Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne

Preface

q Preface in the episcopal archives of troyes, among layers of crumbling paper and yellowing parchments, every now and again there is a flash of color. a small hand-painted playing card appears, folded in half with a hole in the center held by a piece of cotton string (fig. 1). the card—probably painted and played in the late seventeenth century—anchors in place bundles of carefully ordered twelfth- and thirteenth-century charters , which are likewise punctured and connected by the same string. Quite at odds with its original purpose, the card now functions to secure the past in place. such painted cards come to light throughout the departmental archives of the aube and Marne. From time to time they surface among the documents of the bishops of Châlons. another card with a hasty note scribbled on its reverse migrated to Paris and is now tucked inside the last folio of volume 151 of the Collection Champagne in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. an archivist charged with organizing these episcopal records,most likely working in the first half of the eighteenth century, made the cards the guardians of the medieval past: a knave, his pike in hand; a queen, smiling slyly; a complicit four of clubs. the cards hold together groups of charters , some pertaining to the same religious institution, or a plot of contested ground, or the gifts of a particular family, sometimes disputed over generations . these groupings echo the structure of medieval monastic cartularies and administrative registers, which often used the geography of rural estates or social status as organizing principles. indeed the original documents may have been stored in the very same bundles in chests or armoires before they were tied up and assigned their playing cards. as entertaining as it is to find a card, it is the medieval charters they secure that beckon, first in the names of the officials who drew them up, and then farther down the page in the names of men and women who paid to have them made to record their gifts, sales, disputes, charity, and prayers. Many of these charters have been read and studied before, but many more persist, overlooked as unremarkable or insignificant, or simply too difficult to read. this is particularly true of several groups of charters related to the Cistercian nuns of Champagne. in some cases convent documents have been xii PREFACE catalogued together as a clearly conceived archive. But several collections of charters for Cistercian convents were subsumed within the archives of male abbeys,making them harder to find and to identify. this has all but erased the archival presence of some Cistercian nuns, leaving historians to assume that no records exist and therefore that nothing can be said about these women and their history. those who did know of these houses often deemed them too small and insignificant to warrant serious attention. yet all told, when ferreted out, hundreds of medieval parchment records inhabit the archives of northern France, revealing a women’s religious movement and its institutional reform. Within the monastic history of a great order like the Cistercians, these convents are unusual for they boast no formal medieval cartularies,that is,no bound copies of original texts made during the thirteenth century. occasionally , selected charters were copied into small paper books in the crabbed hands of fifteenth-century monks or in the careful cursive and classicizing latin of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century antiquarians. the charters in their bundles and folders form a fragmentary archive that reveals the religious and social worlds that fostered the women’s religious movement in northern France. they evoke the men and women, many of whom were Figure 1. playing card, jack of diamonds, in the episcopal collection in Troyes (undated, ca. late seventeenth century). ad aube, g 3101 (may 1242). photo by the author. PREFACE xiii local townsmen, burghers, mothers, and widows, who supported the ideals of apostolic poverty and active charity that the nuns embraced. the nunneries ’ charters also have much to say about the Cistercian order, its relationship with women, and the acceptance and administration of female convents during the 1220s and 1230s. in some cases the conspicuous absence of written records and visitation documents is more telling of how some Cistercian monks viewed their obligations to women under their spiritual care. Certainly those charters appended with silk threads carrying the wax seals of the counts of Champagne and...