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

Introduction: Written Fragments and Living Parts

1 Introduction Written Fragments and Living Parts In October of 1224 Beatrix, the widow of Thomas of St.-Rémy, came before an official of the bishop’s court in Reims and drew up a donation charter for the nuns of Clairmarais, the new Cistercian nunnery taking shape just beyond the city’s walls (fig. 2). She gave the women, among whom was her daughter Sara, an annual rent of 60 s. collected from two houses in different parts of the city. The charter records Beatrix’s gift but goes on to indulge her concerns about the viability of the new nunnery. Beatrix offered her donation contingent upon certain conditions : “If it should happen that the nuns were dispersed and the house of Clairmarais came to nothing and her daughter Sara should transfer to another house of the Cistercian order,the aforementioned rents were to transfer with her and belong to that house.”1 Clairmarais was a novel institution,something unknown and untried in Reims. Beatrix continued: “If it should happen that after her daughter’s death the house of Clairmarais should be annulled and dispossessed, the [Cistercian] abbots of Igny and Val Regis ought to give the 1. “si contingat predictas moniales dispergi et domum de Claromarisco ad nichilum devenire filia sua Sarra que ibidem monialis est adhuc superstire et ad aliam domum cisterciensis ordinis transeunte redditus antedictus ad eamdem domum cum ea transferbit et illius domus erit.” AD Aube, 3 H 3784 (October 1224). 2 INTRODUCTION rents to a religious house that they deem most worthy.”2 Beatrix’s charter is in many respects a routine and unremarkable document, but her careful planning for contingencies exposes the impermanence and informality of the new female community on the outskirts of Reims. Her concerns, inflected by a mother’s caution, evoke a process of institutionalization that was taking place throughout Europe during the first decades of the thirteenth century: the reform of protean and dynamic religious movements into monastic orders . Beatrix played a role in this process in its distinctive form in Champagne where communities of religious women adopted Cistercian customs and became Cistercian nuns.Yet it was not at all clear that this reform would succeed or what it meant to become a Cistercian nun. Indeed, in Beatrix’s mind,even Clairmarais’s status as part of the ordo Cisterciensis did not guarantee its success or longevity beyond her daughter’s lifetime. 2. “Si vero contingat post decessum filie sue domum predictam annullari in dispositione Igniacis et Vallis Regie abbatum erit dare predictam redditum domui religiose cui voluerunt prout melius viderint expedire.” AD Aube, 3 H 3784 (October 1224). Figure 2. Donation charter from Beatrix of St.-Rémy for the nuns of Clairmarais. AD Aube 3 H 3764 (October 1224). Photo by the author. WRITTEN FRAGMENTS AND LIVING PARTS 3 We know little about Beatrix or Sara except that Sara was part of the first community of women who populated the nunnery of Clairmarais. Only two years earlier,in 1222,a local goldsmith had given these women a tract of land and probably a small building near Reims ( juxta Remensis), which they used as a church and convent.3 In 1229 three of Sara’s sisters joined her and professed at Clairmarais,at which time Beatrix added seven measures of land and another house to her initial gift.4 Neither Beatrix nor her daughters have titles or occupational markers appended to their names. Given the relative modesty and location of her donations, Beatrix and her deceased husband, Thomas, were most likely members of the growing burgher class of Reims and would have been involved in credit networks tied to the archiepiscopal court or in the trade and manufacturing of cloth.5 We are left to wonder what compelled the daughters of burghers to take up a life of religion,to live communally outside their city, and to create a life outside the social world their mother still inhabited. Through their early association with the women of Clairmarais, Sara and her sisters may have understood themselves to be part of a broader religious movement present in Champagne—part of a group of like-minded women who had adopted a new orientation toward the religious life, specifically the ideals of the vita apostolica, which valorized an embrace of poverty, charity, and penitential piety. The term “religious movement”—let alone a women’s religious movement—is challenging to define...