From the Cloister to the State

Fontevraud and the Making of Bourbon France, 1642-1100

Annalena Müller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367714543
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000436297
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the Cloister to the State examines the French order of Fontevraud, one of the largest monastic networks under female leadership in medieval and early modern Europe.

Founded in 1100 and comprised of both monks and nuns, the order had grown to consist of at least seventy-eight priories by the late Middle Ages. Endowed with vast territorial possessions throughout western France, Fontevraud became one of the most powerful religious institutions in the country. However, unaware of its institutional might and economic wealth, scholars have tended to focus on Fontevraud's seemingly unusual gender hierarchy, while bypassing inquiries on practices of abbatial authority in Fontevraud and beyond. This book reveals medieval Fontevraud as an aristocratic cloister where noble women governed. It also discusses the value of Fontevraud's extensive network for the geopolitical ambitions of the dukes of Brittany, the counts of Bourbon-Vendôme, and, during the Wars of Religion, the kings of France. In addition to Fontevraud's political role during the Wars of Religion, the book also examines the order's reforms implemented by Marie de Bretagne and her successors Renée and Louise de Bourbon-Vendôme. These Bourbon abbesses centralized the order's administration, cut the ties between priories and local aristocratic families, and successfully established the Bourbon-Vendômes as the only patrons of the vast and wealthy network.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of medieval and early modern history, as well as those interested in political history and the history of religion.

Part I
Reshaping the Myth

1 1642 or: The Making of Abbatial Absolutism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152088-1

In 1645, the abbess of Fontevraud, Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon, sent two of her monks to the monastery of St. Trinité de Vendôme to steal a letter that stained the reputation of Fontevraud’s founder, Robert of Arbrissel.¹ At that time, the abbess sought to obtain Robert’s canonization. The endeavor was supported in high places. The English queen, Henrietta of France, and the French king, Louis XIII, who were the abbess’ half-brother and half-sister, respectively, petitioned the pope for Robert’s canonization.² However, even the highest political support would be in vain if the curia grew aware that parts of Robert of Arbrissel’s life and teaching had violated Church doctrine. For the Catholic Church to formally recognize somebody as a saint, the life and writings of the person in question have to be in strict accordance with faith and morals.³ Robert of Arbrissel’s life had been far from that, and the letter at St. Trinité de Vendôme proved it.

In the letter, written around the time of Fontevraud’s foundation, the abbot of Vendôme, Geoffroy (c. 1070–1132), criticized Robert for his relations with women.⁴ According to Geoffroy, Robert was guilty of two sins. The first lay in his disparate treatment of the women in his entourage – Robert seemed to care only for some, while letting others go hungry and thirsty.⁵ Robert’s second sin was greater yet: He regularly slept in the midst of his female disciples, thus constantly exposing himself to carnal desires, seeking to martyr his flesh without giving in to temptation. This sexual asceticism, which Geoffroy called “a fruitless kind of martyrdom”⁶ and that scholars of early Christianity know as syneisaktism, was more than just a dangerous habit in the eyes of the abbot of Vendôme. It was a heresy, conciliarly condemned since the fourth century AD.⁷ All in all, Geoffroy’s letter was a reminder that Fontevraud’s charismatic founder had been a pugnacious man of God whose practice of faith had been a thorn in the side of many of his contemporary churchmen; 550 years later, Robert’s canonization was thus all but certain – and, in the end, it indeed never materialized. Yet, in 1645 Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon was determined to obtain it, and she was willing to go to great lengths to erase traces of Robert of Arbrissel’s unorthodoxy.⁸

However, the letter was not the only document which was subject to abbatial censorship at that time. Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon proved to be an avid constructor of Fontevraud’s institutional memory. Her abbacy saw the rewriting of the order’s earliest history. In the process, the abbess had some historical documents destroyed, numerous censored, and several narrative histories about Fontevraud’s origin commissioned. The objective of these narrative histories, in particular, was not so much to render an accurate image of Fontevraud’s historic reality in the antiquarian tradition of her time. Rather, they were meant to provide Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon’s monarchic monastic government with a historic tradition and thus legitimization.

The interest in Fontevraud’s early history under Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon was a direct response to internal quarrels with Fontevraud’s monks, who, at the time, opposed abbatial authority which they deemed had grown too excessive. The image of Fontevraud and its founder rendered in these histories outlasted Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon’s abbacy and the order’s existence. It continues to shape modern perceptions of Fontevraud. Outside the narrow circle of specialists in Fontevrist history, scholars tend to perceive Fontevraud as an unusual monastic order where women ruled and men served them, a place where medieval gender hierarchy was turned upside down. Yet, this image reflects the narratives composed in the seventeenth century rather than Fontevraud’s medieval reality. Any quest to understand medieval Fontevraud and its founder, Robert Arbrissel, therefore needs to start in the seventeenth century with a close look at the construction of Fontevrist memory and the context in which it took place.

When Jeanne-Baptiste became abbess of Fontevraud in 1637, she inherited a monastic network whose internal crises had been somewhat of a public drama for the past thirty years. Since the second half of the fifteenth century, royal appointments rather than elections had determined succession to Fontevraud’s abbacy, and Fontevraud Abbey had increasingly become a place of secular politics rather than religious contemplation. Just how far Fontevraud’s internal secularization had proceeded became obvious when Henry IV appointed Antoinette d’Orléans-Longueville as coadjutrix and future abbess in 1602. The devout Antoinette made no secret of her disdain for Fontevraud’s worldly ways, and in 1617, she led a group of observant nuns to break away from Fontevraud. The schism and subsequent foundation of the Filles du Calvaire involved some of the period’s most illustrious figures, including Richelieu and his confidant, Père Joseph. A few years after the schism, Fontevraud’s monks rose against what they perceived as abbatial absolutism, which, long in the making, became reality under Antoinette’s successors Louise II and Jeanne-Baptiste. The following pages will approach Fontevraud in its seventeenth-century period of crisis and shed light on Fontevraud Abbey at a time when the tension between politics and religion irrefutably settled with the political. It was before this background that the rewriting of Fontevraud’s early history and of its founder took place. So, it is this seventeenth-century background with which this study of medieval Fontevraud shall start.

Order in crisis

In 1602, King Henry IV appointed Antoinette d’Orléans-Longueville coadjutrix of Fontevraud. The office of coadjutrix had only existed in Fontevraud since the second half of the sixteenth century and is best understood as a sort of vice abbacy that came with the right of succession following the death of the acting abbess.⁹ At the time of Antoinette’s nomination, royal appointments to ecclesiastical offices rather than elections were an established practice in France. Since the Concordat of Bologna (1516), the king of France had the right to fill vacant bishoprics and abbacies with candidates of his choice. Politically motivated appointments to France’s 111 bishoprics and nearly 600 abbeys, corruption, and a spiritual decline of the French Church were unsolicited by-products of the royal control over the ecclesiastical infrastructure.¹⁰

Seventeenth-century Fontevraud was a mirror of the close entanglement between political strategy and religious institutions in France. Its abbacy had been firmly in the hand of the Bourbons since 1491, and the number of aristocratic women was high also among the abbey’s cloister nuns. Fontevraud had long been a place of political might and many Fontevrists, accustomed to wealth and luxury, had little taste for religious austerity. Fontevraud’s first seventeenth-century crisis began in 1605, when Antoinette d’Orléans-Longueville arrived at Fontevraud Abbey, three years after her initial appointment, to serve as coadjutrix to Eléonore de Bourbon (1575–1611). Although Antoinette’s appointment had been a political choice, her observant religiosity was sincere, and it was the latter rather than the former that proved to be a misfit for Fontevraud’s aristocratic cloister.

Antoinette (1572–1618) was the daughter of Léonor d’Orléans-Longueville (1540–1573) and Marie de Bourbon (1539–1601). Through her father, Antoinette was related to the House of Valois, which had ruled France until 1589, and through her mother to the newly ruling House of Bourbon – Antoinette and Henry IV shared the same great-grandfather.¹¹ Her ancestry made Antoinette an ideal candidate for coadjutrix and future abbess of Fontevraud. With her appointment, Henry IV sought to kill two birds with one stone: to calm raised tempers after the recent separation from his Valois wife and satisfy the Orléans-Longuevilles’ demand for a prestigious office.¹² As typical for the time, Antoinette’s own desires counted little in the decision-making process.

At the time of her nomination, Antoinette served as prioress of the Feuillantines of Toulouse. The Feuillants and their female branch, the Feuillantines, had originated as a branch of the Cistercian order before they were established as an independent congregation in 1587. Unlike the Fontevrists, they practiced a lifestyle of extreme asceticism and strict observance of the Benedictine rule. Between September and Easter, the Feuillants lived on only one meal a day, which, during Lent, was limited to water and bread. They resented the world and strove to imitate the Desert Fathers and Jesus himself whose martyrdom they sought to relive through mortification of their bodies and a life in voluntary poverty.¹³

Antoinette d’Orléans-Longueville had actively and consciously chosen the Feuillantines and their austere interpretation of religious life. In 1599, a young widow, she left her son and fled Paris and her family, who pressured her to remarry, and traveled to the Feuillantine convent in Toulouse. There, she took the veil immediately upon arrival. Only a few days after Antoinette had taken monastic vows, a royal dispatch arrived at the convent with letters of King Henry IV forbidding her to become a nun. Yet as the royal order arrived after the fact, the king of France and Antoinette’s family had to accept her choice.¹⁴ However, Antoinette’s family deemed the Feuillantines as unbecoming of her social status, and in 1602 they obtained Antoinette’s nomination as coadjutrix of Fontevraud from Henry IV. Antoinette contested her appointment in both Rome and Paris and succeeded to delay her transfer for three years. Only when the pope threatened her with excommunication, she eventually left Toulouse for Fontevraud in October 1605 to assume the office of coadjutrix to Eléonore de Bourbon.¹⁵

Antoinette resented Fontevraud’s worldly ways. The splendor of the abbey, the omnipresent wealth, and the Fontevrists’ lenient interpretation of monastic austerity were worlds apart from the Feuillantines’ strict observance and rigid monastic discipline. Moreover, being coadjutrix implied becoming abbess, and being abbess, first and foremost, meant administrating the large Fontevrist network, it meant managing the order’s priories and its vast and diverse patrimony, and it implied regular negotiations with the king and the realm’s most powerful families. In short, being abbess of Fontevraud was a political and administrative task that left only limited room for the religious contemplation and withdrawal from the world that Antoinette d’Orléans-Longueville desired.

Throughout her tenure as coadjutrix, Antoinette demonstrated her disdain for Fontevraud’s lax discipline. To appease her, Pope Paul V had granted Antoinette the right to keep wearing the Feuillantines’ white habit, which made her visually stand out among Fontevraud’s inhabitants all dressed in black. Her rigorous observance of supplementary fast days and the rejection of her private cell, which she deemed too ostentatious, ensured her only limited popularity at best.¹⁶ Her vociferous attempts to introduce additional fast days for all cloister nuns along with her s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Reshaping the Myth
• Part II Fontevraud and the Making of Bourbon France
• Part III Forming and Re-Forming Fontevraud
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Les Vies et Registres des Abbesses de Fontevraud
• Fontevrist priories
• Bibliography
• Index