle Kingdom of Lotharingia (at the time a much-contested borderland region between West Francia and the emerging German empire) subsequently brought this small monastic establishment to the attention of local and East Frankish aristocrats. This dynamic led to a steady flow of donations, which slowed down in the aftermath of Gozelin’s death in 962 and came to a virtual standstill towards the end of the next decade. The abbey’s stunted growth and the foundation in the area of a considerable number of new female institutions condemned the abbey to a marginal place in Lorraine’s religious landscape.62 After a century and a half during which it was controlled by the bishop of Toul, in the later 1100s Bouxières ended up in the sphere of influence of the dukes of Lorraine.63 This transition likely coincided with the start of the gradual transformation of the convent from one of cloistered religious into one of canonesses. Besides the impact on the status and lifestyle of the women, this process also entailed an admission strategy for new members that became increasingly geared at individuals from the higher nobility in Lorraine and in neighbouring regions in present-day France, Germany, Luxemburg, and Switzerland. These shifts and a prudent financial policy brought relative prosperity in the early 1400s, which the canonesses used (among other things) to fuel the popular cult of St  Gozelin and the reputation of the hill at Bouxières as a destination for pilgrims. But beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century the abbey entered a 200-year-long phase where periods of relative calm alternated with episodes of disruption. Recurrent warfare and political instability in the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth century exposed the Lorraine region, and especially this unprotected, relatively

62  63 

Mougenot, L’abbaye. Les origines, ed. Bautier.

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isolated rural institution, to acute danger.64 These circumstances forced evacuations of precious assets and convent members that lasted years or in some cases even decades. And between these episodes, life at the convent was often troubled by internal clashes. These derived from a number of things, including differences of opinion over the authority of the abbess (particularly in matters that touched on members’ lifestyle and financial status) and from disagreements stemming from the strict requirements for admission of new members. Contemporary efforts by Tridentine agents to bring more structure and rigour to the devotional practices of canonesses also left their mark. And there were moves to combat absenteeism, and also to impose a unified ‘corporate’ identity. But each time new statutes were issued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these texts insisted on the personal freedom of the members, awarded them prebends or individually assigned incomes, and rejected the principle of community life except for office and chapter meetings.65 These disruptions and tensions did not prevent ongoing moves to shift Bouxières abbey towards ever more exclusivity. Its modest estate, unimpressive buildings, and small membership (twelve to fourteen on average until the mid-1780s) made it pale in comparison with the three other houses of secular canonesses in Lorraine: an early modern saying compared the ‘servants of Bouxières’ to the ‘housemaids of Poussay’, ‘demoiselles of Epinal’, and ‘ladies of Remiremont’.66 But despite all these things, over the course of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the abbey on the hill rose to a position of prestige which equalled, and eventually may even have surpassed, that of the much larger and far wealthier

64  The overviews of Lorraine’s history by Robert Parisot, Histoire de la Lorraine, 4 vols (Paris: Picart, 1919–24) and Jean Schneider, Histoire de la Lorraine (Vendôme: Presses universitaires de France, 1950) remain essential. On the Thirty Year’s War there is Philippe Martin, Une guerre de Trente Ans en Lorraine 1631–1661 (Metz: Serpenoise, 2002); and on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Laurent Jalabert and Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet,  La Lorraine pour horizon. La France et les duchés de René II à Stanislas (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016). 65  Poirier, ‘Le chapitre’ and the discussions in Chapters 3 to 5 of this book. 66  Jean-Jacques Lionnois, Histoire des villes vielle et neuve de Nancy, depuis leur fondation jusqu’en 1788, 200 ans après la fondation de la Ville-Neuve, 3 vols (Nancy: Haener Père, 1805–11), 1, p.  608: ‘Servantes de Bouxières  […] Dames de Remiremont, Demoiselles d’Epinal, Femmes de Chambre de Poussay’.

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INTRODUCTION

abbey of Remiremont.67 Driving that development were several key interventions in the recruitment and status of the women. A  system was put in place whereby established dames capitulantes (canonesses with a seat in the abbey chapter) would, as tantes, receive a nièce or young girl into their home and provide the girl with some education: accordingly the number of young women who spent time at the convent as a nièce in anticipation of an advantageous marriage alliance rose significantly. Mighty patrons further boosted the process that drove the institution to the very top of the country’s elite convents for women: from the 1760s onwards, only applicants who could demonstrate their noble ancestry going back eight generations on both sides were accepted. Furthermore, the abbey’s administrators now squarely aimed to recruit new members from the highest ranks of the French nobility, in particular families with links to the court. These long-term trends, along with growing criticism of noble canonesses and their service to society, spurred the chapter’s decision, in 1784, to turn the convent into an institution with an educational mission. As far as we can tell, the abbey’s leadership envisaged a model that was situated somewhere between that of a traditional convent school and that of the nineteenth-century finishing schools for young ladies.68 The implications of this decision were immense. Among other things, there were plans to increase the membership from fourteen to forty-two members (twenty-four tantes and an equal number of nièces), set very high admission fees, and relocate the abbey from its 800-year-old site on the hill to a new urban location in Nancy. Preparations for this deeply transformative process were under way when the French Revolution reached Lorraine.69 In October 1789 the canonesses fled to Nancy, where they held their last chapter meetings on 12 and 13 January 1791. Shortly afterwards, the community was dispersed and its assets were seized.

In the decades prior to the French Revolution, Bouxières was among the most exclusive of the twelve secular chapters or convents of noble canonesses in France; Marchal, ‘Définir’. 68  Christelle Poirier, ‘La translation du chapitre noble de Bouxières à Nancy à la fin du xviie siècle’, Annales de l’Est (2007), 123–40. 69  On Lorraine during the French Revolution, Eric Hartmann, La Révolution française en Alsace et en Lorraine (Paris: Perrin, 1990). 67 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Understanding Bouxières Abbey’s Modern Memory Culture

While the purpose of this book is straightforward, namely to reconstruct how Bouxières’ past was understood in the early modern period, its approach is unusual in several respects. To begin with, it looks at these perceptions over a long period of time in order to examine the way individuals and groups reshaped the abbey’s history at different stages of its existence, responding to present pressures and ambitions by reconfiguring the past. Secondly, the book considers a wide range of testimonies, by outsiders and insiders, and attempts as much as is possible to give the analysis a textual, iconographic, and material dimension. In so doing, it charts the members’ evolving attitudes to various lieux de mémoire, exploring the importance of foundational texts, objects, and spaces to collective identity, and charting the gradual disengagement of this collective identity from direct association with the abbey’s medieval origins and with its physical location. Thirdly, this study dispenses with the traditional cut-off of early 1791 and looks beyond that point into the 1830s. It does so to show that in the post-dissolution period too, individuals and groups of individuals thought of the abbey’s past and its memorial legacies as things that bore direct relevance to their lives and self-understanding. Finally and perhaps most unusually, the argument takes a reverse chronological approach. This avoids a reconstruction that is linear and forward-looking, and neither overemphasizes the disruptive impact of successive crises on the canonesses’ memorial culture nor gives undue weight to the continuity of certain perceptions and practices. Guiding the reader back through time, the book gradually reveals the simultaneously cumulative and elastic character of collective memory. In doing all these things, this study provides evidence in support of recent observations about notions of continuity and disruption in early modern memory culture. The first two chapters deal with post-dissolution memories of the abbey and the handling of its most precious material legacies. In Chapter 1, we look at what the last canonesses did with the abbey’s Trésor des chartes or charter treasure, and what that tells us about their hopes for a resurrection and their perception of these documents as legal and memorial markers. Among other 40

INTRODUCTION

things, it shows us the dying convent’s focus on the charter treasure as a first of two key ‘sites of memory’ of the community’s past, a meaning that had been rendered acutely relevant to the canonesses after they had decided to abandon their old site and move to Nancy. In Chapter 2, we look at the clandestine removal by the canonesses of the abbey’s famous relic treasure. In doing so we consider how this relic treasure was perceived pre-dissolution, how it re-emerged in 1801, and why, more than four decades later, it lost much of its accumulated meaning as a second major site of memory of the communal past. These actions, attitudes, and developments also reveal that the canonesses interpreted the events of 1789–91 not as final, but as a repeat of past crises, so prompting them to act with hope and resilience drawn from a shared collective memory. But at the same time, their reverential treatment of the charter and relic treasures stands in stark contrast with the canonesses’ lack of interest in the ancient convent site and in other material legacies of the medieval past, for reasons that are explained in the second part of the book. Chapters 3 to 5 take us to the period before the dissolution. In the first of these, we consider the transformation of the convent in the 1780s: how this transformation was planned, debated, and implemented, and what it meant for the status of the hill site as a place that signalled continuity and disruption in the regional and communal past. Chapter 3 also considers how the canonesses made some hard choices about what objects and narrative legacies would still hold meaning for them in their future incarnation as an urban convent, and how these choices impacted on the village community at Bouxières. Chapter 4 takes us one generation further back in time. It looks at the abbey as a site of memory through the eyes of nobleman Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt, whose report of a visit to the hill in June 1766 bears witness to the canonesses’ uneasy, shifting relationship with their institution’s medieval past. And the fifth and final chapter begins with the 1692 publication of a fanciful re-retelling of the abbey’s medieval foundation narrative, from there expanding into a discussion of how three seventeenth-century abbesses tried to ease tensions within the community by refashioning memories of the community’s origins. In particular, we see that external pressure 41

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

to revert to a stricter observance, felt since the middle of the sixteenth century, generated internal tensions that could only be resolved by dismantling an old narrative of origins and adapting it to then-current sensitivities.

42

1833 A Gift for an Emperor On Christmas Eve 1833, librarian Leopold Joseph von Khlobeyer (d.  1869) of the Fideikommissbibliothek in Vienna wrote to Emperor Francis I of Austria (1768–1835) regarding the possible acquisition for the collection of an exceptional document: I recently had the honour to most humbly lay at Your Majesty’s feet the following manuscript […] which consists of a single sheet of parchment. This nine-hundredyear-old antiquarian curiosity contains the foundation letter that St Quazelin, the bishop of Toul in Lotharingia, had issued in the year 935 for the women’s monastery of Bouxières […] which he had founded in his diocese. This [monastery] was later turned into a house of noble ladies: but in recent times it was completely abandoned. In case it would please Your Majesty to keep this charter, which for [a document of] its age has been very well preserved, it would be the oldest manuscript in your Serenity’s private library.1

The Fideikommissbibliothek had been founded forty-nine years earlier as Francis’s private reference library of books and graphic works. Over the course of an eventful half century (during which Francis succeeded his uncle Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor in 1792, became Emperor of Austria in 1804, and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806), it had recruited and trained expert staff and adopted procedures that made it possible to run the library’s daily operations without the emperor’s personal

Vienna, ÖNB, Bestand Fideikommissbibliothek (1809–1945), Karton 17, FKBA17146: ‘Dieses mir  […] übergebene aus einem einzelnen Pergamentblatte bestehende Manuscript, habe ich vor kurzem die Ehre gehabt, Eurer Majestät alleruntherthänigst zu Füßen zu legen. Es ist dasselbe eine neunhundertjährige antiquarische Merkwürdigkeit, und enthält den von dem heiligen Quazelinus Bischof zu Toul in Lothringen anno 935 ausgestellten Fundations-Brief des in seinem Sprengel zu Bouzieres (hodie Bouzieres-aux-Dames) von ihm gestifteten Frauenklosters, welches nachmals in ein adeliges Damenstift umgewandelt, in den neuesten Zeiten aber ganz aufgelassen worden ist. Im Falle Euer Majestät diese für ihr hohes Alter noch ziemlich gut erhaltenen Urkunde zu behalten geruhen sollten, wäre sie das älteste Manuscript in allerhöchst dero Privatbibliothek’. The full text of the letter is in Appendix 2 of this book.

1 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

involvement.2 However for acquisitions of a potentially delicate nature his opinion was still needed and duly solicited. This, we learn from the note, was one such case. According to the librarian’s information, a certain Madame Delort had arranged for delivery of a small locked box containing Bishop Gozelin of Toul’s ‘totally unknown’ charter, sending it to the Austrian embassy in Paris as a gift for Francis. The mysterious transaction caused a great deal of confusion among Austrian bureaucrats. On finding that they were unable to verify Delort’s claim that Francis had previously agreed to receive the document, the embassy personnel sent it to chancellor Fürst Klemens von Metternich (d.  1859). But he too was unaware of any previous agreement between Delort and Francis and failed to find any supporting evidence for it, either in the papers of the secret state cabinet or in those of the sovereign’s library. Apparently at a loss over how to resolve this issue, von Metternich dispatched his counsellor Emmanuel von Bretfeld to the Fideikommissbibliothek, where the matter was handed over to von Khlobeyer. The librarian, so we learn from his letter, was entrusted with the double task of submitting a judgement on the document’s interest and of discretely enquiring with the sovereign about Delort’s claim. Reluctantly von Khlobeyer set to work. From the tone and content of his note to the emperor we can infer that he was less than thrilled about being passed the proverbial hot potato: [I should point out that] the charter is not a new discovery for historians, since it has long been available in printed form in Calmet’s Histoire de Lorraine. I  was able to verify that this [edition] was done with precision according to the rules of diplomatics, which means that [the original document] loses in preciousness. Furthermore I am unable to provide information on how this Delort person obtained the present foundation document and by whom she was notified of your Highness’s permission to send it.3

Thomas Huber-Frischeis, Nina Knieling, and Rainer Valenta, Die Privatbibliothek Kaiser Franz’ I.  Von Österreich 1784–1835. Bibliotheks- und Kulturgeschichte einer fürstlichen Sammlung zwischen Aufklärung und Vormärz (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2015). Regarding von Khlobeyer’s background and responsibilities at the library, see esp. pp. 140–51. 3  Vienna, ÖNB, Bestand Fideikommissbibliothek (1809–1945), Karton 17, FKBA17146: ‘Auch die Urkunde für den Historiker keine neue Entdeckung ist, indem sie schon vorlängst in Calmet’s Histoire de Lorraine, wie ich mich überzeugte, mit diplomatischer Genauigkeit abgedruckt vorkommt, daher auch dadurch an Prätiosität verliret. 2 

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1833 A Gift for an Emperor

Under the pretence of objectivity, the librarian did his best to discourage the emperor from adding the charter to his collection. Von Khlobeyer disparaged its historical and intrinsic value, implied that the printed edition would satisfy even the most critical of scholars, and expressed his reservations about accepting such a valuable item from an unknown woman whose motives were likewise unknown. But the elderly sovereign paid no heed. On 26 February 1834 he had his secretary inscribe the following apostille on von Khlobeyer’s note: For this manuscript, which was sent over with my prior knowledge, I  instruct Fürst Metternich to send my thanks to the former director of the young ladies’ Institute S. Filippo in Milan, Lady von Delort.4

With these few words the matter was settled. Without further ado the charter and an eighteenth-century translation into French were entered into the collection of the emperor’s library.5 A catalogue number was assigned and a smart folder covered in black maroquin leather with gilded lettering was made to house the materials.6 For the next 168 years, Bishop Gozelin’s charter languished unnoticed in the collection of the Fideikommissbibliothek and in that of its successor institution, the Austrian National Library. Then, in 2002, the German historian Klaus Oschema realized its significance, authenticated the document and its contents, and edited the text in a scholarly article.7

Wie übrigens die Delort zu diesem Stiftungsbriefe kommt und durch wen ihr die allerhöchste Erlaubnis zur Einsendung bekannt gemacht worden ist, darüber bin ich außer Stand eine Auskunft zu geben’. The cited edition is that by Augustin Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, 7 vols (Nancy: A. Leseure, 1745–57), 4, col. 340. 4  Vienna, ÖNB, Bestand Fideikommissbibliothek (1809–1945), Karton 17, FKBA17146: ‘Für dieses mit meinem vorwissen übersendete Manuscript lasse ich durch Fürst Metternich der Frau von Delort gewesenen Vorsteherin des Fräulein Instituts  S. Filippo zu Mailand meinen Dank bezeugen’. 5  Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. n. 12672. The translation is one of several such documents that are mentioned in a post-1720s synopsis of the abbey’s charter treasure and a 1788 archive inventory; Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fol. 234v and Nancy, BSt, 175, p. 1. 6  The letters on the spine spell Litterae Buxerianae; Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. n. 12672. It appears that the original box is no longer in the collections of Austria’s National Library (communicated via e-mail by Friedrich Simander). 7  Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung’.

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Illustration 3. Gozelin’s Foundation Charter for Bouxières Abbey. Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. n. 12672. 13 January 938. Copyright Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

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1833 A Gift for an Emperor

Oschema’s study was the first to bring the survival of the original of this (literally and metaphorically) foundational document of Bouxières abbey to the attention of the academic community. His analysis of the charter’s formal aspects and content also offered decisive arguments to debunk the previous view that the text was a later forgery.8 But it also left many questions unanswered. How exactly did this charter end up in Vienna and why was it not among the abbey’s confiscated archives in French public collections? What does this tell us about its status and whereabouts post-1791? And who was this Madame Delort, and how had she come into possession of the most precious item in Bouxières’ former archives? Answering these questions sheds light on the canonesses’ focus on the charter treasure as a keystone lieu de mémoire of the convent’s communal identity in the medieval and early modern eras and on members’ subsequent efforts to keep it from the hands of revolutionary officials in the early 1790s. A Straight Link to Bouxières Abbey

Emperor Francis’s apostille is the key to reconstructing the charter’s ownership and whereabouts before its transferral to Vienna. More precisely it allows us to identify the donor of Gozelin’s document as Caroline Delort, a woman who led the Collegio delle Fanciulle, a state-sponsored finishing school for young ladies in Milan, between 1809 and 1828. The Collegio had been created, along with similar but smaller institutions in Verona, Bologna, Naples, and Lodi, in the context of Napoleon‘s efforts to reorganize the educational system in the recently established Kingdom of Italy (1805–14).9 Finding a

In 1987 Robert-Henri Bautier edited the charter text from an August 1788 transcription (which he thought derived directly from the original document) made for Bouxières archivist Hilaire de Puibusque, and declared the text a forgery based on a problematic passage; Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 6, pp. 72–76. However, Oschema’s edition of the original in Vienna showed that the passage does not feature on that version of the document; ‘Zur Gründung’, pp.  188–90. Michel Parisse subsequently established that de Puibusque’s copy derived not from Gozelin’s original (which does contain a small interpolation) but from a defective early eighteenth-century copy; ‘Un évêque’, appendix 2. 9  Charles Dejob, L’instruction publique en France et en Italie au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie., 1894), pp.  59–79; Angelo Bianchi, ‘La bibliotheca della 8 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

suitable female director, a headmistress, and women teachers for these places took much longer than expected. The French administrators were reluctant to enlist the help of religious congregations, presumably for fear of handing over the educational system to the Church: this policy disqualified a substantial number of women who had worked at convent schools prior to the French Revolution. And because the authorities wanted to avoid a staff comprised only of Italians, they had counted on Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan (d. 1822), the director of the Château d’Ecouen (the state-sponsored school of Napoleon’s Légion d’Honneur that served as a template for the Collegio), to send some of her experienced female educators.10 But as it turned out, Campan resisted such requests. Only on 21 January 1809, almost a year after the school in Milan was formally established, was Delort appointed as the first director. Other staff members, including a number of Italian male teachers, trickled in over the course of the next year and a half. Not all of them turned out to be a fit with Delort’s temperament and by mid-1812 three of of the female teachers, the only ones among the staff to have (tenuous) links to the Château, had already been dismissed or asked to leave.11 madre di famiglia. Modelli culturali e indicazioni bibliografiche per l’educazione delle ragazze tra Francia e Italia in età napoleonica’, in Richerca pedagogica ed educazione familiare: Studi in onore di Norberto Galli, ed.  by Luigi Patti (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2003), pp. 56–60; and Laura Giuliacci, Dall’educandato monastico al collegio: Trasformazioni istituzionali e modernizzazione pedagogica nell’educazione femminile tra periodo napoleonico e restaurazione (unpublished PhD dissertation, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2005–6). 10  Established in 1802, the Légion was created to award distinctions to those who had served the state: but three years later, its activities were extended to include two schools, one for boys and one for girls, for the children of soldiers who had fallen at the battle of Austerlitz. Campan became director at the latter institution, housed in the Château d’Ecouen, situated some fifty kilometres to the northeast of the French capital; Louis Bonneville de Marsagny, Mme Campan à Ecouen. Etude historique et biographique d’après des lettres inédites et les documents conservés aux Archives Nationales et à la Grande-Chancellerie de la Légion d’Honneur, précédée d’une notice sur le Château d’Ecouen (Paris and Pontoise: H.  Champion and Alexandre Seyes, 1879) and Rebecca Rogers, Les demoiselles de la Légion d’honneur. Les maisons d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur au  xixe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1992). 11  The French female staff were Caroline Delort, Angélique-Elisabeth-Louis de Ficte de Soucy, Victoire and Hortense de Maulevrier, Marie-Prudence Clausier, and Dorothée Gibert, and the English one was Henrietta Smith; Dejob, L’instruction, p.  83; Bianchi, ‘La bibliotheca’, pp.  61–62; and Giuliacci, Dall’educandato monastico

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1833 A Gift for an Emperor

The embarrassment stemming from Campan’s lack of cooperation and the resulting scramble to find suitable educators might explain why the archives of the Collegio, and of the French administration in Italy tell us so little about the career of the staff members prior to coming to Milan.12 And there might also have been an incentive to remain discreet about the fact that some had formerly belonged to a religious congregation. Regarding Delort, for instance, the records merely state that before being appointed in Milan she had resided in Paris.13 This discretion may have also extended into the public sphere, where Delort’s antecedents were either only vaguely understood or subject to a consensus about a need for discretion. In his 1819 Italian travelogue, the French writer Stendhal (d.  1842) was unsure whether he should describe the Collegio’s director as a ‘disciple’ or a mere ‘imitator’ of Madame Campan.14 And around the same time, the Irish travel writer Lady Morgan (real name Sidney Owenson, d.  1859) visited the Collegio and noted that Delort (whom she calls Madame Delor) had moved to Milan from the French capital and that she had experience working at a ‘similar establishment’ prior to being

al collegio, pp.  76–78. Besides these individuals, the Collegio’s Italian teaching staff included a male instructor of French and geography, one of Italian and history, one of calligraphy and arithmetics, one for singing, one for piano, one for drawing, and finally also a female dancing instructor. All these people were nominated between February 1809 and December 1810, in time before the school’s opening; Dejob, L’instruction, pp.  81–98. On Delort’s disputes with female educators de Ficte de Soucy and Maulevrier, Ibid., pp.  83–84; Bianchi, ‘La bibliotheca’, pp.  61–62; and Giuliacci, Dall’educandato monastico al collegio, pp. 67 and 76–78. 12  Some of the other female teaching staff may have been previously employed at one of countless private day schools and boarding houses in France, many of which had been established in the 1790s and early 1800s and were often run by staff of former convent schools; Rebecca Rogers, ‘Boarding Schools, Women Teachers and Domesticity: Reforming Girls’ Education in the First Half of the xixth Century’, French Historical Studies, 19 (1995), 153–81, at pp. 155–57. Others might have worked in one of many clandestine convent schools that had been established in the aftermath of the French Revolution; Gwénaël Murphy, ‘Les religieuses et la Révolution française, 1789–1799’, in Combats de femmes: Les révolutionnaires excluent les citoyennes, ed. by Evelyne Morin-Rotureau (Paris: Autrement, 2003), pp. 85–103, at pp. 96–98. 13  Dejob, L’instruction, p. 84. 14  Stendhal, Rome, Naples et Florence, ed.  by Daniel Muller and Charles Maurras, 2 vols (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1919), 1, p. 93: ‘Les collèges de jeunes demoiselles [que Napoléon] institua à Vérone et à Milan, sous la direction de madame Delort, élève ou imitatrice de madame Campan, ont eu l’influence la plus salutaire’.

49

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

appointed as director of the school.15 Presumably this was the only information that Delort was willing to share with all but her closest associates. The information that is crucial to identifying Caroline as a former member of a religious community was published in an 1823 monograph on the French administration in Italy, in which author Federico Coraccini stated that Delort was a former canoness from Nancy.16 That remark, which was published nine years after the Catholic Austrian Empire had taken over power in north Italy, helps us situate her in one of Lorraine’s houses of secular canonesses, more precisely Bouxières abbey, in the years prior to the French Revolution. Establishing a link between the surname Delort (or de Lort) and the Nancy area is easy. The family originally came from France’s southern region of Guyenne, but in the early eighteenth century one branch had moved to Lorraine, where several of them subsequently attained high secular or ecclesiastical rank. Of the men, one was made commander of the town and the citadel of Nancy in the 1760s, and another became a member of the noble chapter of Nancy cathedral in 1785.17 And of the women, two daughters of the above-mentioned commander had entered Bouxières as canonesses: Marie-Rose de Lort and Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique de Lort de Montesquiou were admitted respectively in 1765 and 1767.18 However there is no record of a relative named Caroline at this abbey or any of the three other such institutions in the area. In fact, no member of the family with that first name is on record for the period up to the French Revolution. Thus Caroline Delort’s trail seems to run cold prior to her appointment in Milan.

Lady Morgan, Italy, 3  vols (London: Henry Colburn and co., 1821), 1, pp.  114–17 (also excerpted in Appendix 3 of this book). On Morgan’s travel account, see Donatella Abbate Badin, ‘Lady Morgan in Italy: A  Traveller with an Agenda’, Studi irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies, 6 (2016), 127–48 and (by the same) Lady Morgan’s Italy. Anglo-Irish Sensibilities and Italian Realities (Bethesda, MD: Academia Press, 2007). 16  Federico Coraccini, Storia dell’amministrazione del regno d’Italia durante il dominio francese (Lugano: Francesco Veladini e cont., 1823), p. lxxxiii. 17  Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 399–401. 18  The chapter records of their admission as canonesses are in Nancy, BSt, 132, resp. fols 13–15 and 21v–23r. 15 

50

1833 A Gift for an Emperor

In order to solve this problem, the nineteenth-century French historian Charles Dejob theorized that she was in fact one of the Bouxières canonesses.19 His argument is partially backed up by the match between the chronology of Caroline Delort’s life and the available biographical data on these two individuals.20 Both had stayed on as members of the Bouxières convent until the very end of its existence, which made their post-1791 identification as former canonesses more likely than women who had left at an earlier point in time.21 Of Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique, we know that she was still alive in 1833.22 And of her sister MarieRose, we know from her notarized post-mortem inventory that she died on 2 July 1837.23 In Dejob’s opinion, one of these two women adopted the name Caroline at some point in the late 1700s or early 1800s and subsequently found a new career as an educator. However he was unable to support the hypothesis of a name change with solid evidence or link it to a specific individual. Because of this, it did not resonate in later studies of the Collegio or in those that discussed the end of Bouxières abbey and its early afterlife. Evidence from the former municipal archives at Bouxières-auxDames proves without a doubt that Dejob speculated correctly. It also adds crucial information, so we can now identify Caroline Delort as Marie-Rose de Lort, the elder of the two Bouxières canonesses. A  mere two months after the convent was dissolved, on 28 March 1791, French official François Bastien set out to make an inventory of the immovable property at the village of Bouxières that still belonged to individual convent members. Six of these inventories survive, including for the two de Lort

Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 399–401. Contemporary sources reported that Caroline retired as director of the Collegio at the age of sixty-four, which if true would mean that she was too young to be one of the two canonesses. However Dejob does not give much credence to those statements, which may have been deliberately flattering; Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 114 and again 399–401. 21  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 290. 22  Liste générale des pensionnaires de l’ancienne liste civile avec l’indication sommaire des motifs de la concession de la pension (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1833), p. 317. 23  Paris, AN, MC/ET/LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no. 16, le 2 juillet 1837. 19 

20 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Illustration 4. Inventory of Ex-canoness Caroline Delort’s Properties in Bouxières-auxDames. Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 212 U. 28 March 1791. Copyright Connaissance et Renaissance du Vieux Bouxières

52

1833 A Gift for an Emperor

sisters.24 In one of them the clerk refers to the younger de Lort sister as Angélique de Montesquiou, which is a short version of her full name as it appears in the abbey’s records.25 But in the other he left a blank space before Marie-Rose de Lort’s surname, ostensibly because there was uncertainty about how she wanted to be addressed. When the document was ready for signing, someone other than Bastien wrote ‘Caroline’ in the blank space.26 Possibly that person was Marie-Rose herself, since the inventory also features her autograph signature. A  comparison of the chapter’s final records with the inventory document indicates that Marie-Rose had changed her name to Caroline between the end of June 1790 and early March 1791.27 Why she did so is unknown. It was common for former religious to drop their religious name and resume their original: however, as far as we can tell the Bouxières canonesses did not actually adopt religious names on entering the convent. Possibly Caroline had been a second or third name, in which case it might have been used in domestic contexts as a pet name: but Marie-Rose’s admission record only mentions this first name.28 Yet another possibility is that she adopted a new first name to make her Catholic faith less obvious or her former career as a canoness less conspicuous; or that she found that ‘Caroline’ sounded more pleasing and in line with then-current tastes.29 Whatever her reasons for the identity shift, the evidence is clear that it was former canoness Marie-Rose de Lort who became director of the Collegio in Milan, and that it was she who donated Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 207  U (canoness de Montesquiou), 211 U (canoness de Moy de Sons), 212  U (canoness de Lort), 214  U (secrétaire de Gléresse), 215  U (canonesses de Ligniville and Boisgelin), and 218 U (deaconess Mohr de Waldt). 25  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 207 U. 26  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 212 U. 27  She signed the chapter protocol of 26 June 1790 as Marie-Rose de Lort (Nancy, BSt, 56, fol.  2v) but is not mentioned in the records of the two final chapter meetings of 12 and 13 January 1791 (Nancy, BSt, 56, fols 3r–6v). 28  Her admission record gives no second or third first names; Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 13–15. 29  In her interactions with the French state, Caroline continued using the name Marie-Rose. So a 1791 census indicates that she (identified by the latter name) and her sister were each entitled to a royal pension that their mother had been awarded for the service of her late husband; Etat nominatif des pensions sur le trésor royal imprimé par ordre de l’assemblée nationale, 4  vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1789–91), 4, p. 442. 24 

53

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Gozelin’s charter to Emperor Francis some three and a half years before she died in the summer of 1837.30 However, this does not necessarily mean that she had originally kept the charter out of French officials’ hands when they came to confiscate the abbey’s properties. One of the last documents to be issued by the Bouxières chapter brings her sister Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique into focus as the most likely person who took it from the abbey’s archives. Dismantling the Trésor des Chartes

On 26 June 1790, exactly one month and one day before French officials arrived at the canonesses’ temporary residence at the convent of the Minimes in Nancy to draft an inventory of their abbey’s possessions, the chapter members and several male clerics convened for one of their final meetings.31 One of the women suggested that they reflect on ‘how to act in the event of the announcement, which we presume to be imminent, of the suppression of the chapter’. The ensuing discussion, so three different versions of the protocol of that meeting tell us, was about a range of measures to be taken. The one that was inscribed in the Bouxières chapter’s official register states that incumbent Abbess de Messey would be invited to protest against the suppression and to use ‘[all] means that are permitted by the law’ to resist it, without going into details.32 A  second version was inscribed in a separate register that relates to the admission of new members. It details how the chapter members decided to formally accept four 30  She is mentioned as Marie Rose in her post-mortem inventory; Paris, AN, MC/ET/ LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no.  16, le 2 juillet 1837, p.  1. However, a procuration that was inserted in that document mentions that one of her executors, the wife of a relative of former Abbess de Messey, knew her as Caroline. The notary who issued the inventory subsequently crossed out that statement, presumably to avoid confusion over the deceased canoness’s identity (p. 2). 31  The convent members had moved there on 27 October 1789; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. 32  Nancy, BSt, 132, fol.  118v: ‘Une des Mesdames ayant proposé de réfléchir à la conduite qu’on auroit à tenir dans les circonstances présentes au moment de la signification probablement prochaine de la suppression du chapitre; il a été arreté, que Madame l’abbesse seroit invité de faire les réserves et protestations [et] de se pourvoir par les moyens permis par la loi contre la même suppression’.

54

1833 A Gift for an Emperor

women who had successfully submitted their nobility papers and had paid the required admission fee but had not yet gone through the ceremony where new members were formally accepted into the convent and assigned a prebend. To these clauses it adds a note that a copy of this record would be sent to each of the four women, so that they would be able to claim back their deposit in due time.33 Finally, a third and secret version was inscribed in a separate register that may have been intended for the personal use of de Messey. It expands on the first version and goes into considerable detail in its arguments against the suppression of the convent and the confiscation of its properties.34 It insists on the abbey’s inalienable rights, the illegitimacy of the impending dissolution and confiscation, and the protection of the abbey’s status by the international powers. And it also discusses the ways in which the canonesses would try to reclaim ownership of the estate once the revolutionary storm had abated, by doing two things: one, having de Messey take the steps outlined above to protest the convent’s plight35 and, two, having copies made of the meeting’s protocol and arranging for several of the chapter members to deposit them in public archives, so that they could be retrieved in the event of a restart.36 Near the end, this final version further reveals that the chapter members had decreed that ‘the present protestation will be inscribed in a separate register or on a loose sheet separately from the register of deliberations so that it will remain secret until that time when it would be beneficial to use it’.37

Nancy, BSt, 136, fols 27v–28r. Part of the text was edited in Deux chapitres-nobles et deux chanoinesses (Besançon: Imprimerie de l’Est, s.d.), p. 43. 34  Nancy, BSt, 56, fols  1–2, edited for the most part in Deux chapitres-nobles, pp. 40–42. 35  De Messey followed up on that promise when she drafted a letter of protestation to the Imperial Diet of Regensburg; see Chapter 3, at note 66. However, it is unknown if she ever sent that letter. 36  Five identical such copies were still among the abbey’s papers when these were confiscated and are now bound in Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 336–45. 37  Nancy, BSt, 56, fol.  2r (also edited in Deux chapitres-nobles, pp.  41–42): ‘Il a été arrêté que la présente protestation seroit transcrite sur un registre particulier ou sur feuille volante séparée du registre des délibérations pour demeurer secrette jusqu’au moment où il serait utile d’en faire usage […]’. 33 

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Judging by what happened in the aftermath of this meeting the chapter members debated further ways of protecting the abbey’s most precious instruments of collective, cultic and legal memory, in discussions too secret to be recorded at all. How were they, for instance, to protect the abbey’s most prestigious charters and other legal titles? That collection (which was known locally as the Trésor des chartes and is summarily described in Table  1) was an impressive gathering of documents that spanned the convent’s entire history – from its medieval origins through to the eighteenth century – and contained numerous high-profile items. Not to be confused with the abbey’s full body of charters, which was substantially larger and was scattered across different parts of the archive, it was much more than a mere repository of supporting legal documents of the convent’s estate. As we shall see in Chapter 5 of this book, it had generated significant interest from historians and genealogists since at least the end of the seventeenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth was considered a collection of prime importance for the study of Lorraine’s past and that of the international nobility. And just as importantly, it was one of the central pillars on which the local narrative of origins rested. Some of the documents had also been granted or personally owned by founder St  Gozelin, which made them even more special in the eyes of the canonesses: the fact that the bishop’s foundation charter was kept separately in a black box lined with silk was a telltale sign that the convent members awarded it a cultic significance that came close to that of a secondary relic.38 And other pieces in the collection preserved the memory of key patrons (lay and clerical rulers, but also a number of private donors) who had been instrumental in getting the earliest community off the ground. It was for all of these reasons that the Bouxières canonesses felt it was imperative to bring these documents to safety before the convent was dissolved and its archives were confiscated. The obvious candidate to select the most significant pieces from this collection and remove them from the convent was the abbey’s provost, who as secretary drafted and signed all the protocols

According to de Puibusque’s testimony in his 1788 inventory; Nancy, BSt, 175, p. 1. Also refer to Chapters 2 and 5 of this book.

38 

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1833 A Gift for an Emperor

of the chapter meetings and had full access to the archives.39 But as we learn from all three records of the 26 June meeting, incumbent office-holder Joseph Raybois refused to draft the text, resigned as secretary, and promptly withdrew. In response, the chapter appointed Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique de Lort de Montesquiou as the new secretary: it is her signature that we find at the bottom of each preserved version of the meeting’s protocol. Bouxières’ papers do not tell us why Raybois declined to continue in his role as the chapter’s secretary. In one possible explanation he realized the potential consequences of the canonesses’ secret decision to remove the charter treasure.40 Ever since the National Assembly had declared all Church goods national property on 2 November 1789, hiding the convent’s archives or any other assets and preventing an inventory of these was a crime against the French state. And as a former parish priest who had only been appointed to the abbey in August 1787 Raybois may not have felt enough of a connection to the canonesses’ interests to be willingly involved in such a clandestine undertaking. But a more likely explanation for his sudden move is that, as provost, his responsibilities in managing the abbey’s papers made him far too obvious a suspect in case the authorities were to find out that key pieces from the archives had gone missing.41 The traditional role of male agents in helping the abbess and deaconess to manage the abbey’s assets probably also explains why the chapter then took the unusual step of appointing one of their own, MarieThérèse-Agnès-Angélique, as the new secretary. On account of the fact that she was a long-standing convent member without any

On the provost’s roles and obligations, see Poirier, Le chapitre, pp. 31–32. Although the abbey’s 1786 statutes had arranged for the appointment of an archivist (Poirier, ‘La translation’, p. 132), a permanent such position never materialized. Between late 1786 and the early summer of 1788 the convent employed the Benedictine monk Hilaire de Puibusque to draft a new archive inventory (Nancy, BSt, 175). However his appointment was temporary and for that specific purpose only; see note 45 below. 40  On the convent’s strategy to hide the relic treasure, see Chapter 2. 41  Raybois’s appointment is discussed in Poirier, Le chapitre, p. 31. His resignation as secretary by no means signalled the end of his interest in administering the abbey’s affairs. For instance, on 2 and 6 August 1790 he made notes about the inventories that French officials had made on 27–28 and 30 July; Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 412–13. And in the next chapter we shall see that he was involved in keeping the abbey’s relic treasure out of the hands of French officials. 39 

57

58

912, King Charles the Simple of West Francia

923, Bishop Gozelin of Toul

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

1027, Emperor Conrad II

1073, Bishop Pibo of Toul

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 3

963–65, Bishop Gerard of Toul

Cha. Li. 2

976, Emperor Otto II

966, Ermenaidis

Cha. Li. 2

996–1019, Bishop Berthold of Toul

966, Duke Frederic of Lotharingia

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

959–60, Lay abbot Odelric

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

960, Emperor Otto I

965, Emperor Otto I

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

941, Pope Stephen VIII (forgery)

Cha. Li. 1

41

40

39

37

26

32

33

15

31

25

13

6

923–31, Bishop Gozelin of Toul 4

938, Bishop Gozelin of Toul

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

2

1

Charters and other documents, Number in by year and author Les origines, ed. Bautier

Folder number in de Puibusque’s 1788 inventory (Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 1–12)

20, doc. 208

(?)

11, doc. 193

10, doc. 13

10, doc. 68

10, fols 24–25

9, doc. 113

6, fol. 223

5, fols 147r–48r

4, doc. 141

4, doc. 104

4, doc. 18

Preserved

Lost

Lost

Lost

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Lost

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Lost

Lost

De Puibusque's 1788 Status copies for Moreau in after the Paris, BNF, Collection dissolution Moreau

Table 1: Original Documents in Archival Folders Cha. Li. 1-4

Nancy, ADMM, H 2958

 

 

 

 

Nancy, ADMM, 1 J 173

 

Nancy, BSt, Chartes Année 963

 

 

 

Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. n. 12672

Modern archival reference of preserved original charters

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

(1761), Chapter of Bouxières (procuration)

Cha. Li. 4

47

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

42

52

49

45

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(?)

 

(?)

30, doc. 78

72, doc. 144

62, doc. 108

57, doc. 98

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Lost

Preserved

Preserved

Preserved

Preserved

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Lost

Lost

Lost

Preserved

Lost

Nancy, BSt, 413/1

 

 

Nancy, BST, 413/1

Nancy, BSt, 413/1

Nancy, BSt, 413/1

Nancy, ADMM, H 3000

 

Nancy, ADMM, H 3023

 

 

 

 

Nancy, ADMM, H 2970

 

Notes to the above table: (1) De Puibusque's inventory references multiple copies, translations, and miscellaneous notes that were kept together with the original documents. On these, see Chapter 1 at notes 53-54. (2) On de Puibusque’s copies of original for Moreau, see Chapter 4, notes 52-53.

1761, Chapter of Bouxières (chapter record)

Three charters by dukes of Lorraine (copies)

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 4

Transcript of the four above charters

Cha. Li. 3

1761, King Louis XV

Four charters by dukes of Lorraine (copies)

Cha. Li. 3

1761, Chambre des comptes (arrest)

1385, Abbess and chapter of Bouxières (copy)

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 4

1441, Duchess Isabella of Lorraine

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 4

1245, Count Thiebaut of Bar

1341, Count Raoul of Lorraine

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 3

1163, Bishop Henry of Toul

1101–7, Bishop Pibo of Toul

Cha. Li. 3

1146, Bishop Henry of Toul

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 3

1137, Pope Innocent II

1136, Bishop Henry of Toul

Cha. Li. 3

Cha. Li. 3

1833 A Gift for an Emperor

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

notable experience in administering the abbey’s affairs except as dame capitulante, her actions were less likely to draw unwanted attention. Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique’s time in office as secretary was brief. When the canonesses had their final chapter meetings on 12 and 13 January 1791 – the next ones on record after that of 26 June 1790 – she had already been replaced by a male secretary.42 But the previous half year would have been more than enough time for someone in her position to go through the abbey’s archives, determine which documents had to be removed, and take concrete steps to that effect.43 Her job and that of her accomplices was greatly facilitated by the revolutionary officials’ lack of attention to detail when they arrived to make an inventory of the abbey’s property on 27 and 28 July 1790. In their report, they recorded the presence at the Minimes convent of the canonesses’ archives but (perhaps deliberately) did not bother to carry out a full inspection. ‘The archives’, so it states, ‘consist of forty-five small bags, which contain documents that we did not consider necessary to make an inventory of and that contain (we were told) the old legal titles of the chapter, bulls from the court of Rome, and procedures’.44 Because of the superficial nature of the description, any removal of pieces that might have taken place before that date went undetected. And a future such operation would likewise be difficult to detect after the fact, since the canonesses and their male staff were still the only ones who had a detailed view of the archive’s contents.

Nancy, BSt, 56, fols 3r–5r and 5r–6v. Contemporary evidence shows that the convent members had initially (on 12 August 1789) evacuated their archives to the convent of the Ladies of the Visitation in Nancy, which is where their relic treasure had been evacuated in the war-torn years 1743–47; Nancy, BSt, 132, unnumbered page between fols 112–13. Presumably the archives were moved to the convent of the Minimes after the canonesses had relocated there on 27 October 1789; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. 44  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fol. 395r: ‘Les archives consistent en quarante cinq petits sacs, contenant des papiers que nous n’avons pas jugé nécessaire d’inventorier, et renfermand ainsi qu’il nous a été déclaré les anciens titres du chapitre, bulles de la cour de Rome et procédures’. The visit was followed by a second one at Bouxières on the 30th, the protocol of which is now in Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 381–402v. On 26 and 28 November, officials also made an inventory of immoveable property owned by the convent and by individual members at Bouxières; Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols  403r–10v and Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 879 U. 42  43 

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A  number of clues tell us that between 26 June 1790 and early 1791 they probably went ahead with the removal operation. To begin with, there is the written legacy of Benedictine monk and archivist Hilaire de Puibusque (d.  1789), whom archbishop of Toulouse Loménie de Brienne (more on whom in Chapter 3) had recruited to draft a full inventory of the abbey archives and who submitted his finished assignment in early Summer 1788. Similarly to what he did for other parts of the collection, de Puibusque made a detailed description of the contents of the Trésor, to which he gave inventory numbers Cha. (for Chartes) Li. (for Liasse, folder) 1 through 4. At this stage the Trésor included not only the original charters and other legal documents, but also a number of late medieval and early modern copies, translations of Latin charters into French, a host of notes on relevant documents that were kept in other parts of the abbey’s archive, and even some copies of forged charters that had been published in the sixteenth century.45 Of the original charters in that collection – the most precious part of the Trésor by a long stretch – three or four probably ended up being confiscated,46 while the rest (including major pieces by founder St  Gozelin, kings, emperors, popes, bishops, dukes, counts, and private donors) vanished from sight. In all likelihood the inventory and various by-products of de Puibusque’s classification effort helped the convent members and their associates decide which documents they ought to remove from their archives. One such by-product was a set of copies of eighteen original charters from the Trésor that de Puibusque arranged to make for the French historian and head of the Cabinet de Chartes Jacob-Nicolas Moreau (d.  1803). The monk’s selection of documents for that project, which is detailed Table 1 and of which de Puibusque may have left behind a list at the Bouxières

Nancy, BSt, 175, fols  1–12v. De Puibusque had entered the monastic life in 1757 at the abbey of Saint Mihiel and in the early 1780s lived at Remiremont. Following his inventory work at Bouxières between late 1786 and the early summer of 1788, he was invited to carry out the same task at the abbey of Poussay; Abbé Didier-Laurent, ‘Correspondance des Bénédictins de Lorraine avec Moreau’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 46 (1896), 147–94, at pp. 169–72. 46  Below, notes 56-57. 45 

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convent, strikingly matches that which was removed from the abbey archives before their confiscation.47 A second clue that the planned removal of the archive treasure went ahead is that de Puibusque’s inventory was probably also taken away before the confiscation of the abbey’s properties in early 1791. At that point, French officials managed to lay their hands on many of the abbey’s records. Most of the accounts, registers, inventories, and contents of former archival bags relating to specific estates eventually ended up in Nancy’s Archives Departementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.48 For its part, Nancy’s municipal library at this or a later stage acquired four registers of chapter records covering the period 1652–1791, as well as ten illustrated genealogies of canonesses from the mid to late eighteenth century.49 It also obtained a collection of loose papers from the abbess or secretary’s offices that totalled almost eight hundred pages and were later bound together in two nineteenth-century codices with shelf marks 413/1 and 413/2. No records survive that tell us when in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century these items entered the library’s collections. However, we do know that de Puibusque’s inventory, which was the keystone reference of the abbey’s archival memory, only did so three decades after the convent was dissolved. A  note on one of the end leaves of 47  Lepage was the first to point out the existence of some of these copies; ‘Cinq chartes inédites de l’abbaye de Bouxières’, ed.  by Henri Lepage, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine 4 (1862), 121–48. For a more extensive list, see Chapter 4, note 53. On de Puibusque’s correspondence with Moreau, see Didier-Laurent, ‘Correspondance’, pp. 170–72. 48  Nancy, ADMM, H  2943 to H  3042; summarily described in Henri Lepage, Inventaire-sommaire des Archives Départementales antérieures à 1790. Meurthe-etMoselle. Tome 5. Archives ecclésiastiques – Série H, Nos 1693 à 3353 (Nancy: N. Collin, 1883), pp. 136–48. Also see the commentary in Chapter 4, note 29. 49  Nancy, BSt, 101 (register of chapter decisions, 1685–1762), 132 (1761–90), 136 (1786–90), 56 (1790–91), and 487 (illustrated genealogies). Succinct descriptions of these are in Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France. Départements 4 (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1886), nos  593, 592, 591, 590, and 1007. Other confiscated items from the convent’s book collection may have been discarded shortly after the dissolution (see again the commentary in Chapter 4, note 29), while others still undoubtedly await identification in public and private libraries. Nancy’s BSt holds at least one book from a canoness’s private collection, namely a 1689 imprint of the composer Jean-Baptiste Moreau’s Choeurs de la tragédie d’Esther, which according to an ex-libris belonged to ‘Madame l’abbesse Bouxier’; Nancy, BSt, Rés. 4657.

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the codex says that the French official (counsellor to the prefect of the Meurthe département) and amateur historian Pépin Dufeugray (d.  1855) handed it over to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Municipale on 19 May 1820.50 Presumably he had acquired the manuscript from one or several individuals who three decades earlier had removed it from the convent to make it difficult for French officials to see that key items had gone missing after the inventory was drafted in 1786–88.51 The  final and most decisive clue to the removal of key documents from the Trésor can be found in the abbey’s confiscated papers, more precisely in the above-mentioned codices 413/1 and 413/2. Both contain items relating to the daily operation of the convent in the 1780s and early 1790s and to the canonesses’ plans to move to the urban site of Bon Secours in Nancy. Because nineteenth-century librarians did not bother to organize these documents thematically or otherwise, their current state of preservation offers us a fascinating view of the documentation that the abbey’s last administrators had kept at hand.52 And another consequence is that the librarians did not spot an anomaly in 413/1. Between folios 56 and 109 we find a substantial number of copies of the abbey’s oldest charters, some translations of these pieces into French, and notes on documents of which the canonesses did not have the originals. All of these are inscribed with

Nancy, BSt, 175. front endleaf. Defeugray, a man with strong royalist convictions and an amateur of regional history, had been counsellor to the prefect of the Départment de Meurthe since the late 1810s until he was made under-prefect of Savenay on 10 May 1820; Jacques Javayon, La sous-préfecture et l’arrondissement de Savenay 1800–1868 (Savenay: Les amis de l’histoire de Savenay, 2008), pp. 66–67. It is possible that the inventory was just one of several items from the former abbey (mentioned in the previous note) that he handed over to the library. 51  The confiscated papers of the abbess or secretary contain several copied extracts from de Puibusque’s inventory in his own hand, including of the section that described the Trésor des chartes; Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fols  228–50. And in note 54 below we shall see that the same codex also contains numerous copies and translations of charters that had originally been kept in the same folders as the original documents. Since we do not know when this particular part of the abbey’s documentation fell into public hands, it remains impossible to say if French officials at the time of the Revolution could have used them to reconstruct the gaps in Bouxières’ archival memory. 52  For an overview of the contents of these two nineteenth-century volumes refer to Appendix 4 of this book. 50 

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inventory numbers that are written in de Puibusque’s hand and are a match with those we find in his 1788 inventory. This tells us that these documents had originally been kept alongside the original material in folders Cha. Li. 1 and 3; furthermore, between folios 200 and 210 we find additional materials from Cha.  Li.  4.53 And it also reveals that they are the debris of an operation to reduce the bulk of the folders and facilitate the removal of the original charters from the convent.54 These observations help us to formulate the following reconstruction. Sometime between late June 1790 and early 1791, convent members and their male associates took the bag or bags that contained the Trésor and disassembled folders Cha. Li. 1 to Cha. Li. 4. In the first stage, they took the original documents (possibly keeping them in the original folders) along with de Puibusque’s inventory, and brought them to a safe location where the revolutionaries would not be able to seize them. And in the second, they did not place the copies, translations, and miscellaneous documents back in the correct archive bags but deposited them between the abbess or the secretary’s papers, which is where librarians at Nancy’s municipal library found them when those papers were handed over to their institution at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Of several people who could have carried out this operation, the first to come to mind is secretary Marie-ThérèseAgnès-Angélique: she might have worked together with her sister Marie-Rose as an accomplice. Another candidate is Joseph Raybois, who despite his apparent reluctance to participate in illegal acts will emerge in Chapter 2 as a key figure in a simultaneous effort to

Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 1–12. To give a few examples, from Cha. Li. 1 Nancy, BSt, 413/1 preserves a transcription of a notarized copy from 1597 of Gozelin’s foundation charter; a seventeenthcentury notarized copy of that same document; an eighteenth-century transcription of a 1728 printed edition of the charter by Augustin Calmet; three translations, one of which was issued by a notary; and a copy that closely resembles the one de Puibusque had made for Moreau; from Cha.  Li. 3 many more items are included. Other such documents are preserved for Les origines, ed. Bautier, nrs 31, 40, and 47. A  few copies of charters ended up not in codex 413/1 but in Nancy’s ADMM: modern inventory numbers H 2996 and 2997 contain copies of a 959–61 charter by lay Abbot Odelric (on which see also below, note 56) and a 960 privilege by Emperor Otto  I. It is unclear what happened to the two copies of original documents (Les origines, ed. Bautier, nrs 26 and 40) in folder Cha. Li. 2. 53 

54 

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remove and hide the abbey’s relic treasure. And finally, in Chapter 3 we shall see that the incumbent Abbess de Messey was not ready to give up the abbey and her leading status there without a fight and that she probably hoped for a future resurrection of the convent. Given the risk of this clandestine operation, all four and even several other chapter members may well have worked together to bring the abbey’s most precious documents and objects to safety. The Trésor’s Fate in Difficult Times

The person or persons who removed the original documents from the Trésor and subsequently had them in their possession must have been aware of the collection’s legal, historical, and especially also symbolic significance. And their anxiety about keeping it out of the hands of French officials may well have increased over the decade following the convent’s dissolution. By early 1801 all of the abbey’s properties had been confiscated and sold; most of the former buildings had been torn down or auctioned off; and all the surviving items from the relic treasure had been transferred to Nancy cathedral.55 As these other lieux de mémoire were one after the other dismantled or handed over to third parties, keeping the Trésor intact and in the hands of someone who could assist them with the future resurrection of the convent must have seemed critical. And in the case of Gozelin’s foundation charter at least, no doubt former convent members also realized that it was the only object in their keeping that still linked them directly to their saintly founder. Presumably this is why the charters did not resurface in the first decades after the convent was dissolved, and why it took more than forty years for the foundation charter to re-emerge. But the perceived significance of the Trésor does not necessarily mean that the Bouxières community had managed or even tried to preserve the entire set of original documents. Regarding at least four charters we already saw that they probably fell into the hands of French officials in 1790-91. Either this was because they had not been selected for removal in the first place on account of

55 

See the discussion in the next chapter.

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the fact that their perceived legal, historical, cultic, or memorial interest was limited. Or this was because someone who had taken the folders in their entirety and later disassembled them for the same reasons saw little use in retaining these specific items and arranged to have them handed them over to public institutions. A private charter by lay Abbot Odelric from 959–62 has survived intact along with a French translation, which is a sign that it belongs to a small part of the Trésor that was not subjected to the above mentioned dismantling process: it is now in Nancy’s municipal library.56 And at least three further documents, two episcopal charters from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and a comital one from the fourteenth, ended up in Nancy’s Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle.57 These were all documents that de Puibusque had decided not to copy for Moreau: in all likelihood (ex-)convent members relied on his judgement to determine which items in the Trésor were essential. Also, the importance the canonesses had awarded to the Trésor pre-dissolution did not guarantee that its former holdings of authentic charters would be adequately preserved. The fact that so few of the missing documents have resurfaced since 1791 might indicate that the conspirators had become fearful of discovery and reprisals and had discarded some items early on. Alternatively, some of the documents might have been lost when their initial guardian or guardians passed away. According to one scenario, de Messey might have held on to key papers from the abbey until her twilight years in the early 1820s. If this were to be proven correct, her death in 1825 would stand out as a likely time when the Trésor’s survival had hung in the balance and choice items were ultimately passed on to one or both of the de Lort sisters. Nancy, BSt, Chartes Année 963. The first publication to refer to that document was ‘Chartes antérieures au xive siècle conservées à la Bibliothèque publique de Nancy’, ed. by Charles Pfister, Journal de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 48 (1899), 54–63, at pp.  54–56. The most recent edition is in Les origines, ed. Bautier, no.  15, pp.  87–89 and a fascimile and French translation can be found in ‘Doter les servantes du seigneur. Charte d’Odelric pour Bouxières-auxDames’, ed.  by Michel Parisse in Autour de Gerbert d’Aurillac, le pape de l’an mil, ed. by Olivier Guyotjeannin and E. Poulle (Paris: Ecole Nationale des Chartes, 1996), pp. 200–2. 57  Nancy, ADMM,  H  2968 (by Bishop Pibo of Toul); H  2970 (Bishop Henri of Toul); and H 3023 (Count Raoul of Lorraine). 56 

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But it is likewise tempting to speculate that former secretary Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique had held on to the collection of charters (and perhaps also de Puibusque’s inventory), but at some point began to let go of several items. An 1833 census of holders of a state pension mentions her as having lost her fortune.58 With most of her fellow convent members dead or unlikely to return to Nancy, she might have seen her own financial hardship as a valid excuse to sell off choice items, as there was bound to be much interest in these documents among historians and collectors.59 One possible clue that such a transaction took place is the fact that a Nancy bibliophile, art lover, and numismatist Count Gastaldy (d.  1848)60 at some point in the early nineteenth century acquired a late-thirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century wooden chest once belonging to the abbey that was said to have previously held Gozelin’s evangeliary and Bouxières’ most prestigious charters.61 Yet another possibility is that whoever owned these documents post-1791 held on to them for so long that most eventually lost their legal and symbolic significance and came to be regarded as worthless mementos of a defunct convent’s past. With few former staff available, or none, with which to resurrect the convent, and with little or no outside support to bring a former cohort of secular canonesses back from the dead, interest in preserving most of the charters for that purpose may well have rapidly faded. One of the known victims of that process (besides all the more prestigious documents that are still unaccounted for) is a private charter by the tenth-century noblewoman Ermenaidis, one of the abbey’s earliest known lay patrons. Long presumed lost, it resurfaced in the 1980s when it was rediscovered, cut into eight pieces, inside the binding of copies of a Restauration-era (1814-30) Catholic Liste générale des pensionnaires, p. 317. On early modern historians’ interest in the abbey archives, see Chapter 5. 60  Henri Lepage, Le département de la Meurthe, statistique historique et administrative, 2  vols (Nancy: Peiffer, 1845), 2, p.  426 and A.  De Mahuet, ‘Un catalogue de livres rares’, Revue historique de la Lorraine, 3rd s. 14/87 (1950), 45–48. 61  Eduard Auguin, Monographie de la cathédrale de Nancy depuis sa fondation jusqu’à l’époque actuelle (Nancy: Berger-Levrault et co., 1882), pp.  330–31 and 336 (facing). In Marianne Barrucand’s opinion, the chest was used strictly to house items from the relic treasure; ‘Le trésor de saint Gauzelin à la cathédrale de Nancy’, Le pays lorrain 63 (1982), 89–106, at p.  105. Another nineteenth-century collector who acquired items related to the abbey was Jean-Baptiste-Félix Thiéry; on him, Chapter 3, note 48. 58 

59 

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Illustration 5. Chest Said to have Held Gozelin’s Evangeliary and The Abbey’s Most Prestigious Charters. Reproduced in Eduard Auguin, Monographie de la cathédrale de Nancy depuis sa fondation jusqu’à l’époque actuelle (Nancy: Berger-Levrault et co., 1882), p. 336 (facing)

journal.62 The fate of this document reminds us of a comment by the late nineteenth-century historian Edouard Ferry, who chillingly reminded his readers that during the Restauration period, a French official had arranged for the archives of the collegiate chapter Saint-Dié in Vosges to be sold by their weight as paper without value.63 It is possible that most of the other Bouxières

62  Now preserved as Nancy,  ADMM,  1 J  173 and edited in Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 32, pp. 109–11 (with comments on the recovery at pp. 51–57. The discovery was first announced in Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Étude critique sur les plus anciens actes de l’abbaye de Notre-Dame de Bouxières, à propos d’une charte lorraine inédite de 966’, Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France  (1972), 50–52). Bautier asserts that the charter turned up in the library of the abbey of Solesmes in a volume with copies of L’ami du clergé. But since that journal was only founded in 1878, the similar-sounding L’ami de la religion (1814–62) is a more likely candidate. 63  Edouard Ferry, ‘La population de la Haute-Meurthe au viie siècle’, Bulletin de la Société philomatique vosgienne, 16 (1890–91), 230–308, at p. 234.

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charters were likewise discarded by whoever had them in their possession at that point. Presumably it was the exceptional prestige and symbolic significance of Gozelin’s foundation charter that kept it immune from destruction or alienation and inspired a number of people to make the necessary effort to keep track of it. In a note in his 1859 article on Bouxières abbey, Lepage made the cryptic comment that ‘(the document) was given, a number of years ago, to someone who took it to Vienna’.64 Evidently he had received inside information about Delort’s gift to the emperor. But either his source had refused to give him more precise information about what had happened or it was Lepage himself who declined to provide more detail, possibly for fear of exposing Caroline Delort as an unpatriotic agent, or of triggering an attempt by French officials to repatriate the charter. Either way, the vague nature of his statement explains why later scholars ignored it.65 His death in 1887 therefore probably marked the end of any living recollections of the charter’s fate. Destination Vienna

Exactly how Caroline Delort ended up being the final caretaker of her former institution’s foundation charter can no longer be established.66 However, her sister’s presumed role in the disappearance of much of the Trésor makes it at least likely that she had long known about its post-dissolution whereabouts. In contrast, the 64  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 133: ‘Elle a été donné, il y a un certain nombre d’années, à une personne qui l’a emportée à Vienne’. 65  In the late nineteenth century, historian Félix de Salles dismissed Lepage’s statement as being ‘without proof’ and asserted that he had looked ‘everywhere’ for the original charter; Chapitres nobles de Lorraine, Annales, preuves de noblesse, documents, portraits, sceaux et blasons (Vienne and Paris: Gerold et Cie and Emile Lechevalier, 1888), p. 35. It is possible that he misunderstood Lepage’s reference to Vienna (Vienne in French) as being to the French town of Vienne. Later commentators Bautier and Oschema were either unaware of Lepage’s comment or simply ignored it; L’abbaye and ‘Zur Gründung’. 66  De Lort’s post-mortem inventory does not reveal if her estate contained any of the former abbey’s papers at the time of her death; Paris, AN, MC/ET/LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no. 16, le 2 juillet 1837.

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reason why she picked Emperor Francis as its recipient is not so difficult to guess. When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, the Austrians took control of the former Kingdom of Italy: by 30 May, the Treaty of Paris confirmed its incorporation into the Austrian Empire. A decree was issued the next day that ordered all foreign educators to leave their posts and for a moment Delort’s future career prospects must have looked decidedly bleak. Although we already saw that the French novelist Stendhal described her as either a disciple or an imitator of Madame Campan,67 her chances of relocating to one of Campan’s schools of the Légion d’Honneur in France were non-existent. To begin with, these schools (at the Château d’Ecouen and Saint-Denis) had been so closely linked to Napoleon that their situation at the time was likewise jeopardized by his downfall. But the former canoness also faced a complicating factor, which was that Campan’s expressed opinion of Delort and her leadership was very unfavourable. In a letter dated 2 April 1809, Campan had privately indicated that she thought the newly installed director of the Collegio had made a grave error hiring as her first headmistress a woman named Angélique-Elisabeth-Louis de Ficte de Soucy.68 Campan estimated, correctly so it seems, that Angélique’s track record and temperament made her unsuitable to be an educator. The twenty-nine-year-old had only recently entered the profession after her mother had tried and failed to have a new school of the Legion d’Honneur established in the south of France, with Angélique as its head.69 By way of compensation, Angélique was appointed as mistress ‘second class’ at the Château d’Ecouen, where she made a poor impression on Campan, her new employer, who found her uneducated and resistant to Campan’s attempts to get rid of her ‘childish airs’.70 Stendhal, Rome, 1, p. 93. Annette de Mackau, Correspondance d’Annette de Mackau, comtesse de SaintAlphonse, dame du palais de l’imperatrice Josephine (1790–1870), extraite des archives Mackau et Watier de Saint-Alphonse, ed.  by Chantal de Tourtier-Bonazzi (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1967), no. 65, p. 167. 69  Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, p. 57 and Bonneville de Marsagny, Mme Campan, pp. 39–40. 70  Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, no. 71, p. 178 (letter to Annette de Mackau, 29 June 1809). Also Campan’s devastating commentary on Angélique’s personality in another letter, dated 17 June 1809; no. 66, p. 171. 67 

68 

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Although Angélique’s relatives had presumably stepped in to find her a better position in Milan, Campan laid the blame entirely on Delort for promoting this ignorant and headstrong individual. She accused Delort of doing so out of sheer rivalry with herself, the Château’s director.71 And when Angélique and Delort fell out shortly afterwards and Angélique was subsequently dismissed from her position at the Collegio,72 Campan made good use of the situation to vent her lingering resentment of the former canoness. In a letter to a relative of Angélique’s written in October 1812, she noted that Delort had revealed herself as a ‘very despotic and unjust woman’ who had ruined the young woman’s spirit.73 Not one to forgive easily, Campan subsequently declined a request to re-hire Angélique.74 And when the Collegio’s director herself faced a possible dismissal three years later, the thought of reaching out to her colleague at the Château probably did not even cross her mind. Fortunately for Delort, she had powerful local supporters among the north Italian elite. The new minister of interior affairs, Paolo de Capitani, intervened on her behalf and that of the other staff at the Collegio and let it be known to the new rulers that public opinion of the educational programme there was highly favourable. With the exception of two recently hired women teachers, all French staff were allowed to stay, on condition that their institution be

Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, no. 158, p. 301. Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 84–86. In 1811–12 Delort had another run-in with two staff members, sisters named Victoire and Hortense Maulevrier, who were also former employees of the Château. The dispute ended with the sisters’ departure and an intervention by the authorities to prevent further such incidents; pp. 91–96. 73  Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, no. 158, p. 301. In a letter from 27 November of the same year she indicated that Angélique had fallen victim to ‘the false appearance of virtue of Madame de L.’; no. 199, p. 340. 74  Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, no.  199, p.  340 (letter dated 27 November 1812). By April 1813 Angélique was trying to secure a post at the Légion d’Honneur’s second school of Saint-Denis, where she became the treasurer; p. 57, note 3 and Saint-Maurice, Histoire de la Légion-d’Honneur (Paris: A.  J.  Denain, 1833 (second edition)), p.  400. By 1825 she was a resident at Sankt Anna in Munich, a house of noble canonesses that also hosted a convent school and apartments for private residents. Towards the end of her life she retired to Auvergne; Annette de Mackau, Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, p.  57, note 3. On Sankt Anna, see Norbert Backmund, Die kleineren Orden in Bayern und ihre Klöster bis zur Säkularisation (Abtei Windberg: Poppe, 1974), p. 91. 71 

72 

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subject to an investigation into the nature and the quality of the education offered. The results of that investigation were positive, and on 8 July 1816 the Collegio was officially allowed to continue its activities.75 In her travelogue, Lady Morgan implied that the sacrifice Delort and her staff had made to continue the school’s operations was high. Prior to the fall of the French administration, she noted, the Collegio had been an exemplar for Napoleon’s project of revolutionizing women’s education, by combining traditional female roles and pursuits with a broad intellectual formation. But since the fall of the French administration and the subsequent annexation of Lombardy by the Austrians, life at the Collegio had, in Lady Morgan’s view, changed to the point that it now resembled life in a religious convent.76 It is true that the Austrians gradually took measures that put greater emphasis on spiritual education and reduced the reading by the pupils of secular literature.77 However, the fact that Delort and her French staff were allowed to stay indicates that the region’s new rulers thought it feasible to continue the Collegio’s operations without the need for a drastic intervention or reorganization. To begin with, we know that Lady Morgan overstated the paradigm-shifting nature of Napoleon and Campan’s educational project compared to that of major pre-revolutionary institutions such as that of Saint-Cyr, a secular institution turned convent school near the royal palace in Versailles.78 Furthermore, in the late eighteenth century Emperor Joseph II had already modernDejob, L’instruction, pp. 100–3. Lady Morgan, Italy, 1, pp. 114–16. Also Appendix 3 in this book. 77  Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 101–8. 78  Rebecca Rogers, Les bourgeoises au pensionnat. L’éducation féminine au  xixe  siècle  (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), p.  7. Saint-Cyr had been founded by King Louis  XIV in 1686 as a reward for families from the French nobility who had lost their fortune or had otherwise become disadvantaged as a result of their service to the crown. Although it started as a secular institution, it was soon turned into a convent school. By the mid-eighteenth century, commentators were mocking it for producing nothing but religious fanatics and women too prudish to be suitable wives. And they also expressed their disappointment in the level of education attained by the pupils, which they found was very rudimentary; Rogers, Les demoiselles, pp. 20–21; Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp.  129–54; and Dominique Picco, ‘Saint-Cyr, un modèle éducatif?’, in Genre et éducation. Former, se former, être formée au féminin, ed.  by Bernard Bodinier, Martine Gest, Marie75 

76 

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ized the education of girls in convent schools, with the result being that the convent school model that Austrian administrators relied on as a benchmark was less conservative than Lady Morgan implied.79 And evidently the Austrians found much about Delort’s directorship of the Collegio that was to their liking. In 1818, Emperor Francis further showed his appreciation for Delort and her staff when he intervened to mitigate the impact of an impending budget cut.80 And later on, he officially recognized her services to the Austrian Empire by awarding her the Sternkreuz, a high distinction for noble ladies.81 The support of the local elite in north Italy and especially of the Austrian ruler, as well as his explicit acknowledgement of her achievements, must have made a tremendous impression on the then-elderly woman. Delort in 1828 resigned from her directorship of the Collegio on account of her poor health and advanced age, and returned to Paris.82 She moved into an apartment at the Abbaye-aux-Bois in the Rue de Sèvres, a former Cistercian monastery that had been dissolved in 1792 but in 1827 had been re-established as a convent of Augustinian canonesses. There she was part of a small circle of ladies that held weekly salons in which authors and artists mingled with businessmen, diplomats, and other members of high society.83 It was there also that she presumably arranged for the 1833 transferral of Gozelin’s foundation charter to the Austrian

Françoise Lemonnier-Delpy, and Paul Pasteur (Mont-Saint-Agnan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2009), pp. 337–52. 79  Bianchi, La bibliotheca, pp. 43–54. 80  Dejob, L’instruction, p. 109. 81  Hof- und Staats-Schematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthums, vol.  1 (Vienna: Hof- und Staats-Aerarial-Druckerey, 1827), p.  164. Possibly Delort was aware of the fact that she was not the first Bouxières canoness to receive the Sternkreuz. In 1764 the same honour had been awarded to Marie-Charlotte-Beatrix de Zuckmantel; Alain Petiot, Au service des Habsbourg. Officiers, ingénieurs, savants et artistes lorrains en Autriche (Paris: Editions Messene, 2000), p. 122. 82  Dejob, L’instruction, p.  114. In the early 1820s the Austrian authorities shifted the recruitment policy of the Collegio to include a larger proportion of non-paying children from poor families and to admit a greater total number of pupils (up to 71 in 1824–25, from 50 at the time of the foundation). This resulted in a deficit which in turn compelled budget cuts. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Delort resigned from her post in the same year that these were announced; Ibid., pp. 108–9. 83  This is mentioned in a short story by Laure Jouet d’Abrantès in Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un, 15 vols (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831–34), 1, p. 363.

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embassy, from whence it made its way to Francis’s personal library in Vienna. Delort’s post-mortem inventory from July 1837 mentions several beneficiaries of her estate who belonged to her inner circle at this late stage in her life, and they may have assisted her in this endeavour. They include a few relatives, friends from her time in Lorraine and Paris (including a Countess de Messey, who is mentioned as ‘her old friend’), several male associates and staff from her time in Milan, and the Collegio’s headmistress Henrietta Smith. Of all the beneficiaries Smith received the largest sum of cash.84 At least three of these individuals had direct links to Austrian court circles. Smith, who became the second director of the Collegio (1828–49), ex officio maintained close contacts with the emperor’s administrators. For her part, Countess de Messey should probably be identified as Marie-Antoinette-Rosalie-Eugénie de Messey de Bielle, a former canoness of Remiremont and later of Sankt Anna in Munich, or her sister Julie-Eléonore-Marie, a former canoness of Remiremont and later of Halle in Tirol. Their father was a chamberlain and colonel of the emperor of Austria, and their brother, LouisGabriel-Séraphique-Gaëtan, was a captain in that ruler’s service; and they were also relatives of Bouxières’ last Abbess de Messey, who (we shall see in Chapter  3) had also maintained close links with the Empire.85And one of the two executors of Delort’s will, Catherine Barthélemy, like her was a former canoness and a lady of the Sternkreuz order.86 Any of these people might have helped Delort with making the necessary contact with the emperor and with having the charter delivered to the Austrian embassy.87 Paris, AN, MC/ET/LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no. 16, le 2 juillet 1837, pp. 1–4. Reports from the time indicate that Smith and Delort had been on excellent terms; Dejob, L’instruction, pp. 91 and 114 and Giuliacci, Dall’educandato monastico al collegio, p. 68. 85  Borel d’Hauterive, Annuaire de la noblesse de France et des maisons souveraines de l’Europe (Paris: Dentu, Diard, and Lemine, 1856), pp.  249–50. On Marie-AntoinetteRosalie-Eugénie de Messey de Bielle’s former residence of Sankt Anna in Munich, see again Backmund, Die kleineren Orden, p. 91. 86  Paris, AN, MC/ET/LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no. 16, le 2 juillet 1837, p. 1. 87  The editor of the Annette de Mackau’s correspondence mentions that Delort visited Livorno with her adoptive daughter in May 1810; Annette de Mackau, 84 

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In one possible scenario, the elderly Delort decided to donate the charter as a token of her gratitude to the ruler for supporting her after the fall of the French regime in 1814 and for awarding her the Sternkreuz. In another, she picked the emperor for this reason and because she did not wish the charter to fall into the hands of a French state that had thrice failed her – once, when her convent was dissolved, then when the Napoleonic regime in north Italy fell, and again, when the King Charles  X (a figurehead of the Restauration movement) had been made to abdicate in August 1830. For either scenario, it is not difficult to see why the transaction was shrouded in secrecy. French officials at the time would have been very interested in finally locating the document and in securing for a public institution the ownership of an item that legally belonged to the state. But there were enough people, apparently, who were willing to support Delort and who deliberated with her over her decision: otherwise Lepage would probably never have known about its post-1833 fate.88 Conclusions

In this chapter  I traced the mysterious journey of Gozelin’s foundation charter for Bouxières abbey between summer 1790 and the final months of 1833. When it became obvious that their institution would be dissolved and its properties confiscated, the canonesses rolled out a secret plan to salvage the convent’s Trésor des chartes: this action represented one of the convent members’ last attempts to collectively control and transform their environment. But over time their willingness to hold on to such items eroded. The last of these to retain some of its memorial significance was Gozelin’s foundation charter, on account of the fact that it had been central to historical, legal, and cultic identity narratives throughout the

Correspondance, ed. de Tourtier-Bonazzi, p.  57, note 3. Unfortunately  I was unable to verify the latter’s identity. One possibility is that the editor’s source mistook for Delort’s adoptive daughter her confidante and head mistress of the Collegio Henrietta Smith, whom (we already saw) was a close associate of hers. 88  Countess de Messey’s daughter-in-law, Alexandrine de Messey, in the second half of the nineteenth century made papers and portraits of Abbess de Messey available to the historian de Salles; Chapitres nobles, p. 37.

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abbey’s existence. And arguably it also represented some of the former canonesses’ hope for a resurrection of the convent at some point after the dissolution. However by the time of its last custodian’s death in 1834, the charter’s meaning had changed from a communal signifier of historical continuity (and, so we may assume, post-dissolution defiance) to one that was predominantly charged with biographical meaning. The charter’s transferral into the collection of the Austrian emperor sealed the transformation of Marie-Rose de Lort, from an aristocratic canoness under French rule into a celebrated educator known as Caroline Delort who achieved the pinnacle of her career under Austrian rule. And in a poignant example of how the agency and life trajectory of an individual woman impacted on the memorial culture of her former convent, it also definitively disconnected this celebrated document from the other spatial, material, and textual reminders of the abbey’s medieval past. In the next chapter we shall see that a similar process played out for the abbey’s famous relic treasure, albeit over a much shorter time span. In less than a decade, these precious objects transitioned from being the cornerstone of the convent’s memory culture to being additionally charged with biographical meaning for those who secured their safekeeping. Then they briefly re-emerged in the early nineteenth century, presumably in the context of Abbess de Messey’s revived hopes for a resurrection of the convent. Those hopes foundered against a lack of interest by the French state, the general public, and (so we can assume) most of the former canonesses. As it turned out, the individual agency of one of the convent’s former clerics was not enough to return to these objects their former collective meaning.

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1801 St Gozelin’s (Im)mortal Remains In 1828 Lorraine native Elise Voïart (real name Anne-Elisabeth Petitpain, d.  1866) published a six-part novel titled La femme, ou les six amours.1 A typical product of the Restauration-era rediscovery of the national past, its six plots depict different forms of female love (as a daughter, a sister, a lover, a friend, a wife, and a mother) as a strength that gives women the heroic power and the conviction to contribute to the unity of the French nation in revolutionary times.2 For the opening passages of the fourth part, titled Amitié (‘Friendship’), Voïart chose the late 1780s hilltop site of Bouxières as the setting. It conveys an atmosphere of bewilderment and anxiety at the unexpected news that the venerable abbey and adjacent convent school were about to be dissolved: The young children, in their seclusion, did not know that a revolution (of which the aurora radiated so brilliantly with hope) was beginning to shake all of society on its foundations. The decree of the National Assembly that suppressed all the religious orders was eventually delivered at the convent of Bouxières, causing great consternation among the community. A  delay of one month was granted to obey to the decree. During that interval the children’s parents had come to take them back. Most of the canonesses who had relatives or friends left to stay with them; the others left for Germany, where many noble families had already fled  […] The abbey was nearly deserted when Monsieur de Clainville […] arrived at Bouxières.3 1  Elise Voïart, La femme, ou les six amours, 6  vols (Paris: Ambroise Dupont et Compagnie, 1828 (second edition)). 2  La femme was an instant success with literary critics and the general public. It won Voïart the Prix Montyon of the Académie Française and launched her career as a prolific author of historical and moralizing novels (earning her the epithet of the ‘Walter Scott of Lorraine’) for a younger audience. By the mid-nineteenth century reviewers became increasingly impatient with the maudlin sentimentality of her work and her reputation as a literary star subsequently faded; Nicole Cadène, ‘Elise Voïart, une femme de lettres romantique, de la Lumière à l’ombre’,  in Femmes des Lumières et de l’ombre. Un premier féminisme (1774–1830), ed.  by François Le Guennec (Orléans: HAL. Science de l’homme et de la société, 2011), pp.  163–72 (online publication at https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00680132, accessed 7 September 2019). 3  Voïart, La femme, 4, pp.  26–27: ‘Les jeunes filles, dans leur retraite, ignoraient qu’une révolution, dont l’aurore était si brillante d’espérance, commençait à ébranler

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De Clainvile is the father of the main protagonist Cécile, who attended the abbey’s convent school and had struck up a friendship with fellow pupil Pulchérie. With no relatives to whisk her away and no help forthcoming from the canonesses, Pulchérie begins to panic at the thought that she might have to stay behind in the deserted abbey. On being told about her situation de Clainville agrees to bring her along so she can stay with him and his daughter in their castle on the bank of the Moselle River. Finding himself at a loss about how to keep his teenage offspring occupied, he is relieved to know that she now has a companion and a lifelong friend. It makes no sense to read Voïart’s account as anything but a work of fiction. To begin with, we can tell that she tailored the narrative to represent the literary themes of undying female friendship and mutual support by women in times of crisis. Furthermore, the novel’s elite convent school in real life had been an institution for poor girls down in the village. And most importantly, its depiction of the sudden announcement of the abbey’s dissolution, of the members’ anxious response, and of the hasty manner in which one after the other fled from the site is unrealistic. When Bouxières abbey was dissolved in early 1791, the canonesses had been living as refugees at the Minimes convent in Nancy since 27 October 1789.4 And over the next fifteen months, there had been plenty of indications that their institution’s days were numbered. Besides the decrees of the National Assembly, news had been filtering through about what was happening in other houses of secular canonesses. For instance, in early 1790 the noble chapter of SaintLouis in Metz was notified that they were to submit an inventory of their institution’s assets by 1 March and to expect revolutionary officials to do an on-site review on 14  June. The deaconess there, Elisabeth-Agnès Mohr de Waldt de Betzdorff, surely relayed news la société tout entière. Le décret de l’Assemblée nationale qui supprimait tous les ordres religieux parvint enfin au couvent de Bouxières, et jeta une grande consternation parmi la communauté. On avait accordé un délai d’un mois pour obéir au décret; dans cet intervalle les parens des élèves étaient venus les reprendre. La plupart des chanoinesses qui avaient des parens ou dés amis se retirèrent près d’eux; les autres passèrent en Allemagne où se réfugiaient déjà un grand nombre de familles nobles, et la maison était presque déserte, quand M.  de Clainville  […] arriva à Bouxierès’. 4  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191.

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of these events to her sister, the Bouxières Deaconess Philippine.5 Furthermore the three protocols of the Bouxières chapter meeting of 26  June of that year bear witness to the fact that the members were intent on taking action against the impending dissolution by lobbying foreign powers, setting up a legal defence against the dismantling of the estate, and protecting the financial interests of recently admitted members.6 And the reconstruction in the previous chapter also shows that the canonesses directed one of their number to take away the abbey’s most precious charters and keep them out of the hands of state officials. Meanwhile the chapter members and Abbess de Messey adopted a defiant tone, including at the final chapter meetings on 12 and 13 January 1791.7 During the latter, de Messey proclaimed that the convent members would continue to celebrate Mass every day and to operate as a convent.8 But they and more neutral observers probably also realized that the canonesses’ situation was rapidly becoming untenable. The convent (whose numbers had expanded significantly in the preceding few years in anticipation of the move to the new buildings in Nancy) had been hemorrhaging both senior and junior members. Several tantes and nièces had either resigned or did not return from one of their legitimate absences, and given the circumstances it is also not surprising that a number of recently admitted convent members had declined to enter the community.9 And de Messey’s dream of setting up a magnificent new urban site next to the church of Bon Secours had Paul Lesprand, ‘L’abbaye de Saint-Louis de Metz, chapitre noble de Dames (1762–1791)’, Annuaire de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie lorraine (1923), 277–356, at pp. 354–67. 6  Chapter 1, at notes 31–37. 7  Chapter 3, at notes 63–68. 8  Chapter 3, at note 69. 9  In the early autumn of 1789 the convent counted approximatively eighteen dames capitulantes and another five women who did not participate in the chapter on account of their status as nièces; Ducas, Les chapitres nobles de dames, recherches historiques, généalogiques et héraldiques sur les chanoinesses régulières et séculières, avec l’indication des preuves de noblesse faites pour leur admission dans les chapitres et abbayes nobles de France et des Pays-bas, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à l’époque de leur suppression (Paris: Ducas, 1843), p.  35. It is impossible to say how many of these individuals had formally given up their position by January 1791 and exactly how many newly admitted ones had declined to enter the convent; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 290 and de Salles, Chapitres nobles, p. 40, note 265. 5 

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also quickly evaporated. In Chapter 3 we shall see that construction work on the convent buildings, which was only in its early stages when it abruptly halted in the autumn of 1789, was never resumed and that none of the standing structures were ready for the canonesses to move into. Even the church of Bon Secours (in the process of being refurbished for use by the canonesses as their abbatial sanctuary) was left as an unfinished construction site.10 Bouxières abbey’s death struggle was long but very obvious, and it might not be a coincidence that officials took steps to dissolve the convent just a few weeks after former members of religious institutions became entitled to a state pension.11 Finally and perhaps most paradoxically, Voïart’s account in Amitié is also misleading because it implies that contemporary observers saw the dissolution as the definitive end of Bouxières abbey. Admittedly it is true that the remaining canonesses quickly dispersed. By late March 1791 canonesses de Moy de Sons, de Ligniville, and Boisgelin had moved to Saint-Mihiel, Poussay (both in Lorraine), and Tréguier (in Brittany).12 Deaconess Mohr de Wald de Betzdorff and secrétaire de Gléresse had emigrated, the former to her home region of Luxemburg and the latter to the Rhineland region of Porentray.13 The two de Lort sisters (whom we encountered first in Chapter 1) too had left: but at least they were still residents of Nancy.14 And so was Abbess de Messey: but less than a year and a half later she was in Germany, having

Chapter 3, at note 53. The pension scheme came into effect on 1 January 1791; 'Décret sur le paiement des pensions ecclésiastiques, lors de la séance du 30 novembre 1790 (décrets, lois et arrêtés)', Archives parlementaires de la Révolution Française, 21 (1885), 149-50. Also refer to the provisions described in Code général français, contenant les Lois et Actes du Gouvernement publiés depuis l’ouverture des Etats Généraux au 5 mai 1789, jusqu’au 8 juillet 1815, ed. by Jean Desenne, 22  vols (Paris: Ménard and Desenne, 1818–25), 10, pp. 389–390 and 399. 12  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 211 U and 215 U. 13  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 218  U and 214  U. A  similar property inventory with information about Canoness Madeleine-Barbe de Breiten de Landenberg’s whereabouts in March 1791 has yet to surface (on her, Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p.  287), even though she is on record in November 1790 as the owner of a dilapidated house on the hill (Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 879 U). Some of the canonesses had rented out their properties to locals after the convent had moved to Nancy; Chapter 3, note 61. 14  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 207 U and 212 U. 10  11 

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joined her brother in self-imposed exile.15 This dispersal timeline roughly matches that for other houses of secular canonesses in the area.16 However, we should not be tempted to conclude that all the convent’s former members were immediately resigned to the death of their institution.17 We have already seen that the chapter had vowed to take the necessary steps in order to make a resurrection of their institution possible. Chapter 1 reconstructed the implications of this for the Trésor des chartes. And this chapter will do the same with the abbey’s famous relic treasure, which disappeared around the same time and resurfaced in early 1801. That collection’s most obvious significance to the convent was that it carried memories of the abbey’s origins in the tenth century and its enduring connection to founder St  Gozelin. But as I hope to show, in addition to this it also recalled the convent’s troubled past in the medieval and early modern period, the members’ resilience in the face of danger and adversity, and the multiple occasions on which the canonesses had triumphantly returned after years of dispersal or exile. In light of this multi-layered significance, we need to look at how the treasure was removed, how the memories associated with it were formed, and whether that perception lived on into the nineteenth century. Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 203 U. On de Messey’s post-dissolution whereabouts, refer to Chapter 3, at notes 73–74. 16  For instance, the abbeys of Remiremont and Epinal formally ceased to exist in respectively December and early January 1790; Georges Durand, L’église Saint-Pierre des Dames de Remiremont, 2 vols (Epinal: Société anonyme de l’imprimerie Fricotel, 1929–31), 1, p. 215 and Georges Poull, Les dames chanoinesses d’Epinal (Haroué: Gerard Louis, 2006), pp.  127–128. Because of the COVID19-crisis and resulting travel restrictions, I  was unable to consult a number of public and private archives that might have yielded more information about the post-dissolution activity of individual Bouxières canonesses. The F19 series in the Archives Nationales in Paris (particularly the inventory numbers F/19/1111–20 and 1122–28) contain unpublished records on former religious who received pensions from the French state (in Chapter 1, at notes 29 and 58, we saw that the two de Lort sisters were in that category). Napoleonic police records (in the F7 series) might also prove useful for tracing former convent members. 17  After the canonesses of Epinal were barred entry to their convent in early January 1791, they moved to a nearby private house where they continued to hold chapter meetings and attend office until April of that year; Poull, Les dames chanoinesses, pp.  127–28. Regarding other groups of women religious in France that continued to live in community after the dissolution, see Jean de Viguerie, ‘La résistance des religieuses à la persécution révolutionnaire: Contribution à l’histoire de l’héroisme féminin’, Bulletin de la Société historique de Compiègne, 34 (1995), 75–98, at pp. 80–81. 15 

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A Missing Treasure

At the time of the dissolution, the abbey’s relic treasure consisted of a black wooden shrine with silver figurines that contained most of St Gozelin‘s remains. There were also two silver reliquaries that held, respectively, his skull and one arm, and various precious objects formerly owned by him: a chalice, a paten, a ninth-century evangeliary with precious metal covers that were studded with gemstones, a ring, an ivory comb, and a cloth to cover the chalice.18 On 12  August or (more likely) 24 or 27 October 1789, all of these objects were transported to Nancy to protect them from destruction or pillaging.19 We do not know where exactly they were initially kept. Nor do we know exactly what happened to them in the immediate aftermath of the fateful chapter meeting of 26  June 1790, even though evidence reviewed in the previous chapter strongly leads us to suspect that their fate was discussed at that meeting too.20 But we do know that they do not appear in the inventory of the convent’s properties that was taken by officials of the French state on 27 and 28  July of that year.21 Indeed, this document only records the presence at the church of Bon Secours of a small number of church vessels, textiles, missals, and other objects used in the liturgy, none of which had great value or had been a part of this previous collection. Some of these items ended up being melted or otherwise dismantled, while others were given to parish churches in the region.22 The absence in this inventory of any reference to the relic treasure is remarkable, for two reasons. One is that the officials who made this type of inventory typically paid particular attention to such items, principally because of the bulk resale value of the metal contained in liturgical vessels, book covers, and reliquaries. For comparison, the inventory of the assets and properties of Epinal abbey meticulously records numerous items from Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 247–64. Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p.  191. The date of 12  August was when the archives were brought to Nancy; Chapter 1, note 43. 20  As was already suggested in Deux chapitres-nobles, p. 43. 21  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 381–410v. 22  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  256–58. The convent members actually celebrated their liturgical rites in the church of the Tiercelins; Chapter 3, at note 59. 18 

19 

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Illustration 6. Gozelin’s Paten and Chalice from Bouxières Relic Treasure in Nancy Cathedral. Reproduced in Auguin, Monographie, p. 276 (facing).

the relic collection, all or nearly all of which ended up being dismantled so that their precious metalwork could be melted down or sold.23 At Remiremont, the abbey’s church treasure was inventoried with the same attention to detail (even including estimates of the weight of the metalwork), and afterwards most of the items were shipped off to the Paris mint for melting.24 And at Poussay too, most of the items from the treasure were either

Ch.  Chapelier, ‘Inventaires ecclésiastiques. Collégiale de Saint-Dié, chapitres nobles des Vosges’,  Bulletin de la Société philomatique vosgienne, 18 (1892–93), 98–118, at pp.  102–4 (for a more detailed discussion of the inventories, see Léon Schwab, ‘La fin de l’insigne chapitre Saint-Goëry d’Epinal’, La révolution dans les vosges. Revue d’histoire moderne, 2  (1908), 129–48). St  Goëry’s shrine was opened in 1791 and confiscated the next year; Ch. Chapelier, ‘Epinal et Saint Goëry’, Bulletin de la Société philomatique vosgienne, 12 (1886–87), 63–109, at pp. 90–93 and 104–10. 24  Chapelier, ‘Inventaires’, pp. 104–10 and Durand, L’église, 1, pp. 217–19. 23 

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dismantled or sold.25 A  second reason why it is so remarkable that the Bouxières inventories contain no mention of its most prized assets is that these items were widely known at the time. Over the previous centuries they had been routinely displayed at the old abbatial church on major feast days, and on several occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the subject of major public rites and celebrations.26 We also know that some eighteenth-century visitors had been treated to private showings.27 And finally, the treasure was widely known through published reports, most notably that by Augustin Calmet in his History of Lorraine.28 The officials’ negligence can therefore mean only that these men had been bribed or otherwise persuaded to silence (maybe they sympathized with the canonesses’ plight) in anticipation of an attempt to secretly remove the collection, or that it had already been removed and taken to a safe location. Either way, there can be no doubt that its absence from the inventory derives from a deliberate attempt to keep the relics from being confiscated and that the decision for that attempt was made at the 26  June chapter meeting or shortly afterwards. When the abbey’s assets were seized in the early months of 1791, officials carefully checked what they found against the 1790 inventories. Among other things, they noticed that the abbey’s former provost Joseph Raybois had taken away two missals from the abbatial church of Bon Secours. He was duly summoned to hand them over: but as far as we know, they did not ask any questions about the relic treasure.29

Poussay’s relic treasure comprised items that were similar to Bouxières’ but focussed on the figure of Pope Leo  IX (1048–54); Emile Gaspard, ‘Abbaye et chapitre de Poussay’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 13 (1871), 88–129, at pp. 122–23. 26  See below, at notes 67–70. 27  During two separate visits to the hill the eighteenth-century laywer Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt was shown various items from the treasure (the liturgical comb in 1740, and the main shrine, head shrine, chalice, and evangeliary in 1766); ‘Une visite à Bouxières-aux-Dames en 1766’, ed.  by Edmond Des Robert, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique Lorrain, 75 (1937–39), 213–31, at pp. 216 and 229–30. Also refer to the discussion in Chapter 4 of this book. 28  Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, col. 894. 29  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 258. 25 

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Looking for Culprits

To explain these unusual circumstances, Henri Lepage in his 1859 article speculated that Raybois had arranged for the removal of the precious objects. This is plausible and might explain his decision to step down as secretary (so as not to be responsible for this action and the removal of the Trésor des chartes) at the chapter meeting of 26 June 1790.30 His profile also broadly matches that of individuals who removed the most precious relics from the three other houses of secular canonesses in Lorraine and who apparently held on to these throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. At Epinal it was the local parish priest who extracted the relics of St  Goëry from their 1720s shrine, which ended up being confiscated in 1792.31 At Remiremont, it was also the local parish priest and one of the former canons who intervened to save the relics of Romaric and other saints.32 And at Poussay, those responsible for rescuing the relics of St  Menna were the lay president, secretary, and the undersecretary of the commune of Mirecourt.33 Like Raybois, all of these individuals stayed in the region during the revolutionary period and presumably had the right connections and access to the appropriate facilities to make long-term concealment of these items possible. But there was also an important difference between these cases and that of Bouxières. In the other three Lorraine abbeys, aside from a few minor exceptions the removal operation concerned only the physical remains of patron saints, which were of no interest to the revolutionaries because they had no material value and because many considered them to be accessories of Catholic superstition. But at Bouxières, not just St  Gozelin’s remains were secreted away but also several highly valuable items in gold, silver, and other precious materials, as well as the reliquaries in which the saint’s remains had been kept. Whoever it was that took these and subsequently had them in their possession must have realized that in the eyes of the authorities they were committing a serious

30  31  32  33 

Chapter 1, at notes 40–41. Chapelier, ‘Epinal’, p. 96. Chapelier, ‘Inventaires’, p. 110 and Durand, L’église, 1, pp. 223–24. Chapelier, ‘Inventaires’, p. 117.

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crime. For comparison, Charles Chapelier recounts that when the properties of Poussay abbey were about to be seized in 1793, the local parish priest for that very reason obstructed an attempt to save the abbey treasure: The most precious objects could have been saved. A fervent Christian had shown how to subtract them from all investigations. But fear had already extracted a fatal oath from the parish priest of Poussay and had compelled him to accept a schismatic mission: it prevented the Christian from taking advantage of this opportunity.34

The highly clandestine nature of what happened is probably the reason why there is so much mystery about the Bouxières treasure’s removal and subsequent whereabouts in the final years of the eighteenth century and the very early nineteenth. In January 1801, when Raybois handed over to Nancy cathedral a bag containing St  Gozelin’s remains, three cathedral clerics issued a written statement that was notably vague about what had happened: [The bag] was without a doubt taken from a shrine that held [the relics of Saint Gozelin], and that used to be offered from time to time for the veneration of the faithful in the church of the noble canonesses of Bouxières. During the savage persecution launched by the Jacobins against the Catholic religion and all things holy  […] in order to avoid the death of the person [who had hidden the relics] at the hands of their capturer the said shrine was burned and the said bones enclosed in their cushion were buried. So it was that they were kept free from profanation and stayed unharmed.35

Both the relics’ re-emergence and the clerics’ discretion about their fate in the intervening ten years must be viewed in light of developments in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church. Just a few months later Napoleon and Chapelier, ‘Inventaires’, p.  114: ‘Les objets les plus précieux auraient pu être sauvés. Un chrétien fervent avait montré comment on pouvait les soustraire à toutes les recherches; mais la peur qui déjà avait arraché un serment fatal et fait accepter une mission schismatique au curé de Poussay, l’empêcha de profiter de ces ouvertures’. 35  Auguin, Monographie, pp.  363–64: ‘Extractaque nempe est certo certius e capsa has sacras reliquias continente, et in ecclesia Buxeriensis (vulgo de Bouxières) canonicarum nobilium capituli jam pridem olim venerationi fidelium interdum exposita. Porro, persecutionis atrocis tempore a Jacobinis exagitatae contra religionem catholicam et res sacras […] predicta capsa, ne fieret causa mortis illius penes quem deprehenderetur, combusta fuit et praedicta sacra ossa cum suo pulvillo in profundo occultata, fuerunt a profanatione liberata, attamen salva remanserunt’. 34 

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Pope Pius  VII would issue the Concordate, an agreement that once again allowed the Catholic faith to be openly practised and Church institutions to be restored. Among other things, it made it possible for French ecclesiastics to once again promote Gozelin’s cult, retrieving his remains from their hiding place and offering them for veneration at Nancy cathedral.36 However the Concordate did not imply a restitution of confiscated properties to the Church, and so Bouxières’ former estates, archives, and other moveable belongings remained the property of the French state. This also meant that whoever had taken the shrines and secondary relics of St  Gozelin in mid-1790 could still be prosecuted for theft, and it is probably the reason why the 1801 statement issued by Nancy cathedral is silent about the rest of the treasure – mentioning neither that most of the secondary relics (the chalice, paten, manuscript, and other objects) still existed, nor that Raybois had either transferred these to the cathedral or was about to.37 A public announcement of the re-emergence of these items would have drawn the attention of French officials and likely would have resulted in their confiscation and possible destruction, and might also have resulted in the prosecution of Raybois and his accomplices. This is presumably also the reason for yet another major omission from the 1801 report: the identity of the individual or individuals who had removed and hidden the relic treasure at the beginning of the 1790s. However this did not stop several nineteenth-century scholars from speculating on who had been originally assigned the dangerous task of hiding the treasure and where it might have been concealed. Lepage referred to an oral tradition that claimed that Deaconess Philippine Mohr de Waldt de Betzdorff had taken it to her home region of Luxemburg. After she died during the 1794–95 siege of the citadel of the region’s eponymous capital, he added, unnamed persons had handed

In 1801, the parish priest of Epinal revealed that he had the relics of St  Goëry in his possession and requested permission from the lay and clerical authorities to offer them for veneration in his church; Chapelier, ‘Epinal’, pp.  96–102. At Remiremont the restitution of patron saints’ relics and what was left of their shrines took place over several years in 1803–7; Durand, L’église, 1, pp. 223–24. 37  We know this because in 1803 the local bishop put all of these objects along with St Gozelin’s remains in a former shrine of St Sigisbert; below, at note 73. 36 

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over the items in the collection to Raybois.38 Later commentators mangled and embellished Lepage’s version. In 1866 Nancy priest Pierre-Etienne Guillaume claimed that it was not de Betzdorff but Abbess de Messey who had taken the relics to Luxemburg, and that she subsequently worked with the former provost to hand them over to Nancy cathedral.39 And in 1882 Bernard Auguin combined Lepage’s version with the contents of the 1801 transferral record to state that the siege of Luxemburg had compelled de Betzdorff to take all the relics out of the shrines, then burn the shrines and bury the relics, but not before telling Raybois about their precise location.40 Sceptics might dismiss all three of these accounts as mere speculation. However, most of Lepage’s oral sources appear to have been trustworthy: among other things, they provided him with accurate information about Gozelin’s foundation charter being sent off to Vienna.41 Independent testimonies also help us to corroborate his account of de Betzdorff’s post-dissolution movements. They tell us that she left the convent shortly after the final chapter meeting and that she had returned to her ancestral region of Luxemburg by late March 1791.42 And like Cécile and Pulchérie in Voïart’s novel, she probably departed from Nancy together with another former convent member: this person was her twelve-year-old nièce Cunégonde-Marie-Anne de Kerpen, who came from the same region and also happened to be her niece in real life.43 From an addendum to her 1794 will we also know that de Betzdorff died during the siege of Luxemburg, namely during

Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 264. Pierre-Etienne Guillaume, Histoire du diocèse de Toul et de celui de Nancy, depuis l’établissement du Christianisme chez les Leuci jusqu’à nos jours, précédée d’une dissertation historique sur l’antiquité de l’église de Toul, 2  vols (Nancy: Thomas & Pierron, 1866), 1, pp. 265–66. 40  Auguin, Monographie, p.  278 and Charles Pfister, Histoire de Nancy, 3  vols (Paris and Nancy: Berger-Levraul & Cie, 1902 (second edition of the first volume) and 1908–9), 1, p. 46. 41  Chapter 1, at note 64. 42  A  1791 inventory of her properties reveals that she had emigrated before 28 March of that year; Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 218 U. 43  The documentation regarding de Kerpen’s admission as a nièce in 1786–87 is in Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 97r–98r and 136, fols 6v–7r. 38 

39 

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the night of 2 May 1795.44 Assuming that she had taken the treasure, it might have been either Cunégonde or de Betzdorff’s sister Elisabeth-Agnès (the deaconess of Saint-Louis, who had returned to Luxemburg in May 1791) who then informed Raybois of Philippine’s death and told him where the treasure was hidden.45 The same sceptics might also say that the claim about de Betzdorff’s role derives from an attempt to exculpate the exprovost for the clandestine removal of the treasure items. But even if new evidence were to surface indicating that Lepage’s account is indeed inaccurate, its mere existence calls to our attention the fact that the ‘theft’ and subsequent concealment of a collection of this scope, financial value, and finally also significance as a lieu de mémoire could not possibly have been the work of a single person. As we saw earlier, the decision to remove the treasure was likely made at the June 1790 chapter meeting, which implies that all participating individuals in that meeting were complicit in the affair. Serious deliberation and preparation must have preceded the relic treasure’s removal from the convent: possibly the shrines were even disassembled on-site. Finally, post-dissolution there were several convent members who would have been interested in staying informed about the status and safety of these items. The first was Abbess de Messey, who for several years following the dissolution continued to style herself as the leader of the convent and who also became involved with a cohort of exiled clerics that was carrying out clandestine operations in the Nancy area.46 Possibly Deaconess de Betzdorff also continued in her religious role, as did her nièce Cunégonde: de Betzdorff’s will contains a clause saying that after her death Cunégonde would benefit from the usufruct of a legacy of 24,000 Francs ‘for as long as she remains a canoness’.47 Finally, in

Luxemburg, ANL, Fonds Anciens, A–LXV–39, Chartes et titres divers nos 899–934, no. 931, pp. 8–9. 45  Lesprand, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 358. 46  Chapter 3, at note 73. 47  Luxembourg, ANL, Fonds Anciens, A–LXV–39, Chartes et titres divers nos 899934, no. 931, p. 3. The provision echoes two laws, issued respectively in October 1790 and January 1791, which granted canonesses (and nièces after the death of their tante) a state pension for life but decreed that they would lose it in case the got married; Code général français, ed. Desenne, 10, pp. 389–390 and 399. 44 

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Chapter 1 we saw that one of the de Lort sisters was in all likelihood responsible for removing key items from the Trésor, which itself suggests that either one or both of them did not consider her membership of the convent to be a chapter in her life that was forever closed and done with. Conceivably, some or even all of these individuals formed a small network that kept track of the relic treasure throughout the 1790s; sought for and found ways to prevent it from falling into the hands of the French authorities; and eventually made the decision to hand it over to Nancy cathedral. These suspicions about a collective effort also draw our attention to the underlying reasons for risking lives in order to retain control over the relic treasure. Because it functioned (alongside the Trésor) as a lieu de mémoire that linked eighteenth-century canonesses to their patron as well as to their earliest predecessors, ownership of its contents was likely viewed as crucial to a future resurrection of the abbey. But as we shall see in the next section, alongside that obvious logic we also find that this collection of precious remains and other objects functioned as a material reminder of the convent’s ability to bounce back from episodes during which its existence had been critically threatened. Emergence and Early Perceptions of the Relic Treasure

Since all of the objects in the relic treasure were linked directly to St  Gozelin, we must trace their origins as memorial objects back to the man himself and to the earliest indications of his cult. As we learn from the abbey’s 938 foundation charter, Gozelin had arranged to be buried in the crypt of the abbatial church and to occupy a place of distinction in the community’s commemorative prayers.48 He took these measures not only to create a place of commemoration for himself, but also so that his memory as founder would overshadow that of other individuals (particularly a number of women) who had crucially contributed to the abbey’s emergence.49 His posthumous memory gained some traction with

48  49 

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locals and pilgrims: a modest cult developed around his person and there are some indications of pilgrimage to his tomb. And a hagiographical narrative from the eleventh century also mentions that the abbots of the nearby monasteries of Saint-Mansuy and Saint-Evre (both of which also shared a close association to Gozelin) took the reliquaries of their abbey’s patron saints to the hill in times of drought.50 His achievements were further celebrated in the eleventh- or early-twelfth-century Deeds of the Bishops of Toul, an expanded version of which was issued sometime during the seventeenth century.51 Despite the existence of these written accounts no proper saint’s Life or stand-alone biographical treatment was ever attempted.52 And as far as we can tell, Gozelin’s legacy at Bouxières was primarily anchored in spaces and in objects. Regarding spaces, over time the focus of his commemoration shifted from his tomb in the crypt of the abbatial church to the entire monastic site and its immediate surroundings. For instance, as late as the eighteenth century visitors were shown St Gozelin’s Tribune, a brick construction on the far side of the Pelouse (the landscaped area behind the abbey) from which the bishop was said to have preached to pilgrims.53 And regarding objects, we can see that the significance awarded to the saintly bishop’s remains and his secondary relics increased exponentially from the later Middle Ages onwards. When the abbey went through a phase of economic growth in the fifteenth century, these circumstances inspired the convent’s leadership to disconnect the saint’s cult from his tomb.54 In 1436 Bishop Henry de Ville-sur-Illon of Toul allowed for Gozelin’s grave or shrine to be opened and the upper part of his skull to be placed in a silver head reliquary.55 By February 1454, the saint’s body and one of his arms were encased in two separate reliquaries: we know this because the archdeacon of Toul authorized them to be carried around in a quête itinérante, a fundraising journey, to collect donations for a renovation of the Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, col. 892. Gesta episcoporum Tullensium, ed. Georg  Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores  8 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1848), pp.  639–40. On the early modern version, see the discussions in Chapters 3 and (especially) 5 of this book. 52  Parisse, ‘Un évêque’. 53  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 138–39. 54  Mougenot, L’abbaye, pp. 55–60. 55  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 261–62. 50  51 

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abbatial church.56 At this stage the contents of the relic treasure (including the secondary relics, most of which date from Gozelin’s time) became more or less consolidated.57 Gozelin’s principal shrine was replaced for the first time during the tenure of Abbess Anne-Catherine de Cicon (1641–68).58 Not much is known about that chest, except that it included the bishop’s bones inside a bag made out of white silk taffeta that was wrapped in crimson satin.59 Judging by the 1801 inspection report by the Nancy cathedral clerics, the bag probably remained intact throughout the remainder of the abbey’s existence and even beyond.60 De Cicon’s replacement shrine subsequently became the centerpiece for all liturgical celebrations in honour of St  Gozelin. In 1734 it itself was replaced by a further reliquary, made (according to a 1743 document) ‘in the manner of ebony wood’ and decorated with silver figurines.61 However for the period after this last action until the early 1790s, we have little indication that the convent members made much of an effort to promote Gozelin’s cult. No doubt broader developments in contemporary culture, including shifting attitudes to the cult of saints and their relics but also aethestic taste, played an important part in this. Some of the Bouxières community’s more sophisticated members and their visitors might have felt slightly embarrassed at the macabre spectacle of Gozelin’s body, skull and arm reliquaries, the gaudy bling of his secondary relics, and the unfashionable medieval style of

Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 248. The body of St Goëry of Epinal was translated in 1464; Chapelier, ‘Epinal’, pp. 75–76. 57  A  description of these items in their post-revolutionary state is in Auguin, Monographie, pp. 266–331, with further notes in Barrucand, ‘Le trésor’, pp. 89–106. 58  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 262–63. 59  According to the protocol of the 1734 transferral of the relic treasure; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  297–98. Perhaps by some oversight I was unable to find the original protocol in the abbey’s surviving papers. 60  Auguin, Monographie, pp. 363–64: ‘Nos infra scripti […] testamur magnam ossium S.  Gauzelini Tullensis episcopi partem, intus panno bombycino albo involutam, quodque includitur pulvillo oblongo panni serici rubri in tribus lateribus consuto, ad nos certam et indubiam pervenisse’. 61  The 1743 document is now in Nancy, BSt, 101, fols  136r–38v and is edited in Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  251–55. The design and appearance of the new container was in line with then-current tastes. At the nearby noble house of Poussay the canonesses likewise had the remains of their patron St  Menna enshrined in a box made of ebony; Chapelier, ‘Inventaires’, p. 117. 56 

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several of these objects. And more generally speaking they must have realized that Gozelin’s cult had little traction, especially outside of Bouxières’ immediate area.62 When the canonesses wrote to King Louis  XVI in 1784 to request permission to move to Nancy, their letter made no references at all to the need to safeguard the material tokens of that cult.63 But in spite of these attitudes, we find that the collection nevertheless remained vital to the convent’s understanding of self. To understand why this was the case we must look at the relic treasure’s eventful history over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Remembering Collective Resilience

Although interest in Gozelin as a cultic figure may have waned in the mid to later eighteenth century, the objects that were linked to his person were more than mere sites of memory of his sainthood. To begin with, both the Trésor des chartes and the relic treasure referred to him as a monastic founder and to the continuous existence of a religious community on the hill at Bouxières since the 930s. And secondly, the latter collection also functioned as a material reminder of the triumphant resilience of previous generations of canonesses in the face of impending ruin. Over the previous century and a half, the community of Bouxières had been compelled to evacuate the relic treasure on three different occasions, each time because the abbey, its inhabitants, and its most precious assets were threatened. The first such episode was in the 1630s, when the region was hit by the plague and Swedish, Hungarian and other troops subsequently made life around Bouxières extremely dangerous. While the convent was dispersed until its return in 1649, Gozelin’s relics were absent for even longer. Secretly taken out of their shrines and transported to the convent of the Grey Sisters in Nancy, they remained there under lock and key for twenty-four years,

Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fol. 301r. For other examples of this attitude, refer to Hannah Williams, ‘Saint Geneviève’s Miracles: Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, French History, 30 (2016), 322–53. 62  63 

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until 1659.64 A second evacuation occurred during the French occupation of Lorraine in the 1670s–80s: in 1683 the canonesses were dispersed and the relic treasure was deposited at the convent of the Sisters of St Elisabeth, again in Nancy.65 The third removal was in 1743, when more warfare in the area led to another mission to hide the collection at Nancy, this time with the Ladies of the Visitation: some returned in 1745 and 1747, others in 1748.66 By the end of the eighteenth century, recurrent episodes of dispersal and subsequent restoration were engrained in the convent’s collective memory. The relic treasure helped the convent members to anchor memories of these episodes into a general narrative of resilience and survival in the face of critical threat, as its removal and subsequent return had provided to each episode a concrete beginning and end. A distinguishing feature of this identity discourse is that from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards (but possibly from much earlier) the canonesses had in place a specific ritual procedure which they relied on to publicly announce the restoration of convent life, reaffirm the historical links between the abbey and surrounding lay society, and celebrate the Bouxières community’s ability to survive episodes of critical danger with its most precious assets intact. That procedure is extensively documented for 165967 and was repeated almost to the letter in 1748. On the latter occasion, which took place on 24 August, a delegation of the Bouxières chapter and two local canons came to the convent of the Ladies of the Visitation, broke the seals that had been placed on the cases that held the relics, inspected the contents, and held a few brief ceremonies in the local church. After the laity were allowed to pray before them for an hour, the relics were put on

Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 262–63 and Poirier, Le chapitre, p. 23. Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 250–51. 66  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p.  255. Since 1735 the convent of the Ladies of the Visitation had housed a former canoness of Bouxières named Anne-Marie-Louis de Zuckmantel. Her presence at this institution may be one of the reasons why her former fellow convent members relocated the relic collection there in 1743; HenriAntoine Regnard de Gironcourt, ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 227–28. 67  Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 131v–33r, edited in Lepage, L’abbaye, pp. 295–97, with further relevant pieces at pp. 292-95. 64  65 

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two carts (with the canonesses ascending a third)68 and driven to the bridge of Bouxières, where we encountered the Ladies and nièces that had stayed at the abbey, dressed in their attire for church service, together with one of their canons and Monsieur Trompette, the parish priest of Bouxières, and Sirs Gallois and Monchablon took the shrine, bust, and relics into the parish church of Bouxières, followed by the Ladies, the parish priest, the inhabitants of the said village of Bouxières and the neighbouring villages, who walked in procession. After the two men had placed the relics in the choir, the parish priest began to sing Iste confessor and several other hymns, incensed them, and having said the Collect the two canons retrieved the said shrine, bust and reliquaries and took them in a procession, singing the litanies of the saints as well as multiple hymns, to the abbey church. This church they entered with the Ladies and all the people who had followed in a procession, then deposited the shrine, bust, and relics on the main altar, incensed them, and sang with the Ladies Iste confessor. The ceremony ended with the Te Deum, which was sung as all the church bells were ringing […] The said relics were presented to the devotion of the public during the octave, after which the office of the blessed St Gozelin was celebrated and the shrine and bust and all the other reliquaries were placed back in the treasury and cupboards of the chapter, in the presence of the Ladies of Bouxières who were present at the time.69

We can only wonder if these carriages resembled the highly ornate ones that the canonesses of Sainte-Waudru in Mons and those of Sainte-Aldegonde in Maubeuge used for processions; François De Vriendt, ‘La procession de la Trinité à Mons et celle de Sainte Aldegonde à Maubeuge: Des rites jumeaux (xiie–xviie s.)’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp. 249–73, at p. 263. 69  Nancy, BSt, 101, fols  131v–33r: ‘où nous avons trouvé les dames et les niepces qui  étoient restées dans l’abbaye, revêtues de leurs habits d’église, ensemble  un de leurs chanoines et le sieur  Trompette, curé dudit Bouxières;  et les sieurs Gallois et Monchablon ont pris et porté la châsse, buste  et reliques dans l’église paroissiale dudit Bouxières, suivis des dames,  du sieur curé, des habitans, tant dudit Bouxières que des villages circonvoisins, qui marchoient en procession; lesquels aiant posé lesdittes  reliques dans le choeur, le sieur curé a comancé chanter Iste confessor, avec plusieurs autres hymnes, les a encensé et après avoir eu dit la collecte, les deux chanoines ont repris ladilte châsse, buste et reliquaires, qu’ils ont portés processionnellement, en chantant les litanies des saints, plusieurs hymnes, jusqu’à l’église collégialle, ensuilte  ils y sont entrés avec les dames et tous les peuples qui avoient suivis en procession, puis ils ont déposé la chasse, buste et reliques sur le maître autel, les ont encensés, ont chanté avec mesdames Iste confessor, et le tout s’est terminé par le Te Deum, que l’on a chanté pendant le son de touttes les cloches […] lesquelles reliques ont esté laissées exposées pendant l’octave à la dévotion du public, après laquelle et la fête du bienheureux saint Gauzelin célébrée, la châsse et buste et tous les autres reliquaires ont esté  remis dans le thrésor et armoires du chapitre, en présence des dames alors présentes audit Bouxières […]’. 68 

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After these ceremonies, a protocol was drafted and signed by the abbess, several canonesses, two canons, and the abbey’s secretary.70 When the canonesses sat together on 26 June 1790 to talk about a strategy for a future resurrection of the abbey, this discussion surely triggered memories of these earlier episodes and rituals. Bringing the entire relic treasure to safety was an option that had been tested multiple times over the previous centuries and that was extensively captured in the abbey’s written and oral memories. And on several of these occasions, a specific ritual for bringing back the treasure to Bouxières had helped the canonesses to symbolically represent the survival of the convent as the legitimate institutional and spiritual successor to Gozelin’s original foundation. It so happened that Deaconess de Betzdorff was the only remaining convent member who as a young nièce had witnessed the last such ceremony, in 1743.71 And as such she may have been one of the individuals who reminded her fellow chapter members of this tried-and-tested procedure and who insisted on the symbolic importance of bringing not just Gozelin’s remains but the entire treasure to safety. On that basis she might also have offered to take the treasure with her to Luxemburg, a possibility that lends credence to Lepage’s account of her role in the operation. Nineteenth-century Continuities and Ruptures

Arguably this discourse of renewal – the phoenix-like ability of Bouxières abbey to rise from its proverbial ashes – was still operational more than a decade after its formal dissolution. When the abbey’s former provost Raybois transferred Gozelin’s remains to Nancy cathedral in 1801, he took advantage of the improved relations between the French state and the Catholic Church to bring the cult of this saint back to public attention.72 But we can assume that he also saw an opportunity to deposit the rest of the collection (sans the reliquaries, the paten cloth, and the tortoise shell Auguin, Monographie, pp. 274–76. Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 264. The chapter record of her 1740 admission is in Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 120r–21r. 72  Auguin, Monographie, pp. 363–64. 70  71 

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box in which the paten had been kept) in a stable institutional environment for future retrieval. For legal reasons, this part of the transferral was not advertised. In 1803 Bishop Antoine Eustache d’Osmond of Nancy placed all of the surviving items from the treasure inside an ‘orphan shrine’ that had formerly held the relics of St Sigisbert, sealed the lid, and put that container in one of the side chapels.73 In the eyes of those who were still hoping for a resurrection of the convent, hiding the relic treasure in the public space of this sanctuary must have seemed like a much safer option long term than doing so in someone’s private residence. And the fact that Raybois had found employment as a canon of Nancy cathedral probably reassured them that the collection would henceforth be well looked after. Shortly afterwards Abbess de Messey returned to Nancy, after years of exile.74 Her move and that by Raybois might indicate that some observers believed that the convent’s resurrection was imminent. As Gemma Betros notes, public opinion in France had been calling for a return of religious institutions to society, caused by – alongside devotional concerns – a decades-long disruption in education and hospital services. Already before the Concordat with Rome, steps were being taken to re-establish female religious congregations, in particular the ones that were able to provide a robust institutional structure, with the approval of the state.75 It is possible that plans were afoot to seek official (or, as was sometimes the case, tacit) permission from the French authorities to re-establish Bouxières abbey too, and resurrect the aborted project to give it an explicit identity as an educational institution for girls.76 But Auguin, Monographie, pp. 299–300. De Salles, Chapitres nobles, pp.  39–40 and Pfister, Histoire, 1, p.  51. Regarding de Messey’s self-profiling and whereabouts post-1791, see again the discussion in the next chapter. 75  Gemma Betros, ‘Napoleon and the Revival of Female Religious Communities in Paris, 1800–14’, in Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, ed. by Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (New York: The Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 185–95. 76  The inspiration for these plans might have come from de Messey’s contacts in Westphalia and the Rhineland. In the early nineteenth century local authorities in that region acknowledged the social and educational role that houses of noble canonesses had formerly played, and took steps to reinvent some of these as secular institutions. It appears that they were particularly drawn to this idea because of the potential of these places to house and educate impecunious daughters of the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie; Edeltraud Klueting, ‘Damenstifter sind 73 

74 

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what the former abbess and her associates may not have included in their calculations was that contemporary attitudes and circumstances were not working in their favour. To begin with, over the previous decade feelings about organized religious life had been subject to significant change, which negatively impacted on the prospect of a revival of institutions of secular canonesses. On the one hand, French Catholics in the early 1800s preferred to invest their energies and resources in reviving other forms of religious life for women: considering the criticism to which canonesses had been subjected in the eighteenth century this is not so surprising.77 And on the other hand, the French authorities were careful not to offend their anti-religious subjects, endorsing women’s congregations strictly in their role as providers of key social services rather than in their identity as religious communities.78 In those circumstances de Messey and her associates would have struggled to find powerful backers for their plans. Furthermore, the specific educational identity of the dissolved convent, arguably the most significant argument in favour of a possible resurrection, was an awkward fit with Napoleon’s vision. In a bid to unify female religious communities and precisely delineate their social role, he tried several times to give the Ursuline sisters an exclusive role in female education in France.79 And earlier in this book we already saw that shortly afterwards, the French authorities solicited Madame Campan’s services to establish the state-sponsored schools of the Légion d’Honneur. The highly regulated structure of these institutions and the advanced degree of official supervision make it easy to see why the idea of a possible refoundation of Bouxières abbey as an elite school for girls would have seemed deeply unattractive to Napoleonic officials. And yet another factor that spoke in the former abbey’s disfavour was the fact that its educational identity had only been realized in embryonic form, namely by the publication of a highly

zufluchtsörter, wo sich fräuleins von adel schiklich aufhalten können. Zur Säkularisation von Frauengemeinschaften in Westfalen und im Rheinland 1773–1812’, in Reform – Reformation – Säkularisation. Frauenstifte in Krisenzeiten, ed. by Thomas Schilp (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2004), pp. 177–200. 77  Introduction, note 34. 78  Betros, ‘Napoleon’, p. 189. 79  Betros, ‘Napoleon’, p. 193.

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implicit set of constitutions in 1784, the recruitment of a substantial number of new tantes and nièces, and the planning and initial construction of a new convent. By all accounts the abbey had never acquired the routines, personnel, and infrastructures in order to function and be viewed as a fully-fledged convent school. Lacking an actual track record as a successful and progressive educational institution, making a case for Bouxières abbey’s potential role in meeting early nineteenth-century society’s social requirements would have been very difficult indeed. Finally, we can suspect that several former convent members did not share de Messey’s nostalgia. They too must have realized that the abbey’s prospective status as an elite school for girls had been superseded by other institutions. In addition, there were no suitable convent buildings to return to in the event of a resurrection, no established educational routines to resume, and no guarantees that Catholics and the French state would support their endeavours, financially, in terms of recruitment, or otherwise.80 Several of the last chapter members were already nearing middle or old age and had long returned to their family’s estate.81 For these women, the prospect of embarking on an uncertain institutional adventure, moving to nondescript living quarters in one of Nancy’s former convents, taking on educational or administrative duties, conforming with a code of conduct for canonesses (admittedly fairly loose), subjecting their community to state surveillance,82 and possibly even giving up their state pension, must have sounded like a deeply unattractive prospect. And for other chapter members the initial trauma of the convent’s dissolution and the accompanying fears of losing a status and livelihood rapidly dissipated after they had returned to their family’s estate, or found a new source of income, or (more generally) a new purpose in life. We might in fact assume that the specific status and lifestyle of secular canonesses had prepared at least some The financial struggle of some reinstated religious communities is discussed in Betros, ‘Napoleon’, p. 189. 81  See above in this chapter, at notes 12–13. 82  On 22  June 1804 Napoleon decreed that all religious communities had to either submit their statutes and rules to the Conseil d’Etat for approval (a move that effectively subjected them to supervision by the state) or face dissolution; Betros, ‘Napoleon’, pp.  190–91. And beginning in 1805 he also planned to centralize the governance of religious community life; p. 195. 80 

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of them to adapt swiftly to the new circumstances. For centuries members of the Bouxières convent had become canonesses fully aware that they would not necessarily be spending their entire life in the community, but might leave to marry, withdraw to their own estate, or enter a cloistered convent. Especially some of those who had seen in the abbey’s transformation in the 1780s an opportunity to reinvent themselves as educators may well have quickly realized that there were now other, more efficient and lucrative ways to realize this goal: Caroline Delort’s career at the Collegio in Milan is a case in point. As a result of these trends and circumstances, no official or (at least as far as we can tell) clandestine steps were taken towards the refoundation of Bouxières abbey. St  Sigisbert’s shrine was not reopened while either de Messey or Raybois were still alive, and the former abbess spent the rest of her life in obscurity.83 A  window of opportunity during which the convent may have been able to rise from its ashes had briefly opened and closed again: but perhaps the existence of such a window had been mere wishful thinking by a handful of desperate ex-canonesses and their associates. The seals on St Sigisbert’s reliquary were broken for the first time in 1845, at the request of the Commission des Monuments religieux du Diocèse de Nancy.84 Bishop of Nancy Alexis Menjaud (1844–59) took advantage of the occasion to extract four teeth from Gozelin’s skull; he sent them as a gesture of good will to the parish church of Bouxières-aux-Dames for display, more than five decades after the parishioners had submitted a petition to obtain the remains of the former abbey’s patron saint.85 But the main reason for the opening was that artists and scholars had come to perceive the shrine as a time capsule with authentic medieval objects that could serve as templates for the neo-gothic style that Chapter 3, at note 77. Lepage, L’abbaye, p. 267 and Auguin, Monographie, p. 280. 85  Menjaud’s gift is recorded on a label that is attached to a nineteenth-century shrine (which today holds only three teeth) in the parish church of Bouxières-auxDames (communicated via e-mail by Jean-Luc Colombat). Possibly it was on this occasion that other churches in the diocese, namely those of Saint-Nicolas-de-Port and Rosières-aux-Salines, and even a few private individuals also obtained relics of St  Gozelin; Lepage, L’abbaye, p.  264, note  2. On the petition, see Chapter  3 at note 81. 83 

84 

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was then becoming all the rage. In the introduction to an 1851 study of the chalice, paten, and evangeliary, Auguste Digot wrote: The need that is felt today by all men of taste to abandon the Greek style for the construction and furnishing of churches  […] has for some years called our attention not only to old religious buildings, but also to all the objects that these buildings contained and that formerly served to celebrate the liturgy. They have understood that the best way to give back to the furniture of the churches and the sacerdotal ornaments the utility and dignity that they often lack in this age is to go back to the primitive models, or at least those which had been adopted during the Middle Ages.86

The appreciation of these objects by Digot and his peers was entirely detached from Gozelin’s reputation as a saint and from the relics’ eight-hundred-year connection to Bouxières abbey. And as more and more people began to realize their art historical and financial value, the precious items from the treasure also became literally detached from Gozelin’s physical remains. In 1870, the vessels, evangeliary, and other objects of art historical interest were placed in a safe in Nancy cathedral’s second sacristy. And a few years later, they were put in a glass case where they are still displayed today.87 Once the relic treasure was dismantled, Gozelin’s remains and their significance as lieux de mémoire of Bouxières abbey’s communal identity slipped further into obscurity. Initially St Sigisbert’s former shrine remained on display in Nancy cathedral, but in the twentieth century it was recognized as a fine example of eighteenthcentury religious furniture and ended up being transferred to

Auguste Digot, ‘Notice sur l’évangéliaire, le calice et la patène de Saint Gozlin, évêque de Toul’, Bulletin de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 2  (1851), 5–22, at p.  5: ‘La nécessité aujourd’hui sentie par tous les hommes de goût d’abandonner, pour ce qui concerne la construction et l’ameublement des églises, le style grec, ou plus exactement le style bâtard que l’ou décore de ce nom cette nécessité, disons-nous, a, depuis un certain nombre d’années, appelé l’attention non-seulement sur les anciens édifices religieux, mais encore sur tous les objets qui y ont figuré et qui ont autrefois servi au culte. On a compris que le meilleur moyen à employer pour rendre au mobilier des églises et aux ornements sacerdotaux la convenance et la dignité qui leur manquent trop souvent aujourd’hui, était de recourir aux types primitifs, ou du moins à ceux qui avaient été adoptés pendant le moyen-âge’. 87  The report of this action is edited in Auguin, Monographie, p. 281. 86 

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Nancy’s Musée Lorrain, with its post-1845 contents still intact.88 Countless visitors to the museum have gazed at the chest’s saintly occupant without realizing his identity, let alone understanding the memorial meanings that used to be attributed to his remains and the precious objects with which these were associated. Conclusions

In this chapter we have seen how the relic treasure of Bouxières functioned as a lieu de mémoire with multiple meanings and mental dimensions. It was the combination of these that led the last community members to take the highly clandestine step of removing and concealing the complete collection before it could be seized. And it was arguably also this combination that explains how and in what circumstances it resurfaced in the early nineteenth century, and why it eventually ended up dismantled. The above observations and those in Chapter  1 bear witness to the enduring significance of physical reminders of Bouxières abbey’s medieval past as anchor points of communal identity into the early modern period and beyond. But they also reveal to us in which circumstances this significance was eventually lost, and how that loss must be understood in light of shifting expectations of the religious life for women and in that of the individual trajectories of ex-convent members and their associates. The next chapter will look at how this significance does not mean that objects, spaces, and landscapes of memory had been exempt from drastic interventions by the convent members prior to the convent’s dissolution: quite the contrary was actually true. In the mid-1780s the canonesses embarked on a journey to redesign their communal narrative of self, a key part of which process entailed either letting go of many reminders of the abbey’s eighthundred-year old past or utterly redesigning their meaning. Over

On 13 May 2017, on the occasion of a public celebration known as the Nuit des cathédrales (‘Night of the Cathedrals’), the shrine was brought back to Nancy cathedral for a brief few hours. The event was covered in the local paper Republicain de l’Est (https://www.estrepublicain.fr/edition-de-nancy-ville/2017/03/20/la-chassede-saint-sigisbert-de-retour-pour-une-nuit-a-la-cathedrale-de-nancy, accessed 12 November 2020).

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the span of just half a decade, the convent severed its links to the old abbey site, their saint’s tomb and other pilgrimage destinations, their predecessors’ homes, and a host of other objects, spaces, and landscapes that had defined its historical narrative of self. The implications of these changes were much debated by outsiders, much discussed by convent members, and extensively justified in the abbey’s records.

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1784 The Death of a Medieval Convent Extraordinary testimonies from the past often emerged in circumstances that seemed ordinary at the time. One such is a three-part monograph by the French cleric Jean-Jacques Lionnois (real name Jean-Joseph Bouvier, d.  1806), entitled the Histoire des villes vieille et neuve de Nancy. Considered his magnum opus and conceived in two phases in the mid-to-later 1770s and several months in 1788, the last two volumes of this study of Nancy’s urban past remained unavailable for nearly two decades.1 And when Lionnois finally found a publisher who was willing to make not just the first volume (a first edition of which had been published in 1779) but the entire work available to the public, he only updated some parts of that earlier publication and left the rest of the text untouched. The result of this was that the Histoire presented early nineteenth-century readers with an account of the region’s past that was mostly conceived in blissful ignorance of the French Revolution and its impact on contemporary society and culture. Of particular note to cultural historians are the passages in which Lionnois expressed concern over his contemporaries’ fragile relationship with the collective past and its various lieux de mémoire. From the perspective of its original readers, memories were still fresh of how the revolutionaries had destroyed and dismantled many of these legacies. However the cleric’s book also reminded them of the fact that some of the pre-1789 custodians of these legacies had often failed in their moral duty to preserve key documents, objects, images, buildings, and landscapes. To make his point Lionnois submitted various case studies, perhaps the most

Lionnois, Histoire. His life and work are discussed in Charles Pfister, ‘Eloge de Jean-Jacques Lionnois’, Mémoires de l’Académie Stanislas, 7  (1889), 3–51. The introduction to this chapter is based in part on Steven Vanderputten, ‘They Lived Under that Rule as do Those Who Have Succeeded Them. Simultaneity and Conflict in the Foundation Accounts of a French Women’s Convent (Tenth-Eighteenth Centuries)’, The Downside Review, 139 (2021), 82–97.

1 

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compelling of which is that of the canonesses of Bouxières. In 1784 the members of this elite institution had decided to relocate from their eight-hundred-year-old convent site to a new one adjacent to the urban church of Bon Secours. Although construction work on the new abbey had begun only in April 1787 and planning for the move was still underway, Lionnois sternly condemned the project. The canonesses’ chosen location was prone to flooding and remote; the budget for the new convent buildings optimistic at best; and the very idea that the hill of Bouxières would no longer host a religious community he found deeply offensive: The very watery terrain [of Bon Secours] does not seem to lend itself to healthy living quarters for these Ladies; and the expense of constructing the large foundations must be immense. It appears that these Ladies would have been better situated and would have incurred fewer expenses at the new Place de la Grève, which they would have embellished and filled with handsome buildings and a church that would have served that remote neighbourhood, as Monsieur de Stainville would have wished. I  do not even know if these Ladies will not end up regretting having abandoned, by their full will, their old church (built by the order of the Holy Virgin) on the holy mountain of Bouxières, which was consecrated by Jesus Christ himself and adorned by the celestial spirits with all that is necessary for the divine service  […] shortly no trace will be left of that monument of our ancestors […]2

This passage shows that the Nancy cleric felt that the canonesses had thrown themselves into an adventure that might well end in disaster. In his opinion, there was plenty of evidence that these women lacked the necessary understanding of Nancy’s physical and social geography, of urban planning, and of budgeting to bring a project of this scope to a successful end. But more importantly, it seemed that they lacked understanding of the hill’s Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp.  594–95: ‘Ce terrain  fort aquatique, ne paroît pas devoir rendre l’habitation de ces Dames fort saine, outre la dépense immense que doivent coûter les grandes fondations qu’il y faut faire. Il semble que ces Dames auroient été mieux placées, et  à moindres frais, sur la nouvelle Place de Grève, qu’elles auroient embellie et remplie de beaux bàtimens et d’une église, qui auroit servi à ce quartier reculé, comme M.  de Stainville l’auroit désiré. Je ne sais pas même, si ces  Dames n’auront pas lieu de se repentir d’abandonner, de leur plein gré, leur ancienne église bâtie par ordre de la Sainte Vierge, sur la Ste Montagne de Bouxières, consacrée par J. C. même, et ornée par les esprits célestes de tout ce qui est nécessaire au Service Divin  […] dans peu de temps  il ne restera plus aucune trace de ce monument de nos  ancêtres’.  On de Stainville and his role in planning the move to Nancy, see further at notes 19–23.

2 

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historical and religious significance as a prominent site of remembrance, not just to their own institution but to all the inhabitants of Lorraine. To illustrate the importance of this ‘monument of our ancestors’ and the implications of the canonesses’ decision to abandon it, Lionnois included in his work the story of the abbey’s venerable origins in the 930s, when it was founded by St Gozelin. To this end he reprinted two long extracts of a Latin office for the feast day of the saint taken from a late seventeenth-century publication, along with a full French translation.3 But paradoxically he also indicated that he thought very little of the office as a historical document or of those who used it in the liturgy. ‘One cannot be much surprised’, he wrote, ‘that these Ladies […] in the simplicity of their conscience and to fulfil their duty recited these pious musings. But (I do not know) how their canons […] did not warn them that the Church has always wanted to remove from its offices all the legends that have no authority and cannot deserve any respect’.4 Was it responsible of the authorities, he further implied, to allow these ignorant women and negligent men to cut their ties with that sacred sanctuary on the hill and to let its historical and religious legacy go to waste? There would be no time to find out. In summer 1789 the agitations of the French Revolution reached Lorraine and the neighbouring region of Franche-Comté. Caught up in a rapid succession of smaller and greater incidents and an increasingly serious state of disruption affecting the wider region,5 construction work on the new convent ground to a halt: it was never resumed. Anxiety among the canonesses must have reached peak levels shortly after 6  October, when the news arrived that King Louis  XVI had been

3  Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp. 595–605. These extracts (lessons 5 and 6 of the office) are markedly different from the matching ones in the office text for St Gozelin that was used at Toul Cathedral; Scipion Jérôme Bégon, Breviarium Tullense (Toul: A. Leseure, 1748), pp.  381–83. It is possible that the other parts of the two offices were more alike, which would explain why Lionnois decided to edit only the two extracts from the Bouxières version. 4  Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp.  605–6: ‘On ne peut pas être étonné que ces Dames  […] dans la simplicité de leur conscience, et pour remplir leur devoir, ayent récité ces pieuses rêveries. Mais comment leurs Chanoines, qui doivent le savoir, ne les ont-ils pas averties, que le voeu de l’Eglise a toujours été d’ôter de ses Offices toutes les légendes qui n’ont aucune autorité, et ne peuvent mériter aucun respect’. 5  Hartmann, La révolution, pp. 116–37.

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forced by the National Assembly to relocate from his palace in Versailles to the Tuileries in Paris. Keenly aware of the possibility that the venerable institutions of the past might become prime targets for destruction and looting and that their old abbey site was particularly vulnerable in this respect, they decided to take drastic action. Having evacuated their archives on 24  August, on 27 October they traded the hill for the relative safety of Nancy’s urban convent of the Minimes.6 But the rapid pace of events soon caught up with the community members: by mid-June 1790 (we already saw in Chapters  1 and 2) the chapter was busy drafting a strategy for how to act in the event that the convent was dissolved. And within another eight months, Bouxières abbey had ceased to exist. In spite of these unforeseen developments, Lionnois’s view from the late 1780s is precious to us because it offers an outsider’s perspective on the Bouxières convent as it was in the process of drastically reinventing itself.7 That process, which is documented in the abbey’s surviving papers, complicates our understanding of which parts of its memorial culture disappeared because of the Revolution and which ones the canonesses had already let go of their own accord. It also reveals how some outsiders felt disturbed at the canonesses’ seemingly careless resignation of their role as caretakers of a key site of institutional and regional memory. This chapter is about that process of letting go and how it impacted on the convent’s status as a lieu de mémoire just before and after its dissolution. Looking and Lobbying for a New Site

When Bouxières’ last-but-one Abbess Françoise d’Eltz died in early May 1773,8 the search for a suitable replacement was a political issue of some significance. Over the preceding half-century, the membership of Lorraine’s four houses of secular canonesses had become increasingly monopolized by a select cohort of famiLepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. On the publication history of the Histoire de Nancy, see Pfister, ‘Eloge’, pp. 41–42. 8  Lepage reports that when d’Eltz’s body was discovered (where he does not say) on 20 March 1799, her flesh was incorrupt; ‘L’abbaye’, p. 282. 6  7 

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lies from the upper ranks of the French aristocracy. Accordingly, the prestige of the office of abbess had increased drastically and the stakes behind appointments grew exponentially. Emblematic of that shift is the 1738 election of Anne-Charlotte of Lorraine (d.  1773) as Remiremont’s new leader. Anne-Charlotte was the daughter of Duke Leopold I of Lorraine and his wife (niece of Louis XIV) Elisabeth-Charlotte of Orléans: because of the independent status of her institution, her appointment put her virtually on the same rank as sovereign rulers.9 Members of noble families in Lorraine were more than ever drawn to having female relatives enter such places too. They weighed in on the selection of suitable candidates for the post of abbess, and where possible also influenced the choices these leaders made for the administration of their convent. Although the details of the search for a new abbess at Bouxières largely elude us, the admission there of thirtysix-year-old Remiremont canoness Marie-Françoise-Angélique de Messey on 4  June 1773 and her subsequent election as abbess resulted from complex negotiations between a host of aristocratic stakeholders.10 And there is little doubt either that she was positioned specifically with a view to further raising the status of Bouxières as an elite convent. This observation is underlaid by two facts. One is de Messey’s personal profile and connections. Born out of an alliance between the counts of Brielle and the prominent Lorraine family of Ligniville, she and her siblings were destined for influential positions. One of her brothers became chamberlain to the emperor in 1780 and another became bishop of Valence in 1788. Her mother and aunt were Grand Mistresses at the court of Abbess AnneCharlotte of Remiremont and Mons, and four of her sisters (one at Mons and three at Remiremont) served as canonesses under the same Anne-Charlotte. And Marie-Françoise-Angélique herself was a member of the Remiremont convent from the time she entered it aged seven until she was transferred to Bouxières. As a woman who had been born in an elite environment and spent most of her childhood and early adult life in the splendidly opulent setting of Remiremont abbey, it was inevitable that she would be inclined to Marie-Françoise Degembe, ‘Anne-Charlotte de Lorraine, abbesse séculière du chapitre Sainte-Waudru de Mons’, in Les chapitres, ed. Parisse and Heili, pp. 231–47. 10  de Salles, Chapitres nobles, p. 39. 9 

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replicate her own experience of convent life and governance after she was made abbess of Bouxières.11 The second fact behind de Messey’s appointment is that her leadership was demonstrably defined by efforts to raise the elite profile of her institution and make it more attractive to a then-modern aristocratic audience. Although little is known about her early administration,12 we do have indications that her actions were shaped to a significant extent by a drastic injection of funds and a substantial tightening of admission requirements in the early 1760s. Both of these developments must be understood in the context of ongoing efforts at the time to link elite convents and their aristocratic networks more closely to the crown.13 De Messey herself went to some lengths to acknowledge her institution’s indebtedness to French royalty, by accepting portraits of Louis  XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette as a gift from Duke Charles-Alexandre of Lorraine.14 But these developments also accelerated a process whereby the convent members and their social network were made to think about their identity, how to present themselves, and what role they wanted to play in contemporary society. Over time de Messey began taking increasingly drastic steps to realize the outcomes of that reflection. We know that she tried to modernize the abbey site, presumably in order to make it more attractive to visitors and potential recruits, by installing (among

Poirier, ‘La translation’, p.  127. De Messey’s income as abbess as reported in the Almanach Royal of 1789 (3,500  livres) was far lower than that of her peers at Lorraine’s other houses of secular canonesses Poussay (8,000), Epinal (12,000), and Remiremont (30,000); A. Benoît, ‘Notes critiques sur “Les chapitres nobles” par M. Félix de Salles’, Jahrbuch der k.k. heraldischen Gesellschaft Adler zu Wien, 15 (1888), 72–75, at p. 75. 12  The memoirs of one of her sisters, the Remiremont canoness Marie-Antoinette de Messey, briefly evoke her generous personality; ‘Mémoires de Marie-Antoinette de Messey chanoinesse de Remiremont’, ed.  by Ch.  Chapelier, Bulletin de la Société philomatique vosgienne, 14 (1888), 241–68, at pp. 259–60. 13  Chapter 4, at note 8. 14  According to correspondence from spring and early summer 1776 that is cited in Albert Jacquot, ‘Documents sur le théatre en Belgique sous le gouvernement du prince Charles-Alexandre de Lorraine’, Réunion des sociétés des beaux-arts des départements, 35 (1911), 12–43, at pp.  37–38. De Salles edited a letter by Queen MarieAntoinette to de Messey (dated 24 January 1784) in which she thanks the abbess for her handling of the apprébendement of a canoness; de Salles, Chapitres nobles, p. 40. 11 

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other things) a clock in the church tower.15 And later developments indicate that she must have spent a considerable part of her early tenure developing a drastic strategy to elevate Bouxières abbey and her own office to a position of prestige and influence similar to that of Remiremont. Key to that strategy was her plan to relocate (the technical term for which is to translate) the convent from the hill site – which was far too rural, too small, and too ‘medieval’ to match her and her supporters’ taste and vision – to a more suitable location in the nearby urban environment of Nancy. The winter of 1783–84, with its severe cold and heavy snowfall, may have helped de Messey win over the chapter members.16 On 7 February 1784 they gave her permission to petition King Louis  XVI of France to appoint an apostolic commissioner to investigate the possibility of a translation.17 A draft version of that petition survived the French Revolution. The following extract gives us an insight into how de Messey and her canonesses argued their case: The Chapter of Bouxières is situated on a high hill, two miles from Nancy and three from Pont-à-Mousson. Because of this it is deprived of the support of masters who are suited to form the talents of the young ladies of standing who are admitted there. The forests that surround [the abbey] are the asylum of deserters of the garrisons of Metz, Sartonis, Marsal,  etc. There are insufficient means to keep these men outside, who nearly always turn into brigands because of indigence and lack of hope. There is nothing also that protects the archives, so interesting for the nobility of the realm and for that of foreign countries, from their actions. Floodings of the Meurthe River also deprive [the abbey] of all means to communicate with the capital, even though it is the place where they need to obtain most necessities. This is an inconvenience that could be remediated only with a new road and multiple bridges, the cost of which would weigh very heavily on the population or the government  […] The abbatial church, which was built five or six hundred years ago on the steepest slope of the hill is about to fall into ruin: the choir of the church is even older – the sisters can only access it by descending forty-two steps – and the collapse of the church [into the valley] would inevitably cause it to be destroyed too  […] The storms at Bouxières are so violent and so frequent that one is hardly in safety on the ground floor [of a building].18

Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 55v–58v. On the weather conditions, see Pfister, ‘Eloge’, p. 26. 17  Nancy, BSt, 132, fol. 71v. 18  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols  301–3v: ‘Le chapitre de Bouxières est situé sur une haute montagne, à deux lieues de Nancy et à trois de Pont à Mousson. Il est privé, par là, du secours des maitres propres à former les talents des demoiselles de qualité qui 15 

16 

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While the petition is clear enough about the chapter’s intentions, we do not know precisely when it was sent or even whether it was actually submitted to the sovereign in this form. Conceivably de Messey realized in time that any such request would fail to have the desired effect if she did not recruit someone outside the abbey who could lobby in support of her ambitious plan beforehand. She also needed someone who would be able to secure powerful financial backers, since her vision for the abbey required an investment that far exceeded the incomes deriving from its modest estate. De Messey found that person in Jacques Philippe de Choiseul de Stainville (d.  1789), a Lorraine nobleman who had started his career working for the duke of Lorraine. Later he became a prominent politician and military leader, acting successively as commander of the troops in Lorraine, governor of Lorraine and Barrois, and (from 1783) maréchal de France. As a result of these career progressions he was well connected and experienced as a lobbyist. Furthermore, he was sympathetic to the cause of secular canonesses, as female relatives of his had been admitted at Remiremont, Saint-Louis of Metz (where one became abbess), and Bouxières itself.19 A letter from 28 November 1784 reveals that he and de Messey had agreed to work together in pursuit of the translation of the convent. In order to ‘obtain the goal which y sont admises. Les forêts qui l’entourent sont l’azile des déserteurs, des garnisons de Metz, Sartonis, Marsal etc. Point de clôture suffisante pour rassurer, contre ces hommes, que la nécessité et le désespoir transforment presque toujours en brigands. Rien qui mette à l’abri, de leurs entreprisces, ses archives si intéressantes pour la noblesse du royaume, pour celle même des pays étrangers. Les débordements de la Meurthe lui otent, d’ailleurs, fréquemment, toute communication avec la capitale d’où il est obligé, néanmoins, de tirer la plupart des choses nécessaires à la vie. Inconvénient auquel on ne pouvoit pârer qu’au moyen d’une chaussée et de plusieurs ponts, dont la dépense seroit très onéreuse, ou au peuple, ou au gouvernement  […] l’abbatiale, batie depuis cinq ou six cent ans, au point le plus escarpé de la côte menaçoit ruine; que le choeur de l’église qui est plus ancien encore, et où les dames chanoinesses ne peuvent se rendre qu’en descendant quarante deux marches, serait infailliblement entrainé par la chute de l’abbatiale […] Les ouragans sont si violens et si continus à Bouxières, qu’on y est à peine en sureté dans un rez de chaussée’. 19  Pfister, Histoire, 3, pp. 836–48. On de Choiseul de Stainville’s military and political career, refer to Charles Denis, ‘Jacques de Choiseul comte de Stainville, maréchal de France (1727–1789)’, Bulletin de la Société philomatique vosgienne, 27 (1901–2), 31–47.

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we have set ourselves’ he advised the abbess to hold a chapter meeting where the members would decide to seek the patronage of the king’s aunt, Adelaïde, and ask her permission to relocate to Nancy. Once that permission was obtained, he wrote, he would be able to seek the king’s approval.20 De Stainville’s suggestion to solicit Adelaïde’s support was an excellent tactical choice. She and her sister Victoire looked favourably on the phenomenon of secular canonesses and had visited the Lorraine abbeys of Epinal and Remiremont in 1761.21 Presumably de Stainville hoped that de Messey’s connection to the latter institution would help with warming them to the Bouxières cause. But he also knew that the two women had a personal connection to the region as granddaughters (on their mother’s side) of the king of Poland and duke of Lorraine, Stanislas Leszczyński (d.  1766), and his spouse, both of whom were buried at the Nancy church of Bon Secours.22 Finally, he must have been aware that Adelaïde and Victoire were looking to sponsor a religious community that was happy to settle near Bon Secours and help celebrate the memory of their ancestors there. Such a community actually existed at the time: near the church was a daughter house of the Nancy convent of the Minimes. But since a recent decree had prohibited religious orders in France from having more than one establishment in each city, this was facing closure.23 De Messey and de Stainville realized that here was an opportunity for the Bouxières canonesses to simultaneously claim the church of Bon Secours and its adjacent plot as their future site, obtain royal support for the translation project, and secure the necessary financial help to carry out their grandiose plans for a new convent. Accordingly they adapted their vision for Bouxières’ future location. Originally de Messey had set her eyes on the old Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fol. 181r–v; also Poirier, ‘La translation’, pp. 127–28. Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt, Description des fêtes données à Mesdames de France, Adelaïde et Victoire, dans la ville d’Epinal (Nancy: Antoine, 1761). 22  The church also held the tomb of their daughter and queen of France Anna Leszczyńska; Renata Tyszczuk, The Story of an Architect King: Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737–1766 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p.  234. On this sanctuary and its connection to the Bouxières convent, refer to Léon Jérôme, L’église Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours à Nancy. Notice historique & descriptive (Nancy: René Vagner, 1898), pp. 90–99. 23  Poirier, ‘La translation’, p. 129. 20  21 

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convent of the Jesuits in Nancy, but that plan fell through when the local bishop decided to install his seminary there. Then de Stainville suggested that the Place de Grève would be a better site, but in light of the connection with Adelaïde and Victoire he begrudgingly dropped that idea too.24 Having shifted gears the two then began lobbying aggressively, presumably to gain support from the local bishop (whose attitude was sympathetic if distant) and other stakeholders, successfully so it seems. By October 1784 the Minimes convent members were protesting against the canonesses’ campaign,25 and just one month later de Stainville wrote the above-cited letter to de Messey, urging her and the other convent members to quickly respond to these protests and directly seek Adelaïde’s support. Closing a Chapter in the Abbey’s History

The canonesses’ appeal to the royal aunt was a resounding success. She and Victoire agreed that the Bouxières community was a good fit, prestige-wise and functionally, with their vision of Bon Secours’ future: they committed to covering a substantial part of the massive expense of building new convent buildings. The records of a chapter meeting that was held on 12  June 1786 further reveal that the two women had agreed to donate 100,000  pounds to build the new convent (in five instalments, to begin in 1787), and another 30,000  pounds from lottery income to remodel the choir of the church of Bon Secours.26 Previously they had also sought and obtained their royal nephew’s assent for the project: on 19 June 1785 Louis XVI gave his permission for a papal commissioner to investigate the canonesses’ request.27 Furthermore, to make the canonesses’ case in Rome they recruited the archbishop of Toulouse Etienne Charles Loménie de Pfister, Histoire, 1, p.  47. Lionnois’s commentary (cited at the beginning of this chapter) echoes de Stainville’s disappointment. 25  Poirier, ‘La translation’, p. 129. 26  Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 79r–81v. 27  Brevet qui autorise le chapitre noble de Bouxières, à solliciter, en cour de Rome, sa translation, soit dans la ville de Nancy, soit aux environs (Nancy: s.e., 1787), pp. 1–3. The text of the king’s permission echoes the canonesses’ petition or another document that derived from it. 24 

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Brienne (d.  1794), a man with strong connections to the Nancy area. His appointment bears all the marks of a deliberate action to make sure the outcome of the investigation was favorable. Loménie de Brienne not only had excellent connections to the court at Versailles, but in 1772 had also presided over the Commission des réguliers, which from its creation in 1766 had suppressed hundreds of religious institutions across France and had given many of their properties to houses of noble canonesses.28 The papal bull that allowed for the investigation and that also appointed him as its executor arrived in early June 1786, and was followed by yet another royal decree that gave the green light for the next step in the process.29 On paper the archbishop’s mission was strictly to investigate if the translation of the convent to Nancy was necessary and if there were any objections to it. But in reality it was threefold: namely, to put together an objective-looking report on why the convent’s old site was no longer suitable; to verify if all parties involved were in agreement; and finally to strike several deals that tied up any loose legal or practical ends. To aid him in his complex task, the archbishop relied on the assistance of a number of professionals. On 12 June a cartographer drew a large map with an overview of the village and abbey site of Bouxières in preparation for an on-site investigation. And on the 22nd of that month Nancy architect Jean-François Miroménil was dispatched to Bouxières to undertake a survey. From his report we can tell that he was briefed in advance on the expected outcome of his mission: it insisted that the road to the abbey was difficult; the abbey itself was situated on a high plateau and lacked a natural source of water; the abbatial church was ruinous, humid, and sometimes dangerous to access; the old abbatial residence was ‘absolutely in ruins’; and the houses of the canonesses were in dire need of repair. Finally, he commented that it would be difficult to build new convent structures since the terrain was

Pierre Chevalier, Loménie de Brienne et l’ordre monastique, 1766–1789, 2 vols (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959–60). On the Commission and its impact on houses of noble canonesses, refer to Suzanne Lemaire, La Commission des réguliers 1766–1780 (Paris: Léon Telin, 1926) and Marchal, ‘La place’. 29  Brevet, resp. pp.  4–22 and 22–27. The papal bull mentions the danger to which the ‘precious furniture’ (précieux meubles) of the abbatial church was exposed as a reason for the transfer to Nancy; p. 7. 28 

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Illustration 7. Aquarel and Ink Plan of Bouxières Abbey and the Hill of Bouxières. Nancy, BSt, Fonds Iconographique, FG6 BOU 1. Made at the Orders of Archbishop Loménie de Brienne of Toulouse on 12 June 1786. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

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unsuitable and the cost would be excessively high due to the lack of a water source and the difficulty of bringing materials up the steep hill.30 While Miroménil was making his notes, Loménie de Brienne was also present at Bouxières. The first part of his mission (which lasted two days, 22 and 23  June) was to obtain formal confirmation from the canonesses that they wished to leave for a new site in Nancy. Having replied in the affirmative, the convent members asked for and received permission to keep the abbey’s name as well as its seal, privileges, and male staff.31 Had de Brienne at this point suggested rebuilding the old site of Bouxières and bringing it up to modern tastes and needs, then de Messey and her canonesses would surely have been dismissive. In their letter to Louis  XVI they had pre-empted that very suggestion by arguing that the expense of a reconstruction project would be much higher than that of building an entirely new convent, and that such a project would also take much longer. But their most significant objection was not of a practical nature but of a representative one. In de Messey’s view and that of her supporters, the old hill site was simply not a suitable environment to host the kind of institution they envisaged. This view was based on two major considerations. One was that it would be impossible to increase the abbey’s interest among noble recruits and turn it into an institution on a par with Remiremont prestige-wise if it remained in such a remote location and was not drastically adapted to modern requirements. Although some of the site’s eighteenth-century houses were fairly comfortable,32 as a whole the convent made a rather drab and ramshackle impression

De Brienne’s report, which also includes the report of Miroménil’s survey, was printed in full in Brevet, pp. 47–86. 31  The canonesses’ account of the 23 June meeting is in Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 81v–83r; further deliberations were recorded at fols 84r–85r. 32  De Messey lived in a 1730s–40s house that had formerly been the property of canoness Marie-Antoinette-Elisabeth de Zuckmantel; see Chapter 4, at notes 70-75. Its appearance and furnishing paled in comparison with the splendour of Abbess Anne-Charlotte of Remiremont’s residence, discussed in Pierre Heili, Anne-Charlotte de Lorraine (1714–1773), abbesse de Remiremont et de Mons. Une princesse européenne au siècle des Lumières (Remiremont: Société d’histoire de Remiremont et sa région, 1996), pp.  85–87; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp.  72–79; and Tassin, ‘L’oeuvre architectural’. 30 

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on visitors. The small abbatial church was perched on the edge of the hill and retained its medieval appearance: its aspect was unimpressive on the outside and gloomy and disorganized on the inside. And the cloister, medieval houses (including the old abbatial residence that had been standing empty for decades), and other structures likewise failed to impress contemporaries: one observer from the 1760s described them as an eyesore and an aesthetic affront.33 Another consideration was that it would be impossible to obtain the necessary political and financial support to realize the convent’s planned transformation into an institution that was not only much larger but also had a new educational identity, as a finishing school for young ladies.34 In that sense too the old site was utterly unsuited to the new incarnation of Bouxières abbey. If de Brienne did not bother engaging in a pro forma discussion with the convent members, it was probably because he was in a hurry to move on to the more complicated part of his mission. It began with a consultation with the abbey’s canons and provost, who gave their consent to the translation. Next came the local parish priest and the representatives of the village community, who asked that the abbey continue to support the village and that it leave behind a relic of St  Gozelin. An agreement was reached over the continuation of a fund that supported the poorest inhabitants and was worth 930  pounds per year, and another that financed a small charity school for girls.35 De Brienne also promised on behalf of the canonesses that they would hand over to the local parish priest four of St  Gozelin’s teeth, so that local inhabitants could still venerate him at the parish church.36 On 24 June the prelate was back in Nancy to negotiate and sign a deal with the Minimes convent members, who agreed to cede almost all of their property at Bon Secours except for the cloister, a pond, and

33  Refer to de Gironcourt’s impressions in the next chapter, and to Illustration 12 there for a visual impression of the church’s precarious position at the edge of the hill. 34  See further in this chapter at note 41. 35  Brevet, p.  75. Both of these charities had been established during the abbacy of Anne-Marie d’Eltz (1716-60) by herself and two other canonesses; Nancy, ADMM, H 2952. 36  Brevet, p. 77.

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a garden. The agreement basically turned their daughter house there into an auxiliary institution of Bouxières abbey.37 On the same day the archbishop returned one last time to Bouxières. On arriving at the village he ascended the hill to the abbey, where the abbess and convent members were waiting for him in front of her house. Together they went in procession to the abbatial church, and once there he aspersed the building with holy water, sang the Veni creator, attended Mass, and gave his pontifical blessing. Although the canonesses planned to use the old site until the new buildings of Bon Secours were ready to move into, symbolically at least the ceremony closed an 848-year chapter in the history of the abbey. In the next few days de Brienne wrote up his report and sent it off to Rome. A papal bull soon confirmed all of his actions.38 Finding a New Identity

As soon as it was clear that the move to Nancy would take place, Abbess de Messey and her supporters launched a series of measures to metaphorically and literally redesign the convent. To begin with, on 7  October 1786 the chapter approved new statutes. Their contents reveal strong analogies with the 1730s statutes of Remiremont, an institution that we already saw inspired Bouxières’ reinvention.39 Besides creating new procedures for decision-making, they increased the membership from fourteen canonesses and a handful of nièces to twenty-four tantes and an equal number of nièces.40 They also created a number of new

Various documents relating to the agreement were printed in Brevet, pp. 28–47. The papal bull was printed as Bulla confirmationis perpetuae translationis illustris capituli canonissarum oppido de Bouxieres (Paris: G. Desprez, 1788). 39  Nancy, BSt, 413/1, Division générale des règlements, fols  265–367; extracts were published in Brevet, pp. 64–78. Whoever composed the new Bouxières statutes probably also studied the statutes of Poussay abbey, as codex 413/1 includes excerpts of that document on fols 271–78. On the Poussay statutes (the full text of which is lost) see Françoise Boquillon, ‘Le chapitre de Poussay à l’époque moderne. Institutions et recrutement’, in Mirecourt et Poussay. Journées d’études vosgiennes 22.23 mai 1982 (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1984), pp. 125–155. 40  Brevet, pp. 65–66. For comparison, the ratio tantes/nièces at Remiremont in 1790 was 61/39; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, p. 49. 37 

38 

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offices (including that of a genealogist and a librarian), which indicates that the internal administration was expected to grow more sophisticated and more streamlined at the same time, and that plans were afoot to turn the old convent into a religious institution with a mission akin to that of a finishing school for young ladies.41 Finally, to cope with the new urban environment and the larger number of younger members, stricter rules about conduct were imposed: absences were limited to four instead of six months per annum; outings in the towns by members younger than twenty-five would henceforth be chaperoned; and attendance of balls, spectacles, and other festivities strictly prohibited.42 Further measures reveal a focus on recruiting individuals from the highest echelons of the French aristocracy. Building on earlier regulations, the new statutes stipulated that all candidates had to prove a noble ancestry going back to the year 1400 on their father’s side and of eight successive noble generations on their mother’s side. To further underscore the abbey’s elite status and presumably also to cover its hugely increased expenses, an admission fee was fixed at 6,000 pounds for nièces and 15,000 for tantes.43 Finally, to consolidate the transformation of Bouxières abbey into one of France’s most exclusive convents for noble canonesses, in 1787 all members of the chapter by royal appointment received a decoration and the title of countess.44 As a result of all these changes, the prestige of the convent instantly increased and the geographical scope of the recruitment of new members drastically shifted.45 Whereas previously members had come mainly from the general Alsace-Lorraine region, Luxemburg, and the westernmost parts Brevet, p. 70 and the commentary in Poirier, ‘La translation’, pp. 131–32. This corresponds with a trend that has been noted for other houses of canonesses; Marchal, ‘Les chapitres’, pp. 281–87. 42  Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fols 299v–300r. 43  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 251r–52v. 44  De Salles, Chapitres nobles, p.  37. On this decoration and contemporary ones for the three other houses of secular canonesses in the region, see Auguste Digot, ‘Mémoire sur les décorations des chapitres de Lorraine’, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 6  (1864), 5–41, at pp.  27–31. Also the reproduction of the decoration of a canoness of Epinal in Françoise Boquillon, Les dames du chapitre Saint-Goëry d’Epinal aux xviie et xviiie siècles: Etude socio-institutionnelle (unpublished master’s thesis, Université de Nancy, 1974–75), p. 183. 45  Bouxières’ frenzied recruitment of new members is documented in the chapter records; Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 92v–117r and Nancy, BSt, 136, fols 1–27. 41 

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of Germany, from this point onwards, new recruits came almost exclusively from France, including from distant regions such as Brittany and Gascony. Nearly all of these individuals belonged to prominent families with direct links to the French court.46 Simultaneously the convent members enlisted the help of Archbishop Loménie de Brienne to recruit the Benedictine monk Hilaire de Puibusque (whom we already encountered in Chapter 1) to take stock of the abbey’s legal and administrative memory. His principal outcome was by far the most detailed, neatly laid out, and aesthetically pleasing of all archive inventories the abbey had ever acquired. This large (500  pages of 410x270 millimetres) tome reflected a desire that even this somewhat mundane instrument of governance and institutional memory should radiate Bouxières abbey’s stellar ascent.47 And de Messey and her associates also worked hard to give concrete shape to her vision for the new urban convent. In keeping with the project’s status as the crowning glory of the abbess’ redesigning effort, a series of magnificent large-format plans and drawings was issued.48 The principal one of these reveals the architect’s vision for a structure in two parts. The first, accessible from the street, consisted of a court of honour bordered by various utility buildings, the entrance to the church to the right-hand side, and (facing the visitor) a covered passage with the houses of the abbess and the deaconess on either side. Both of these houses he designed to be almost completely

Poirier, Le chapitre, pp. 212–13. Nancy, BSt, 175. In a letter from 3  November 1786 de Puibusque wrote to the historian Moreau, indicating that he was already working on this assignment and stating that ‘Monseigneur the archbishop of Toulouse  […] wishes that it be done before the translation of this Chapter takes place’ (Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 377, p. 68). In another letter dated 30 June 1788 the monk wrote that he was finished with the inventory and had already moved to Poussay, to draft an inventory for the community there; Didier-Laurent, ‘Correspondance’, pp.  170–71 and the discussion in Chapter 1 of this book. 48  In the nineteenth century these plans and drawings (several of which were made by an engineer named Martin) were acquired by the wealthy collector JeanBaptiste-Félix Thiéry (d.  1889); on him, see Mireille François, ‘Madame de Graffigny dans les collections de la Bibliothèque Stanislas de Nancy’, in Françoise de Graffigny (1695–1758), femme de lettres des Lumières, ed. by Charlotte Simonin (Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier, 2020), pp.  145–71. They were gifted to Nancy’s Bibliothèque Stanislas in 1921 and can now be viewed online at https://galeries.limedia.fr/ (accessed 6 December 2020). 46  47 

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Illustration 8. Plan of the New Convent at Bon Secours. Nancy, BSt, H–TS–DE–00028. 1780s. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

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self-catering and ready to be used for a range of representative and executive purposes. Moving through the passage, the imaginary visitor then entered the second area, which consisted of a large rectangular courtyard lined with trees and surrounded by twenty-four identical two-storied houses for the canonesses. The contrast between the planned convent and the old one on the hill in terms of accessibility, size, layout, comfort, and aesthetic appeal could not have been greater. Work on the new convent began in April 1787. The plan was that the canonesses would move in as soon as it was possible for all of them to live there.49 According to the official record of the planned translation (published as a hefty brochure in the same year), this was because they intended to sell their houses on the hill and use the proceeds to help subsidize the construction of their new abode.50 But presumably most convent members were also by now quite eager to trade their rustic and isolated home for the considerably more elegant, urban environment that de Messey and her supporters had promised them. Dismantling an Old Site of Memory

First impressions suggest that when the canonesses made arrangements for the translation of their convent to Nancy, they gave little thought to the question of what to do about countless lieux de mémoire – places and objects – on the hill at Bouxières. And far as we can tell, no concrete arrangements were made to retain the old church, the cloister, and St  Gozelin’s Tribune as sites of remembrance that were in any way relevant to the new incarnation of Bouxières abbey, or even to the cult of Gozelin the founder. And even though (as we have already seen in previous chapters) the convent members were keenly aware of the value and significance of the charter and relic treasures, for other objects that served as reminders of the communal past (such as epitaphs and inscriptions inside the church and around the convent site, inscribed church bells, and paintings) no concrete plans seem to have existed for how to handle them post-translation. Indeed, 49  50 

Brevet, p. 78. Brevet, pp. 64–68.

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many of these objects were still in situ when French officials came to inventory and subsequently seize the abbey’s assets.51 Based on these observations, one might be tempted to argue that this lack of attention to the preservation of memorial objects and spaces was quite deliberate. In support of this we could refer to de Messey’s focus on completely reinventing Bouxières abbey and on moving to the new site in Nancy. We could also look at the changing recruitment patterns that had resulted in a situation where fewer convent members felt a personal connection to the area, its history, and possibly also to the cult of St  Gozelin. Furthermore, quite a few individuals had recently applied to join the convent on the understanding that it would soon relocate to Nancy, which presumably made them less inclined to award much significance to the memorial markers that they encountered on the hill. However, we must also consider two further things. One is that the translation to Bon Secours had been planned as a gradual process, the timeline of which extended several years into the 1790s. When the French Revolution disrupted that relocation timeline, the convent members had not yet arrived at a stage where they had worked out the detail of how they would organize the move and what exactly would happen to the convent’s various sites of memory – places, landscapes, objects, and so on. Indicative of this is the fact that we find little trace of such plans either among the abbey’s papers or in Loménie de Brienne’s published report of his 1786 enquiry. And a second thing we must consider is that when the political situation in the general area around the abbey became unstable in the summer of 1789, the canonesses relied on a tried-and-tested method for evacuating some of their most precious assets. For instance, on 12 August of that year they had the convent archives moved to the Ladies of the Visitation in Nancy, the same place where the relic treasure had been kept when Bouxières abbey was evacuated in 1743–47.52 And like their predecessors in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the community did not attempt to evacuate any memorial objects This is revealed in a sale document from September 1792; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  258-59 and Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p.  93. An earlier inventory dated 30 August 1790 lists fewer objects of memorial value. Of those cited here it only mentions the church bells; Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 401r–3v. 52  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. 51 

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except for the archives and the relic treasure, which we must assume was moved to Nancy at some point between 12  August and the canonesses’ own relocation to the city on 27  October. While such a large-scale operation would have been impractical given the circumstances, at that stage the convent presumably still saw the hill as its home and expected the archives and relics to return there once public order was restored. In theory at least, the abbatial church was still Gozelin’s principal sanctuary and the entire site was still the principal lieu de mémoire of the saint’s role as a monastic founder and of the abbey’s long history. And it would have made no sense to try and take advantage of the situation to speed up the translation to Bon Secours anyway; at that point only the houses of the abbess, deaconess, and three or four canonesses were finished.53 It was thus circumstances rather than deliberate planning that determined when and how the canonesses eventually moved out of their old home. By late October 1789, violence and unrest in the area had escalated to the point that they decided to vacate the convent on the hill. On the 27th the members attended Mass one last time in the abbatial church before they too sought a safer place to stay in the city, not realizing it would be the last time any religious rites were celebrated there.54 After the service they took their leave of two locals whom they had appointed as the site’s caretakers, namely a widow and her (aptly named) son Louis-Gauzelin Robert.55 They then stepped into the carriages that drove them to the convent’s new dwellings at the Minimes. But even these events did not signify the canonesses’ intention to definitively cut the emotional and practical ties with their old home. Before they fled to Nancy the abbey on the hill had still been fully operative as a religious institution, and after that its functions were suspended rather than formally cancelled. A notice from 27 October by the vicar general of the bishop of Nancy merely states that they expected to stay at the Minimes for ‘at least a few months’, which given the unfinished state of construction work at Bon Secours can only mean that they intended to These buildings were in a bad state of disrepair when they were auctioned in 1798; Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1 Q 592 1. 54  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. 55  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 403r–4v. 53 

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return to Bouxières.56 And post-October 1789, convent members did not take (or were unable to take) serious steps to relinquish their former homes and possessions. A set of documents from between November 1790 and April 1791 indicates that Abbess de Messey, Deaconess de Betzdorff, secrétaire de Gléresse and five or six other canonesses at that point each still owned a private house on the hill.57 And when the contents of de Messey’s house were auctioned on 23 September 1794, the sale included large quantities of furniture, cutlery, pots and pans and other kitchen utensils, board games, and even some of her undershirts.58 Undoubtedly de Messey and her canonesses were relieved to find temporary accommodation in Nancy, even though it must have been a deflating experience to have to celebrate office at the nearby convent of the Tiercelins instead of at Bon Secours.59 But subsequent developments hardly bode well for the future. On 31 August two rebellious French regiments were responsible for a massacre in Nancy. And further events over the winter of 1789–90 made the women realize that they were now (literally and metaphorically) stuck halfway between the old convent and the new. Arguably the single most traumatic moment of this period must have been when it dawned on them that their institution’s death struggle was about to take place at the convent of the Minimes – for them, a memorial no (wo)man’s land. Picking up the Pieces

When they left for Nancy in late October 1789, the Bouxières canonesses most likely intended to return to the old convent, bringing with them their most precious memorial assets once the revolutionary storm had abated. But this does not take away Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191, note 1: ‘Cejourd’hui, les dames abbesse, doyenne, chanoinesses du chapitre noble de Bouxières-aux-Dames s’étant transportées en notre ville épiscopale à l’effet d’y fixer, au moins pendant plusieurs mois, leur demeure, ont commencé leur office canonical en l’église des RR. PP. Tiercelins de cette ville’. 57  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 879  U (28 January 1790) and 207  U, 211  U, 212  U, 214 U, 215 U, and 218 U (28 March 1791). Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 203 U (1 April 1791) concerns de Messey’s properties and is the latest document in this series. 58  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 931 U. 59  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 191. 56 

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the fact that the hill’s role as a prominent lieu de mémoire – of their patron saint and of their predecessors – would have been completely phased out in the long term. The lack of a formal pre-1789 promise to maintain the abbatial church, its inscriptions, and other memorial objects post-translation speaks to this, despite remarks we made earlier about the gradual nature of the translation process. And so does the villagers’ 1786 request that they be given a few of St  Gozelin’s relics for the parish church. Presumably the mood at the convent about the prospect of temporarily returning to the hill had also changed over the course of late 1789 and early 1790. One clue for this is the contrast between the chapter members’ stated intention at the meetings of June 1790 and January 1791 to resurrect the convent and their apparent lack of interest in returning to its old location following the dissolution.60 None of the protocols of those meetings makes any mention of the old convent site or of the convent members’ old homes. And we already saw that by late March 1791 most had left the area, some having found local tenants for their former dwellings.61 Only canonesses Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique de Montesquiou and Marie-Rose de Lort were still living in the area and had left their houses on the hill vacant.62 Abbess de Messey’s actions and self-styling shortly before and after the dissolution are further revealing of the convent members’ plans post-1789. At the chapter meeting of 26 June 1790 she expressed her intention to work towards a resurrection of the convent or at least a compensation of newly admitted members.63 At Epinal, another of Lorraine‘s houses of secular canonesses, several members opted to return to their former home after the convent was dissolved. The local authorities quickly awarded to these women the usufruct of the dwellings and shortly afterwards gave them the option to buy them back from the French state, which several did; Schwab, ‘La fin’, p. 142 and Poull, Les dames chanoinesses, pp. 132–34. 61  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 218  U, 214  U, 211  U, and 215  U.  On canonesses of Bouxières and Epinal who rented out their houses after the dissolution, see resp. Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 94; Poull, Les dames chanoinesses, pp. 132–34; and further in this chapter, note 75. 62  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 207 U and 212 U. 63  De Messey may have followed the example of countless religious leaders across France to protest with the National Assembly against the impending dissolution; on such protestations, see the discussion in Gemma Betros, ‘Liberty, Citizenship and the Suppression of Female Religious Communities in France, 1789–90’, Women’s History Review, 18 (2009), 311–36. Although the Assembly recommended the suppression of 60 

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And in her exchanges with the French authorities she pitted her arguments (as was common in the letters of protest from other female religious leaders at the time) in terms familiar to the revolutionaries, insisting on the canonesses’ rights as individuals and their common will as a group.64 When officials came to make an inventory of the abbey’s properties on 27–28  July 1790, on the second day she insisted on making a speech on ‘the general interest of the chapter and especially of the ladies who had been admitted since the translation from Bouxières to Nancy’, demanding that the admission fee of these individuals be reimbursed if the abbey were to be dissolved.65 By contrast, in exchanges with Ancien Régime correspondents her discourse was markedly different. In a 1790 letter to the Imperial Diet of Regensburg she lashed out against the Revolution and its attacks on the nobility and the clergy.66 And at the final chapter meeting of 13  January 1791, she stated that it was ‘impossible that a power that was temporarily usurped could cause serious harm to an ancient institution, of which the preservation is guaranteed by the mightiest powers of Europe’.67 She also vowed that the canonesses would continue to fulfil the abbey’s religious functions in public and that they would ‘take the most necessary measures for the exercise of the rights of the Lady canonesses, especially those that pertain to the perpetuity and the existence itself of the chapter’.68 And finally the

all regular convents on 4  August 1790 and did the same for all secular ones on the 8th, the Bouxières abbess might have hoped that convent schools and institutions with a similar educational focus (including Bouxières) would be allowed to stay open on account of their service to society. A formal decision to suppress that latter cohort of institutions was made on 30  November 1791, long after Bouxières abbey was dissolved; Murphy, Les religieuses, p. 89. 64  Betros, ‘Liberty’, esp. p. 327. 65  Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols  395v–96r: ‘Madame l’abbesse prenant la parole en nom du chapitre, nous a déclaré qu’elle se croit obligé de faire une observation relative à l’interêt général du chapitre et à celui des dames en particulier qui ont été admises depuis la translation de Bouxières à Nancy’. 66  Undated draft in Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 235–42. 67  Nancy, BSt, 56, fol.  5v: ‘qu’il soit [point] possible par l’abus d’une puissance momentanément usurpée de porter une sérieuse atteinte à un établissement antique, dont la conservation est garantie par les premières puissances de l’Europe’. 68  Nancy, BSt, 56, fol.  5v: ‘de prendre  […] les mesures les plus nécessaires pour l’exercice des droits des dames chanoinesses, de ceux sur-tout aux quels est attainte la perpetuité et l’existance meme du chapitre’.

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Illustration 9. (p. 129-131) Abbess de Messey’s Draft of a Letter to the Pope to Announce the Dissolution of Bouxières abbey. Nancy, BSt, 136. 20 January 1791. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

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chapter agreed three things: one, to celebrate Mass each day in the church of the Tiercelins; two, to continue to exercise their rights as canonesses, including in the nomination of nièces, in accordance with the regulations and statutes of the chapter; and three, to protest any attempt to dissolve their institution.69 Perhaps the reality of the situation only sank in a week later, which is when de Messey wrote to Pope Pius  VI to notify him of the dissolution of the convent and ask for his moral support.70 While the letter to the pope suggests that she was resigned to the death of her institution, other sources suggest that de Messey actually continued with the defiant élan of the last chapter meeting. On 1 April 1791, she signed an official document as ‘Messey, abbess of Bouxières’.71 Sometime during the next year and a half, she left France with her brother Gabriel Melchior de Messey, the former bishop of Valence (1787–90), and headed to the RhinelandPalatinate. They probably did this in response to the late 1792 decree that obliged clerics and former religious women to swear an Oath of Liberty to be faithful to the Nation, and to maintain freedom and equality or die while trying to maintain it.72 Once they had reached their destination the siblings became involved with a group of exiled clerics who carried out various clandestine, anti-republican operations in the Nancy area. The former abbess did anything but fade into the background: the bishop of Nancy Anne-Louis-Henri de la Fare (d.  1829), who played a leading role in this movement, in January 1793 made her what he described as a ‘temporary mother superior’ of a small colony of priests who had fled there after refusing to swear the oath to the nation.73 Finally, in September 1800 she was still identifying

69  Nancy, BSt, 56, fols  5v–6v. On other convents that continued to hold chapter meetings and attend office beyond their dissolution, see Chapter 2, note 17. 70  Nancy, BSt, 136, two unnumbered pages after fol. 28; edited in Deux chapitres-nobles, pp.  47–48 and in Appendix 5 of this book. On the discourse of contemporary petitions to the French authorities by the leaders of female religious institutions, refer to Betros, ‘Liberty’, pp. 319–21. 71  Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 203 U. 72  Murphy, Les religieuses, pp. 92–93. 73  Bernard de Brye, Consciences épiscopales en exil (1789–1814) à travers la correspondance de Mgr de La Fare, évêque de Nancy (Paris: Editions du Cerf 2005), p. 150 : ‘J’ai constitué Mme l’abbesse de Bouxières mère temporelle de notre petite colonie dans le Palatinat’. Gabriel de Messey was in Mannheim in July 1792 and was probably still

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herself as abbess of Bouxières and was involved with a cohort of émigrés who, in the words of a contemporary eyewitness, ‘united a strand of gallican rigorism with an outrageous exaggeration in political views’.74 All of these things tell us that she held on to the possibility of a future resurrection of her convent, or at the very least that she continued to insist that her identity was still defined by her leadership of this vanished institution. A second observation we can draw from de Messey’s actions and self-styling in these years concerns the mental distance she saw between the reinvented convent as it had gradually emerged in the 1780s and the old one. In the letter she wrote to Pope Pius, she spoke of the dissolution of the abbey as the ‘destruction (of) […] this ancient institution’. But instead of referring to its founder or the abbey’s long-standing legacy, she insisted its status as grounded in eighteenth-century treaties and in its subordination to Rome. And instead of mentioning the site on the hill, which to all accounts and purposes was still the location of the convent’s sanctuary and the canonesses’ residences, she merely referred to her own and her subjects’ valiant efforts to continue practising their duties at ‘a church in the town of Nancy’. Further evidence relating to her post-dissolution attitudes confirms that she situated her identity as former abbess in the reinvented version of Bouxières abbey, not the old one.75 Thus, in 1794 she had her miniature portrait painted. In the bottom right corner we can see that she is holding in her hand a knotted ribbon with the convent’s there in January 1793, but in April 1794 we find him on his way to the abbey of Ober Altaich (Marquis de Bombelles, Journal, vol. 4, 1793–1795, ed. by Jean Grassion, Frans Durif, and Jeannine Charon-Bordas (Paris: Droz, 1995), p.  233). Before or after that he was at the Swiss abbey of Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, then (in 1801) in Augsburg, and finally (until his death in 1806) in Vienna (de Brye, Consciences, passim). Regarding religious women who joined counter-revolutionary insurgents in Vendée or corresponded with exiles, see Murphy, ‘Les religieuses’, p. 98. 74  Henri-Marie-Gislain Mérode-Westerloo, Souvenirs du comte de Mérode-Westerloo, sénateur du royaume, ancien envoyé extraordinaire près S.M.I.R.A., 2  vols (Brussels: Ch.-J.-A.  Greuse, 1845–46), 1, p.  103: ‘La société émigrée y était encore nombreuse alors; et quoique d’un genre qui réunissait le rigorisme gallican et l’exagération outrée en politique, il y avait du moins quelque variété’. 75  According to a document that is dated 1 April 1791, a local man named Godefroy had rented all of de Messey’s properties in Bouxières, including her former home; Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 203  U.  Three years later these properties were sold at auction; note 82 below.

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Illustration 10. Former Abbess of Bouxières de Messey, Etching after a Miniature Portrait from 1794. Reproduced in Félix de Salles, Chapitres nobles de Lorraine: Annales, preuves de noblesse, documents, portraits, sceaux et blasons (Vienne and Paris: Gerold et Cie and Emile Lechevalier, 1888), p. 40.

decoration.76 And an anonymous report from the mid to later nineteenth century, states that de Messey (who died on 10  April 1825) had eventually settled at Nancy, where she spent her final days in a small room, devoted to a life of solitude, reflection, and simplicity, albeit ‘with the decoration of the chapter still attached to her simple robe’.77 While this latter account is hard to verify for its accuracy, we can reasonably suspect that her memories of the former abbey focused on that short era in which it had enjoyed royal approval, been at the crest of its influence, and been in the process of completely reinventing itself into a new educational institution. If she hoped for a resurrection of the convent – which conceivably was the case at this early stage – her focus would likewise have been on 76  77 

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De Salles, Chapitres nobles, p. 40. Deux chapitres-nobles, p. 49.

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recapturing those glorious, forward-looking years of planning and seeing the new convent slowly rise, not on returning to the old site on the hill and its associated memories. Locals at Bouxières-aux-Dames had been quick to realize that if there ever were to be any serious attempt to resurrect the abbey, it would neither benefit their village nor help with rescuing any lieux de mémoire that linked them to the old convent. Shortly after the abbey was dissolved and its property confiscated by the French state, the villagers took stock of its losses. In April 1791, concerns were raised over the fact that the charity school for girls, which used to be funded by the canonesses, no longer had any staff. The municipal council appointed Bouxières’ former provost Joseph Raybois (the same who would later re-emerge with the relic treasure) to lead it, but finding sufficient funds remained a concern for at least two more decades.78 Very soon there were also calls to claim materials and objects that were still at the old abbey to use them for the good of the community. On 24 May the council decided that the abbey’s church bells would be tolled to warn the villagers of approaching storms.79 And on 8 August it decreed that the bells and the tower clock of the abbatial church be moved to the local parish church, where the villagers would have better use of them.80 The local Catholic community too found that the canonesses had forfeited their right to the old convent’s spatial and material sites of memory. In June 1791 they apparently circulated a petition to demand that Gozelin’s relics be handed over to the nation so that they could be brought back for veneration in the parish church.81 And as far as we can tell they did not protest against the above measures by the municipal council. Nor did they object when the local authorities took further steps to dismantle the old convent site. By early 1794 several of the canonesses’ residences had been

Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 106. According to local schoolmaster Dudot’s written testimony from 1888; Nancy, BSt, 820, fol. 235v. 80  Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, pp.  109–10. On 14 August 1793 the district council further emptied the old convent buildings when it moved several items to Nancy, including the tower clock, several paintings, a chalice, and a paten; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 259. 81  Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 81. 78 

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confiscated and auctioned off.82 Meanwhile the abbatial church, cloister, and several communal areas and secondary structures were allowed to fall into ruins, until they too were sold to the highest bidder on 26  January 1798.83 The church and cloister were almost immediately torn down; and finally, on 2  September of the same year, the contents of the church, including Gozelin’s tomb, epitaphs, a small altar, a cupboard, bookcases, the choir stalls, part of the pulpit, and other such pieces of furniture, were also auctioned.84 All these actions reified the village community’s awareness that its eight-century link with Bouxières abbey could never be restored. Whether or not the manner in which the site was dismantled and sold reflects lingering resentment over the canonesses’ actions and attitudes prior to the dissolution is impossible to say. Even though convent members had financed a local school for girls and a charity, we also have a few indications that there had been tensions with the local villagers. A  chapter protocol from September 1766 records that they ‘perpetrate on a daily basis crimes, expecting not to be punished for it on grounds of the negligence of the keeper of the woods and on that of the good will of the canonesses, who tend to act in a benign fashion when they interact with them’.85 Furthermore, their attitude in 1789–91 also contrasted with that of the convent members of Remiremont, where work on a new clock tower had started in April 1789. At the outbreak of the Revolution the chapter members of that latter institution decided to press on with this project in order to provide employment for the impoverished lay population. And even after it was announced that the convent would be dissolved, for as long as it continued to exist the chapter carried on financing the improvements, so as to leave behind a fully functional sanctuary that could be easily turned into a parish church for the local community.86 Compared to this, 82  Pfister, Histoire de Nancy, 1, p. 51; Geindre, Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 94; and Poirier, Le chapitre, p.  145. The deeds of the sale of the houses belonging to de Messey, Mohr de Waldt, and de Gléresse are preserved as Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1 Q 487 2 (former two) and 1 Q 488 1. 83  Nancy, Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1 Q 592 2. 84  Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 258–59. 85  Nancy, BSt, 132, fol.  55r: ‘[les villageois] commettent tous les jours des delits attendu l’impunité dans ils jouissent, tant par la negligence du foretier, que par la bonté de Mesdames qui se portent à faire grace lorsqu’il y a des rapports’. 86  Durand, L’église, 1, pp. 212–17.

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the Bouxières canonesses’ concessions to the local village, promised in 1786, strike us as very modest indeed. Conclusions

While the French Revolution upset many old structures and customs, the effect on the Bouxières community was to interrupt a process of profound transformation: of institutions, localities, and religious, social, and historical identities. To make that transformation possible, the convent members gradually disengaged themselves from all but the abbey’s most essential memorial objects and connections. Precisely how that disengagement process would have eventually played out is unclear, as it was still unfolding when they hastily traded the old convent site for a safer residence at Nancy. Yet, here as in other stages of the abbey’s late existence and afterlife, a fascinating combination of arguments of continuity and drastic renewal can be observed. Furthermore, we can also see how the canonesses’ individual and collective agency was influenced by a wide range of actors outside the convent – royals, local aristocrats and clerics, villagers, and so on – and that the outcomes of that intersection (and the concomitant negotiation) impacted on the abbey’s trajectory in these final years of its existence, until it was caught up in the revolutionary storms. In the next two chapters we shall see that this paradoxical tension between continuity and renewal had already been a recurrent motif in the abbey’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century past.

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1766 Retooling Religious Space and Identities Soon after dawn on 15  June 1766, the lawyer Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt (d. 1786) left his rented room in the village of Bouxières-aux-Dames and made his way up the steep road to the abbey.1 In his travel journal he recorded his delight:2 I got up at the break of dawn to revisit, with renewed delight, a place that I have loved since my youth and that I have gone to many times. The beauty of the view from the position of the chapter high up on the hill has always enchanted me. It is obstructed only to the north side by a very pleasant wood: the east, south, and west offer the most pleasant diversity [of views]. It offers a splendid panorama [of] immense meadows, a fine river winding there, small valleys, hills, hillocks, mountains, vineyards, castles, fine villages and, to the side of Frouard the arrival of the Moselle River that absorbs the Meurthe River running at the foot of [the hill of] Bouxières. It was with the utmost attention and the keenest and most philosophical pleasure that I visited all the different points that offer a panoramic view […] I whiled away some time there on one of summer’s loveliest days, when the freshness, serenity, and the purity of the air allow the soul to experience a delightful sensation as it contemplates the wonders of nature […]3

On de Gironcourt’s life and work, see P.  Fiel, ‘Le journal de voyage de HenriAntoine Regnard de Gironcourt’, Le pays lorrain, 4 (1932), 161–78. 2  His autograph journal (Nancy, BSt, 1658) no longer includes the pages that describe the visit to Bouxières, even though they are listed in a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century table of contents. The text is now only available through the edition in de Gironcourt, ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 213–31. 3  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 215–16: ‘Je me levay dèz le grand matin pour aller revoir avec un nouveau plaisir un endroit que j’ay aimé dèz ma jeunesse et où je suis allé plusieurs fois; la beauté de la vue au point de la situation du chapitre, au haut de la montagne m’a toujours enchanté. La vue n’est bornée qu’au nord par un bois très agréable, l’orient, le midy et le couchant vous offrent la plus agréable diversité. C’est une vüe superbe et de ce coté tant que la vüe peut s’étendre des prairies immenses, une belle rivière qui y serpente, des vallons, des collines, des coteaux, des montagnes, des vignes, des châteaux, de beaux villages et, du côté de Frouard, l’arrivée de la Moselle qui va absorber la Meurthe qui passe au pied de Bouxières. Je visitay avec la plus grande attention et le plaisir le plus vif et le plus philosophique tous des différens points de vue, je m’y fixai, je m’y suis arrêté quelque tems, dans une de ces belles journées d’été, où la fraicheur, la sérénité, la pureté de l’air font éprouver à l’âme, spectatrice des merveilles de la nature, une sensation délicieuse’. 1 

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But our commentator had not come to Bouxières strictly to enjoy the natural beauty and solitude, for he was also on a fact-finding mission. Over the previous decade and a half he had travelled to a considerable number of sites of historical interest across the region to gather evidence for a monograph on the history of the dukes of Lorraine, each time taking notes on both the relevant evidence and his own impressions and experiences. The hilltop abbey’s many spatial, material, written, and even oral reminders of the past had made it an obvious destination, as he knew from learned publications, previous contact with convent members,4 and earlier visits. Furthermore, he was also keen to study this institution and its inhabitants with what one might describe as an anthropological eye. He owed his career as a successful lawyer largely to the support of Abbess Gabrielle de Spada d’Agremont of Epinal (1735–84).5 And he maintained personal connections with a number of secular canonesses (including a former abbess of Bouxières), and generally enjoyed interacting with his aristocratic peers. On this basis, he was naturally drawn to asking questions about the layout and appearance of Bouxières abbey, the identity of its members and staff, how they went about their daily lives, and how they engaged with their institution’s past.6 Of these things too he took extensive notes in his travel journal. Despite all this, de Gironcourt’s text is hardly a historian’s dream description of convent life at 1760s Bouxières. Besides the fact that it is biased and elliptic, it also reveals that the author at the time did not have privileged access to the abbey’s inner workings and private spaces, or to its various sites of memory, or

4  One of his contacts was Anne-Marie-Louise de Zuckmantel, who had been admitted to the Bouxières convent in 1731 but had left it again four years later to enter the convent of the Ladies of the Visitation in Nancy. He was still in touch with her in 1767; ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p. 227. 5  Fiel, ‘Le journal’. De Gironcourt’s published output includes (among other works) an account of a visit to Epinal in 1761 by Mesdames de France Adelaïde and Victoire (King Louis  XVI’s aunts, the same ones who would later sponsor the move of the Bouxières convent to Nancy; see the discussion in the previous chapter) and de Gironcourt, Description. 6  His account of a 1779 visit to Remiremont abbey was partially edited in ‘Une visite au Saint-Mont par Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt (7 juin 1779)’, ed.  by J. A. Morizot, Le pays de Remiremont, 7 (1985), 56–57.

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Illustration 11. Ink Drawing of Bouxières Abbey in 1770, after an Original Painting by Jean-Baptiste Claudot (d. 1805). Nancy, BSt, 1810, fol. 108bis. Second half of the nineteenth century. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

even to the activities of its members. Were it not for the fact that one of the nièces was kind enough to invite him into her tante’s house and to have dinner with her, his experience at the abbey would probably have been like that of most visitors. And as we shall see further in this chapter, his trip to the hill took place on a day when not much in particular was happening and many of the canonesses were absent. However, the lawyer’s relative anonymity and the informal nature of his visit also has an upside, for it allowed him to move around freely in the abbey’s public areas and casually interact with its resident members and staff. Furthermore, in terms of quality and detail his journal still vastly surpasses any other account by an outsider of Bouxières abbey in the eighteenth century. The journal’s relevance to our study of the convent’s relationship with the communal past becomes even greater when we realize that it offers a snapshot of this institution during a transformative phase in its history. In 1760–61, the abbey had gone through a major transition when Stanislas, the king of Poland and also duke of Lorraine, added the properties of the dissolved chapter of Vaudémont to the 141

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estate, an act that considerably boosted the canonesses’ income.7 And in a second step he further contributed to the convent’s rising prominence by formally restricting the right of admission to individuals who could demonstrate eight noble generations on either side.8 In Chapter  5 we shall see that a tendency to recruit exclusively among the old nobility had in fact been going on for many decades. But the king’s latter measure in particular brought to the surface a trend, driven forward by the activities of the Commission des secours (established in 1727), which in principle sought to aid women’s religious communities in financial distress. In reality though, it sparked a debate about the utility of these places, as purveyors of social services such as education and care for the sick, or as a respectable haven for (as Elizabeth Rapley calls it) ‘surplus daughters’ of the aristocracy.9 And in the longer term it also made houses of noble canonesses in particular vulnerable to both contemporary and later criticism, as institutions that had lost much of their former religious relevance and that emblematized the privileged status and (for some commentators) the vacuous mindset of the old aristocracy. These two interventions by Stanislas had a further destabilizing effect in that they drastically raised existing tensions within the community and its social network over the extent of the abbey’s exclusivity and the implications for the upward mobility of female members of the regional aristocracy. In particular, it resulted in a fierce and highly disruptive dispute between the convent and Deaconess Anne-Catherine de Briey de Landres, who was looking to transfer the former prebend as ordinary canoness of the recently elected (1760–61) Abbess Charlotte-Sidonie-Rose de Gouffier-Thois Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 153. The transferral anticipated the actions of the Commission des réguliers; Chapter 3, at note 28. 8  Pfister, Histoire, 1, pp.  43–44. Regarding the situation in other houses of noble canonesses in France, see Marchal, ‘Les chapitres nobles’. And for two comparative perspectives on the German-speaking world, refer to Ute Küppers-Braun, ‘“… que les Meres, grandes et arrieres grandes Meres doivent être Princesses ou Comtesses d’Empire”: Soziale Differenzierungen in Essen und Thorn (Frühe Neuzeit)’, in Frauen bauen Europa. Internationale Verflechtungen des Frauenstifts Essen, ed.  by Thomas Schilp (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2011), pp.  369–87 and Oliver Auge, ‘Frauenklöster als konstitutive Bestandteile der Adelskultur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts im nordelbischen Bereich’, in Neue Räume, ed. Beuckers and Falk, pp. 317–46. 9  Elizabeth Rapley, ‘The Shaping of Things to Come: The Commission des secours, 1727–1788’, French History, 8 (1994), 420–41, at p. 434. 7 

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to her own, non-eligible niece.10 The issue ended up being taken to court, which resulted in a victory for the convent and likely accelerated its trend towards an elitist profile.11 Among other things, it was probably one of the factors that set the stage for the 1773 recruitment as abbess of the Remiremont Canoness MarieFrançoise-Angélique de Messey, who would soon come up with an ambitious plan to redesign Bouxières as an even more exclusive urban convent with an outspokenly educational mission. Below the sleepy appearance of life on the hill simmered a convent that was still coming to terms with a traumatizing rift between its members, and that was now in the process of transitioning to a new and even more elitist identity. Part of that transition implied a fundamental reflection, by the canonesses and their relatives and other associates, on the convent’s societal role and the nature and relevance of its sites of memory, which we saw in Chapter 3 eventually resulted in the plans to move to Nancy and to completely restyle the abbey’s identity. This chapter investigates de Gironcourt’s account in light of these ongoing reflections. On the one hand, we will see how convent members and their associates were confronted on a day-to-day 10  The dispute originated when de Briey de Landres argued that her niece’s nobility papers did not need to be examined on the grounds that two of her relatives were already canonesses at Remiremont. To justify their refusal the abbess and chapter issued two printed pamphlets, namely Mémoire pour les dames abbesse, chanoinesses & chapitre de l’insigne église de Notre-Dame de Bouxières, contre la dame de Briey de Landres, doyenne (s.l.: Louis Cellat, 1763) and Mémoire pour les dames abbesse, chanoinesses & chapitre de l’insigne église de Notre-Dame de Bouxieres, appellantes, défendresses sur l’incident & demanderesses en sommation, & désavouantes contre demoiselle Françoise-Claire de la Tour en Voivre, tant de son chef que comme procédant sous l’autorité de dame Anne-Therese de Landres de Briey, sa mere, intimée, demanderesse en incident, & demanderesse (Nancy: Veuve et Claude Leseure, 1764). Abbess de Gouffier-Thois’s tenure would be short-lived, as she left the convent in 1762 to get married and was succeeded by Françoise d’Eltz; de Salles, Chapitres nobles, p. 39. 11  Bouxières abbey was hardly the only mid-eighteenth century house of noble canonesses to go through one or several major episodes of internal strife over such issues as admission requirements, canonesses’ property rights and the obligation to lodge one or several nièces in their home, and individual members’ financial rights; Placide-Fernand Lefèvre, ‘Une querelle de chanoinesses au chapitre noble de Sainte-Waudru à Mons, sous l’ancien régime’, Annales du Cercle archéologique de Mons, 47 (1923), 1–33 and Christine Mazella-Leriche, ‘Le chapitre noble de Maubeuge à l’heure de son apogée (xviie–xviiie)’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp. 185–208, at pp. 192–93.

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basis with their abbey’s embedding in the medieval and early modern past. And on the other, we will also catch echoes of how they viewed these reminders of the past in light of the abbey’s shifting composition and status, its tendency to move away from old practices and customs, and its situation at the beginning of even more intense transformations under Abbess de Messey. Dismantling a Medieval Abbey Site

De Gironcourt’s account contains significant references to the canonesses’ experience of space in and around the abbey. In particular, it reveals that certain parts of the site were still deeply anchored – architecturally, functionally, and in terms of their location – in the hill’s medieval past, whereas others were almost completely dissociated from it. After admiring the view over the river valley, de Gironcourt turned his attention to the Pelouse, the lawn behind the canonesses’ dwellings. Unlike Henri Lepage, Marie-Edmée Pau, and countless other visitors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was less than impressed by the way in which the area had been redesigned, and wondered if the linden saplings (which had been planted there as recently as in 1751 and remain a defining landscape feature today) would last very long. Of far greater interest, he found, was a small site at the far end of the grounds, at the limit of a small wooded area: on a previous visit in 1740 Abbess d’Eltz had taken him there to show him the remains of the stone Tribune from which St Gozelin had allegedly preached to pilgrims.12 Next de Gironcourt went to the abbatial church to say his prayers and then inspect the building and its interior. He timed his visit so that it would be finished before the canonesses came in to say Matins: I examined all that was interesting to see in this rather small church, which is low and very ancient. The choir of the Ladies is at the far end of the church, opposite the main altar, and is narrow and of the greatest simplicity. The middle part of the church is fairly large and in the small annexes on each side there are, in the one at the entrance, in the upper part an altar, and in the lower, a very neat chapel in which one descends via several steps, where  […] abbess d’Eltz is

‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp.  216–17. The permission to obtain the linden saplings from a local forest had been granted in 1750; Nancy, ADMM, H 2953. For a description of the Tribune, see Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, col. 892. 12 

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buried  […] there ones sees her epitaph  […] Most notable about the church are a number of inscriptions and epitaphs […]13

The next part of the tour around the convent briefly dwells on the medieval cloister, ‘which one finds before entering the church via the main gate [and which] is in a style that is very ancient [as well as] small and very ugly’.14 The houses of the canonesses, the journal continues, were arranged as if they were in a blind alley and were closed at night by a large gate. On one side of the alley there were steps that led down to the abbatial church; on the other the houses all featured a walled garden at the back with an exit to the Pelouse. The abbess’ residence stood separately from the houses of the canonesses, and ‘has nothing that is remarkable about the construction, which is very ancient’. The most attractive dwelling, de Gironcourt added, was the sacristan’s, which was built against the side of the church: it featured a forecourt that offered a pretty view of the Meurthe valley.15 On the way back down the hill there was also the house of a male staff member, Canon Bérard, which he found was charmingly decorated on the outside.16 ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p.  217: ‘Jexaminay tout ce qu’il y avoit de curieux à voir dans une assez petite église, basse et fort ancienne. Le choeur des Dames qui est dans l’extrémité de l’église opposée au grand autel est étroit et de la plus grande simplicité. Le milieu de l’église a une assez grande largeur et dans les petits collatéraux de chaque coté, dans celuy en entrant il y a, dans la partie supérieure un autel et, au bas, vis-à-vis une chapelle fort propre dans laquelle on descend par plusieurs degrés, c’est là qu’est inhumée cette digne abbesse d’Eltz  […] l’on y voit son épitaphe […] Ce qu’il y a de plus curieux dans cette église ce sont quantité d’inscriptions et d’épitaphes, les alliances, les quartiers contenant de grands et d’illustres noms’. 14  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p. 224: ‘Le cloître de ces Dames que l’on trouve avant d’entrer dans l’église par la porte principale est dans un goût fort antique, petit et très laid’. 15  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp.  224–25: ‘Depuis les maisons canoniales toutes rangées dans une rue fermée par une grande porte durant la nuit, l’on descend à l’église par quantité de marches. Le coté néanmoins des maisons qui donnent sur la plouse ont des issues à l’extrémité des jardins. L’hôtel abbatial, séparé des maisons des chanoinesses n’a rien de remarquable quant à l’édifice qui est ancien: mais ses appartements tournés du côté de la route de Champigneule et de Frouard d’où l’on décrouvre le beau, le superbe bassin de Nancyn, offrent la vue la plus charmante et la mieux diversifiée. De l’église l’on va de plein pied dans la maison du sacristain […] à cette maison atteint un jardin où l’on descend par un perron qui est près et au sortir d’une chambre. Depuis ce perron on jouit d’une vue que l’on ne peut se lasser de voir’. 16  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p. 230. 13 

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Illustration 12. The Pelouse at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century. Postcard from the author’s collection.

A  comparison with an 1832 cadastral plan and a 2010 reconstruction reveals that de Gironcourt was generally accurate in his description.17 To begin with, he gives a realistic impression of the outside appearance of the abbatial church as a small and ancient-looking building that was perched on one side of the plateau, and of the inside as a multi-levelled, barely unified jumble of mostly cramped spaces. Formal analysis indicates that most of these spaces had originated in the ninth to thirteenth centuries, with additions and changes dating from the fifteenth, and that their general structure and appearance was preserved intact up until the end of the abbey’s existence in the 1790s. Exactly two decades after de Gironcourt wrote his account, the chapter members and the surveyor Jean-François Miroménil would suggest that the lack of post-medieval attempts to remodel or completely rebuild the church was due to its position at the edge of the slope and the danger of collapse, and also to the expense of building in a

Nancy, ADMM, 1926 W  24 and Charles Kraemer and Christelle Poirier, ‘Du cloître au quartier canonial. Approche historique et archéologique de l’abbaye de Bouxières-aux-Dames (xe–xviiie siècle)’, Annales de l’Est (2010), 117–39. A  3D impression of the abbey site can be viewed at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4y4nx (accessed 12 November 2020).

17 

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Illustration 13. Reconstruction of the Abbey Site in the Mid-to-later Eighteenth Century. Based on the cadastral plan at http://archivesenligne.archives.cg54.fr/ ark:/33175/s005d3e9bb72cf66/5d3e9bb72e3d9 and on the maps in Kraemer and Poirier, ‘Du cloître’, pp. 124 and 130. Copyright Ludwig De Pauw

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location that was not only hard to access but (according to the surveyor) also lacked a natural water source.18 De Gironcourt’s description of the rest of the site also seems accurate. The cloister had lost its use in the later Middle Ages, when the convent transitioned from being a monastic community that lived in communal spaces to being a secular community of noble canonesses who each had their own house: because of this, nothing had been done to update its medieval appearance. Behind the cloister was the abbess’ house, which was indeed very old and either stood empty or was about to be vacated when he saw it. A  survey by French officials from 28  November 1790 describes the structure as being ‘in a very bad condition’.19 And when it was sold at auction in 1794, the report of that sale included a statement to the effect that the building had been vacant for three or four decades.20 From the abbatial residence there was a passage that led to the blind alley where most of the houses of the canonesses were situated: as de Gironcourt accurately states, those on the north-east side were recent and featured a garden looking out over the Pelouse.21 All these things speak to the accuracy of de Gironcourt’s evidence. But the 1832 plan and the 2010 reconstruction also reveal that the lawyer’s account contains some notable omissions. Except for the abbatial church and the cloister, we hear nothing at all about any pre-modern structures. These include old buildings for agricultural purposes and several houses for canonesses (situated on the south-west side of the alley) that dated back to the later medieval era.22 Presumably de Gironcourt had no interest in describing utility buildings. However regarding the medieval houses we can hypothesize that he omitted them from his description not just because he disliked their appearance, but also because some (or even all of them) were either no longer being used as residences or were about to be vacated. Documents from late March 1791 indicate that several were in a state of neglect and were owned by convent members who also owned and lived in a modern house on the other side of the alley.23 The construction of 18  19  20  21  22  23 

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Chapter 3, at note 30. Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 879 U. Nancy, ADMM, 1 Q 488 1. A description of one of these houses is in Poirier, Le chapitre, pp. 164–78. Kraemer and Poirier, ‘Du cloître’. Bouxières-aux-Dames, AMB, 207 U.

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these new buildings in the 1730s–40s had been the starting point of a gradual but deliberate process whereby the gravity point of convent space shifted to the north-east. The redesigning of the Pelouse fifteen years before de Gironcourt’s visit would be a good fit with this, as would the post-1766 decision by the Bouxières abbess to move out of the abbatial house and into one previously occupied by an ordinary canoness. These indications allow us to argue that de Gironcourt’s account not only reflects his personal taste but also that the Bouxières community was distancing itself, both mentally and physically, from the abbey’s medieval spaces. Accordingly there is also reason to reflect on what de Gironcourt has to say about the abbatial church and its interior, and also on what he leaves unsaid. Strikingly, he omits any reference to features such as inscriptions, paintings, and objects that pointed to the convent’s medieval past, its origins in the tenth century, and especially also to its founder. One space to which this applies is the subterranean crypt, where the bishop’s body had been laid to rest and which still held his original tomb. Evidently de Gironcourt did not recognize it as a significant site of memory – but then we find that the convent itself was doing little to keep memories of the crypt’s former significance alive. For the entire early modern period we have no evidence of any ritual or cultic use of this space, nor do we have any textual or iconography references. And when a revolutionary official described the crypt and its contents as ‘a stone in a cellar’,24 his choice of words might have accurately reflected its use in the decades prior to the convent’s dissolution. This trend also extended to biographical sites of memory from the abbey’s medieval past. For instance, de Gironcourt strikingly leaves out of his account any mention of inscribed monuments in honour of medieval members and patrons. It is possible that he deliberately ignored them, even though he did copy or describe numerous sixteenth- to eighteenth-century inscriptions.25 But it is more likely that most or even all had long been removed, for instance when the church was renovated in the mid-fifteenth Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 259: ‘une pierre dans un caveau’. ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp.  217–24. The inscriptions he cites concern five secrètes (female office holders at the abbey) and one canon from the seventeenth century; three deaconesses and three canonesses from the early to mid-eighteenth century; and five abbesses from the mid-sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries.

24  25 

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century.26 The lack of information about medieval inscriptions also corresponds with the sketchy memories at the abbey concerning pre-1400/1500 convent members, their relatives, and generous donors. Earlier we already saw that both founder St  Gozelin had instructed the Benedictine nuns at Bouxières to play a major part in his liturgical commemoration, and that various lay benefactors had likewise been drawn to the convent’s potential role as a site of personal memory. The convent members may have sustained that role until the early modern period. From the scarce documentation that survives for the abbey’s late medieval stage, we can infer that the fifteenth century was a phase of economic expansion for the abbey, driven (we saw in Chapter 2) among other things by new donations and other revenues deriving from the revived cult of St  Gozelin. This spurred a revived interest in the canonesses’ commemoration of deceased members and patrons, which is the likely explanation for the existence of two collections of obit notes for the years 1346–1597.27 However by the mid-sixteenth century the focus of administrators shifted to consolidating the canonesses’ prebends and recruiting wealthy members of the regional nobility, a trend that almost certainly explains the declining focus on maintaining this type of documentation.28Accordingly there seems to have been no enthusiam at the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury convent for adding new material to these necrological records. Nor did the early modern canonesses show much interest in giving a narrative dimension to communal memories of former members, patrons, and other associates, with the exception of the above-mentioned tombstones and inscriptions.29

26  The inscriptions and tombstones were auctioned off in September 1792; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  258–61. In the 1980s Lucien Geindre reported that some fragments were in the hands of local villagers; Bouxières-aux-Dames, p. 181. 27  By far the longest one is the seventeenth-century Mémoire des anniversaires dict obbit que l’on a accoustumé de célébre office annuellement en l’église Notre-Dame de Bouxières-aux-Dames, which covers the years 1346-1597; Nancy, ADMM, H  2950. A fragment with five additional obit notes for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries survives on two leaves from a fifteenth-century antiphonar; they were first published in ‘Deux feuillets d’un nécrologe de Bouxières, aux Archives des Vosges’, ed.  by André Philippe, Bulletin mensuel de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 2/21 (1926), 23–26. Both sets of obits were subsequently edited in Mougenot, L’abbaye, pp. 93–105b. 28  Mougenot, L’abbaye, pp. 55–60 and Poirier, Le chapitre. 29  Admittedly it is impossible to completely rule out the possibility that such narratives had existed prior to the dissolution of the convent. Some French officials

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Illustration 14. Eighteenth-century Seal of the Chapter of Bouxières Abbey. Nancy, BSt, 132, fol. 15r. Impression made on 28 August 1765. Copyright Bibliothèques de Nancy

From these observations we can conclude two things. The first is that the canonesses did not see much reason to anchor their identity in the spaces these predecessors had used and lived in. Arguably this means that the community’s disenchantment with the hill site long pre-dated that fateful chapter meeting of 1784. And, furthermore, the mid-eighteenth-century shift away from the abbey’s medieval location to a new one further along the plateau likely qualifies who worked on the confiscated papers of religious houses in the mid-to-later 1790s had a habit of discarding any documents (liturgical books, memorial records, egodocuments, and so on) that did not pertain to the ownership and exploitation of an institution’s former estate; e.g. Johan Van der Eycken and Michel Van der Eycken, “Wachten op de prins…” Negen eeuwen adellijk damesstift Munsterbilzen (Bilzen: Historisch Studiecentrum Alden Biesen, 2000), p.  313. Judging by the holdings of Nancy’s ADMM and Bibliothèque Stanislas, such an intervention also affected the written legacy of Bouxières abbey (which would explain the loss of (for instance) some of the statutes that are mentioned in de Puibusque’s archive inventory), albeit with some notable exceptions such as the above-mentioned Mémoire, a ceremonial and a set of statutes in Nancy, BSt, 413/2, and a handful of other items; see Chapter 1, note 51 and especially Appendix 4.

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as a precursor, a dress rehearsal so to speak, for de Messey’s more drastic plan to abandon the hill entirely and move to Nancy. The second conclusion we can draw is that that convent members in the mid-eighteenth century were not particularly drawn to maintaining a link with their medieval predecessors. Emblematic of that attitude is the change in the convent’s seal, which since the later medieval period had featured a seated image of the crowned Virgin holding a lily in her right hand, with the Christ child on her lap.30 In the eighteenth century this was replaced by a new version with an image that presumably still shows the Virgin, but as an elegant woman, half-turned away from the viewer and seemingly in motion. Impressions of this seal are comparatively rare. We do however find several on the chapter’s admission record (28  August 1765, less than a year before de Gironcourt’s visit) for Marie-Thérèse-Agnès-Angélique de Lort de Montesquiou, whom we met in Chapter 1.31 Impressed with the mark of the convent’s explicitly  forward-looking attitude, this document functions as a telltale sign of the fact that any ongoing changes in the convent’s relationship with the medieval past were also likely to have a profound impact on the destinies of its individual members. Considering these signs of an increasingly distant relationship with spatial and material legacies of the medieval past, the canonesses’ enduring interest in the abbey’s oldest charters may surprise us. However, as we shall see in the next section and in Chapter 5 it was a blend of historical and contemporary arguments that maintained that collection’s central position in their memory culture. ‘These Archives, so Interesting for the Nobility of the Realm’

It is difficult to say why de Gironcourt’s report of his visit contains no references to the abbey’s archives, given his obvious interest in regional history. Perhaps he did not see the need to spend any time in them, on account of the fact that he was satisfied with what he had found in Calmet’s History of Lorraine or had obtained copies and transcriptions through his network of fellow

30  31 

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Reproduced in Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 219 (facing). Nancy, BSt, 132, fols 13v–15r.

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amateur historians and genealogists.32 But we must also remember that his journal records an account of a casual and possibly even unannounced visit to the abbey and that the likelihood of being given permission to inspect documents without prior notice would have been small. Various regulations from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries indicate that access to the collection was strictly controlled: the most important parts of the archives were kept in a chest with multiple locks, and that at least two canonesses (from 1763, at least three) each had a separate key.33 Any request for access would therefore have been subject to the approval of the chapter, or at the very least of leading convent members. And even if de Gironcourt had notified the canonesses of his intentions prior to coming to Bouxières, a positive outcome would by no means have been guaranteed. In the mid-1760s the convent was still reeling from the recent court cases over the admission of the niece of Deaconess de Briey de Landres, which may have made them more reluctant than usual to let amateur historians and genealogists snoop in their institutional memories. Whatever the precise reasons for de Gironcourt’s silence, it starkly contrasts with the fact that since the late seventeenth century, the convent had been actively advertising its archival memories as a major resource for genealogists and historians. This, in turn, must be understood in light of the ongoing shift in the recruitment policy of Lorraine’s houses of noble canonesses.34 Briefly said, it entailed

In his travel notes for 1779 de Gironcourt reported that he was able to visit the convent library at the abbey of Remiremont, where he briefly inspected the obituary of Saint-Mont (a nearby priory of that institution) and made some notes on its contents: ‘Je parcourus dans la bibliothèque le manuscrit qui contient le nécrologe, j’y vois plusieurs seigneurs et dames chanoinesses qui avaient fait du bien et des fondations à cette église, on y trouve des Dames de Cey, Versay, de Choiseux, des seigneurs d’Haroué, le nécrologe remonte en 1279. On voit que Varin de Haroué époux de N.  de Toulonzon se fit religieux en ce prieuré’; ‘Une visite’, ed. Morizot, pp. 56–57. On the nature and contents of that document, see L’obituaire du Saint-Mont (1406), ed.  by Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean  and Gautier Poupeau (Paris: Éditions en ligne de l’École des chartes, 2005) (online publication at http://elec.enc. sorbonne.fr/obituairestmont/, accessed 9 December 2020). 33  Two keys according to the abbey’s 1605 archive inventory (Nancy, ADMM, H  2946), and three according to statutes that are referenced in the 1763 Mémoire (Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 217–18). 34  Also refer to the discussions in Marchal, ‘Les chapitres nobles’, pp.  275–80 and François De Vriendt, ‘Un travail généalogique inachevé relatif aux chanoinesses de 32 

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increasingly strict conditions for admission: members had to submit a genealogical dossier that demonstrated their noble ancestry over at least multiple generations on both their father’s and their mother’s side.35 Besides other documentation that survives in the abbey’s archives, we have an impressive witness to the convent’s evolving recruitment policy in the form of painted genealogical trees that represent the noble ancestry of ten individuals who had requested admission.36 Comparison of these depictions with preserved ones from other institutions in the wider area reveals that Bouxières abbey was looking to position itself in the same upper percentile, at least as far as the elite status of its membership was concerned, as the much larger and wealthier abbey of Remiremont.37 These strict requirements for admission necessitated a great deal of archival research. And without a doubt, they resulted in intense exchanges between, on one side, the Bouxières canonesses and the aristocratic families from which the abbey recruited, and, on the other, historians and genealogists.38 This type of exchanges must also have put the spotlight on the abbey’s archives, which contained precisely the type of historical evidence that the aristocratic elite was looking for.39 Unlike other communities of noble canonesses that refused outside requests to consult their historical archives,40 the Bouxières convent in principle welcomed such interest. By the Mons. Bibliothèque des Bollandistes, ms.  223 (vers 1755–1760)’, Annales du Cercle archéologique de Mons, 84 (2018), 137–69. 35  Pfister, Histoire, 1, pp. 43–44. 36  Nancy, BSt, Fonds iconographique. On their use during the admissions procedure, see the Mémoire pour les dames abbesse, chanoinesses & chapitre (1763), p.  14 and Hubert Collin, ‘“Les arbres de lignes” des chanoinesses de Bouxières-aux-Dames en Lorraine, conservés à la Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy’, in Les chapitres, ed. Parisse and Heili, pp. 223–30. 37  Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp.  37–45 and Poull, Les dames chanoinesses, pp. 145–46. Few documents of this type have been preserved, presumably because they were usually given back to candidates once the admission procedure was concluded; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp. 125–26. 38  Françoise Boquillon, ‘Les dames nobles des chapitres de Lorraine sous l’Ancien Régime’, in Les chapitres, ed. Parisse and Heili, pp. 90–94. 39  Compare with the comments in Nora Gädecke, ‘Das Interesse an den ottonischen Urkunden für Quedlinburg im Hannover der Leibniz-Zeit’, in Bene vivere in communitate. Beiträge zum italienischen und deutschen Mittelalter. Hagen Keller zum 60. Geburtstag überreicht von seinen Schülerinnen und Schülern, ed.  by Thomas Scharff (Münster: Waxmann, 1997), pp. 279–95. 40  Donetzkoff, ‘Les archives’, p. 350.

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late eighteenth century, the collection’s reputation was such that the chapter members justified their plans to relocate to Nancy by referring (among other things) to ‘these archives, so interesting for the nobility of the realm’.41 How this reputation originated can be reconstructed through various types of evidence. To begin with, sometime in the late seventeenth century an anonymous author produced a Mémoire or descriptive synopsis of the abbey’s most prestigious charters.42 That booklet explicitly sought to reflect the interests of historians: hence the detailed if somewhat inept description of the contents of each piece and of elements that would help identify and authenticate it, such as the dating and the script, and the presence of seals or monograms. A second Mémoire that was made after 1720 additionally notes that the archive at that point held four transcribed copies and five translations of Gozelin’s 938 foundation charter.43 The transcriptions were likely intended (besides any possible legal or administrative purposes) either for use by visiting researchers or by those who had requested copies by letter. And with the translations, the convent members were probably looking to advertise the significance of their historical resources to those who did not read Latin, including patrons, their researchers and relatives, and other members of the nobility. The canonesses’ strategy for promoting the Bouxières charter treasure as a historical resource paid off, primarily thanks to the crucial intervention of male outsiders. Instrumental to its success was the work of scores of anonymous genealogists who relied on the abbey’s archives to prepare application files for prospective canonesses at this and other places. But its reputation as an archival repository of the highest interest for Lorraine’s medieval past was also considerably boosted by the work of regional historians, particularly the Norbertine monk Charles-Louis Hugo (d.  1739) and his Benedictine peer Augustin Calmet (d.  1757). In 1708 Duke Leopold of Lorraine had commissioned the former to write a major History of Lorraine, although in 1713 Leopold took him

Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fol. 301; refer also to the previous chapter. Memoire tiré des tiltres du tresor de l’abbaye de Bouxieres aux Dames, now Paris, BNF, Collection de Lorraine, 717, fols 215–22 (inventory G in Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60). 43  Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fols 234–40 (inventory I in Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60), with the note at fol. 234v. 41 

42 

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off the project and handed it over to Calmet. While Calmet, too, ended up falling out with the duke over the political implications of his research, he did manage to publish his monograph in four volumes.44 And as he neared the completion of his work, Hugo went public with his own findings in a separate study.45 Both of these publications drew readers’ attention to the exceptional contents of Bouxières abbey’s oldest archives and contained the first printed editions of a handful of medieval documents.46 Calmet’s monograph in particular became the standard reference for the study of Lorraine’s past: both the original edition and a revised second one from the 1740s–50s were widely consulted, including in other parts of France and even in other countries. One of many tokens of the work’s influence is the fact that the passage on Bouxières in the second edition is cited almost verbatim in de Gironcourt’s travel journal;47 in Ferdinand Maloteau de Villerode‘s 1750 history of all the noble chapters of canonesses in Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique and (by the same) Histoire de Lorraine. On this work and its tortuous origins, see Augustin Fangé, La vie du très-révérend père d. Augustin Calmet abbé de Senones (Senones: Joseph Pariset, 1762), pp. 23–24 and 52–53. Recent discussions of Calmet’s biographical and intellectual trajectory are in Dom Augustin Calmet: Un itinéraire intellectuel, ed. by Philippe Martin and Fabienne Henryot (Paris: Riveneuve, 2008) and Aurélie Gerard, Dom Augustin Calmet et l’abbaye de Senones: Un milieu littéraire (Langres: Editions Dominique Guéniot, 2012), esp. pp. 345–52. 45  Sacrae antiquitatis monumenta historica, dogmatica, diplomatica, notis illustrata, ed. by Charles-Louis Hugo, 2 vols (Etival: J. M. Heller, 1725). 46  Hugo edited a single charter by Emperor Otto  I from 965 (Sacrae antiquitatis monumenta, 1, p.  191, which corresponds with Les origines, ed. Bautier, no.  31). Calmet edited more royal, episcopal, and papal items from the tenth to early twelfth centuries (Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, Preuves, cols  335, 350–51, 370–73, 402, and 474–75, which corresponds with Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos  1, 13, 31, 40, and 41); in the re-edition of his work he added one more document (Histoire de Lorraine, 4, Preuves, col.  340, which corresponds with Les origines, ed. Bautier, no.  6). And Calmet also reprinted a number of sixteenth-century forgeries from François de Rosières, Stemmatum Lotharingiae ac Barri ducum tomi septem (Paris: Guillaume Chaudière, 1580), Preuves, fol. xxiii recto, nos 11, 108 and fol. xxiii verso, no. 109 and 110 (Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 2, Preuves, cols  264, 290, 349, and 370, which corresponds with Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos  43, 44, 51, and 57). Although there is no direct indication that de Rosières’ forgeries were made with the involvement of the Bouxières canonesses and their associates, more research would be needed to understand a possible link to the turbulent history of that institution in the later sixteenth century; on the context, see Chapter 5, especially note 24. 47  These passages derive from the text in Calmet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 3, col. lxxx–ii and concern internal disputes during the abbacies of Anne-Françoise de Ludres 44 

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France, the Low Countries, and the Empire;48 and in the series Gallia Christiana, which aimed to make an inventory of all religious institutions in France.49 Another measure of success is that several of Calmet’s editions of charters from the abbey’s archives were reprinted in the Receuil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, a likewise prestigious series that published original documents concerning French history.50 These publications increased the archive’s reputation as a major historical resource even further and sustained this reputation until the very end of the abbey’s existence. Earlier we already saw that the community mentioned the importance of their archive in their 1784 letter to King Louis XVI, emphasizing its interest to both the French and foreign nobility. And when the noted French historian Jacob-Nicolas Moreau linked up with the Benedictine Congregation of SaintVanne to obtain copies of medieval charters from France’s past for the king’s Cabinet de Chartes, he established contact with Hilaire de Puibusque, who (we already saw) had been commissioned in 1786 to draft a new inventory of the abbey’s archives.51 Moreau requested and subsequently obtained transcriptions of up to eighteen of the most precious documents in the collection.52 These transcriptions (all of which are dated August 1788 and were made by a clerk whom de Puibusque had hired specifically for (1553–1603) and Anne Catherine de Cicon (1641–68); ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 219 and 222. 48  Douai, Bibliothèque Marcelline Desbordes-Valmore, 938, fols 124r–25v. 49  Benedictines of the Congregation of St  Maur, Gallia Christiana, 16  vols (Paris: various editors, 1785), 13, cols 1353–57. 50  Receuil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 22 vols (Paris: Librairies Associés, 1738–1865), 9, pp. 224–25 and 561; also Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos 13 and 1. 51  Claude Faltrauer, ‘Les réseaux au service de la vie intellectuelle des vannistes’, in La correspondance: Le mythe de l’individu dévoilé?, ed. by Philippe Martin (Louvainla-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2014), pp.  127–37, at pp.  132–33. In a 1786 letter to Moreau de Puibusque stated his hope that his research and transcription work on the Bouxières charter treasure would not only allow him to make a modest contribution to the study of France’s past, but would also one day bring him in the presence of the king; Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 337, p. 73 (quoted in Dieter Gembecki, ‘La condition historienne à la fin de l’ancien régime’,  Dix-huitième siècle, 13 (1981), 271–87, at p. 276). 52  Letter by de Puibusque to Moreau from 30 June 1788; Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 337, p.  64, also quoted in Didier-Laurent, ‘Correspondance’, p.  171. In another letter from 3 August he complained about the expense of hiring a clerk to transcribe these pieces; Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 337, p. 62.

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that purpose)53 remain valuable to scholars, partly because they are superior to earlier ones from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and partly because, after the events of 1790–91, many of the original charters went missing and are still unaccounted for (for reasons discussed in Chapter 1). Thus, despite the convent’s willingness to let third parties inspect their muniments, presumably de Gironcourt arrived at the wrong time or lacked the connections to take advantage of it. Had he been able to do so, he might have observed in his journal that the canonesses’ focus on their archives was very much about promoting their institution’s relevance to the aristocratic elite. But as we shall see in the next chapter, he might also have noted that they saw the collection as one of the few things that still linked them in a meaningful way to their institution’s medieval origins. Life Amidst the Shadows of Past Canonesses

What de Gironcourt is unable to offer in terms of insight into the archive’s condition and its status as a storehouse for memories is more than compensated by his observations of the abbey going about its business on a random day in the mid-1760s. Much of what he tells us can actually be derived from the convent’s statutes (particularly a recent set that had been issued in 1763) and from comparing Bouxières with the three other Lorraine convents of secular canonesses. Nonetheless, his comments give added The database Telma (http://telma-chartes.irht.cnrs.fr/moreau/page/introduction, accessed 9 December 2020) identifies fifteen such documents: Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 4, doc. 18 (corresponds with Les origines, ed. Bautier, no.  1); 4, doc.  104 (Ibid., no.  2); 4, doc.  141 (Ibid., no.  4); 5, fols  147r–48r (Ibid., no.  6 and Oschema, ‘Die Gründung’); 6, fol. 223 (Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 13); 9, no. 113 (Ibid., no. 25); 10, no.  13 (Ibid., no.  26); 10, fols  24–25 (Ibid., no.  31); 10, doc.  68 (Ibid., no.  33); 11, doc.  193 (Ibid., no.  37); 20, doc.  208 (Ibid., no.  40); 30, doc.  78 (Ibid., no.  42); 52, doc.  144 (Ibid., no.  52, where the charter text is listed as lost); 57, doc.  98 (Ibid., no.  47); and 62, doc. 108 (Ibid., no.  49). The most likely candidates for the missing three documents are indicated in Table  1 of this book. It is possible that these are still a part of BNF, Collection Moreau, resp. vols 16, 17, 18, or 19; 164 or 165; and 250: but due to the Covid-19 restrictions I was unable to consult these volumes, none of which had been digitized at the time of writing. Note however that the Telma database (which goes up to 1208) does not list a 996–1019 charter by Bishop Berthold among the known de Puibusque copies. 53 

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depth and a human face to some of these known regulations and customs, the application of which in real life would be hard to verify otherwise. In addition, they add a personal dimension to the canonesses’ sense of distance from their medieval predecessors. And finally, they make it more obvious than any other existing commentary that the abbey hosted a significant number of clerics and staff members and that the hill was probably more ‘home’ to these people than to most convent members. One of the journal’s most telling observations is that only a few of the community were present at the time of de Gironcourt’s visit. When he went to high Mass in the abbatial church, only seven canonesses (thus a little over half) turned up.54 This low attendance would have neither shocked nor surprised him. Absences of individual members were not unusual in houses of secular canonesses and could last up to six months at a time.55 And unless a visitor chose his or her moment well, chances were that a significant percentage would not be there, even in a small community like Bouxières.56 He was sorry, he noted, not to have seen Canoness Coudenhove de Vaudoncourt, whom he had previously met at Nancy and found ‘very outgoing and very friendly’.57 Not mentioned but surely also missed by him was Abbess Françoise d’Eltz (1762–73), who was either absent or unavailable. His only documented interaction with a convent member was with twenty-two-year-old Barbe-Antoinette-Julienne de Schauenburg, a nièce from the Strasbourg area who lived together with a tante

At Remiremont high Mass was celebrated around noon; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, p. 245. 55  Poirier, Le chapitre, pp.  84–85 (for Bouxières); Boquillon, Les dames, p.  140 (for Epinal, where nine months of residence per year was required); (by the same) ‘Le chapitre’, p.  150 (for Poussay, where the rule was eight months’ residence); and (again by the same) Les chanoinesses, pp.  213–28 (for Remiremont, where the residence length varied over time). 56  At Bouxières, absences of less than fifteen consecutive days during periods of residence were not counted as interruptions, which means that some individuals could be absent for much more than six months per year in total; Poirier, Le chapitre, p.  121. On regulations regarding short-term absences, see Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 49–50. 57  Marguerite or Marie-Agnès, both of whom had been admitted to the convent in 1750; ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p. 229. 54 

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(also her aunt by kinship) named Marie-Antoinette-Elisabeth de Zuckmantel, who was also absent at the time.58 Inevitably the lengthy absences shaped the canonesses’ selfunderstanding as members of a religious community in ways that were quite distinct from that of a traditional monastic group. And in other respects too, their experience and (self-)perception was far removed from that of cloistered women. Looking first at their appearance, their dress was distinctive only in specific circumstances and with the possibility of variation. According to a decision the Bouxières chapter issued in 1722, members had to wear a black mantle and a white, black or violet veil when they attended office.59 But outside of the church, they could wear clothes of their own choice, on condition that these were in ‘modest colours’ such as brown, grey, violet, purple, deep blue, and ‘dead leaves’ (feuilles mortes): they were not to wear silver or gemstones on their clothes, or flowers in their hair.60 Despite these precise instructions, practices at the monastery would remain in flux: in 1763 the canonesses were wearing a small head ornament called the marit.61 In the next chapter we shall see that the question of dress had been a sensitive issue at the abbey since at least the seventeenth century. Because native speakers of French had difficulties with pronouncing these German names, locally the two women were known as Madame de Chaubourg and de Soupemane; ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 225–29. De Gironcourt mentions that there were at least five de Zuckmantels who had recently been a tante or nièce at Bouxières, and others still who were convent members at Epinal and Remiremont. 59  Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 84r–85v. Compare this description with the depiction of the clothing of a Remiremont canoness in Hippolyte Hélyot, Histoire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires et des congrégations séculières de l’un et de l’autre sexe, qui ont été établies jusqu’à présent, 8  vols (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1714–19), 6, p.  419. And with the depiction of three Poussay canonesses on an eighteenthcentury painting that used to hang in the abbatial church of that institution; Charles Guyot, ‘Un tableau de l’église de Poussay (Vosges)’, Journal de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 41 (1892), 52–55, esp. p.  53. Also Chapter  5 at notes 61 and 70. 60  Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 84r–85v. 61  Mémoires pour les dames abbesse (1763), p. 15, note 3. Like their peers in Bouxières, the eighteenth-century canonesses of Poussay wore a luxurious veil known as the barbette; Gaspard, ‘Abbaye’, p.  114 (‘Les chanoinesses portaient indistinctement sur le sommet de la tête une voilette en toile blanche fraisée en tuyaux et posée perpendiculairement; à cette voilette, qui se nommait barbette, se rattachait sur la nuque le manteau d’étamine’). 58 

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Besides having to comply with these and other ‘soft’ rules regarding attendance and outward markers of corporate identity, canonesses typically had few obligations to the convent. Except for the abbess, the Bouxières women did not make any vows and knew that they were free to abandon their state at any time, for instance to get married or to enter a cloistered community.62 All convent members were obliged to attend office, but only if they were on site: de Gironcourt’s comment reveals that high Mass was a good opportunity for outsiders to observe how many were present. Senior canonesses as dames capitulantes were expected to attend ordinary meetings, but again only if they were present at the convent. The exception was the annual chapter meeting (held in March of each year) and any extraordinary chapter meetings.63 The lack of joint activities was also reflected in the lack of communal spaces outside of the abbatial church, and the fact that we have no indications at all that the old cloister was used for any specific purpose. All these things tell us that the Bouxières women did not root their self-understanding as members of a religious cohort in their physical presence on the hill of Bouxières, or only to a limited extent. Likewise limited in significance was their appearance, a certain routine of communal occupations, and even their joint or individual use of convent space. Rather, it was their status as individuals who had been admitted to this highly exclusive institution on grounds of their noble ancestry, had been awarded a prebend, and now enjoyed the freedom to live a relatively independent life that constituted the basis on which they grounded their identity. De Gironcourt’s report depicts a situation where each canoness, when she was present at the abbey, mostly minded her own business in the domestic environment of her own home or (if she was a nièce) that of a tante. She might be reading, playing games, and writing letters; taking dance or music lessons;64 receiving instructors, lawyers, officials, and other visitors; carrying out busiCompare among other things with the discussion of the 1645 regulations for Epinal in Boquillon, Les dames, p. 126. See further in this chapter, notes 73 and 75 for two examples of canonesses who left to get married; and above at note 4 for one who left to join a cloistered community. 63  De Salles, Les chapitres, p. 36. 64  On canonesses’ leisure activities, refer to the discussions in Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp. 284–98 and Marchal, ‘L’utilisation’. 62 

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ness with merchants;65 or generally exploring her future options. A considerable number of these women probably saw their house on the hill as a mere residence rather than as an actual home. And metaphorically speaking, quite a few of them must also have realized that their career as a canoness might end up being but a mere way station on their life’s journey. De Gironcourt’s report also draws our attention to the fact that, in contrast, a considerable number of clerical and lay staff must have viewed the site on the hill as their permanent abode. He includes a brief but telling account of how he met the sacristan (who also acted as organist) and his wife, who received him in their home and casually chatted with him.66 Eighteenth-century documentation indicates that Bouxières abbey had in addition three canons, who celebrated Mass and acted as almoners. And it also employed a provost (who oversaw the abbey’s estate, managed the institutional archives, and acted as the secretary of the chapter meetings)67 and a porter.68 The canonesses also had at least one female servant each, a chambermaid, and in some cases also a factotum who was responsible for repairs and maintenance.69 Although we tend to overlook these people because they do not play a prominent role in the surviving documentation of this and other religious institutions, they outnumbered the canonesses and (except maybe for the personal maids of the canonesses) constituted a far more stable presence in these abbey sites.  We can only wonder what emotions they went through when de Messey first came up with the plan to relocate the convent to Nancy. The journal’s description of the encounter with the organist and his wife and the domesticity of their life on the hill is a fitting counterpoint to that of the lawyer’s encounter with nièce de Schauenburg. When he called at her residence, he was told to wait in the reception room while she got ready to receive him. She then showed him around in the ‘beautiful and costly house

Corinne Marchal, ‘Les laïcs dans les chapitres nobles féminins au xviiie siècle (France-Lorraine)’, in Les laïcs dans les religions. XXIIe université d’été du carrefour d’histoire religieuse, ed.  by Bruno Bethouart and Laurent Ducerf, special issue of Les cahiers du Littoral, 2/13 (2014), pp. 139–54. 66  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p. 225. 67  Poirier, Le chapitre, pp. 29–32. 68  Pfister, Histoire, 1, p. 44. 69  Poirier, Le chapitre, p. 182. 65 

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of Madame de Zuckmantel, which she had built entirely new in the most attractive style and on the highest point of elevation of the hill of Bouxières; [it is oriented towards] the beautiful and vast plain of Nancy’.70 From a post-dissolution description of the house we know that it was an elegant structure, built on a square floor plan with a small courtyard on the eastern side and another one to the south. The ground floor had six rooms, including a reception room, a dining room, two further rooms and a cupboard. And on the second floor, there were seven rooms, one of which was for a chambermaid or servant; a small adjacent structure held the kitchen, office, food cupboard, rooms for servants, two cellars, and an attic.71 De Gironcourt obviously got to see only the public parts of the house. His notes in the journal express his admiration for the elegant contemporary furniture. They also describe a portrait of the absent de Zuckmantel, in casual clothing and looking preoccupied while composing a letter,72 and recount how de Schauenburg showed him the garden, which featured a pretty view of the valley. The conversation then turned to the fact that Madame de Zuckmantel was unlikely to return, due to her recent marriage to Monsieur Alphonse Ladvocat de Sauveterre, the French ambassador in Berlin.73 When the church bells rang for office he accompanied the young nièce to the church, where they attended high Mass. Later that day, the two lunched together; and just before Vespers, he took his leave.74 What he could not have known is that de Schauenburg would soon leave the convent and that ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p.  229: ‘la belle et riante maison que Madame de Zuckmantel, sa tante, a fait bâtir tout au neuf dans le plus bel aspect et le plus haut point d’élévation de la montagne de Bouxière et prenant ses jours de la face principale sur la belle et vaste pleine de Nancy’. 71  The plans are in Nancy, ADMM, 1  Q  488  1; also Poirier, Le chapitre, pp.  178–80. Compare with the description of the houses of the Remiremont canonesses in Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp. 271–79. 72  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p.  229: ‘La maison est meublée fort galament et dans l’élégance moderne. Dans le cabinet de jour je vis le portrait de M. sa tante, en négligée et avant d’entrer à sa toilette, elle tient une plume à la main, à l’air fort occupée et paroit faire ses dépêches’. 73  Ernest Lehr, L’Alsace noble suivie par le Livre d’Or du patriciat de Strasbourg d’après les documents authentiques et en grande partie inédits, 3  vols (Paris and Strasbourg: Veuve Berger-Levrault et fils, 1870), 3, p. 260. 74  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, p.  229. At Remiremont vespers was held at three o’clock in the afternoon; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, p. 245. 70 

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Madame de Zuckmantel’s house would shortly become the abbatial residence.75 This transformation of the property’s ownership was a crucial step in the process of moving the living convent in the present away from the site of its medieval predecessor. As such, it was one of many ways in which the canonesses were saying goodbye to the abbey’s pre-modern past. Before leaving the hill site de Gironcourt went to cast one last glance at the convent’s relic treasure. In his journal he recalled how twenty-six years earlier Abbess d’Eltz had taken the trouble to personally show him several items from that precious collection, and had also taken him to see the Tribune and a late medieval statue of the Virgin, as if to underscore their significance as lieux de mémoire of the monastic and regional past. This time, however, none of the canonesses joined him.76 Conclusions

In this chapter I relied on de Gironcourt’s report of a visit to Bouxières abbey in June 1766 to nuance the image of the canonesses’ 1784 decision to relocate the abbey to Nancy, looking more closely to assess whether this in fact represented a drastic rupture with the convent’s medieval legacy. Unwittingly the lawyer recorded numerous indications that convent members were already in the process of letting go of the medieval abbey site as foundational for their identity as a religious community, in a physical sense and in a mental one. At the same time, I also reviewed evidence indicating that certain objects that referred to this community’s medieval origins remained central to its institutional narrative. To understand this ambivalent attitude, we must look back at the abbey’s turbulent past in the preceding two centuries, and to the various strategies taken by its leaders to give the convent members a sense of shared identity and purpose.

75  She left the convent shortly after de Gironcourt’s visit in order to marry LouisJoseph-Xavier de Latouche; E.  Muller, Le magistrat de la ville de Strasbourg, les Stettmeisters et Ammeisters de 1674 à 1790, les préteurs royaux de 1685 à 1790 et notices généalogiques des familles de l’ancienne noblesse d’Alsace depuis la fin du xviie siècle (Strasbourg: Salomon, 1862), p. 157 and Lehr, L’Alsace noble, 3, p. 124. 76  ‘Une visite’, ed. Des Robert, pp. 216 and 229–30.

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1692 Old and New Memories of Origins When the members of Bouxières’ chapter elected Anne-Marie de Simiane de Moncha (d. 1716) as their new abbess in 1685, she must have instantly realized that before her stood a monumental task of renewal. Even from the distant viewpoint of her former house of Remiremont it would have been plainly obvious that St  Gozelin’s old foundation had stopped functioning as a religious community. According to chapter records from early on in her tenure, absenteeism was rampant and attendance at office and chapter meetings was catastrophically low:1 all but two canonesses resided away from the hill and most seldom gave themselves the trouble to travel there.2 Meanwhile, the abbey’s administration was in disarray. An archive inventory from 1680 had revealed in painful detail how episodes of political instability and warfare (of which there had been many in the preceding two centuries, and of which there was more to come in 1683), forced evacuations, economic collapse, and sheer neglect had resulted in considerable losses of the documents that underpinned institutional memory.3 As a result of this it had become very difficult to adequately manage the abbey’s estate and protect its integrity. And in other respects too, the canonesses’ links with earlier phases of their institution’s past had become tenuous to say the least. To give but one example, in the previous chapter we already saw that the long-term memory of members and benefactors (in sum, all the people a religious community was supposed to commemorate) had become fragmented.4 With the exception of their prestigious 1  The difficult circumstances of de Moncha’s election are described in Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 1v–3v. 2  Nancy, BSt, 101, fol.  20v. A  similar state of affairs is documented for the abbey of Baume-Les-Dames in Burgundy during the mid-to-later seventeenth century; Marchal, ‘Le coutumier’. 3  Paris, BNF, Collection Lorraine, 720, briefly discussed in Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60. On the context, see among others Pfister, Histoire, 3, pp. 203–26. 4  Chapter 4, at note 26.

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title of canoness of Bouxières and the fact that they all enjoyed a prebend that derived from the same estate, the convent members at this point probably had very little sense of a common identity or purpose. Following her installation in October 1686 de Moncha took immediate steps to reorganize the convent. The first of these was designed to combat absenteeism and gain a controlling stake in the chapter against the other members. In November she had letters sent out that summoned all absent members to return to the abbey within six weeks: copies of these letters were also attached to the door of the abbatial church and to each of the absent canonesses’ houses.5 And in February of the next year she acted on the chapter’s threat to disinvest (décoiffer) any individuals who had failed to comply and had the members declare the prebends of these individuals vacant: as a consequence, three canonesses lost their title and income. De Moncha took advantage of the resulting vacancies and newly available resources to promote three resident juniors or nièces to full membership of the chapter. Her draconian actions went uncontested by the other canonesses in the chapter, despite the fact she had blatantly ignored the chapter’s prerogative to appoint new dames capitulantes and even though none of the three women had reached the required age of twenty-five.6 Over the next eleven years the abbess took multiple consecutive steps to set her institution’s organization and membership on a new footing. In 1690, she had a new archive inventory drafted and subsequently used it to regain control over a number of estates that had been quietly claimed by outsiders.7 She also dug out a set of mid-seventeenth-century statutes by Abbess Catherine de Cicon, revised it, and published a new version. Also in 1690 she issued new regulations that described exactly for how long and under what conditions the canonesses were allowed to be absent from the abbey.8 Then, in 1693, she shifted control over convent membership and prebends, moving it away from the individual title-holders and their relatives and into the hands of the chapter. Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 10r–13v. Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 13v–14r. 7  Nancy, ADMM, H  2949. The inventory was subsequently used to reorganize the abbey’s estate; Nancy, BSt, 101, fol. 30r–v. 8  Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 20v–21v. 5 

6 

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From now the chapter would assign to each senior member (tante) a junior member or nièce, who would automatically succeed the former as a member (provided that she was at least twenty-five years old) and as the holder of a prebend when either the tante died, got married, or otherwise left the abbey’.9 And finally, in December 1698 she issued a full set of statutes that summarized and consolidated her policies of the previous twelve years.10 All these measures drastically shaped the recruitment of new canonesses, the trajectory of individual convent members, and also the governance procedures at the abbey, and continued to do so for the remaining ninety-two years of its existence. We also have evidence of steps to renew the canonesses’ link with their institutional past, by revising the abbey’s narrative of origins and its account of founder St  Gozelin’s intentions. Shortly after her accession, probably in 1692, de Moncha arranged for the publication of a printed office for the feast of St  Gozelin.11 The fifth and sixth lessons of the office text contained a revised account of the origins of Bouxières abbey compared to those that could be found in the abbey’s two medieval foundation

Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 27r–28r. Nancy, BSt, 101, fols 34r–36r. 11  A  search in the catalogue records of French public collections has yielded no surviving copies of this publication, of which (we already saw in Chapter 3) JeanJacques Lionnois published several extracts in his Histoire, 1, pp.  596–605. Augustin Calmet provided a brief synopsis of the fifth and sixth lessons from a ‘choir book made for use by the Ladies of Bouxières’ in Histoire ecclésiastique, 1, cols 891-92. For his part Lionnois referred to it as an octavo 1692 imprint by the Metz bookseller P(ierre) Collignon; Histoire, 1, p.  595. And in the first half of the twentieth century the bibliographer Jean-Julien Barbé (d. 1950) inspected a c.  1680 imprint by Pierre Collignon titled Office de la fête de Saint Gauzelin, fondateur de N.  D.  de Bouxières; see his unpublished L’imprimerie à Metz, recherches historiques et bibliographiques, which is now preserved as Metz, Médiathèque Verlaine, 1551/3, p.  6 and was used in Albert Ronsin and Nadine Gravelin, Répertoire bibliographique des livres imprimés en France au xviie siècle. Tome X. Lorraine – Trois Evêchés (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1984), p.  64. Already in the nineteenth century the booklet was exceedingly rare. Henri Lepage used Lionnois’s version, without however explicitly referring to it, in ‘L’abbaye’, pp.  131-33. In the 1870s Pierre-Etienne Guillaume reprinted the Nancy cleric’s edition in Histoire du culte de la très-sainte vierge en Lorraine, et principalement dans l’ancien diocèse de Toul, formant aujourd'hui ceux de Nancy-Toul et Saint-Dié (Nancy: Hinzelin et compagnie, s.d.), pp.  8–16. And in the early twentieth century Charles Pfister likewise relied on the same publication to translate and paraphrase a few brief passages in his Histoire de Nancy, 1, p. 38. 9 

10 

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narratives.12 On the one hand, there was Gozelin’s original foundation charter from 938, which we already discussed in the Introduction of this book.13 And on the other, there was the early twelfth-century Deeds of the Bishops of Toul (edited and translated in Appendix 6), whose anonymous author submitted a story made of three parts.14 The first part consists of a brief section that was taken almost word for word from the mid-eleventh-century Life of Bishop Gerard of Toul by Widric, which briefly states that Gozelin did ‘laborious and useful’ work in building the abbey.15 In the second part the text switches to a narrative that is inspired by Adso of Montier-en-Der’s c. 970 Life of St Mansuy, which recounts the story of an attempt by Gozelin to establish a subsidiary male institution of the abbey of Saint-Evre outside the city walls of Toul.16 This part of the Deeds tells the tale of how Gozelin’s brother, a man named Hardrad, went on a hunt along the Meurthe River. Following his dogs in pursuit of a wild boar into the dense forest around Bouxières, he noted that the boar suddenly halted under a spiny tree: on closer inspection it turned out to be the site of a former sanctuary. Hardrad reported his discovery to Gozelin, who consulted ‘people of great age’ and learned that the site had once hosted a church dedicated to the Mother of God and that heavenly lights often illuminated the surroundings. The bishop then set out to acquire the site from his colleague at Metz, trading a precious

12  Edited in Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp.  595–605 and re-edited and translated in Appendix 7 of this book. 13  Introduction, at notes 57–61. 14  Gesta episcoporum Tullensium, ed. Waitz, pp. 639–40. On the date of this text, see Monique Goullet, ‘Les Vies de saint Mansuy (Mansuetus), premier évêque de Toul. Aperçu du dossier et édition critique des textes inédits’, Analecta Bollandiana, 116 (1998), 57–105, at pp. 66–67. On the relationship of the text to earlier commentaries about the abbey’s origins, see now Vanderputten, ‘They Lived According to that Rule’. 15  Widric, Vita sancti Gerardi, ed. Georg Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores 4 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1841), p. 500. 16  It describes how the bishop rebuilt a former sanctuary of St Peter in the middle of an old cemetery; installed a group of monks from Saint-Evre to venerate the tomb of St Mansuy; gave them an abbot; and also arranged for royal confirmation of their properties; Adso of Montier-en-Der, Vita et miracula s. Mansueti episcopi Tullensis (BHL 5209–5210), ed.  by Monique  Goullet, Adso Deruensis. Opera hagiographica. De ortu et tempore Antichristi (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 198) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 131–70. Discussion in Goullet, ‘Les Vies’.

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relic of St Peter’s staff for it: following the transaction Gozelin rebuilt the church, and installed an altar in honour of Mary. For the final part the author of the Deeds relied on Gozelin’s 938 foundation charter. This last passage is notable for the omission of all references in that document to the Bouxières convent’s exemption from episcopal interference in its administration. Presumably the author tailored his argument to reflect the position of the bishops of Toul in a then-ongoing dispute with the abbess and convent members.17 The office text used the amplified and embellished version from the Deeds but took it even further, adding a substantial number of tropes drawn from medieval hagiographic tradition as well as a number of subtle references to then-current views about the origins and legitimacy of the canonesses’ mode of life. Written almost like a stage play and clearly designed to trigger the imagination of the performers and audience members,18 the text opens with a passage where the Virgin Mary appears to Gozelin in his sleep and exhorts him to build a church in her honour: he is to find the right location by taking his dogs on a hunt and then following a white doe into the woods on the hill of Bouxières. After a brief statement about the next morning’s events, the narrative of the office follows the Deeds’ account, which claims that Gozelin agreed a trade with the bishop of Metz, offering a relic of St  Peter in exchange for the hill site. In the following scenes though, the office text radically revises long-established views on the abbey’s origins. It recounts how the Virgin called on an unidentified queen to subsidize Gozelin’s project when his

In 1137 the abbess and convent members of Bouxières regained their right of self-governance by papal privilege; Bautier, Les origines, no.  47, pp.  134–47 (edition) and 46–47 (discussion). 18  The office text echoes contemporary practices of musical and theatrical performance at Essen and Maubeuge; Jörg Bölling, ‘Musik und Theater am Hof der Essener Fürstäbtissinnen in der Barockzeit’, in  Frauen, ed. Schilp, pp.  435–49 and Céline Drèze, ‘L’économie de la musique au chapitre Sainte-Aldegonde de Maubeuge (xviie–xviiie siècles)’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp.  319–41. Parts of the new narrative were borrowed from hagiographical traditions that were being read in the wider area. For instance, the passage about the camels was clearly adapted from the mid-eleventh-century Life of Deodatus, the founder and patron of the Vosges collegiate chapter of Saint-Dié; Vita sancti Deodati, ed. Acta Sanctorum Junii 3 (Antwerp: Vidua Henrici Thieullier, 1701), pp. 872–83, at p. 875. 17 

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funds ran out due to a famine: the queen had three camels loaded with ‘tapestries and ornaments of silk for use in the church  […] gold and silver, and  […] foodstuffs’ and sent them off without a driver. The camels then arrived at the bank of the Meurthe River and were taken to the other side by an unmanned boat: a  mute witness, who received back his speech on the same occasion, was able to report to Gozelin what had happened. Thanks to the queen’s anonymous donation the church was finished. Following this the bishop brought together a group of ecclesiastical dignitaries to consecrate it for the next morning, but discovered during the night that Jesus Christ was already performing the rites. The final scene, which is again completely original, describes Gozelin’s conversation with the Virgin about who should serve the church, and how he recruits the first women religious to the new abbey: The blessed Gozelin prayed  […] to the Holy Virgin, to know to which congregation she wanted to confide her church, so that they would serve it. The blessed Virgin appeared to him and said: ‘Go to the bridge of Saint-Michael: there three women will come to you, one at six o’clock, another at nine, and the third at noon’. When he went there, all happened as it had been announced to him. At six o’clock a veiled woman presented herself to him, to whom he said ‘My daughter, where are you going?’ To which she answered: ‘Lord, I  heard that a certain saintly bishop (his name is Gozelin) has built a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That is where I am going: but I do not know where it is’. He told her: ‘Sit down, my daughter’. At nine o’clock there came another woman, and he spoke to her as he did to the the first. He also spoke thus to the third whom came at the sixth hour. St Gozelin brought them to his church, gave them a rule, and ordained that they should have prebends. And they lived in the attire and according to the order they had when they arrived, as do those who have succeeded them.19

One can hardly blame Jean-Jacques Lionnois and other commentators from the eighteenth century onwards for dismissing this imaginative retelling of how the female community at Bouxières was first established.20 The final sentence must have been espeLionnois, Histoire, 1, pp. 602–3 and Appendix 7 of this book. The Bollandists referred to Calmet’s synopsis (above, note 11) to say that the choir book for use by the canonesses of Bouxières ‘told [other things than those reported in medieval accounts of Gozelin’s life] that […] give lustre to the memory of St Gozelin: but they appear to derive more from popular accounts than from ancient documents’ (Acta sanctorum Septembris 3 (Antwerp: Bernardus Albertus Van

19 

20 

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cially problematic for them, as the comment about prebends and clothes was in utter contradiction with the versions in the Deeds and in Gozelin’s charter. Those earlier accounts stated that the bishop had founded the convent as a nunnery, which implied that strict observance of the Benedictine rule, individual poverty, and a unified dress code had been defining features. In contrast, the office implies that the abbey had been founded as a house of canonesses and depicts its earliest membership in a way that echoes (despite the mention that they lived according to a ‘rule’) the situation as it existed in early modernity. Convent members in the late seventeenth century knew about an earlier tradition that insisted on the abbey’s Benedictine origins. Apart from the original of the 938 charter and several copies, their institution also owned at least one copy of the relevant passage in the Deeds.21 And they also knew about the fact that some time in the later Middle Ages, the community had transitioned from a cloistered observance to a canonical one, which in this case meant that members no longer shared communal spaces, practised poverty or monastic stability, or dressed in the same manner.22 And yet Abbess de Moncha was now asking them to suspend their disbelief in the office’s revised narrative of origins and actuder Plassche, 1750), pp.  142–43: ‘Alia quaedam […] quae […] illustrant S. Gauzlini memoriam; sed magis relata videntur ex fama quadam populari quam ex monumentis antiquis’). As we already saw in the Introduction of Chapter  3 of this book, Lionnois condemned the office text as ‘pious musings’ and a legend ‘that ha(s) no authority and deserve(s) no respect’; Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp. 605–6. 21  A  1570 inventory mentions the presence in the abbey archives of a parchment copy of the abbey’s foundation history as recounted in the Deeds; Nancy, ADMM, H 2945. Beginning in the later seventeenth century the Deeds enjoyed a great deal of scholarly interest thanks to a renewed interest in the history of the Toul diocese; Fabienne Henryot, ‘Réécrire les vies des saints évêques de Toul (1699-1712)’, in Les saints anciens au temps de la Réforme catholique (Europe occidentale, xvie et xviiie siècle). Déclin ou renouveau, ed. by François De Vriendt and Philippe Desmette (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2020), pp.  193–214 and Vanderputten, ‘They Lived acccording to that Rule’. However Augustin Calmet dismissed the Deeds’ account of Bouxières abbey’s origins as ‘miraculous’ and ‘a fable’. See his Histoire de Lorraine, 1, col. 893: ‘à l’égard du récit de l’auteur de la Vie de St Gauzlin, il faut […] abandonner toute l’histoire qu’il a faite de la manière miraculeuse dont Bouxieres fut fondée, laquelle, à la vérité, a beaucoup l’air de fable’. 22  On the ‘ambiguous’ nature of the observance of women religious in the high Middle Ages, and on the risks of anachronistically projecting onto the period distinctive features of late medieval and early modern Benedictine nunneries and houses of canonesses, see the discussion in Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries.

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ally perform it on the saint’s feast day on 31 August. How can we explain this subversion of local historical memory and why was it deemed acceptable for it to be published in print? And how did de Moncha and her contemporaries reconcile arguments of continuity with forward-looking changes in the way they handled the abbey’s narrative and material legacies? The answer to these questions, this chapter will argue, lies in the turbulent history of the convent over the preceding century and a half. Reform Precedents and Fiascos

When de Moncha first revealed her intention to renew convent life, informed observers likely estimated that she had little chance of success. Since the mid-sixteenth century there had been multiple attempts, at Bouxières and at other houses of secular canonesses in the Lorraine area, to impose a stricter discipline, reorganize or abolish the system where appointments and prebends were passed down as if they were personal titles and properties, and finally also to award abbesses a higher degree of control over administration, income, and membership. Several of these attempts had caused a breach of trust between the abbey’s leadership and the chapter members, resulting in court battles and the suspension of convent life. The earliest episode we know of dated back to when the Tridentine reform movement first gained traction in Lorraine.23 Early in her tenure at Bouxières, Abbess Anne-Françoise de Ludres (1553–1603) tried to force a return to a monastic regime marked by communal service and use of shared spaces, individual poverty, and stability.24 As such her leadership aligned with the drive by Catholic reformers to impose a stricter, more ascetic lifestyle on religious communities throughout France. It also chimed On Lorraine as a hotbed of Tridentine action, refer to the contributions in Les réformes en lorraine, 1520–1620, ed. by Louis Châtellier (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1986), especially the chapter by Michel Pernot, ‘Les débuts de la réforme tridentine au diocèse de Toul (1580–1630)’, pp. 89–112. 24  Poirier, ‘Le chapitre’, pp.  138–41. On a slightly later attempt to suppress private property and impose joint use of the refectory at the convent of St  Stephan in Augsburg, Thomas Groll, ‘Statuten im Wandel. Das Beispiel St Stephan in Augsburg’, in Räume und Identitäten. Stiftsdamen und Damenstifte in Augsburg und Edelstetten, ed. by Dietmar Schiersner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 77–105, at pp. 86–97. 23 

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with a strong penitential trend in contemporary religious culture caused by the trauma of religious war, which Catholic preachers interpreted as a sign of God’s wrath, generating an apocalyptic spirituality that found expression in both personal and communal acts of atonement.25 The November–December 1563 decree of the Council of Trent gave a concrete aspect to these notions, by arguing that there could not be such a thing as a religious life for women unless it was defined by strict enclosure and solemn vows, and by insisting that vowed religious wear a habit.26 While the Council made no special provisions for canonesses,27 in subsequent years Church leaders took the decree as an invitation to review the lifestyle of that cohort too.28 De Ludres’ endeavours broadly coincided with a number of reform efforts in neigboring regions.29And it also anticipated similar moves under Abbesses Claude d’Anglure of Poussay (1576–86), Claude de Cussigny of Epinal (1621–33), and Catherine de Lorraine of Remiremont (1611–48, in the years 1612–27).30 Yet it hardly served as a useful precedent for these other reforms. The Bouxières women violently rejected de Ludres’ argument that their identity as convent members was defined by the founder’s original creation of a Benedictine institution. In addition, they insisted that their status as canonesses (including the right to live in their own homes and own private property, have prebends, and leave the convent to get married if they wished to do so) was legitimate and grounded in local tradition. They also claimed that de Ludres wanted to reform the convent members’ observance Barbara  B. Diefendorf, Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 26  Marchal, ‘Les abbayes’. 27  Groll, ‘Statuten’, p. 85. 28  This was hardly the first time that the lifestyle of noble canonesses had been subject to criticism. A case study from fifteenth-century Strasbourg is discussed in Benoît Jordan, ‘Chanoinesses nobles et pasteurs luthériens: L’abbaye Saint-Etienne de Strasbourg aux xvie et xviiie siècles’, in Terres d’Alsace, chemin de l’Europe: Mélanges offerts à Bernard Vogler, ed.  by Dominique Dinet (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003), pp. 273–87, at pp. 274–75. 29  On a similarly controversial attempt by Abbess Margarita de Landsperg of SaintEtienne in Strasbourg (elected 1545), see Jordan, ‘Chanoinesses’, pp. 279–80. 30  Gaspard, ‘Abbaye’, pp.  17–18; Poull, Les dames chanoinesses, pp.  87–89; Pernot, ‘Catherine de Lorraine’; Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp.  103–24; and generally Marchal, ‘La circulation’. 25 

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purely in order to claim their prebends for her own use. In 1560 the conflict erupted in full force when three members of the chapter alleged that she wilfully deprived them of their income, to the point that they were unable to celebrate Maundy Thursday.31 In the background of this dispute a struggle was playing out between noble families – and even between social classes – for control over the abbey’s resources and admission policies, a struggle that had resulted from ever stricter entrance rules and the increasing involvement of these institutions within high aristocratic politics.32 Relations between the abbess and the canonesses deteriorated so far that the abbey archives were evacuated to the convent of Dominican women in Nancy33 and the pope and the bishop of Toul were called in to mediate. To defuse the situation, the bishop decreed a number of measures to prevent absenteeism and somewhat regulate the canonesses’ behaviour.34 Nonetheless, tensions between the convent members and their abbess lingered on until de Ludres’ death half a century after she came to power.35

The original documentation regarding this dispute is lost, but de Puibusque’s 1788 inventory contains analyses of several pieces; Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 176–77. 32  Compare with Francis Rapp, Réformes et réformation à Strasbourg: Eglise et société dans le diocèse de Strasbourg, 1450–1525 (Paris: Ophrys, 1974), esp. p.  103; Jordan, ‘Chanoinesses’, pp.  280–81; Sabine Klapp, ‘Les abbesses des chapitres de chanoinesses d’Alsace au xive au xvie siècle: Leurs marges de manoeuvres entre l’Eglise et le siècle, l’individu et la communauté, la fonction et la famille’, Revue d’Alsace, 136 (2010), 359–68, at pp.  364–66; and (by the same) Das Äbtissinnenamt. Abbess Catherine de Lorraine’s reform effort at Remiremont failed in part because of a lack of support by the duke of Lorraine; Inge Gampl, Adelige Damenstifte: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung adeliger Damenstifte in Österreich unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der alten Kanonissenstifte Deutschlands und Lothringens (Vienna and Munich: Herold, 1960), pp. 52–53 and Boquillon, Les chanoinesses, pp. 103–24. And in Essen too, the early seventeenth-century reform failed because the canonesses and their relatives resisted the revised statutes; Groll, ‘Statuten’, p. 97. 33  Pfister, Histoire, 1, p. 46. From this turbulent episode three archive inventories survive: Nancy, ADMM, H  2944 (1560, inventory made for Abbess de Ludres of pieces that the other canonesses had taken away to Nancy and subsequently had been handed over to the procureur général of Lorraine), H  2943 (1561, working document based on H 2944), and H 2945 (eighteenth-century copy of an inventory from 1570, made after de Ludres was handed back the archives). 34  Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 182–86. 35  Poirier, ‘L’abbaye’, pp. 138–39. Calmet briefly refers to de Ludres’ failed reform in his mid-eighteenth-century History of Lorraine: ‘Françoise de Ludres […] essaya de réformer son Abbaye, et d’y rétablir l’observance de la Regle primitive; mais elle y 31 

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De Moncha also knew about a second and more recent reform attempt. In the early 1630s, warfare, marauding French and foreign troops, and an outbreak of the plague had compelled the canonesses to evacuate the site and transport their relic treasure to Nancy.36 When they returned in 1649, Abbess de Cicon took advantage of the situation to mark a new beginning for the convent. Among other things she drafted new statutes that prescribed a stricter regime and fought absenteeism. And she actively recruited new members to fill the vacant positions in the chapter with individuals who were sympathetic to her mission: in 1649–59 alone at least fifteen new ladies were admitted.37 But her reputation as a capable leader and a moderate reformer turned sour when in 1665 she appointed a canoness named Barbe des Armoises as her coadjutor (a second-in-command who was expected eventually to succeed to the position of abbess) without consulting the chapter. A group of nine canonesses started legal proceedings before the bishop of Toul: they lost, but appealed to the duke of Lorraine and to the pope. While the relevant authorities were still reviewing these appeals de Cicon died and des Armoises succeeded her, an event that triggered a new legal dispute that disrupted convent life and dragged on until the latter resigned in 1678.38 The canonesses had no time to recover from this episode, as French troops had once again invaded Lorraine in the early 1670s and the community was dispersed shortly afterwards. Even closer to home from de Moncha’s point of view were several attempts by Remiremont‘s leadership to impose a stricter lifestyle on the canonesses there, to regulate their status, and to award greater powers to the abbess. In the early seventeenth century Abbess Catherine of Lorraine had imposed Tridentine rites at the abbatial church, installed new altars, arranged for the church doors to be closed during office, and finally, also (mostly in

trouva tant d’obstacles, qu’elle fut obligée de s’en désister’ (Histoire ecclésiastique, 3, col. lxxx). 36  Nancy, ADMM, B  7439 and B  7434. On the general context, Stéphane Gaber, La Lorraine meurtrie, 1616–1648 (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1991). 37  Poirier, ‘Le chapitre’, p. 80. 38  De Puibusque’s inventory contains brief analyses of the relevant documentation; Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 31–47.

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vain) tried to impose a stricter and more unified observance.39 And a generation later Abbess Dorothée Salm (1661–1702) launched another attempt to address the canonesses’ absenteeism. She also tried to subject prebends and appointments to stricter conditions and oversight by the abbey’s leadership and chapter, and to weed out behaviour that she found inappropriate or likely to cause disrepute. While still a canoness at Remiremont, de Moncha had witnessed at first hand how Salm’s policies had brought into the open a fundamental difference of views within the community – differences over the abbess as an authority figure, the control she had over the abbey’s institutions and finances, and finally also her ability to dictate the conduct of individual canonesses. A discussion about principles soon turned into an open conflict and then into a legal battle. Its end was nowhere in sight when de Moncha was made abbess of Bouxières.40 Very likely these precedents shaped de Moncha’s own reform approach. From the chapter records of Bouxières abbey we know that she pre-empted a repeat of the court battles that occurred at Remiremont, under her former Abbess Dorothée Salm, and also at Bouxières under Barbe des Armoises, by replacing (as de Cicon had done before her) a good part of the former community with new members. But Abbess de Cicon’s example had also shown de Moncha that this was not enough to guarantee success. In addition to her plans for renewal, the community needed to be reassured that the status and lifestyle they associated with convent membership at Bouxières would not be fundamentally challenged. To this end, de Moncha likely sought and found inspiration in the governance of other seventeenth-century leaders and commentators. One of these may have been Marie d’Achey, the abbess of Baume-les-Dames in Burgundy, who in 1685 had countered fears of a Tridentine reform of her convent by issuing a set of new statutes that insisted on the members’ status as canonesses.41 And further in this chapter we shall see that she was probably also inspired by the historical revisionism of an early seventeenth-century Pernot, ‘Catherine de Lorraine’, p.  111. For an account of a visitation by a papal legate in 1614 and the violent response of the canonesses, refer to Gampl, Adelige Damenstifte, pp. 52–53. 40  Pernot, ‘La querelle’. 41  Marchal, ‘Le coutumier’ and (by the same) ‘Le clergé’. 39 

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cleric from Remiremont. But a closer (and more subtly attested) influence was that of a Bouxières abbess, Françoise de Hautoy (1603–36), who came to power after the long and ill-fated tenure of de Ludres. Reconciling Original and Current Identities

Many details of de Hautoy’s leadership elude us, not least because the latter half of her tenure coincided with a period of considerable political turmoil and the forced evacuation of the convent, both of which apparently resulted in the loss of key documents. Nevertheless, we have a number of indications that she tried to realize a more cohesive experience of convent life at Bouxières in the aftermath of de Ludres’ catastrophic tenure. One of several clues is her connection to the cleric Pierre Fourier (d. 1640), one of the most prominent advocates of Tridentine reform in Lorraine.42 His correspondence reveals that he was particularly devoted to St Gozelin.43 And in his biography we find an anecdote of how he visited Bouxières abbey in May 1614, was received by de Hautoy, and knelt on the floor of the abbatial church to pray to the former bishop of Toul.44 According to later accounts, he also put his 1597 foundation of the Canonesses of St Augustine of the Congregation of Our Lady under the saint’s protection.45 While Fourier was likely drawn to Gozelin as a role model for his own ambitions as a monastic reformer and as a founder of a female institution that

42  Saint Pierre Fourier en son temps:  Actes du colloque organisé à Mirecourt, les 13 et 14 avril 1991, ed. by René Taveneaux (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992). 43  Pierre Fourier, Sa Correspondance, 1598–1640, ed.  by Hélène Derréal and  Madeleine Cord’homme, 3  vols (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1988), 3, p.  254. Fourier’s connection to St  Gozelin was widely known in the seventeenth century; Jean Bedel,  La vie du révérend père Pierre Fourier dit vulgairement le père de Mataincour, réformateur et général des Chanoines Reguliers de la Congrégation de Nôtre Sauveur et instituteur des religieuses de la Congregation de N.  Dame (Toul: J.  Laurent and J.-Fr. Laurent, 1674 (third edition)), p. 56. 44  L’esprit du B.  Pierre Fourier, vulgairement apellé le père de Mattaincourt, représenté dans un nouvel essay de l’histoire de sa vie et dans quelques receuils de ses lettres choisies (Lunéville: Messuy, 1757), pp. 54–55. 45  Jean Dorigni, Histoire de l’institution de la congrégation de N.  Dame (Nancy: JeanBaptiste Cusson, 1719), pp. 124–25.

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was now a house of canonesses, for her part Abbess de Hautoy must have been at least sympathetic to Fourier’s reform ideals.46 We have reason to suspect that she acted on this reformist inspiration and sought to renew the convent. According to a 1763 report the archives at that time contained a set of statutes that was dated 1622.47 Although the statutes are now lost and apparently were unfinished due to the chaotic situation in the later part of that decade as well as the next,48 in his 1788 inventory Hilaire de Puibusque transcribed the titles of all five of the articles. These alone offer us sufficient evidence to argue that the abbess tried to establish a clear division of responsibilities and tasks in the convent, define the canonesses’ common activities, and, along with other aspects of abbey life, subject their recruitment and finances to the authority of the chapter.49 That she also tried to bring order back into the archives further suggests de Hautoy’s intention to renew the convent, give it a sense of shared identity and purpose, and restore relations of trust. Thus in late 1605, shortly after her election, she arranged for the documentary holdings to be summarily described, put into new folders, placed inside a chest with two locks, and stored in the Chapel of St  Nicholas inside the abbatial church. As a token of reconciliation between the convent and its leadership, the keys to the locks were held by different convent members.50 Over the next seventeen years, further steps were taken to reorganize the archives: each item was assigned a new inventory number, and in late 1622 a canon named Jean Marin drafted a new survey in anticipation of a systematic

Compare with the discussion on Baume-les-Dames in Marchal, ‘Le clergé’. Mémoire pour les dames (1763), pp. 10–11: ‘Nous ne dissimulerons pas que les deux cahiers ne soient-très informes […] le second correct, régulier en son contexte, et qui a une date certaine d’année (1622), ne contient que cinq chapitres ou paragraphes, et n’est pas fini […]’. 48  Pfister, Histoire, 3, pp. 12–16. For a cleric’s view of the troubled situation in these years, refer to Cédric Andriot, ‘Pierre Fourier et les cavaliers de l’Apocalypse’, in Religion et piété au défi de la guerre de Trente Ans, ed.  by Bertrand Forclaz and Philippe Martin (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), pp. 113–26. 49  Nancy, BSt, 175, p. 185: ‘On y traite: 1° De l’état de l’église; du nombre des dames et autres ministres d’icelles; 2° De l’office divin; 3° De la charge de la dame trésoriere; 4° De l’office des chanoines; 5° De l’autorité du chapitre et de la manière dont il doit le tenir’. 50  Nancy, ADMM, H 2946; commentary in Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60. 46  47 

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inventory.51 That inventory never materialized in de Hautoy’s lifetime, presumably because of the epidemic and warfare in the 1630s:52 but it likely formed the basis on which a 1652 version was drafted.53 The unfinished nature of these statutes and archive projects may point to any number of internal and external obstacles. But we must also consider the possibility that de Hautoy had deliberately chosen to proceed cautiously. Given that de Ludres’ catastrophic tenure was still a thing of living memory, the risk of sparking a new conflict was acute. To address that risk, the new abbess may have opted to move gradually instead of drastically towards reviewing the abbey’s organization and procedures. And another tactic may have consisted of trying to reassure the canonesses and their relatives that the personal freedoms and income of the members would not be directly affected by any reform measures: what little is left of the 1622 statutes seems to bear witness to this. The similarities between de Hautoy’s attempt to renew convent life at Bouxières, de Cicon’s efforts to pick up the thread of that attempt in the mid-seventeenth-century, and Abbess de Moncha’s reform leadership from the 1680s onwards suggest that the two latter leaders had realized that insisting on a common abbatial approach across episodes of rupture would make it easier for them to realize their goals. Furthermore they must have also understood that embedding (as de Hautoy presumably had done) their approach in a discourse of continuity with members’ former customs and expectations would help them to minimize the risk of internal disputes that had plagued their own and other communities from the middle of the sixteenth centuries onwards. But de Moncha did not stop at reorganizing the convent’s administration and admissions policy, issuing new statutes, and reorganizing the archives. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, she also relied on pseudo-historical arguments in order to ‘sell’ her renewal strategy to the convent members and their social network, and to reassure them that the status of the canonesses (with all its associated privileges) would not be called into question. These pseudohistorical arguments were both general and local in nature. 51  52  53 

Nancy, ADMM, H 2947; Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60. Pfister, Histoire, 3, pp. 57–110. Nancy, ADMM, H 2948; Les origines, ed. Bautier, p. 60.

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Regarding the former, we find evidence in a late seventeenthcentury copy of an inflammatory text by a cleric of de Moncha’s former institution. In 1619, one of the priests at Remiremont abbey named Pierre du Heaume de l’Oratoire had composed a lengthy treatise in which he defended the lifestyle of secular canonesses, arguing that it was rooted in ecclesiastical history going back to the earliest origins of the Christian Church. Of that text, Bouxières abbey acquired a post-1664 redaction sometime in the late seventeenth century.54 Its presence among the papers at Bouxières indicates that renewal attempts at the time of its acquisition were framed in a discourse that insisted on the historical legitimacy of the canonesses’ way of life. That discourse was conceived in response to arguments (the earliest of which emerged in the 1570s) by a number of Catholic commentators that communities of noble canonesses had originally been established as Benedictine nunneries. We do not know of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentaries that made such a statement about Bouxières specifically.55 But in his 1714–19 Histoire des ordres religieux, Franciscan historian Hippolyte Hélyot wrote to the effect that all Lotharingian houses of canonesses, including that of Bouxières, had Benedictine origins.56 And judging by the presence of du Heaume de l’Oratoire’s text at the abbey on the hill, local leaders were (on the one side) concerned about how reformist agents might use commentaries such as that of Hélyot to force a monastic reform on the canonesses and (on the other) busy throwing up ramparts against such attacks. The evidence of a second, local focus in de Moncha’s historical revisionism consists of two sources that show the abbey’s medie-

54  Discours sur l’estat seculier des dames chanoinesses. Leur origine ancienne et l’ethimologie de leur nom par monsieur Du Heaume prestre de la mission, bound in the nineteenth century in Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fols  1–35. The text is a redaction of du Heaume de l’Oratoire’s 1619 Discours sommaire de l’institution, ordre & estat de l’Eglise de Remiremont, briefly discussed in Calmet, Histoire de Lorraine, 1, col. ccxviii. 55  When reformist Abbess Dorothée Salm of Remiremont – the one under whom de Moncha had served as a canoness – tried to introduce liturgical celebrations for St Benedict and impose simple vows on the three most important dignitaries in the convent, she likely found support for her efforts in the erudite historical research of noted Maurist scholar Jean Mabillon, who in 1687 argued that the abbey had most probably been founded as a Benedictine convent; Marchal, ‘Les abbayes’. 56  Hélyot, Histoire, 6, pp. 397, 420, and 423.

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val narrative of origins re-cast to reflect then-current realities and expectations. This phenomenon of rewriting medieval foundation accounts was not uncommon in the post-Tridentine era.57 Over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, throughout Europe we can see a renewal in the veneration of saintly founders and an expansion of their hagiographical and liturgical commemoration, often with a view on addressing contemporary concerns and expectations and on doing so explicitly from a local perspective.58 The canonesses of Bouxières actively participated in this trend. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the office in honour of St  Gozelin that was printed in 1692 broke with a tradition dating back more than seven centuries when it stated that the first religious at Bouxières had received prebends and had worn ‘the attire they had when they arrived, as do those who have succeeded them’, and that they did so with founder Gozelin’s approval.59 We do not know if the office text was new at the time. However, the fact that de Moncha and her associates had it published in print does tell us that they saw the revised foundation narrative of Bouxières abbey in a liturgical genre and a corresponding practice as a keystone argument in the abbess’ message that change in the convent’s governance and organization would never impinge on the convent members’ personal liberties, their institution’s historical identity, and (most outrageously) even their saintly founders’ intentions.

Compare with contemporary efforts to revive the cult of Sts Walberte and Bertille at Maubeuge; Jean Heuclin, ‘Les vies de Walbert et Bertille au xviie siècle’, in Chanoines et chanoinesses, ed. Heuclin and Leduc, pp.  429–43 and Raphaël Coipel, Christine Mazella-Leriche, and Christophe Leduc, ‘Le culte des reliques de Walberte et Bertille’, Ibid., pp. 445–54. 58  William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 117–34; Eric Suire, La sainteté française de la réforme catholique (xvie–xviiie siècles) d’après les textes hagiographiques et les procès de canonisation (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001); La mémoire des saints originels entre xvie et xviiie siècle, ed. by Bernard Bompnier and Stefania Nanni (Rome: École française de Rome, 2019); and Les saints anciens, ed. De Vriendt and Desmette, especially the contribution by Nicolas Guyard, ‘Réformer par l’exemple. Le rôle des vies des saintes fondatrices dans la réactualisation des modèles et des normes des régulières au xviie siècle’, at pp. 157–71. 59  Lionnois, Histoire, 1, pp. 602–3. 57 

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The new booklet was hardly a discreet statement. After all, its contents were specifically designed to be sung on the feast day of the saint, which marked one of the convent’s most solemn and well-attended events of the year. Even the use of Latin (which made the contents of the office unintelligible to most of those who attended the liturgy, including some of the canonesses) does not mean that this message was designed to be understood by only a select few individuals. Indeed, we have at least one piece of evidence that tells us that the same content was conveyed in multiple textual and visual languages. A painting that now hangs in the parish church of St  Martin at Bouxières-aux-Dames but which originally came from the abbey church, faithfully reproduces the revised narrative of the office in pictorial form.60 On first impression, nothing in the iconography refers to the abbey’s troubled recent past or, more specifically, to ongoing tensions over the status of the canonesses. However, if we take a closer look at the roundel in the bottom right-hand corner, we find a detail that suggests the contrary. Each of the three religious women is wearing a different colour and style of dress underneath their black mantle. This is very likely not a simple matter of artistic licence. In the post-Tridentine context, monastic clothing was a point of acute attention and fierce contention, and had the artist been told to represent Benedictine nuns he or she would no doubt have depicted them all wearing one and the same monastic habit. Furthermore, this was a painting of which the design and iconography would have been subject to intense scrutiny by the abbey’s leadership and by other agents involved in its creation, especially since the end product was intended for display in the abbatial church.61 My dating of this work is based on the description in the French Ministry of Culture’s database POP: Plateforme ouverte du patrimoine; https://www.pop. culture.gouv.fr/notice/palissy/PM54000114?listResPage  = 2&mainSearch  = %22Bouxières%22&ou  = %5B%22Bouxières-aux-Dames%22%5D&resPage  = 2&idQuery = %22e58614–584f–4d56-a6b3–74e7a781d67%22 (accessed 11 December 2020). On the decoration of the churches of houses of noble canonesses in Germany, see Andrea Wegner, ‘Letzte Blüte: Ausstattung der Essener Stiftskirchen im 18. Jahrhundert – ein Forschungsbericht’, in Frauen, ed. Schilp, pp. 391–411. 61  A  painting from the former abbatial church of Poussay depicts three eighteenth-century canonesses of that institution wearing mantles with ermine borders. The colour, fabric, and style of the rest of their clothing is more difficult to make out; Guyot, ‘Un tableau’, p. 53. 60 

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Illustration 15. Painting from the Abbatial Church of Bouxières. Parish Church of SaintMartin in Bouxières-aux-Dames. Late Seventeenth Century. Image by M. Bourguet. Copyright Commune de Bouxières-aux-Dames

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DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

The conclusion must therefore be that the commissioner of the painting had wanted to make a very explicit statement to (first) reassure convent members and their relatives that any changes to the convent’s organization or any attempts to combat absenteeism and suchlike would never compromise their fundamental identity as secular canonesses, 62 and (second) indicate to reformist outsiders that the convent’s early modern identity was rooted in its tenth-century origins and was beyond criticism due to St Gozelin’s authorship.63 Yet at the same time, this invented tradition was not backed up by an attempt to suppress existing liturgical memories of the convent’s Benedictine origins: up until the end of the convent’s existence the canonesses kept celebrating the feast of the translation of St Benedict, which was a tradition that their peers at Remiremont had long given up.64 Nor did it lead to an attempt to suppress archival memories of these roots: in fact, the office’s new narrative of origins actually even coincided with a surge of interest in the authentic documentation of the abbey’s earliest past. Competing Narratives of Origins

The mid-to-later 1600s were a time in which the abbey’s tenthcentury origins locally emerged (or re-emerged) as a major focus. Besides the accounts that are mentioned earlier in this chapter (the office, the painting, and the stories about Pierre Fourier’s devotion to St  Gozelin), we have a range of others that show that memories of the institutional past were focussed on St  Gozelin and the More common for this period are the revised hagiographical narratives and foundation accounts in which the authors insisted (sometimes falsely) on a female institution’s early or high medieval creation as a regular monastery; Guyard, ‘Réformer’. 63  Conceivably the new Bouxières tradition emerged in part as a result of growing tensions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (spurred among others by a flourishing historiographical and hagiographical production about the diocese of Toul and its clerical leaders) over the status of a number of monasteries that had long claimed exemption from episcopal interference; Henryot, ‘Réécrire’, pp. 206–8. If proven correct, this would lend further credence to the notion that the office and the depiction of lessons 5 and 6 on the painting were designed to pre-empt (or subsequently dismiss) any attempts to subject the canonesses to a monastic regime. 64  Poirier, Le chapitre, p.  118, with reference to the abbey’s 1780s ceremonial in Nancy, BSt, 413/2, fols 1–53. 62 

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first few generations of convent members. When the canonesses returned from their forced exile in 1649, Abbess de Cicon picked up the thread of the abbey’s reorganization and that of a renewed focus on the figure and veneration of the abbey’s founder, among other things by having his remains moved into a new shrine.65 Around this time the entire relic treasure was also inspected and where necessary refurbished: for instance, the old textile wrapping underneath the luxurious metal cover of the bishop’s evangeliary was replaced by a new one of green silk. Undoubtedly these actions must be viewed against the background of a simultaneous attempt to restore a sense of shared purpose by the convent members and emphasize the continuity of the canonesses’ status. The focus on Gozelin’s legacy and on the institution’s origins also implicated Bouxières abbey’s oldest documents, first and foremost the 938 foundation charter. Sometime after 1720, a local commentator noted that this precious item was kept in a box separately from the other charters.66 And in 1788 archivist Hilaire de Puibusque provided a description, noting that the box was ‘lined with blue silk taffeta and covered with black shagreen leather’.67 His account reveals that the box resembled de Cicon’s shrine and that the convent members treated its contents with exceptional reverence. That the charter quite literally attained an ‘untouchable’ status as a secondary relic of the saint can also be inferred from the fact that it is the only archival item on which de Puibusque was not allowed to inscribe a new inventory number. And when he had a clerk make a copy of the charter for the French historian Moreau in August 1788, he had to work not on the original but on a slightly corrupt copy, presumably because the box and its contents were off limits to him.68

On these shrines, see the discussion in Chapter 2, at notes 58–61. Nancy, BSt, 413/1, fol. 234v: ‘L’original est dans une boîte particulière’. 67  Note on a transcription of the charter text (made on a copy of the original rather than on the original itself) that de Puibusque arranged to transcribe for Moreau in August 1788 (Paris, BNF, Collection Moreau, 5, fol. 148r: ‘dans une belle boîte garnie d’un taffetas bleu en dedans et couverte en chagrin noir’). He also inscribed a shorter but similar comment in his 1788 inventory of the abbey’s archives (Nancy, BSt, 175, p. 1: ‘dans une boîte noire, doublée en dedans de tafetas bleu’). 68  Parisse, Un évêque, at note 47. 65 

66 

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In itself, the exceptional prestige of this document at the abbey was not unusual. Foundation charters often held a special status in medieval and early modern communities of religious women, particularly when the author was buried there or when he or she was the subject of a saint’s cult.69 And some other institutions that did not have a foundation charter singled out other key documents by an especially venerated person. For instance, the abbey of Poussay cherished an original or pseudo-original of a bull by Pope Leo  IX (d.  1054).70 However there were two notable differences between how the women at these other places and those at Bouxières viewed their archival legacies. To begin with, at Bouxières the canonesses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owned not one but multiple charters by their saintly founder or patron, three authentic and one forgery.71 And a further two documents – a 912 privilege by the West Frankish king Charles the Simple and a 923 charter by Gozelin – had originally been part of his personal archives as bishop of Toul.72 All these items in principle qualified as secondary relics, just like his chalice, paten, and evangeliary, as well as several other objects in the relic treasure. And a second, crucial difference between Bouxières and elsewhere was that all the above-mentioned documents and about a dozen more tenth- and early eleventh-century charters (by three emperors, a pope, two bishops of Toul, one duke of Lotharingia, and four private donors) belonged to a distinct archival category that arguably functioned as an ‘archival narrative of origins’.73 Together these documents charted the origins and early formation of the abbey’s estate, identified the key private donors and mighty patrons, and described in detail what actions Bishop  Gozelin had taken to establish (or, so the legend goes, re-establish) the hill of

Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, pp. 112–14 and 146. Gaspard, ‘Abbaye’, p.  90 and 122. The above-mentioned eighteenth-century painting from Poussay abbey shows Pope Leo giving his bull to the first abbess of that place; Guyot, ‘Un tableau’, p. 53. 71  Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos 3, 4, 5, and 9. 72  Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos 1 and 2. 73  This is revealed in a range of archive inventories from the early seventeenth century onwards: Nancy, ADMM, H  2946 (from 1605), H  2947 (1622), and H  2948 (1652); Paris, BNF, Collection de Lorraine, 720, fols 236–76 (1680); and Nancy, ADMM H 2949 (1690). 69  70 

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Bouxières as a focal site of Christian veneration and as a home to a community of women religious. The convent members actively celebrated the narrative quality of this collection. When an anonymous compiler in the late seventeenth century drafted a Mémoire or synopsis of Bouxières’ most valuable historical records, he or she noted that several were kept in a bag titled Fondations, ‘Foundation(s)’.74 But the origins of Fondation as a separate archive category actually went back much further in time. We can tell this because of two inventory notes on the back of the original of Gozelin’s foundation charter. The first, which dates from the eleventh or early twelfth century, reads ‘Charter of Lord Bishop Gozelin’ (Carta domini Gauzelini episcopi) and reflects a common practice at the time of describing high-status documents via the name of their author. But the second note, which dates from the thirteenth century, reads ‘Foundation 1’ (Fondatio I). This indicates that Gozelin’s charter was now being viewed as part of a distinct category of archival documents concerning the abbey’s origins and earliest development.75 The likely context in which that category first emerged is the aftermath of the convent’s acquisition of a papal privilege in 1137: the privilege described the entire estate and probably made most of the tenth- and eleventh-century documents legally redundant.76 As a result of this development, the status of the abbey’s pre-1137 charters had changed. Some items ended up in archival categories that dealt with a specific estate or property.77 But those that eventually became part of Fondation were kept together and over time gained a symbolic quality as an alternative narrative of origins. All of these documents, except for Gozelin’s foundation charter, were all physically kept together, in a bag, a folder, and at one point possibly even in a handsome wooden chest.78 Symbolically speaking the sum of that collection was greater than the parts, as not all documents had the same prestige or triggered

Paris, BNF, Collection de Lorraine, 717, fol. 215. Notes to the edition of the charter in Oschema, ‘Zur Gründung’, pp. 188–90. 76  Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 47, pp. 134–47 and (on the context) pp. 46–47. 77  Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos  8, 15, 32, and 38. The originals of these pieces were preserved because they were not kept in the Trésor des chartes but in other sections of the archives; Nancy, BSt, 175. 78  Chapter 1, at note 61. 74  75 

187

188

Authorship

Royal

Episcopal

Episcopal

Episcopal

Papal

Royal

Royal

Private

Ducal

Private

Episcopal

Royal

Episcopal

Royal

Number in Les origines, ed. Bautier

1

2

4

6

13

25

31

15

33

32

26

37

39

40

1027

996–1019

977

963–65

966

966

959–60

965

960

941

938

923–31

923

912

Dating

G.II (sac des fondations)

X.I (sac des fondations)

D.I (sac des fondations)

F I (sac des fondations)

P.I (sac des fondations)

J.II / K.I (sac des fondations)

(not mentioned)

F.II (sac des fondations)

L.I (sac des fondations)

(not mentioned)

A.I (sac des fondations)

B.I (sac des fondations)

H(?).1 (sac des fondations)

A.II (sac des fondations)

Fondation number as listed in the late seventeenth-century Mémoire (Paris, BNF, Collection Lorraine, 717, fols 215–22)

Table 2: Charters from Fondation as Listed in the Late 17th-Century Mémoire

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 2

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1 (‘copie’)

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

Cha. Li. 1

Folder in de Puibusque's 1788 Inventory (Nancy, BSt, 175, pp. 1–12)

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

1692 Old and New Memories of Origins

the same memories. At one end of the spectrum, Gozelin’s foundation charter was obviously in a league of its own as a key lieu de mémoire of communal origins. At the other end there were four charters by female donors, whose historical significance to the emergence of the institution convent members in the early modern period no longer acknowledged. The first of these donors was Hersendis, whom modern scholars have identified as the original owner of the estate on which a group of women settled around the year 930.79 The second, the wealthy and powerful Countess Eva of Chaumontois, was another key donor in the abbey’s earliest stage and was awarded special commemorative attention after she was buried in the abbatial church.80 The two other individuals had a special personal significance to the earliest community members. Ermenaidis was the mother of two of the community’s earliest members, named Alpaidis and Doda.81 And Lotha, or Judith, has been identified as the mother of first Abbess Rothildis (938–65/77).82 All these women lingered on in the convent’s institutional memory until the very end of the abbey’s existence purely on the basis that their written legacies were part of Fondation. But other early medieval donors were not so fortunate. A  comparison of the abbey’s sixteenth- to eighteenth-century inventories tells us that at that least seven private charters from the abbey’s first two centuries disappeared from the archive over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.83 That process likely caused the local memory of the individuals who featured in these documents to either fade or entirely disappear. The narrative quality of Fondation and its exceptional status in the early modern period compared to the abbey’s other written records is beyond doubt. And so is its relevance as a material lieu de mémoire of this institution’s prestigious origins. However the contents of these documents, both individually or collectively, did not have any noticeable impact on the way the early modern

Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 8; also Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, pp. 93, 96, and 99. 80  Les origines, ed. Bautier, no.  15; also Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries, pp.  96, 100, and 146. 81  Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 32. 82  Les origines, ed. Bautier, no. 34. 83  Les origines, ed. Bautier, nos 7, 8, 11, 15, 32, 34, and 38. 79 

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canonesses recounted their institution’s past. In particular, we have no information that any of these documents was used in the seventeenth century to review the convent’s medieval account of origins. And as we already saw, Abbess de Moncha did not see any objection to tampering with that narrative, even blatantly contradicting Gozelin’s foundation charter in order to reassure the convent members that any reform measures would not affect their individual freedoms and income. Nor did one of her eighteenthcentury successors or an associate of the canonesses who likewise manipulated memories of the abbey’s origins, albeit for entirely different reasons. In an eighteenth-century Mémoire on the vicary of Gironville, the anonymous author claimed that it had been added to the abbey’s estate on the occasion of that institution’s foundation by Bishop Gozelin and Emperor Otto’s wife Ermengilde.84 Where that particular tradition came from and why the canonesses or their associates might have found it relevant to insist on Ermengilde’s fictional role as founder, is unclear. Nevertheless the Mémoire offers additional evidence for the fact that memories of origins at the abbey were extremely malleable. And it also reveals to us that from the later seventeenth century onwards multiple versions of the foundation story were allowed to co-exist in the canonesses’ memory culture, on account of the fact that each of these versions fulfilled a different discursive, legal, or other purpose. These observations about diverse narratives of origins notwithstanding, the enduring significance of Fondation inspired the last canonesses of Bouxières to take the immense risk of hiding the Trésor des Chartes from the Revolutionaries. More so than its contents (which we saw could be ignored at will), the importance of the collection lay in its significance as a talismanic reminder of the abbey’s origins and earliest history, especially its connection to founder St  Gozelin. But behind this lay another, less obvious truth, which is that the early modern canonesses’ respect for the collection as a tangible token of collective memory was one of the few things they had in common with their medieval predecessors.

Nancy, ADMM, H 2991. Regrettably I was unable to consult this document due to the long-term closure of the ADMM.

84 

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Conclusions

In this chapter we moved back to the late seventeenth century, when Abbess de Moncha both tried to implement reforms while avoiding a total collapse of convent life. To do so, she actively manipulated records of the abbey’s creation, its founder, and the original observance of its earliest members. Their interventions, which we saw expressed through images, texts, rituals, and archive (re-)organization, reveal her goal to root Bouxières’ identity in a distant, medieval past. But at the same time they also demonstrate how flexible these memories were to contemporary needs and expectations. As such these pages have shown that the abbey’s medieval lieux de mémoire were subject to adaptation and reinterpretation long into the early modern period. But as we also saw, the adaptable nature of these legacies of the past also means that contradictory accounts of origins could co-exist at the same time, fulfilling different roles in the convent’s engagement with the communal past. To what extent individual members knew or cared about these roles and their inherent narrative contradictions remains difficult to establish, for all the reasons discussed in this book.

191

CONCLUSIONS Using an exceptionally rich and diverse body of evidence from the abbey of Bouxières, Dismantling the Medieval has done three things. By focusing on a series of crises and disruptive moments over more than 250 years, it has, first of all, charted the ways in which the early modern members of this small convent reshaped its memory culture in response to present pressures and expectations. We have also seen that the canonesses curated, reimagined and represented the communal past through their handling of various sites of memory – landscapes, spaces, objects, and narratives. Two, it has established how these different approaches and strategies related to each other, in other words whether there were competing simultaneous interpretations of the past and if older interpretations influenced more recent ones. And the third thing this study has done is to determine whether the dissolution of the convent in 1791 truly constituted the death of one view of the convent’s past and the sudden birth of a new, ‘modern’ one. The book’s reverse chronology has allowed us to see that the dissolution was not as disruptive to perceptions of the abbey’s past and its memorial legacies as commentators had previously believed. And it has also helped establish the fact that predissolution too, perceptions of the past were to a significant extent shaped by frequent disruptions and ongoing transformations in convent life. In the first chapter we reconstructed the background of Caroline Delort – former canoness and director of the Collegio in Milan – and her grand gesture of sending Gozelin’s foundation charter to the Austrian emperor more than four decades after Bouxières abbey was dissolved. And in Chapter  2 we saw that some of Delort’s fellow convent members had been collaborating to retain another keystone memorial legacy of their convent, namely the relic treasure. These opening chapters brought to light the complex memories of origins and resurrection that the charter and relic treasures carried, why and in what form the treasures re-emerged in the early nineteenth century, and finally also why and how they eventually lost their former significance.

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The next three chapters took us to the period before the dissolution and emphasized that pre-dissolution perceptions, too, were shaped by ruptures and transformation. Chapter  3 opened with the canonesses’ decision in 1784 to leave the rural site on the hill at Bouxières and move to the urban environment of Nancy. It charted the paradigm-shifting implications of this decision, which helps us to realize that the subsequent destruction of the old abbey site was for them a less dramatic event than former commentators have assumed. In Chapter  4 we looked at a mid-eighteenth-century abbey in transition through the eyes of Henri-Antoine Regnard de Gironcourt, who unwittingly observed a convent that was already stepping away from its medieval past. Finally, Chapter  5 discussed how tensions over the canonesses’ lifestyle and status and repeated calls for reform in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inspired Abbess de Moncha to drastically rewrite the abbey’s foundation account. Former notions of a fundamental difference between pre-modern and modern perceptions of the past do not apply to the memorial culture of this convent. Pre-1791 the canonesses creatively dealt with narrative and tangible memories of their institution’s medieval past, not to argue or maintain a status quo in their identity but to use and adapt it in light of changing realities and expectations. In some cases these processes of adaptation (all of which were triggered by ruptures and transitions in the convent’s status and that of its members) resulted in a renewed focus on specific accounts, objects, spaces, and even landscapes that carried reminders of the abbey’s tenth-century origins and medieval past. But in other cases, adaptation resulted in a drastic distancing from some of the physical reminders of that long-gone past. And post-1791 both former canonesses and outsiders acknowledged that memories of Bouxières and its history continued to have an impact on their experiences, imagination, and even their personal histories, despite the fact that a resurrection of the convent was unlikely. This dynamic relationship between continuity and disruption across major institutional, social, and cultural ruptures is what makes the evidence regarding Bouxières abbey a compelling precedent for further enquiries into how religious communities and their social environment engaged with the past.

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APPENDICES

1. The Former Abbey Site of Bouxières According to Emile Badel1

A  la fin de cette journée de septembre  […] nous descendions la côte abrupte de  Bouxières,  aux moinettes à jamais disparues, Bouxières aux intéressants souvenirs, Bouxières  aux rues grimpantes, aux arbres séculaires, aux ruines accumulées vers le sommet du mont  chauve qui portait jadis la fière et puissante abbaye  […] Saint Gauzelin est tout pour  Bouxières; il en est le fondateur et le patron; il y est resté très populaire;  sa vie, ses miracles, ses légendes, les souvenirs de son passage et de sa mort, toutes ces choses du siècle  de fer ramènent le visiteur à l’époque lointaine où la  côte de  Bouxières  était encore la forêt vierge d’Austrasie, peuplée de cerfs et d’aurochs. Sous le vocable de Sainte-Marie du Mont, Gauzelin y bâtit une église, y fonda un monastère. Disparue l’église romane, finie  l’abbaye, mortes les dames nobles et leur chapitre, à  jamais enfouies dans la poussière des ruines amoncelées proche la pelouse populaire. Il n’y a plus grand’chose des superbes bâtiments d’autrefois: quelques chapiteaux de l’abbatiale, des croisillons, des ogives  fleuronnées, des retraits mystérieux, voire la crypte  sacrée où fut inhumé le saint évêque de Toul, Gauzelin, au faîte de la colline, face à Nancy, face à la vallée. Cette crypte est profanée aujourd’hui; c’est une cave banale. Un beau rêve des amis de Bouxières, ce serait de voir rétablie à cet endroit, à côté de la croix monumentale érigée par une main pieuse, la chapelle  de l’antique madone de  Bouxières,  de cette Vierge  noire, conservée dans l’église du village. On verrait, par centaines et par milliers, les pèlerins grimper aux flancs du mont aride, vénérer la Madone, se reposer sous les arbres séculaires de la pelouse des Dames, et redescendre par l’ermitage de saint Antoine. Emile Badel, A  travers la Lorraine. Excursions et souvenirs (Nancy: A.  GrépinLeblond, 1899), pp. 259–65.

1 

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Mais jusqu’aujourd’hui les ruines de l’abbaye restent oubliées; des fouilles intelligentes rendraient au jour bien des souvenirs, dans ces recoins si précieux pour le touriste et pour l’amateur photographe  […] Bouxières  abonde en croquis du vieux temps, mais il faut se hâter; les vieilleries disparaissent ou se modernisent lamentablement  […] La rude grimpée du mont, vers ce qui fut l’abbaye, vers les ruines de ce joli séminaire de filles nobles  à marier  […] Les filles nobles s’en sont allées  […]  le mont est désert aujourd’hui. Plus de cris joyeux sur l’herbe drue de la pelouse embaumée, sous les hauts arbres; plus de douces causeries entre les dames, tantes et nièces  […] Plus rien, à peine  l’anneau d’or des divines fiançailles de Reine Madame  d’Eltz-Ottange, retrouvé dans un tiroir de bahut. Des fois seulement, aux beaux dimanches d’été, la pelouse de  Bouxières  est foulée par d’autres promeneurs, nombreux et bruyants, et des danses s’organisent aux sons d’un violon ou d’une flûte champètre  […] Les garçons et les filles de Nancy qui, les soirs de dimanche, descendent par là en courses folles, la côte  de  Bouxières  […] les seize quartiers de noblesse  qu’il fallait montrer pour entrer à l’abbaye leur importent peu ou prou; la pelouse est ouverte aux riches et aux roturiers, aux manants comme aux citadins, et les moulins de  Bouxières  en pourraient dire long sur les bonnets jetés par-dessus les ruisseaux du bois de la Salivière. Il se faisait soir. Un grand calme régnait au sommet de Bouxières; sur la route blanche et droite, des piétons regagnaient la gare, des voitures et des bicyclettes retournaient vers Nancy […] Translation At the end of that September day […] slowly we descended the steep hill of Bouxières, with its little nuns that are gone forever – Bouxières with its interesting memories, with its climbing streets, seasonal trees, and heaped ruins near the top of that empty mountain that once featured the proud and mighty abbey […] St Gozelin is everything for Bouxières; he is its founder and patron; he has remained very popular there. His life, his miracles, his legends, the memories of his visit and death, all these things from the Century of

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Iron take the visitor back to that distant time when the hill of Bouxières was still [part of] the virgin forest of Austrasia, populated with deer and aurochs. Under the patronym of Holy Mary of the Mountain, he built a church and founded a monastery there. Gone is the Roman church, no more is the abbey, and dead are the noble ladies and their chapter; [they are] buried forever in the dust of the amassed ruins close to the popular Pelouse. Not much is left of the splendid buildings of yore: a few capitals from the abbatial church, some parts of the transept, ogees with floral motifs, mysterious alcoves, and the sacred crypt where the saintly bishop Gozelin of Toul was buried, at the summit of the hill, facing Nancy, facing the valley. The crypt is now profaned: it is no more than an ordinary cellar. The Friends of Bouxières have a wonderful dream to see restored in that place, next to the monumental cross that was erected there by a pious hand, the chapel of the old Madonna of Bouxières, of that black Virgin, which is preserved in the church of the village. Hundreds and thousands of pilgrims would be seen climbing the flanks of the arid mountain, [to] venerate the Madonna, rest under the seasonal trees of the Ladies’ lawn, and descend again via the hermitage of St Anthony. But up to the present day the ruins of the abbey remain forgotten; judicious excavations would bring to light many memories in these corners that are so precious to the tourist and the amateur photographer […] Bouxières is full of impressions of ancient times, but one must hurry: these old features disappear or become dismally modernized […] The difficult climb of the mountain, towards what once was the abbey, towards the ruins of that pretty seminary of noble girls that were destined to be married […] the noble girls have departed […] the hill is deserted today. Gone are the joyous cries on the thick grass of the fragrant Pelouse, under the high trees; gone are the sweet conversations between the Ladies, tantes and nièces  […] Nothing is left there except for the golden ring of holy engagement of Reine, Madame d’Eltz-Ottange [that was] found in a cupboard drawer.2 Only rarely, on pretty summer Sundays, is the lawn of Bouxières crowded with numerous and noisy wanderers, and dances are held to the sound of a violin and a shepherd’s flute  […] The boys and girls of Nancy who, on Sunday evenings, come down to the hill of Bouxières in Reine-Madelaine (also known as Reine-Marguerite) d’Eltz d’Ottange entered the convent in 1716 and was deaconess of Bouxières abbey from 1743–54; Lepage, ‘L’abbaye’, p. 286 and Poirier, Le chapitre, p. 26.

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crazy runs […] they care little or naught about the sixteen quarters of nobility that one had to show to be admitted to the convent; the lawn is open to the rich and to commoners, to rural people and to city dwellers, and if the mills of Bouxières could speak they would have many things to say about the bonnets that are thrown over the streams of the wood of la Salivière. Evening fell. A great calm reigned over the top of the hill of Bouxières; on the white and straight road pedestrians returned to the train station, while cars and bicycles made their way back to Nancy […]

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APPENDICES

2. Von Khlobeyer’s Letter to Emperor Francis3

[Introductory note] Vortrag des Fürsten Metternich, dd° 21ten Octh[ober] [1]833, mit welchem er ein der K.  K.  Bothschaft zu Paris von einer sicheren Madame Delort in einem verschloßenen Kästchen übergebenes, daher ihm ganz unbekanntes Manuscript mit dem Bemerken unterbreitet, daß nach dem Vorgeben der Bittstellerinn erwähnte Sendung in Folge all[erhöchster] Bewilligung geschehe. Er Fürst habe übrigens weder im geh[eimen] Cabinet, noch in S[eine]r M[ajestät]s Privatbibliothek eine Spur von einer solchen all[erhöchste] Bewilligung vergefunden. [Von Khlobeyer’s letter] Dieses mir b[revi] m[anu] von dem Staatskanzleirathe baron Bretfeld übergebene aus einem einzelnen Pergamentblatte bestehende Manuscript, habe ich vor kurzem die Ehre gehabt, Eurer Majestät a[ller]u[ntherthänigst] zu Füßen zu legen. Es ist dasselbe eine neunhundertjährige antiquarische Merkwürdigkeit, und enthält den von dem heil[igen] Quazelinus Bischof zu Toul in Lothringen anno 935 ausgestellten Fundations-Brief des in seinem Sprengel zu Bouzieres (hodie Bouzieres-aux-Dames) von ihm gestifteten Frauenklosters, welches nachmals in ein adeliges Damenstift umgewandelt, in den neuesten Zeiten aber ganz aufgelassen worden ist. Im Falle Eu[er] Majestät diese für ihr hohes Alter noch ziemlich gut erhaltenen Urkunde zu behalten geruhen sollten, wäre sie das älteste Manuscript in allerhöchst dero Privatbibliothek. Ueber einem Preis läßt sich hier keine genaue Auskunft erstatten, weil derlei Gegenstände pro libiter taxirbar sind; auch die Urkunde für den Historiker keine neue Entdeckung ist; indem sie schon vorlängst in Calmet’s Histoire de Lorraine, wie ich mich überzeugte, mit diplomatischer Genauigkeit abgedruckt vorkom[m]t, daher auch dadurch an Prätiosität verliret. Wie übrigens die Delort zu diesem Stiftungsbriefe kommt und durch wen ihr die all[erhöchste] Erlaubnis zur Einsendung

3 

Vienna, ÖNB, Bestand Fideikommissbibliothek (1809–1945), Karton 17, FKBA17146.

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bekannt gemacht worden ist, darüber bin ich außer Stand eine Auskunft zu geben. Wien den 24ten Dez[ember] [1]833 [Apostille] Für dieses mit meinem vorwissen übersendete Manuscript lasse ich, durch F[ürst] Metternich der Frau von Delort gewesenen Vorsteherin des Fräulein Instituts  S. Filippo zu Mailand meinen Dank bezeugen. Wien den 26. Febr[uar] [1]834 Franz Translation [Introductory note] Submission by Fürst Metternich, dated 21 October 1833, [of  ] a manuscript that is entirely unknown to him and that was given, inside a small locked box, to the imperial embassy in Paris by a certain Madame Delort, undersigned with a comment that according to the donor said transaction took place with the emperor’s consent. Incidentally, the Fürst has not found any trace of such an imperial consent in the Secret Cabinet or in His Majesty’s private library. [Von Khlobeyer’s letter] I recently had the honour to most humbly lay at Your Majesty’s feet the following manuscript, which was formally handed over to me by counsellor Baron Bretfeld of the State Chancellery and which consists of a single sheet of parchment. This nine-hundred-year-old antiquarian curiosity contains the foundation letter that St  Quazelin, the bishop of Toul in Lotharingia, had issued in the year 935 for the women’s monastery of Bouxières (today known as Bouxières-aux-Dames) which he had founded in his diocese. This [monastery] was later turned into a house of noble ladies: but in recent times it was completely abandoned. In case it would please Your Majesty to keep this charter, which for [a document of] its age has been very well preserved, it would be the oldest manuscript in your Serenity’s private library. Regarding the value it is difficult to gain exact information, since this type of objects can be given any random value. Furthermore the charter is not a new discovery for historians, since it has long been available in printed form in Calmet’s Histoire de Lorraine. I was able to verify that

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this [edition] was done with precision according to the rules of diplomatics, which means that [the original document] loses in preciousness. Furthermore I am unable to provide information on how this Delort person obtained the present foundation document and by whom she was notified of your Highness’s permission to send it. Vienna, 24 December 1833 [Apostille] For this manuscript, which was sent over with my prior knowledge, I instruct Fürst Metternich to send my thanks to the former director of the young ladies’ Institute S. Filippo in Milan, Lady von Delort. Vienna, 26 February 1834 Francis

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3. Lady Morgan’s Account of a Visit to the Collegio delle Fanciulle, c. 18184

Of all the benefits which the Revolution has conferred upon Italy, the greatest, the most permanent, is the new and liberal system of female education, raised upon the ruins of that demoralizing bigotry, which was calculated to make women concubines and devotees, but which could not produce good wives and good mothers. In most of the great capitals, Bonaparte, or the Italian governments that acted under his influence, have formed establishments for the education of girls of all ranks, and endowed them with sufficient revenues: being fully aware how powerfully women contribute in determining the character of society: and how much a generation of well-educated females must help to raise society from that gulf of immorality, into which the vices and feebleness of the old governments had plunged this part of Europe. The church, convent, and ground of San Filippo Neri, belonging to an order of nuns, with a considerable revenue, were appropriated by the government to this establishment, intended as a national school for females, and more particularly for the orphan daughters of the officers of the army who fell in his service. It is a fact, that when this seminary was established, no Italian lady, fitted by education or experience, could be found, who was willing to accept the place of its directress: and the Baroness de Lor, a lady of distinguished talent and irreproachable conduct, was taken from a similar establishment near Paris, to superintend the foundation at Milan. In our visit to this seminary, we were accompanied by Madame de Lor herself; a lady, whose society we afterwards sought upon all occasions with pleasure, and enjoyed with profit. As there is no English school of this description, no comparison can be drawn: but in the great points of air, space, elegance, and accommodation, neatness, freshness, and good order, it is impossible that it should be exceeded. The convent of St Philip Neri resembles a royal palace: its arcades below, and its open galleries above, surround a beautiful and well-cultivated garden […]  We saw groups of little children hurrying from one class to another through blooming

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Lady Morgan, Italy, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn and co., 1821), 1, pp. 114–17.

APPENDICES

shrubs and orange-trees, each with her little straw bonnet and basket on her arm. We afterwards saw them assembled in a vast and handsome hall, from whence they proceeded to an excellent dinner. When Madame de Lor entered, several of the little ones clung around her, and each had her nom de caresse, or some mark of affection and familiarity. She addressed them all in French, to show us the progress they had made, and made them laugh heartily at their own mistakes. Italian is much cultivated; Milanese is rarely allowed. Their studies are liberal, and must shock many of their noble grandmothers, who scarcely learned to read and write; and who see their illustrious descendants (condemned by their birth to worthlessness and indolence) thus occupied in cutting out shifts, making stays, inventing dresses, and mending stockings, conversant in all the details of which no mother or mistress of a family should be ignorant, and combining these homely duties with languages, the arts, the sciences, and literature! Since the Restoration, however, some changes have been made in this, as in every other institution of the late government, which have given to it some of the monastic character belonging to the original destination of the building. The children are no longer permitted to see their fathers, except, as in the old convents, in the parloir; that is, through iron bars. It is in vain that their young hearts may bound towards the object of their affections; no bosom receives them, no knee sustains them! They may press their lips through the bars to the hand that leans against them, but there all intercourse of endearment ends, exactly as in the days of the convent of the ladies of St Philip Neri.

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4. The Collection of Papers in Nancy, BSt, 413/1–2 413/1 Folios Contents 1–35

Reworked copy of Remiremont priest du Heaume de l’Oratoire’s 1619 Discours sur l’estat seculier des dames chanoinesses. Leur origine ancienne et l’ethimologie de leur nom

39–55

Documents relating to the admission in 1741–42 of Canoness Walburge de Flashlande

56–109

Copies, notes, and translations from archival folders Cha.  Li.  1 and Cha. Li. 3

110–31

Copies of early modern charters and other documents

132–33

Charter relating to a conflict over the episcopal prebend, 1609

134–39

Will of Canoness Anne de Custine, 1620

140–44

Will of Canoness Catherine de Custine, 1632

146–99

Documents relating to the will of Canoness Antoinette de Meschatin, inventory of her properties, and their sale, 1735

200–10

Documents on the chapter of Vaudémont, originally in archival folder Cha. Li. 4

211–27

Various documents relating to the admission of new members

228–50

Inventory of the pre-1788 archival categories ‘Statuts’, ‘Chartes’, and other notes by Hilaire de Puibusque

251–62

Overview of all prebend holders, 1649–1785

263–64

List of abbesses, c.  1761 with additions until the early 1770s

265–367

Corps de règlements pour l’église de Bouxières (with extracts of the statutes for Poussay), followed by Division générale des règlements, 7 August 1786

369–75

Various chapter decisions on absences, prebends and their transferral, clothing, exemptions of officers, and so on, 1780s

413/2 Folios Contents

204

1–111

Ceremonial of Bouxières abbey

111–20

Customs of the chapter of Bouxières, 1780s

120–30

Copy of the statutes of 1722

APPENDICES

131–234

Documents relating to the translation to Nancy, 1784–87

235–42

Letter by Abbess de Messey to the Imperial Diet of Regensburg, 1790

243–54

Documents relating to the translation of Bouxières abbey to Nancy

255–66

Miscellaneous documents, seventeenth-eighteenth centuries

267–68

Mémoire on the authority of the king of France over the abbey

269–334

Documents about the translation to Nancy, 1780s

336–45

Five copies of the protocol of the chapter meeting of 26 June 1790

346–80

Miscellaneous documents, arrests, and other papers

381–411

Inventories of the abbey’s properties, dated 27–28 July, 30 July, and 26 November 1790

412–13

Notes by Joseph Raybois on the first two of the above inventories, 2 and 6 August 1790

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5. Abbess de Messey’s Draft of a Letter to the Pope to Announce the Dissolution of Bouxières Abbey, 20 January 17915

Tres saint pere Le chapitre de Notre Dame de Bouxieres, qui dans le nombre de ses avantages a toujours regardé comme le plus précieux sa dépendances [sic] immediate du Saint Siege, croit devoir informer votre saintete quil vient de subir, comme tous les etablissements religieux et civils du Royaume de France, la loi de la destruction. Je pouvois, Tres Saint Pere, métendre sur la douler que nous avons resentie en voiants d’étruire un etablissement antique, garanti par les Puissances de l’Europe dans les traittés solemnels de cession de la Lorraine a la France pour procurer une ressource à l’ancienne nobblesse, mais la perte de ses avantages, la privation de ses biens, lui a été bien moins sensible que la cessation publique du culte parmis nous. Après avoir résisté autant qu’il etoit en son pouvoir au décret qui prononcoit sa dissolution, et s’etre constamment reunies dans une eglise de la ville de Nancy, pour y remplir ses fondations et y celebrer publiquement loffice divin, fonctions saintes qui faisoient sa plus douce consolation, et qu’il navoit pas crue pouvoir interompre sans l’autorité du siege apostolique qui les lui avoit imposee, la force vient de lui oter la possibilité de les remplir, la douleur en est d’autant plus profonde quil y voit la suitte d’un sistême qui attaque la religion que nous professons, et semble en avoir resolu l’aneantissement. C’est dans ces circonstances aussi douloureuses que le chapitre, comme moi, eprouve plus particulierement le besoin de recourir au chef, au deffenseur de cette religion sainte, pour y chercher les consolations que nous devons esperer de la solicitude paternelle, je lui dois le compte fidele de la conduite que le chapitre a tenu, heureuse, si votre sainteté la trouve digne de son approbation, il la suplie de daigner recevoir les copies originales de protestations que nous avons faites. Je renouvele a ses pieds mon serment de vivre et mourir dans la foi catholique apostolique et Romaine, engagement que le chapitre

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Nancy, BSt, 136, two unnumbered pages after fol. 28.

APPENDICES

me charge de renouveller aussi en son nom a votre sainteté et nous la suplions de nous accorder la benediction apostolique. Je suis De votre sainteté Nancy 20 janvier 1791 La tres humble tres obeissante et soumise fille et servante Marie Francoise Angelique Messey abbesse de Bouxieres Translation Most holy Father The chapter of Our Lady of Bouxières, which among its privileges has always regarded as the most precious the fact that it directly depends from the Holy See, believes it should inform your Holiness that it has suffered the law of destruction, like all the religious and civil institutions of the kingdom of France. I could set out at length, most holy Father, the pain we have felt as we saw this ancient institution, which is protected by the Powers of Europe in solemn treaties on the cession of Lorraine to France so that it would provide a resource to the old nobility, being destroyed. However the loss of its privileges and the theft of its properties has been much less painful to the chapter than the cessation of the public celebration of the [Catholic] rites among us. Although the chapter offered as much resistance as it could to the decree that announced its dissolution, and although it came together constantly in a church of the city of Nancy in order to fulfil its ritual obligations and celebrate the divine office in public – functions that gave it the sweetest satisfaction and which it believed could not be interrupted without the approval of the Apostolic See that had entrusted them with this mission – sheer force has taken away from it the possibility of fulfilling these duties. The pain is all the more severe, for it sees [in that action] the consequence of a system that attacks the religion to which we profess, and that appears to have resolved itself to destroy it. It is in these painful circumstances that the chapter, like myself, has felt the need to specifically call on the head and the defender of this holy religion, so that we may seek the consolations that we hope to find with his fatherly care. I owe him the faithful testimony of the [good] conduct of the chapter and shall be happy if Your Holiness finds it worthy of his

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approval. The chapter also begs your holiness to accept an authentic copy of the protestations that we have made. I renew at your Holiness’s feet my oath of living and dying in the Catholic, apostolic, and Roman faith, a commitment that the chapter charges me to renew likewise in its name, and we beg that it will give us your apostolic blessing. I am Of your Holiness Nancy, 20 January 1791 The very humble, very obedient, and subjected daughter and servant Marie Françoise Angelique Messey, abbess of Bouxières

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6. Bouxières Abbey’s Foundation According to the Deeds of the Bishops of Toul6

Cenobium sanctae Dei genitricis Mariae Buxeriis a fundamentis construxit, chorum ancillarum Dei inibi constituit, rebus et praediis ac ornamentis decoravit. Ob cuius facti meritum suo successori praesuli Gerardo est a Deo praemonstratum eum martyri Apollinari in celesti gloria sociatum. Cuius gloriosi facti occasionem operae precium reor posteris tradere ad rememorationem.  Denique Hardradus praefati pontificis Gauzlini frater germanus, in militari studio  vir quam maxime strenuus, in bonitate morum cunctis percarus, quadam vice super Murt  fluvium venationis excercitationi insistebat. Contigit itaque, ut canes eius aprum ferocem insequerentur, quorum coactus latratibus, mortem contiguam idem aper effugere nitebatur.  Qui diu per quaeque avia discucurrit, tandemque in montem supra Buxeriis villam situm  fugitando pervenit. Quo pertingens, sub quadam spinosa arbore fixit gressum, moxque subsequens latrando grex canum, divina virtute celerem continuit gradum. Fera sub arbore stabat intrepida, vis latrantium a longe subsistebat muta et stupida, nec ullatenus audebat proximare ad spineti vicina. Praedictus miles equitando insequitur, rem insolitam sibi contigisse demiratur; equo desiliens, frutectum ingreditur, altare dirutum cum circumvicinis  edificiis contemplatur. Ergo rem veneratus divinam, feramque sinens abire securam, ad propria celer repedat fratri suo pontifici acta et inventa nuntiat. Domnus autem praesul certos nuntios dirigens, et a maioris aetatis senibus, quomodo se res habuerat exquirens, didicit ab antiquo ecclesiam sanctae Dei genitricis inibi constructam, sed vetustate consumente et incuria neglegente desolatam. Astruebant etiam, noctu inibi quam sepe divina luminaria splendere, et loca proxima sua claritate perfundere. Quod pernoscens praesul venerabilis, permaxime letatur. Et quia mons praelibatus ad Metense pertinebat episcopium, petiit a Teoderico praesule, qui et Sixtus vocabatur, illum sibi dari per concambium, conferens illi sancti Petri apostoli baculum venerabile, quem beatus Mansuetus secum detulerat Gesta episcoporum Tullensium, ed. Georg  Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 8 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1848), pp. 639–40.

6 

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a Romana urbe. Adepto itaque monte, ecclesiam restruxit ac super stipitem praefatae arboris altare in honore beatae Mariae stabilivit. Quoniam eiusdem Dei genitricis precibus inibi sanabantur infirmi diversis detenti languoribus, et vota vulgaris populi ibidem confluebant  sepius, divina inspirante clementia dignum duxit, ne diutius careret cultibus. Cepit vero cogitare, quatinus in eodem oratorio, si Deo donante inveniri possent, sanctimonialium virginum societas fieret, quae sub regula sancti Benedicti obsequiis perpetuae Virginis deserviret. Quod sane factum per divinam clementiam meruit provectum. Nam Deo praeordinante invenit quasdam sanctimoniales, velut oves errantes, sed tamen aeternae vitae pascua querentes, in Dei dilectione ferventes, et ad serviendum illi locum remotum desiderantes; quarum miseratione permotus, consultu domni abbatis Archemboldi, qui praeerat coenobio sancti Apri, ceterorumque fidelium, iam dictam cellulam eis ad habitandum delegavit, praeficiens eis Rothildim abbatissam, quae earum regeret vitam. Atque ut ibidem liberius possent rebus vacare spiritualibus, providit illis, unde viverent de episcopii possessionibus, ecclesiam videlicet in eadem villa Buxeria cum decimis et omnibus ad eam pertinentibus, nec non capellam Porcherae curtis cum omni decimatione. Tale ergo fertur habuisse exordium Buxeriense cenobium, quod Deo iuvante in dies sumit incrementum. Translation [Gozelin] built from the foundations the monastery of the Holy Mother of God in Bouxières, installed there a choir of female servants of God, and gave it properties, estates and furnishings. As a reward for this, God indicated to Gozelin’s successor, the bishop Gerard, that Gozelin was associated in celestial glory with the martyr Apollinarius. I believe it is useful to commit to the memory of men the circumstances of this glorious deed. Hadrad, the brother of said Bishop Gozelin, a man who was most ardent in the military profession and was very dear to all because of the quality of his virtues, one day occupied himself with the exercise of hunting in a vicus above the river Meurthe. It so happened that his dogs chased a ferocious boar: driven forward by the barking, the boar tried to escape impending death. It ran through the woodland for a long time and finally its flight took it to the top of the hill that overlooks

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the village of Bouxières. Having arrived at this spot, it stopped its flight under a spiny tree, the pack of barking dogs still closely pursuing it, and halted its fast run through the intervention of God. The wild beast stood without fear under the tree, as the vigorous dogs were held at a distance, mute and restrained by some unknown force, and dared not approach the spiny branches. The above-mentioned soldier followed by horse: he was surprised by this unusual event, descended his horse, entered the bush, and observed that there was a destroyed altar with buildings around it. On realizing it was the work of God, he let the animal leave unharmed, hurried back home, and related to his brother the bishop what had happened and what he had found. The lord bishop sent out trusted messengers [to inspect the site]. Meanwhile, he discussed with people of great age what had happened and learned that once a church in honour of the Holy Mother of God had been built there, but that its great age and lack of maintenance had caused it to be abandoned. They also told him that, during the night, heavenly lights often shone and bathed the nearby places in their brightness. On hearing these things, the venerable bishop much rejoiced. Because the above-mentioned hill belonged to the bishopric of Metz, he asked Bishop Thierry, also known as Sixtus, to give him that place in a trade, offering him [in exchange] the venerable staff of St Peter the Apostle, which St Mansuetus had brought back from Rome. Having thus acquired the hill, he rebuilt the church and at the base of the said tree he had an altar installed in honour of St Mary. Because the sick who were afflicted by various diseases were healed there thanks to the prayers of the Mother of God, and because the common people often came there together to pray, Gozelin by an inspiration of God’s clemency estimated that the Virgin should no longer lack a cult on this site. He began to think about how he would establish at this sanctuary a community of religious women, if by the aid of God he could find any. That community would perpetually serve the Virgin under the Rule of St Benedict. And so it happened thanks to the divine clemency. Indeed, by the will of God he discovered a few religious women, wandering like sheep and looking for the pastures of the eternal life, fervent in their love of God, desirous of serving Him at this remote location. Moved by commiseration, and having consulted abbot Lord Archembald (who led the monastery of Saint-Evre) and other faithful, he sent them to live under the above-mentioned Rule and placed them under the leadership of Abbess Rothildis, who was to guide their lives. To allow them to dedi-

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cate themselves as freely as possible in this place to spiritual matters, he gave them for their sustenance properties that belonged to the bishopric, namely the church of the village of Bouxières with the tithes and all the dependencies, as well as the chapel of Pixerécourt with its entire tithe. This was, so it is told, the beginning of the monastery of Bouxières: with the aid of God it grew from day to day.

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7. Bouxières Abbey’s Foundation According to the Early Modern Office for the Feast Day of St Gozelin7

Quadam autem nocte,  cum in suo pausaret thalamo Deo dilectus Gauzelinus, apparuit ei Sancta Dei  Genitrix cum magna claritate, et ita allocuta est eum,  dicens: ‘Gauzeline, dormis?’  At ille non dormiens sed vigilans, claritate magna circumfultus, et stupefactus ait: ‘O Deus! Quis est qui ad me tantam claritatem adduxit?’ Sancta Maria respondit: ‘Ego  sum Mater Jesu Christi’. At  ille: ‘Quid tibi placet, Domina?’ Beata Dei Genitrix ait: ‘Audivi orationem tuam; et sicut me toties deprecatus es, volo ut ecclesiam unam mihi aedifices’. At ille ait: ‘Quo loco tibi vis illam  aedificari?’ Et illa: ‘Cras mane, cum depulsis noctis tenebris, clara illuxerit dies, canes tuos accipies, et cum penveneris ad nemus, quadam alba cerva ante canes  tuos consurget. Hanc insequere et eo loco quo ipsa steterit, et terram pede suo effoderit, volo ut ibi Ecclesia mea aedificetur’.  His dictis Beata Maria recessit. Sanctus vero Gauzelinus mane surgens, accipiensque canes suos perrexit ad nemus. Et ecce, sicut B. virgo praedixerat, quaedam alba cerva consurgens, canibus eam insequentibus, et ipso Sancto Gauzelino, cucurrit usque ad nemus quod  erat super villam quae vocatur adhuc Buxeria, ibique sistens gradum, pede terram  effodiens quo loco ecclesia  B.  Virginis debebat aedificari, hoc signo indicavit. Sanctus autem Gauzelinus ibi signum ponens, vidit eamdem cervam ita ab oculis suis evanescere, quod, sicut ut in vita sua reperitur, nescivit utrum eam terra receperit, an coelo rapta fuerit. Sanctus vero Gauzelinus  accersivit Adalberonem  tunc temporis Metensem episcopum, ut dictum est, et pro terra illa baculum sancti Petri Apostoli, et peram sancti Materni, et medietatem lapidis quo beati Stephanus lapidatus fuerat, qua omnia sanctus Mansuetus unus ex discipulis Petri Apostoli ad Urbem Leucorum missus, secum apportavit, quae, inquam, omnia idem B. Gauzelinus Adelberoni donavit, ut terra illa et Mons ille, quia prius erant de dioecesi Metensi, ac dioecesim Tullensem pertinerent, et ecclesia beatae Virginis quae ibi aedificaretur, ad Tullensem dioecesim cum 7  Jean-Jacques Lionnois, Histoire des villes vieille et neuve de Nancy depuis leur fondation jusqu’en 1788, 3 vols (Nancy: Haener Père, 1805–11), 1, pp. 597–603.

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suis appendicibus pertineret. Beatus vero  Gauzelinus ecclesiam beati Virginis coepit aedificare viriliter in loco superius assignato. Sed antequam totum consummaretur, orta est in tempore illo fames maxillia, pecuniaque beati Gauzelini deficiente, deprecatus est beatam Virginem, ut ei auxilium  quod sibi promiserat, impertiret. Beata autem Virgo,  non post multum temporis,  apparuit Reginae Franciae  christianissime, et suae filae  speciali, et dixit ei: ‘Ecce, tu dives es: ego autem quemdam famulum habeo pauperem. Nunc ergo peto a te ut succurras ei’. Regina autem respondit beati Virgini: ‘Domina, nescio ubi maneat  servus ille’. Maria respondit: ‘Praecipe tres camelos onerari divitiis, et sine conductore abire permittas’. Quod et fecit; et sic beata Virgo disparuit. Et ecce, tres cameli illi venerunt onerati usque ad aquam quae subtus praedictam villam de Buxeriis est. Erat autem navis per quam transibant homines per locum illum euntes ultra aquam adversus villam ligata, qua, Deo operante, soluta venit ad camelos. Cameli autem intrantes navem  iliam, transierunt aquam  fluminis. Erat autem ibiquidam homo quasi custodiens portum, qui sempermutus fuerat, qui videns miracula haec, venit ad sanctum Gazelinum, et invenit eum in  oratione lacrimantem, dixitque ei: ‘Confortare; exaudivit enim orationem tuam sancta Dei Genitricis in illis mirabilibus quae vidi. Mihi Dominus loquelam reddidit. Veni ergo et vide: nam ecce tres cameli onerati, et quid portent respice’. Venit autem et invenit sicut dixerat  ille. Invenitque quod primus asportabat tapria et ornamenta de serico ecclesiae necessaria; secundus autem, aurum et argentum; tertius, cibaria. Sicque toties venerunt, auxilioque Dei perfecta fuit ecclesia. Videns autem B.  Gauzelinus quia illam ecclesiam benedicere oportebat, accersivit archiepiscopum Trevirensem, et episcopum Metensem ac episcopum Virdunensem, et omnem clerum circum adjacentem in regione illa. Qui  congregati in unum in die  sancti Dionisii fuerunt, scilicet in vigilia apud sanctum  Gauzelinum, ut sequenti die illam benedicerent ecclesiam. Sanctus autem Gauzelinus nocte illa cogitans  turpe sibi esse, si aliquid  ecclesiae deficeret, surrexit, veniensque ante fores ecclesiae, aperuit illas; qui cum intro aspiceret, et videret in illa maximam claritatem, audivit choros angelorum  jam celebrantium officium  Benedictionis. Reversus itaque ut hujusrei testes haberet, vocavit archiepiscopum  coeterosque episcopos qui  secum aderant, et dixit: ‘Venite 214

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et videte quae ostendit mihi Deus’. Et venerunt, et sicut viderat, omnes viderunt, audierunt officium et  ibi steterunt, donec celebrato officio data est eis benedictio Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis […] Facta autem benedictione, quidam surrexit et stetit in medio ecclesiae et dixit: ‘Volo vos omnes scire quia qui celebravit officium, filius est B.  Virginis, Dominus Jesus Christus. Omnibus autem qui ad hanc ecclesiam in honorem ejus, matrisque ipsius ista die ad eam visitandam venerint, haec est ejus indulgentia: ‘lndulgeo enim eis septimam partem peccatorum suorum quorum, confessionem suo fecerint  sacerdoti, peccata oblita, offensas patrum et matrum sine manuum injectione’.’ His  dictis recesserunt qui intras  erant. Qui autem foris erant, intrantes ecclesiam invenerunt altare decenter ornatum, super quo erat extentum pallium quod adhuc hodierna die ostenditur populo, et librum repererunt, et calicem et aquam benedictam. His peractis recesserunt omnes. Beatus autem Gauzelinus deprecatus est B.  Mariam quatenus qualem in  ecclesia sua vellet esse Ordinem. B. autem Virgo ei  apparuit et dixit: ‘Vade ad  pontem B.  Michaelis, et cum  ibi perveneris, venient ad te tres mulieres, una hora prima, altera hora tertia, tertia vero hora sexta’. Et veniens ibi reperit ista. Hora enim prima venit ad eum quaedam mulier habens velum super caput suum, et  dixit illi Sanctus Gauzelinus: ‘Filia, quo vadis?’ Et illa: ‘Domine, audivi quod quidam sanctus nomine Gauzelinus aedificavit ecclesiam  in honorem B.  Virginis Mariae, et illuc vado; sed nescio  ubi sit’. Et ille dixit: ‘Sede  hic, filia’. Hora autem tertia, venit altera, et ad eam sicut ad alteram locutus est. Similiter locutus est ad tertiam quae hora sexta venit,  quas Sanctus Gauzelinus ducens ad ecclesiam praedictam, praebuit eis regulam vivendi, et statuit praebendas, et sub tali habitu et ordine quo venerunt illae vivunt nunc et reliquae. In qua ecclesia laudatur Deus et benedicitur qui non deserit sperantes in se. Translation One night while this beloved servant of God Gozelin was resting in his bed, the Holy Mother of God appeared to him in a bright light, and spoke to him as follows: ‘Gozelin, are you sleeping?’ However he was not 215

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sleeping but was awake thanks to the great light that surrounded him, and he spoke amazedly: ‘O God! Who is it that brings me such brightness?’ Holy Mary answered him: ‘I am the mother of Jesus Christ’. To which he replied: ‘What is it that you wish, my Lady?’ The Blessed Mother of God said: ‘I have heard your prayer; and just as you implored me many times, I wish that you build me a church’. To which he replied: ‘Where do you wish me to build it?’ To which she said: ‘Tomorrow, after the darkness of the night has vanished and the bright day will shine, you shall take your dogs and when you shall arrive at the woods, a white doe will appear before your dogs. Follow it: where it will stop and dig the earth with its hoof, there I want you to build my church’. Having said these words the Blessed Mary disappeared. In the morning St Gozelin got up, took his dogs and went to the woods. And look! As the holy Virgin had foretold to him, a white doe stood up before him. St Gozelin and his dogs followed her as she ran towards the woods that rose above the village that until today is called Bouxières. The doe halted there, and planted her hoof in the earth: in this way she showed the spot where the church would have to be built. As St Gozelin was placing a sign on this spot, he saw the doe disappearing from his sight, in such a way that he did not know (as one can read in his life account) if she disappeared into the earth or was taken to the heavens. St  Gozelin went to find Adalbero, who was bishop of Metz at the time. To obtain ownership of that land Gozelin gave him the staff of St Peter the Apostle, the bag of St Maternus, and half of a rock with which St Stephen had been stoned, all of which St Mansuetus (one of St Peter the Apostle’s disciples, who had been sent to the city of Toul) had brought with him. The blessed Gozelin gave (I say) all these things to Adalbero, so that the land and hill that beforehand had belonged to the diocese of Metz, as well as the church that was to be built there, would henceforth belong to the diocese of Toul with all its dependencies. And so the blessed Gozelin began vigorously building a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin at the above-mentioned site. But before this was completely finished, there was a great famine, and the blessed Gozelin found himself short of funds. He appealed to the blessed Virgin, praying that she would obtain for him the aid that she had promised to him. Shortly afterward, the blessed Virgin appeared to a queen of France, a most fervent Christian and her beloved daughter, and told her: ‘Look, you are wealthy; but I have a servant who is poor. I therefore ask you now to come to his aid’. The queen answered: 216

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‘My Lady, I do not know where this servant lives’. Mary replied: ‘Let three camels be loaded with riches, and let them go without giving them a driver’. And this is what the queen did; and the blessed Virgin disappeared. And look! These three loaded camels came to the river that runs below the aforesaid site of Bouxières. On one bank of the river (across the side of the village) there lay tied the boat that the people used who wished to go from one side to the other. By an act of God, the boat detached itself, and headed towards the camels, who embarked on it and thus crossed the river. A man who had been mute all his life and who was the warden of the port (so to speak), when he saw these wonders went to St Gozelin, whom he found praying and shedding tears. ‘Do not worry’, he told him, ‘the holy Virgin has answered your prayer through the miracles that I just witnessed. God has given me back my speech. Come then and see for yourself: look, there are three loaded camels, and see what they are carrying’. The saint went there and found exactly what the man had told him. He discovered that the first camel had brought tapestries and ornaments of silk for use in the church; the second gold and silver; and the third foodstuffs. They came back several times with the same load, and through this aid from God the church was brought to perfection. When the blessed Gozelin saw that this church needed to be consecrated, he brought together the saintly archbishop of Trier, as well as the bishops of Metz and Verdun, and all the clergy of the region. All assembled with Gozelin on the evening of the feast of St Denis, to consecrate this church on the next day. But after night had fallen St Gozelin considered that it would be shameful if anything would be lacking from that church for the ceremony, got up, and as he arrived at the door of the church opened it. When he went inside he saw from all sides the brightest light and heard choirs of angels who already were singing the office of the consecration. He went out immediately to look for witnesses of this event and called the archbishop and the other bishops who went together with him, and he said: ‘Come and see what God is showing me’. And they came: and like him they all witnessed the office and stood there until it was finished. Then they received the benediction Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis […] Once the benediction was over, one of the officiants got up and stood in the middle of the church, and he said: ‘I wish that you all know that he who has celebrated the office is the Son of the blessed Virgin, namely 217

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Lord Jesus Christ himself. Here is the indulgence that is awarded to all those who will come on this day to this church, which is consecrated in His name and that of his holy Mother. I give them remission for the seventh part of the punishment of sins that they have confessed to a priest, sins that they have forgotten, and those that they have committed against their fathers and mothers, except when they hit them’. Afterwards all those who were in the church left. Those who were outside came into the church and found that the altar was suitably decorated with the canopy that is still shown to the people today, the missal, chalice, and stoup. After this everyone left. The blessed Gozelin prayed […] to the Holy Virgin, to know to which congregation she wanted to confide her church, so that they would serve it. The blessed Virgin appeared to him and said: ‘Go to the bridge of Saint-Michael: there three women will come to you, one at six o’clock, another at nine, and the third at noon’. When he went there, all happened as it had been foretold to him. At six o’clock a veiled woman presented herself to him, to whom he said ‘My daughter, where are you going?’ To which she answered: ‘Lord, I heard that a certain saintly bishop (his name is Gozelin) has built a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That is where I am going: but I do not know where it is’. He told her: ‘Sit down, my daughter’. At nine o’clock there came another woman, and he spoke to her as he did to the first. He also spoke thus to the third whom came at the sixth hour. St Gozelin brought them to his church, gave them a rule, and ordained that they should have prebends. And they lived in the attire and according to the order they had when they arrived, as do those who have succeeded them. In that church God is praised and blessed, He who does not abandon those who put their faith in him.

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Unpublished primary sources Bouxières, Archives Municipales de Bouxières-aux-Dames – Fonds CRVB (Connaissance et Renaissance du Vieux Bouxières), 203 U, 207 U, 211 U, 212 U, 214 U, 215 U, 218 U, 879 U, and 931 U Douai, Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 938 Luxemburg, Archives Nationales du Luxembourg, Fonds Anciens, A– LXV–39, Chartes et titres divers nos 899–934, no.  931 Metz, Médiathèque Verlaine, 1551/3 Nancy,  Archives Départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1  J  173, 1  Q  487  2, 1  Q  488  1, 1  Q  592  1, 1  Q  592  2, 1926 W  24, B  7434, B  7439, H  2943, H  2944, H  2945, H  2946, H  2947, H  2948, H  2949, H  2950, H 2952, H 2953, H 2956, H 2991, and H  2995 Nancy, Bibliothèque Stanislas, 56, 101, 132, 136, 175, 413/1, 413/2, 487, 820, 1658, 1810, Chartes Année 963, and Rés. 4657 Paris, Archives Nationales, MC/ET/LVII/813 Notaire Joseph Philippe Prévoteau, Inventaire après décès de Marie Rose de Lort de Montesquiou, rue de Sèvres, no. 16, le 2  juillet 1837 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection Lorraine, 717 and 720 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection Moreau, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 20, 30, 52, 57, 62, and 377 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bestand Fideikommissbibliothek (1809–1945), Karton 17, FKBA17146 and Cod.  Ser. n.  12672 Published archival sources Brevet qui autorise le chapitre noble de Bouxières, à solliciter, en cour de Rome, sa translation, soit dans la ville de Nancy, soit aux environs (Nancy: s.e., 1787). Bulla confirmationis perpetuae translationis illustris capituli canonissarum oppido de Bouxieres (Paris: G.  Desprez, 1788).

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‘Chartes antérieures au xive siècle conservées à la Bibliothèque publique de Nancy’, ed. by Charles Pfister, Journal de la Société d’archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain, 48 (1899), 54–63. ‘Cinq chartes inédites de l’abbaye de Bouxières’, ed.  by Henri Lepage, Mémoires de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 4 (1862), 121–48. Code général français, contenant les Lois et Actes du Gouvernement publiés depuis l’ouverture des Etats Généraux au 5 mai 1789, jusqu’au 8 juillet 1815, ed. by Jean Desenne, 22 vols (Paris: Ménard and Desenne, 1818–25). De Rosières, François, Stemmatum Lotharingiae ac Barri ducum tomi septem (Paris: Guillaume Chaudière, 1580). ‘Décret sur le paiement des pensions ecclésiastiques, lors de la séance du 30 novembre 1790 (décrets, lois et arrêtés)’, Archives parlementaires de la Révolution Française, 21 (1885), 149–50. ‘Deux feuillets d’un nécrologe de Bouxières, aux Archives des Vosges’, ed. by André Philippe, Bulletin mensuel de la Société d’archéologie lorraine, 21 (1926), 23–26. ‘Doter les servantes du seigneur. Charte d’Odelric pour Bouxières-auxDames’, ed. by Michel Parisse, in Autour de Gerbert d’Aurillac, le pape de l’an mil, ed. by Olivier Guyotjeannin and E. Poulle (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 1996), pp.  200–2. Etat nominatif des pensions sur le trésor royal imprimé par ordre de l’assemblée nationale, 4 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1789–91). Hof- und Staats-Schematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthums, 2 vols (Vienna: Hof- und Staats-Aerarial-Druckerey, 1827). Liste générale des pensionnaires de l’ancienne liste civile avec l’indication sommaire des motifs de la concession de la pension (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1833). Mémoire pour les dames abbesse, chanoinesses & chapitre de l’insigne église de Notre-Dame de Bouxières, contre la dame de Briey de Landres, doyenne (s.l.: Louis Cellat, 1763). Mémoire pour les dames abbesse, chanoinesses & chapitre de l’insigne église de Notre-Dame de Bouxieres, appellantes, défendresses sur l’incident & demanderesses en sommation, & désavouantes contre demoiselle Françoise-Claire de la Tour en Voivre, tant de son chef que comme procédant sous l’autorité de dame Anne-Therese de Landres de Briey, sa mere, intimée, demanderesse en incident, & demanderesse (Nancy: Veuve et Claude Leseure, 1764). L’obituaire du Saint-Mont (1406), ed. by Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean and Gautier Poupeau (Paris: Éditions en ligne de l’École des chartes, 2005) (online publication at http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/ obituairestmont/).

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239

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

A Abbaye-aux-Bois, convent in Paris 73 Adelaïde, madame de France 113, 114, 140 Adso of Montier-en-Der, hagiographer 168 Alsace, region 120 Augsburg, city 133, 172 Auguin, Bernard, historian 88 Auvergne, region 71 B Badel, Emile, travel writer 21, 195 Barbé, Jean-Julien, bibliographer 167 Barthélemy, Catherine, canoness 74 Bastien, François, French official 51, 53 Baume-Les-Dames, house of noble canonesses 165, 176, 178 Benedict, saint 184 Bérard, canon of Bouxières 145 Bertille, saint 181 Boisgelin, Marie-JosephCatherine, canoness of Bouxières 53, 80 Bon Secours, church and convent site in Nancy 63, 79, 80, 82, 84, 106, 113, 114, 118, 119, 122, 124, 125, 126

Bouvier, Jean-Jacques (see Lionnois, Jean-Jacques) Bouxières-aux-Dames, village 16, 20, 51, 52, 95, 100, 119, 135, 139, 182, 183, 195, 196, 199, 200, 210, 213, 214 Brittany, region 80, 121 Burgundy, region 165, 176 C Calmet, Augustin, historian 44, 64, 84, 152, 155, 156, 157, 167, 170, 171, 174, 199 Campan, Jeanne-LouiseHenriette, director of the Château d’Ecouen 48, 49, 70, 71, 72, 98 Chapelier, Charles, historian 86 Charles the Simple, king of West Francia and Lotharingia 58, 186 Charles X, king of France 75 Charles-Alexandre, duke of Lorraine 110 Château d’Ecouen, finishing school of the Légion d’Honneur 48, 70, 71 Clausier, Marie-Prudence, educator 48 Collegio delle Fanciulle, finishing school in Milan 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 70,

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71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 100, 193, 202 Collignon, Pierre, bookseller in Metz 167 Coraccini, Federico, author 50 Coudenhove de Vaudoncourt, Marguerite or Marie-Agnès, canoness of Bouxières 159 Courbe, Marie-Paule, novelist 18, 19 D d’Abrantès, Laure Jouet, author 73 d’Achey, Marie, abbess of Baume-les-Dames 176 d’Anglure, Claude, abbess of Poussay 173 d’Eltz, Anne-Marie, abbess of Bouxières 144, 164 d’Eltz, Françoise, abbess of Bouxières 108, 159 d’Eltz d’Ottange, ReineMadelaine, deaconess of Bouxières 196, 197 d’Osmond, Antoine Eustache, bishop of Nancy 97 de Breiten de Landenberg, Madeleine-Barbe, canoness of Bouxières 80 de Briey de Landres, AnneCatherine, deaconess of Bouxières 142, 143, 153 de Capitani, Paolo, minister of interior affairs in the Kingdom of Italy 71 de Choiseul de Stainville, Jacques Philippe, maréchal de France 106, 112, 113, 114

242

de Cicon, Anne-Catherine, abbess of Bouxières 92, 157, 166, 175, 176, 179, 185 de Cussigny, Claude, abbess of Epinal 173 de Custine, Anne, canoness of Bouxières 204 de Custine, Catherine, canoness of Bouxières 204 de Ficte de Soucy, AngéliqueElisabeth-Louis, educator 48, 70, 71 de Flashlande, Walburge, canoness of Bouxières 204 de Gironcourt, Henri-Antoine (see Regnard de Gironcourt) de Gouffier-Thois, CharlotteSidonie-Rose, abbess of Remiremont 142, 143 de Hautoy, Françoise, abbess of Bouxières 177, 178, 179 de Kerpen, CunégondeMarie-Anne, canoness of Bouxières 88, 89 de la Fare, Anne Louis Henri, bishop of Nancy 132 de Lamartine, Aphonse, poet 27 de Landsperg, Margarita, abbess of Saint-Etienne in Strasbourg 173 de Latouche, Louis-JosephXavier, husband of former canoness de Schauenburg 164 de Ligertz de Gléresse, MarieEuphémie-Thérèse-CarolinePacifique, secrétaire of Bouxières 53, 80, 126, 136 de Ligniville, noble family 109 de Ligniville, Sibille, canoness of Bouxières 53, 80

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

de Lorraine, Anne-Charlotte, abbess of Remiremont and Mons 109, 117 de Lorraine, Catherine, abbess of Remiremont 173, 174, 175 de Lort de Montesquiou, MarieThérèse-Agnès-Angélique, canoness of Bouxières 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 60, 64, 67, 127, 152 de Lort, Marie-Rose, canoness of Bouxières (see also Delort, Caroline) 50, 51, 53, 54, 76, 127 de Ludres, Anne-Françoise, abbess of Bouxières 156, 172, 173, 174, 177 de Meschatin, Antoinette, canoness of Bouxières 204 de Messey de Bielle, MarieAntoinette-Rosalie-Eugénie, canoness of Remiremont and Sankt Anna in Munich 74, 110 de Messey, Alexandrine, noblewoman 75 de Messey, Gabriel Melchior, bishop of Valence 132 de Messey, Julie EléonoreMarie, canoness of Remiremont and Halle 74 de Messey, Louis-GabrielSéraphique-Gaëtan, captain of the emperor 74 de Messey, Marie-FrançoiseAngélique, abbess of Bouxières 54, 55, 65, 74, 76, 79, 88, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127,

132, 134, 136, 143, 144, 152, 162, 205, 206 de Moncha, Anne-Marie (see de Simiane de Moncha) de Moy de Sons, Marie-Anne, canoness of Bouxières 53, 80 de Puibusque, Hilaire, archivist 47, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 67, 121, 157, 174, 175, 178, 185, 204 de Rosières, François, historian 156 de Salles, Félix, historian 69, 75 de Schauenburg, BarbeAntoinette-Julienne, canoness of Bouxières 159, 162, 163 de Simiane de Moncha, AnneMarie, abbess of Bouxières 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 190, 191, 194 de Spada d’Agremont, Gabrielle, abbess of Epinal 140 de Stainville, Jacques Philippe (see de Choiseul de Stainville) de Zuckmantel, AnneMarie-Louis, canoness of Bouxières 94, 140 de Zuckmantel, MarieAntoinette-Elisabeth, canoness of Bouxières 117, 160, 163, 164 de Zuckmantel, MarieCharlotte-Beatrix, canoness of Bouxières 73 Dejob, Charles, historian 51

243

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

Delort, Caroline, director of the Collegio delle Fanciulle (see also de Lort, MarieRose) 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 100, 193, 199, 200, 202, 203, 207 Delort, family 50 des Armoises, Barbe, abbess of Bouxières 175, 176 Digot, Auguste, art historian 101 Dominican women, convent of, in Nancy 174 du Heaume de l’Oratoire, Pierre, priest at Remiremont 180, 181, 204 Dufeugray, Pépin, French official 63 Dumas, Alexandre, novelist 27 E Elisabeth-Charlotte of Orléans, wife of Duke Leopold I of Lorraine 109 Epinal, convent 38, 81, 82, 85, 113, 120, 127, 140, 159, 160, 161 Ercambold, abbot of Saint-Evre 36 Ermenaidis, noblewoman 58, 67, 189 Essen, convent 169, 174 Eva of Chaumontois, noblewoman 35, 189 F Fourier, Pierre, reformer 177, 178, 184 Francis I, Emperor of Austria 43, 45, 47, 54, 73, 74, 199, 200

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G Gascony, region 121 Gastaldy, count, collector 67 Gibert, Dorothée, educator 48 Godefroy, villager of Bouxières-aux-Dames 133 Goëry, saint 83, 85, 87, 92 Gozelin, bishop of Toul 16, 17, 35, 36, 37, 44, 56, 58, 61, 73, 82, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101, 107, 118, 123, 124, 125, 127, 135, 136, 155, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 177, 181, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195, 199, 209, 213, 214, 215 Guillaume, Pierre-Etienne, historian 88, 167 Guyenne, region 50 H Hélyot, Hippolyte, historian 180 Henry de Ville-sur-Illon, bishop of Toul 59, 91 Hersendis, noblewoman 35, 36, 189 Hugo, Charles-Louis, historian 155, 156 J Jacquot, F., journalist 20 Jesuits, convent of the, in Nancy 114 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 43, 72 L Ladies of the Visitation, convent in Nancy 60, 94, 124, 140 Ladvocat de Sauveterre, Alphonse, French ambassador in Paris 163

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

Lady Morgan, travel writer 49, 50, 72, 73, 202 Leo IX, pope 84, 186 Leopold I, duke of Lorraine 109, 155 Lepage, Henri, historian 15, 16, 21, 62, 69, 75, 85, 87, 88, 89, 96, 108, 144, 167 Leszcyńska, Anna, queen of France 113 Leszczyński, Stanislas, duke of Lorraine and king of Poland 113, 141, 142 Lionnois, Jean-Jacques, historian 105, 106, 107, 108, 114, 167, 170, 171 Livorno, city 74 Loménie de Brienne, Etienne Charles, archbishop of Toulouse 61, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124 Lorraine, region 15, 16, 39, 56, 80, 85, 107, 108, 109, 120, 127, 172, 177, 206 Lotha (also Judith), noblewoman 189 Louis XIV, king of France 72, 109 Louis XVI, king of France 107, 110, 111, 114, 117, 140, 157 Luxemburg, region and city 87, 88, 96, 120 M Mabillon, Jean, historian 180 Maloteau de Villerode, Ferdinand Ignace, historian 30, 156 Mannheim, city 132 Mansuy, saint 168 Marie-Antoinette, queen of France 110 Marin, canon of Bouxières 178

Mathieu, François-Désiré, cardinal 27 Maubeuge, convent 95, 169, 181 Maulevrier, Victoire and Hortense, educators 48, 49, 71 Menjaud, Alexis, bishop of Nancy 100 Menna, saint 92 Meurthe, river 16, 111, 139, 145, 170 Milan, city 47, 48, 49, 202 Minimes, convent in Nancy 54, 60, 78, 108, 113, 114, 118, 125, 126 Mirecourt, town 85 Miroménil, Jean-François, architect 115, 146 Mohr de Waldt de Betzdorff, Elisabeth-Agnès, deaconess of Saint-Louis in Metz 78, 89 Mohr de Waldt de Betzdorff, Philippine, deaconess of Bouxières 53, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 96, 126, 136 Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas, historian 61, 64, 66, 121, 157, 185 Moreau, Jean-Baptiste, composer 62 Moselle, river 78 N Nancy, city 15, 39, 50, 80, 82, 86, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 111, 115, 118, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 137, 143, 155, 159, 195, 196, 205, 206 Napoleon, French ruler 47, 70, 72, 86, 98, 99

245

DISMANTLING THE MEDIEVAL Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent’s Past

O Ober Altaich, abbey 133 Odelric, lay abbot of Bouxières and archbishop of Reims 35, 58, 66 Owenson, Sidney (see lady Morgan) P Paris, city 44, 49, 73, 108 Pau, Marie-Edmée, novelist 18 Petitpain, Anne-Elisabeth (see Voïart, Elise) Pfister, Charles, historian 167 Pius VI, pope 132 Pius VII, pope 87 Porentray, region 80 Poussay, convent 38, 61, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 119, 121, 159, 160, 182, 186, 204 Poussay, town 80 R Raybois, Joseph, provost of Bouxières 57, 64, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 96, 97, 100, 135, 205 Regnard de Gironcourt, HenriAntoine, lawyer and travel writer 41, 84, 118, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 194 Remiremont, convent 38, 39, 61, 81, 83, 113, 117, 119, 136, 140, 153, 154, 159, 160, 175, 176 Rhineland, region 97 Rhineland-Palatinate, region 132 Robert, LouisGauzelin, villager of Bouxières-aux-Dames 125

246

Rosières-aux-Salines, church of 100 Rothildis, abbess of Bouxières 36, 189, 210 S Saint-Cyr, finishing and convent school in Versailles 72 Saint-Denis, finishing school of the Légion d’Honneur 70, 71 Saint-Evre, abbey 91, 168 Saint-Louis, convent in Metz 78, 112 Saint-Mansuy, abbey 91 Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, abbey 133 Saint-Mihiel, abbey 61 Saint-Mihiel, town 80 Saint-Nicolas-de-Port, church of 100 Sainte-Waudru, convent in Mons 95 Salm, Dorothée, abbess of Remiremont 176, 180 Sankt Anna, convent in Munich 71, 74 Sankt Stephan, convent in Augsburg 172 Sigisbert, saint 87, 97, 100, 101 Smith, Henrietta, head mistress and director of the Collegio delle Fanciulle 48, 74, 75 Stendhal, writer 49 Strasbourg, city 173 T Thiéry, Jean-Baptiste-Félix, collector 121 Tiercelins, convent in Nancy 82, 126, 132 Toul, city 168

INDEX OF PEOPLE AND PLACES

Tréguier, town 80 Tuileries, palace in Paris 108 V Van der Straelen, Jan Baptist, diarist 22 Vaudémont, chapter of 141, 204 Versailles, palace 108 Victoire, madame de France 113, 114, 140 Vienna, city 43, 47, 69, 88, 133, 200 Vienne, city 69 Voïart, Elise, novelist 77, 78, 80, 88 von Bretfeld, Emmanuel 44 von Khlobeyer, Leopold Joseph, librarian 43, 44, 45, 199 von Metternich, Klemens 44, 45, 199, 200 W Walberte, saint 181 Widric, biographer 168

247