By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe

8. War and Coerced Monachization

213  Chapter 8 War and Coerced Monachization From 1668 to 1763, the first ninety-five years of our period,armed conflict involving European states was under way most of the time. Even when it was not, troops stationed near potential hot spots stood by in readiness for the next outbreak. Only in 1763,when the Peace of Paris brought the Seven Years’ War to a conclusion, did combat on land and sea come virtually to an end until the 1790s, when the wars of the French Revolution began.1 With a few cross-dressing exceptions such as the Basque “nun-lieutenant” Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650),2 women did not serve as combatants in early modern European conflicts. As we shall see, however, war had consequences for female as well as male religious. The disruptions it caused could be used as a pretext for forcing a young woman into the convent, ostensibly for her own protection. For both women and men, hostilities in course or on the horizon could complicate efforts to gain release. In another way, war had a more direct impact on male adolescents. Elders presented many with two alternatives: “Either go into the monastery or I’ll sell you to the war,” 1. On war in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,see The Reader’s Companion to Military History; European Warfare 1453–1815; War in the Early Modern World; and Black. To calculate the number of years in which wars were being waged, I have used The Encyclopedia of World History. 2. See Catalina de Erauso. 214 BY FORCE AND FEAR that is, into service as a common soldier or sailor.3 Faced with this Hobson’s choice, most young men, fearing death in battle or realizing that they were physically unfit to serve in an army or navy, reluctantly entered religious life. Subsequently, a few of them, finding monastic life intolerable, ran away to become soldiers. These men later returned and tried to regularize their status by petitioning for nullification of their vows. “In these wretched times of war”: Aimée Caissel The youngest of seven siblings,4 Aimée Caissel was born around 1662 in Gray, a town in Franche-Comté on the Saône River about 25 kilometers northwest of Besançon, the diocesan seat, and close to the border with Burgundy .5 Her father, Jean-Baptiste Caissel, died when she was around eight, leaving her and her siblings under the control of their mother, Benigne d’Arch. With the exception of the fourth daughter,Anne-Alexandrine,who married Jean-Baptiste Dubon of Gray, one after another of Benigne’s children entered religion—probably at her insistence and certainly to her satisfaction . Étienne became a Premonstratensian; Claude-François, a secular priest;Marguerite-Thérèse,a Carmelite under the name Thérèse-Augustine; Sabine, an uncloistered Ursuline; and Marie-Thérèse, a Franciscan Tertiary.6 In the summer of 1682 Benigne d’Arch decided that the time had come to settle Aimée. According to the sworn testimony she gave eighteen years later,the mother informed her daughter that “she needed to think of choosing a life status, and that the best one was religion, for the place was full of soldiers who had dishonored many virgins, even well-born and rich ones, and she [Benigne] feared that a similar disgrace would befall her [Aimée].”7 Benigne naturally had in mind a particular destination: the Carmelite con3 . On the recruitment, miserable life, and high death rate of common soldiers and sailors, see Parker, Showalter, and Gudmundsson. 4. The quoted phrase comes from Pos. 220 (9 July 1701), Bisuntin., Caissel, translated examination of witnesses, manuscript, 10 (testimony of Aimée’s sister Anne-Alexandrine Caissel Dubon, 22 January 1700). This witness reported her mother’s words. 5. Her date of birth is inferred from a notary’s comment about signatures on the instrument of agreement between her mother and the Carmelite convent dated 21 July 1682 about financial arrangements for her entry: “that of the said Aimée Caissel . . . appears to us to have been written by an insecure and trembling hand, even though the said Aimée was then twenty years old.” Loose sheet, unpaginated (deposition of Bonaventure Joy, 25 January 1700). France had acquired FrancheComt é, previously held by Spain, in the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678). 6. Marie-Thérèse’s secular name is not given. The fifth daughter, unnamed, died unmarried around 1675. Translated examination of witnesses, 6...