Colette of Corbie: Learning and Holiness

Preface

prefaCe Although Saint Colette (1381-1447) founded or reformed seventeen Poor Clare monasteries in France, Burgundy, and Savoy in the first half of the fifteenth century and was canonized in 1807, she has attracted more attention from story-tellers than from historians, with the exception of one learned Franciscan, Ubald of Alençon, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote a number of publications about her life and work. More recently, some studies have concentrated on particular aspects of her influence. Hence the considerable interest of this work, undertaken with both sensitivity and insight by Elisabeth Lopez in order to shed light on this important figure. Saint Colette seems truly to have fascinated those around her during her lifetime, and her influence has endured to the present day through the socalled Colettine Poor Clares. It is not, however, a simple undertaking to discover the true face of Colette and the precise historical role she played. Except for the Constitutions, about fifteen letters covering very specific subjects, and a Testament (the authenticity of which is still disputed), she left few writings. As the author of this book neatly puts it, the reformer of the Order of St. Clare is “a woman who claims nothing for herself,” preferring action to speech. It is not even certain that she knew how to write. But, after her death, others wrote about her, particularly the authors of the two oldest Lives – her confessor Pierre de Vaux and Sister Perrine – who left first-hand LEARNING AND HOLINESS xii accounts.1 Scholars need to find out how to interpret or, more precisely, decode these. It is this task that, unlike her predecessors, Lopez has begun, without following to the letter the cryptic language of the hagiographical texts. Historians today recognize how important these documents are, but they are also aware of the dangers of searching within them for a true reflection of the lived experience. The actual intention of their authors was to ensure that a personality (known for its merits and eventually its miracles) conformed to a certain model of sanctity honored by the Church at a particular period in history. In her outstanding first part, the author shows very clearly how this bias led Colette’s hagiographers to remove from their biographies almost every concrete reference to her work as a reformer, as well as to the sometimes very turbulent ecclesial and political context in which she lived. The image thus drawn is of a sanctity that travels through the world while remaining above it and detached from it. This critical approach to the hagiographical sources ultimately brings us back to the fundamental questions that historians and contemporary readers must ask. Who was the real Colette? And what is her relationship to the conventional portrait left to us by her biographers? In this respect, the Constitutions play a vital role as a collection of customized rules that she developed for the monasteries she reformed. Lopez provides a wise commentary on these. The status of the Order of St. Clare in France at the beginning of the fifteenth century was unsatisfactory. There were few communities, and those there were had adopted the “Urbanist ” rule at the end of the thirteenth century (named after Pope Urban IV who promulgated it). This authorized them to own property. The crises of the fourteenth century and the ravages of the Hundred Years War had caused considerable destruction, and convent life, where it survived, was often noted for its laxity. The value of the current work is that it allows us to enter into the spirit, rather than the concrete 1 Elisabeth Lopez prepared a new edition of the life of St. Colette by Pierre de Vaux, published by CERCOR in 1994. PrefaCe xiii processes (later to be investigated more thoroughly), of a reforming movement at the very heart of the world of women religious. After a long period of uncertainty over her vocation (first joining a Benedictine community, then becoming an anchorite and Franciscan tertiary), Colette finally decided to enter the Order of St Clare and restore it by main force. In this respect, her situation is doubly significant. First of all, from the point of view of the history of the female condition , religious or otherwise, the Poor Clares were at that time the only female order not legally dependent on a male order. Secondly, Colette was the first woman to reform a cloistered congregation...