Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France

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Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France

Susan Broomhall


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Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Susan Broomhall

© Susan Broomhall 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN–13: 978–1–4039–3681–3 hardback ISBN–10: 1–4039–3681–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Broomhall, Susan. Women and religion in sixteenth-century France / Susan Broomhall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3681–1 (cloth) 1. Women in Christianity – France – History – 16th century. 2. Christian women – Religious life – France – History – 16th century. I. Title. BR845.B76 2006 274.406082—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1 Institutional Religion

9

2 Understanding the Divine

46

3 Religious Knowledge

70

4 Visible Religious Practices

96

5 Religious Politics and Violence

118

Conclusions

143

Notes

146

Select Bibliography

176

Index

200

v

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Acknowledgements It is always a pleasure to acknowledge the generous contributions made to this project by others than myself. This project was funded with support from a French government postgraduate scholarship, an Australian Research Council fellowship and The University of Western Australia Research Grants Scheme. The arguments of this work have germinated over a long time and some aspects have been explored in more detail in essays previously published. I would like to thank the publishers, editors and journals for their kind permission to allow excerpts to be reprinted here: ‘Tracing the Fortune of Lady Reason in the Sixteenth Century: Representations in Women’s Prose Literature’, Nottingham French Studies, Women and Fortune in Medieval Literature (ed.) Catherine Attwood, Autumn, 1999, pp. 159–69; ‘ “In my opinion”: Charlotte de Minut and Female Political Discussion in Print in Sixteenth-Century France’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 31, 1, Spring 2000, 25–45; ‘Models of Apostolic Speech by Nuns in the Later Sixteenth-century Catholic World’, Magistra: A Journal of Female Spirituality, 9, 1, 2003, 1–51. Areas of discussion that I will be addressing in more detail in forthcoming publications (several in collaboration with Colette H. Winn) are acknowledged in the text. The staff of archives and libraries across France have assisted in many ways through this project beyond their usual professional call of duty: from correspondence about holdings via email, allowing a small infant to be nursed in the foyer, even staying back after closing hours to keep the archives open on my last day at the Archives municipales in Toulouse. I would like to thank here the personnel of the Bibliothèque nationale, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Archives nationales, Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime, Archives municipales de Rouen, Archives départementales d’Indre-et-Loire, Archives municipales de Tours, Bibliothèque municipale de Tours, Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique, Archives municipales de Nantes, Archives départementales de Vienne, Archives municipales de Poitiers, Archives départementales du Loiret, Archives municipales d’Orléans, Archives départementales du Rhône, Archives municipales de Lyon, Archives départementales de l’Hérault, Archives municipales de Montpellier, Archives départementales du Gard; Archives départementales de l’Aude, Archives départementales de la Haute-Garonne, Archives municipales de Toulouse, Archives vii

viii Acknowledgements

départementales du Tarn-et-Garonne, Archives départementales du Tarn, Archives départementales du Cher, and Archives départementales de Versailles. The School of Humanities at The University of Western Australia and the staff of the Scholars’ Centre at the Reid Library have been ever willing to assist with enquiries for obscure texts. Judy Berman, Toby Burrows, Patricia Crawford, Philippa Maddern, Jeremy Martens and Pam Sharpe have provided encouragement, readings and a supportive, child-friendly environment in which to work. Friends and colleagues have heartened me to continue this study and been kind enough to exchange ideas and work with me: I would particularly like to thank Donna Donald, Sarah Ferber, Lyndal Roper, Joshua Rosenthal, Stephanie Tarbin, Eliane Viennot and Claire Walker. Sybil Jack generously lent me copies of relevant texts and her photos of the Fontevrault chapter house to study. Colette H. Winn has been an inspiring colleague in our on-going projects on women, writing and religion. I thank Julia McLaren for her efficient research services and enthusiasm, and Joan Noble for uplifting conversations and scanned documents about nuns, writing, research, and travel in France. My parents, Margaret and Andrew Broomhall, otherwise known as the ‘Broomhall Research Travel Fund’, whose willingness to spend holidays in French provincial cities with interesting archives has made research much less lonely and certainly enabled me to pursue archival enquiries further than otherwise. I dedicate this text to Fionn, who knew more about the interior of French archives than any three-month-old should; and, as always, to Tim, whose patience evidently knows no bounds.

Introduction

This work considers how French women participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. It examines how they contributed to the culture, meanings and developments in institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters over the course of the century. It seeks to understand what mattered in religious life for women, why women acted in the ways they did, and how they perceived their activities. Significantly, this study shifts the focus from what men said about women’s religious participation1 to what women themselves said about their contributions to religion as this can be interpreted through their writings, speech and deeds. In addition, this work explores women primarily as individuals who acted according to their own understandings, contexts and opportunities, but it also seeks to examine how female religious participation and experiences represented both the collective experience of women of particular confessional identities and women as a group of participants in sixteenth-century life more generally. In doing so, the study is concerned to examine the impact of gender on understandings and experiences of Christianity in sixteenth-century France.

Religion as a social and individual experience Exploring these questions involves bringing together two major areas of scholarly interest and vast literature in recent times. These can be broadly categorised as studies of specifically French religious experiences, and of women and gender during the century of the Reformations in Europe. Both these sets of analyses can be subdivided into many more discrete areas of examination, such as the experiences of monastic 1

2


establishments; women’s religious agency; the institutional responses of the Catholic Church; the gendering of religious and moral regulation; Protestant struggles first for rights and recognition, then governance of particular regions; female theological and spiritual discourse; or the religious sensibilities of the laity. These studies have adopted different methodologies and concerns from institutional, economic, social and cultural approaches to detailed textual analysis, to name a few. Possibilities for new understandings of the period arise from cross-fertilisation of these bodies of research, as I shall explore. Within the historiography of the French religious changes of the sixteenth century, particular debate has arisen over the conceptualisation of religion, and thus approaches to its study, as primarily a social or individual experience.2 My focus in this text on women as protagonists in religion and its transformations considers their actions as both highly individual expressions and as mediated by a broader collective. The notion of religion as a social and collective phenomenon, characterised by Mack P. Holt’s succinct description ‘that ideas, identities, perceptions and ideologies are created and made, not by individuals as completely free agents to be sure, but as collective negotiations’,3 need not imply that highly individual expressions have no place in such an approach. This study interprets both the words and deeds of individual literate and illiterate women as meaningful sources of evidence, with the intention of accessing the religious sensibilities of a range of believers. In doing so, this study canvasses a broad social, geographical, professional and confessional range of women’s religious activities to uncover deeply personal and diverse relationships to the divine (and sometimes the diabolical). Thierry Wanegffelen’s recent study of religious sensibilities, analysing the intuitive manner in which individuals felt themselves to be Christian, is useful for a study of the myriad meanings that women created of their faith.4 Nevertheless, my survey also reveals the extent to which women’s religious contributions were mediated by varied social contexts, including by contemporary notions of appropriate female conduct held by both women and men.5 It is perhaps useful to add here that although women did express a diverse range of understandings about their own religious relationships, they still typically identified themselves, and were classed as such by contemporaries, as belonging to distinct confessional identities. Sometimes the specific identity might vary between the woman and her contemporaries, or might change over time. Distinctions between these identities, nuanced according to the era under discussion, will thus be used over the course of this work.

Introduction

3

Continuities and change A second debate in the historiography concerns the arguments for continuity or change over this period: in the religious beliefs of the laity generally, and in the experiences of women as Catholics or Protestants. Analysis of women and gender has become an area of increasing scholarly interest, and female historians have been particularly instrumental in shaping the recent historiography of the century of the Reformations. Early debate centred on the nature of changes brought by the Protestant Reformation and assessed how they might have decreased or enhanced women’s opportunities for religious and social expression.6 Early studies by Nancy L. Roelker emphasised the potential appeal of Protestantism for French noblewomen. Protestantism brought some women freedom from monastic life without vocation and new leadership roles as preachers and writers in the early days of the Reformation movements.7 Furthermore, historians have examined the development of evolving Catholic and Protestant rhetoric of maternity and family life, which might have altered the perceptions of women’s roles as wives and mothers during the period.8 Kathryn Norberg and Barbara B. Diefendorf have examined the diverse impact of new Catholic Reformation ideology on familial practices and relationships.9 Ellen Macek and Jenifer Umble have focused on women’s opportunities for spiritual expression through martyrdom.10 Research also emphasised the disadvantages which removal of Catholic rituals and practices brought about for women. Merry E. Wiesner and Marilyn Oliva have explored the prospects for women who were forced out of a much-loved convent life by the dissolution of monasteries in Protestant areas.11 Spiritual expression open to women may also have been reduced as veneration of saints and religious confraternal activities were removed from Reformed practices. Assessments have become more complex as historians have learned more about the wide range of potential possibilities and disadvantages which the religious changes could create for women, depending on their social status, location and individual situation.12 The possible attractions of Protestantism for French women, for example, were later nuanced by Natalie Zemon Davis’s study of women in urban France where she did not find evidence of the same causes of appeal as Roelker had argued for noblewomen.13 Moreover, both Roelker and Marshall Wyntjes’ work observed how, as Protestantism became increasingly institutionalised, women’s roles were often restricted.14 Raymond A. Mentzer Jr has carefully analysed women’s restrictions under the institutionalised French Calvinist churches, although he stresses the need to assess the

4


changes of status to reformed women in France in the context of such factors as regional variances, chronology and whether they were in a place where Huguenots constituted the majority or were numerous, or in a minority.15 While medieval Catholicism tended to celebrate virginity as the supreme virtue, historians have debated whether women benefited from the new status accorded to wives and mothers by first Protestant and then Catholic reformers. Lyndal Roper, studying early modern Germany, has argued that since these roles were subservient to men, women were more controlled and less free to pursue a role outside the family. Gender relations were a key concern at the Reformation, she has argued.16 Certainly, there were differences in women’s roles and expectations between Catholic and Protestant ideologies, but questions of advantages and disadvantages for women have often been negated by the evidence of continuity in women’s religious experiences and perception as religious agents across Europe. Jean Delumeau’s theory that the clerical imposition of Catholic Reformation beliefs on the French populace was a slow process has provoked much debate.17 In particular, Delumeau’s vision of ecclesiastic authorities increasingly removing aspects of religious life from the laity in order to control belief has connected to discussions about women’s confessional experiences. Evidence for women’s submission to increased regulation under both Protestantism and Catholic Reformation regimes would seem to support arguments for disadvantageous change in the era, but also continuity in women’s lesser status.18 Susan Karant-Nunn, in her work on Zwickau, Patricia Crawford for England and Susan M. Johnson in her study of Luther’s lasting impact on the European family thus argue that continuity reflects the experiences of women’s lives both before and after the Reformation.19 Similar social and cultural attitudes towards women were reinforced by new authoritative bodies so that in many cases expectations of women’s religious roles remained largely unchanged by the institutional and theological transformations.

Women as agents in religious history A more recent historiographical trend has been to produce detailed studies of the involvement of specific women, and groups of women, during the era of the Reformations. This approach focuses on women as agents in religious history and paints a more dynamic picture of their experience of religion at this period.20 Convent communities have been the attention of special focus, and indeed they constitute one of the

Introduction

5

most accessible groups of women of the era because of the extensive extant archival documentation by and about them. In areas that experienced the Catholic Reformation, historians such as Merry E. Wiesner, Gabriella Zarri and P. Renée Baernstein have examined the ways in which women negotiated their new roles, functions and perception in the Church and community.21 Both the experiences of women in contemplative orders and the newly emerging active Orders of the Catholic Reformation have been explored in such works as Claire Walker’s study of monastic institutions founded by Catholic English women on the Continent, Ulrike Strasser’s examination of the negotiations for meaningful spiritual life by female religious communities in Munich, and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt’s studies of Spanish convents’ continued interactions with the wider community even after the tighter regulations brought about by the Council of Trent.22 Women’s involvement in the religious politics of New World colonisation as missionaries and patrons of such movements have been explored in the work of Natalie Zemon Davis, Electa Arenal, Stacey Schlau and Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela.23 Examination of many individual convents across Europe has led historians to observe the flexible and varied implementation of institutional regulations by local communities. Increasingly, historians are calling attention to the complexities of the application of Tridentine decrees across Europe and focusing on local specificities. Craig Harline, in his work on convents in the Low Countries, argues that we should see Trent as a guideline rather than a blueprint for changes in female monastic life.24 In monastic surveys, historians have perhaps unintentionally depicted the history of convent life in France as one with a paradigmatic rupture in the sixteenth century, and a break in traditions and practices. Whilst there are a number of broad-ranging studies examining women and the religious life in medieval Europe, most end at the point of the mid-century Tridentine reforms.25 Rarely are the effects of the challenges of early sixteenth-century reforming ideas, civil wars from 1562 to 1598 and late sixteenth-century Catholic renewal explored as they impacted on monastic life. Works of French women religious in the CounterReformation era have focused largely on the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Orders and women’s experiences within them.26 Rarely do these studies bridge the divide between medieval and early modern Catholic female monasticism.27 This study, by contrast, analyses the politics of female religious life in sixteenth-century France and may help to identify how the religious changes of that century were experienced by contemporary nuns.

6


Moreover, the religious experiences of French nuns have often been discussed in isolation from those of secular women of their era, and lay women of different confessional identities separate from each other. As the title of this text implies, my study concerns women participating in Christian religious practices across a broad spectrum. Its aim is not to assess which religious persuasion brought more advantages to women as a group, but rather how women engaged with the spectrum of religious and spiritual possibilities before them. It seems likely that women’s opportunities for participation in pious, spiritual and institutional developments over the century differed according to financial, social, regional and a multitude of individual circumstances. The situation of French women’s religious activities in this period is further complicated by the concurrent effects of civil and religious unrest. From 1562 to 1598, France experienced an unprecedented period of civil disruption in the wars of religion fought intermittently throughout this time. The intention of this work is to focus on the participation of women both in and outside of monastic communities, and across the confessional divide, in different institutional and social contexts, over the course of the sixteenth century. Finally, this study aims to integrate modes of female religious expression in the wider field of the French religious experiences of the sixteenth century – assessing the impact of contemporary ideas about the sexes on this history, and recognising women’s contributions in the period. This follows the calls from historians such as Merry E. Wiesner for a need to integrate findings about women’s roles and responses into a broader gender analysis of the Reformation itself.28

Sources for a study of women and religion The purpose of the present study, then, is to assess the realities and representations of women’s religious life in sixteenth-century France. It analyses and interprets the evidence provided by women’s own writings and actions for their religious participation. A. N. Galpern has been critical of Delumeau’s depiction of the French laity as barely Christianised, arguing that we must judge not by standards of a later age but by whether the laity believed itself to be Christian.29 A similar concern underlies the present study. I want to ask not whether contemporary men, particularly leading theologians, thought women’s activities were appropriate, relevant or influential, but rather how women themselves thought that their words and deeds mattered. Women’s compositions and voices are thus embedded at the heart of such a project.

Introduction

7

Historians are increasingly turning to the evidence produced by women themselves about their views of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The writings of nuns have been given new recognition as literary and historical sources of significance by such scholars as Charlotte Woodford, Wiesner, K. J. P. Lowe, Jodi Bilinkoff and Alison Weber.30 The voices of religious women on church politics and spirituality, as well as the opportunities provided for such religious speech, have been a subject of recent focus. Phyllis Mack has likewise highlighted the importance of prophetic speech as a means of expression for radical Protestant women in England.31 Roper draws on insights from psychoanalysis to cultural anthropology in order to explore the meanings behind especially female witchcraft accusations and testimony, as she seeks to understand how men and women’s self-perceptions may have altered after the Reformation.32 In France, too, religion was a rich vein for female expression of various kinds – prophetic, literary, political, spiritual and familial among them. Much remains of women’s written expression of their activities and views in archival and literary sources. Material for such a study is wide and varied. The most common sources of evidence used so far to assess women’s views and activities stem from published documentation.33 These include women’s published and manuscript literary, devotional and political works. Female voices can be discerned and analysed in the cases of demonic possession and saintly female conduct, as these were described and circulated by contemporaries in published form. Convent archives too provide a wealth of documentation of female religious devotions, everyday practices and sometimes spiritual and literary compositions. Such communities form a significant part of the discussion and analysis of this text. Convents were one of the few female-only communities able to mobilise in favour or against religious activities, whose actions were recorded, whose members had knowledge and means to interact with institutional forces, making them key female contributors to sixteenth-century religion. However, this study also aims to include the religious expression of women who could not write for themselves. Something of their activities and opinions is captured in male-authored documents of the era, including chronicles, eyewitness accounts, ecclesiastical records, secular court archives and literary documents. The sources on which I focus are ones which present women’s voices, either written themselves or as they were recorded by men. These sources range from women’s memoirs, historical accounts, family records, their confrontations about religion in the streets and at war, to

8


their discussion about religion and faith in ecclesiastical, consistory and secular courts, witchcraft trials and during episodes of possession. All of these sources are mediated in particular ways. We may never reach the authentic voice of women of the Reformation century, but documents can be read with sensitivity to the contexts in which they were produced, to provide an understanding of female experiences and views. * * * The following study is divided into five chapters. The first explores women’s participation in the institutional hierarchy and regulation within the Catholic Church and later the French Calvinist Church. Chapter 2 analyses how women contributed to the body of knowledge about the supernatural by their interpretations of matters both divine and diabolical. Chapter 3 focuses on women’s thoughts about intellectual and doctrinal aspects of religious knowledge, particularly through their written work. Chapter 4 uncovers women’s involvement in religious practices, shaping meanings of active spiritual expression over the century. Finally, Chapter 5 is devoted to female participation in political and military aspects of religious life, especially during the latter half of the century when France experienced violent conflict and much destruction. The varying lengths of the chapters reflect both the availability of source material to conduct analysis and the extent of scholarly interest these issues have sustained to date. In this respect, some chapters offer highly exploratory readings of the material to hand and present as much a call for future studies as a conclusive judgement on the evidence uncovered thus far.

1 Institutional Religion

This chapter examines women’s participation in the creation of institutional aspects of the Catholic and French Calvinist churches over the course of the sixteenth century. Its focus on female contributions draws attention to an area of women’s religious life that has received little attention to date. Although institutional hierarchies of both confessions were dominated by male officials, it does not follow that women necessarily had no say in how these structures were constituted. This chapter assumes that the institution of ‘the Church’ in each confession is the product of the individuals who interacted with it, although these individuals had varying degrees of ability to affect change and speak authoritatively to and through institutional mechanisms. It explores how women of various social levels sought to engage in developing the formal structures of religion during the sixteenth century and to analyse their subsequent impact on the institutions. Sources of evidence for women’s experiences and actions interacting with the institutional hierarchy and developments of the Christian churches are relatively abundant. In this chapter, much of the focus lies with women in contemplative religious life, who produced significant records of their understandings of religious experiences and practices. Sixteenth-century nuns produced hagiographies, financial and account manuals, necrologies, devotional and spiritual works, historical texts and eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence. Institutional regulatory documents composed by male superiors and officials also offer opportunities to read the voices of women, lay and religious, as they debated with the hierarchy of both the Catholic and French Calvinist Churches. Overwhelmingly, such texts provide us with evidence of women’s persuasive and articulate demonstration of their desire to participate in the organisation and meaning of Christian life in their era. 9

10 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France

Renewing the Church In the late 1550s, Françoise Guyard, a nun at the first Annonciade convent in Bourges, undertook to compile a history of the convent’s foundation and particularly of its virtuous founder, Jeanne de France (1464–1505). The Order of the Annonciades was established in 1502 by Jeanne, the divorced wife of Louis XII (1464–1505). This was the only newly established monastic Order in France during this period. That it was founded by a woman deserves some investigation, for it provided opportunities for a range of women to participate – first as founders of the Order and its various houses, and as later members of its convents – in the renewal of the Catholic Church and its concepts of female monasticism at the turn of the sixteenth century. The contribution of women to this development has received much less analysis than the better known seventeenth-century Tridentine monastic reforms and renewal. When Guyard undertook to produce a history of the Order’s foundress and foundation, it was as the last of the nuns professed under Jeanne de France’s leadership were dying, and during the height of the early religious fighting of the 1560s. Guyard’s work drew on eyewitness accounts and original archives, as well as published chronicles of France, to establish Jeanne’s biography. Although her primary focus was a hagiography of Jeanne, the work is a detailed, female-authored account of the creation of the Annonciades’ rule, lifestyle and early professions. This section explores how Guyard’s text structured the views and memories of the first sisters about their experiences as foundational members of this new monastic Order in the Catholic Church. Guyard’s work was founded on the eyewitness testimonies of those intimately connected with the development of the new Order. These included its first spiritual father (and Guyard’s uncle), the Blessed Gabriel-Maria (Gilbert Nicolas), the convent’s confessors, and Jeanne’s retainers. Yet primarily Guyard relied heavily on female memories collected in the convent from the Annonicade mothers who were the original founding sisters. Her evidence of Jeanne’s saintly behaviour and of her valiant struggle to establish the Order was convincing to readers, she argued, precisely because everything she included came from an eyewitness.1 Some of the male testimonies, Guyard explained, had previously been recorded, but here was the first occasion that the voices of Jeanne’s founding nuns had been brought together for the historical record. Guyard was in fact racing against time to commit the memoirs of the dying sisters to paper. The last of these women, Sister Marguerite Blandine, died in 1563. Guyard implied that the sisters might even have

Institutional Religion 11

been accused of the sin of negligence if they did not record their precious memories. Thus the text was constructed as a duty of the sisters to provide an eyewitness testament to Jeanne’s holy status. The sisters could not be accused of arrogance in demonstrating their participation in the creation of the Order; it demonstrated instead their unique ability to testify to Jeanne’s behaviour and actions. Indeed, the text concluded with the attestation not of a male supervisor but of the last surviving original sister, Marguerite Blandine, who signed the text with an attestation of its accuracy.2 It comes as no surprise in a document intended to promote Jeanne for sanctity that her impetus to found a new Order should be foregrounded at every stage. The Annonciade convents were the product of a new Order, founded in 1502 by the charismatic royal figure Jeanne de France. Jeanne, daughter of Louis XI, is best known as the unfortunate, crippled wife of Louis XII, who was not only publicly mistreated by her husband, but quickly repudiated after his accession to the throne in order that he might marry his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany. The divorce in 1498 was a highly political manoeuvre designed to solidify the union of the previously independent Brittany (of which Anne was ruling duchess) with the French state. Jeanne was given generous living allowances and land entitlements, including the Duchy of Berry, and used her newfound freedom and resources to support a number of religious endeavours. One of these was the foundation of a new contemplative Order for women, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, known eventually as the Annonciades (that is, celebrating the moment of the Annunciation), which expanded from Bourges to seven further convents in France and the Low Countries in its first thirty years of its existence.3 While elite women could and did establish new monastic houses of existing Orders, Jeanne’s insistence on the foundation of a completely new Order, according to the instructions she had received in a vision from the Virgin Mary, was a radical departure from contemporary female religious behaviour. Perhaps more unusually, the depiction of her character in the Annonciade chronicle was not particularly flattering by comparison to other contemporary hagiographic texts of elite women.4 The chronicle portrayed a woman who knew the value of her royal status and who expected to receive the respect that this status demanded. Jeanne was revealed in the Annonciade chronicle to be a domineering and strongminded individual. Although, in the practical steps taken to found the convent and Order, it is clearly Gabriel-Maria who wrote the first rule of the Order and who dealt with ecclesiastical authorities in Rome,


whether these are indications that Jeanne was bound by religious conventions about the limitations of female participation in the institutional and theological development of the Church, or simply the actions of a member of the royal family who expected her wishes to be fulfilled by others, is less clear. Jeanne was not beyond feigning illness when her spiritual advisor, Gabriel-Maria, initially refused to help fulfil her vision, claiming her death would be on his conscience: ‘My Father, you are the cause I am ill, and perhaps even of my death … why do you not help me then to achieve my desire to create an Order to the Virgin Mary? You make me languish.’5 Jeanne, as the chronicle demonstrated more than once, was not beyond using emotional blackmail to control and convince those who stood in her way. Financial and social power were also keys to Jeanne’s success. No new Orders had been founded for many years, so Jeanne’s vision was certainly radical. Gabriel-Maria described it in terms that would later be suitable for note in Guyard’s hagiographic text as ‘an act more divine than human’.6 Gabriel-Maria did not believe the Order would be approved by the Pope and encouraged her to focus her energies and enthusiasm for founding a convent of Poor Clares. Jeanne was not to be deterred. Her vision had spoken to her of an Order, not a convent. Indeed, the historian Bonnefoy has argued convincingly that Jeanne’s original schema was even more radical than that eventually approved and enacted. It seems probable that Jeanne’s original plan was for a mixed-sex Order in the style of Fontevrault.7 Moreover, it was Jeanne’s social and financial influence that enabled the Order to be established and the conventual buildings constructed. As one might expect from his niece, Gabriel-Maria’s role in the management and carrying out of Jeanne’s schema for the Order was also carefully documented. His hagiography, also composed by Guyard, was included in some manuscripts of the Annonciade chronicle. Yet their roles are defined quite distinctly. Although Gabriel-Maria was clearly responsible as an administrator for turning Jeanne’s vision into reality, Guyard’s chronicle firmly places the impetus and drive for the entire project with Jeanne. To put Jeanne’s achievement in some perspective, few women had her access to finances, connections and socially acceptable independence of male control to enable them to found an Order. Even by the terms of other elite women who were known for their piety, or even sanctity, her influence in an institutional context was exceptional. Near-contemporary aristocratic women such as Françoise d’Amboise, Marguerite de Lorraine and Louise de Savoie were each hailed in their time as devout and holy


women for their influence and patronage of monastic institutions. Yet all of them did so within the existing monastic environment and in much the way Gabriel-Maria expected to steer Jeanne’s enthusiasm. That is, Françoise d’Amboise, Duchess of Brittany, established convents of the existing Poor Clares Order and introduced the Carmelite Order to France in the later fifteenth century.8 Marguerite de Lorraine and Louise de Savoie both patronised and founded Poor Clares houses before themselves becoming members of existing monastic communities. All three women fulfilled dynastic and marital obligations first, and took religious vows in widowhood. Most significantly, a number of the women who were among the foundational members of the Annonciade Order can only be said to have joined because of strong coercion from Jeanne. One gains the sense in the chronicle that no one dared refuse her her wish. When GabrielMaria enlisted Macée Pourcelle, a governess from Tours, to help find suitable girls for Jeanne’s convent, Pourcelle warned him of the resistance they might face from relatives.9 But Gabriel-Maria assured her that ‘they would not refuse such a great princess’.10 When Jeanne invited the infirm Catherine Gauvinelle, a third-order Franciscan, to join the fledgling Order, Gauvinelle declined on the grounds that she would not be able to endure the austerity. When Jeanne refused to receive her response, the chronicle explained that Gauvinelle then accepted, since ‘the good girl dared not refuse such a princess twice’.11 Jeanne later decided that her fourteen-year-old attendant, Françoise de Mouhet, would make an excellent convert and set to work on her salvation. When Mouhet responded, ‘Madame, if God had given me the will, I would not resist it. Do not be unhappy with me if God calls me to the world. I hope that He will give me the grace to make my salvation as if in religion’, Jeanne ‘was stunned and the Reverend Father also that it was so difficult to convert her’.12 It is clear that Jeanne’s status as a daughter of a king, and a queen in her own right, went a long way to securing the outcome that she desired. The nuns’ description of Jeanne’s attempts to persuade them to a religious life point to a key dynamic of social power. In keeping with her social status, Jeanne appears to have expected the women to follow her notion of a newly inspired faith, not by mirroring her own religious endeavours themselves, but by becoming nuns of her Order. Thus the fervour of the women and girls Jeanne sought for her first community was to be expressed through the institutions of devotion and piety that Jeanne had devised for them. When Jeanne set to work convincing Mouhet of the merits of enclosed life, the girl resisted, explaining that


‘her heart did not tend towards devotion, but to worldliness, seeing that she was an only daughter with a single brother. And having many goods, she wanted to experience the prosperities of the world. And Madame was most annoyed about it.’13 Indeed, when Jeanne directed Gabriel-Maria to pursue her, Mouhet begged him not to importune her further, promising to serve Jeanne in the world as devotedly as in the convent.14 After such firm expressions of her conviction, it was considered a miracle when Mouhet eventually experienced a change of heart and accepted the opportunity to number among Jeanne’s select few. Yet Jeanne herself, it appears, was less certain of divine intervention since ‘the holy Lady had such great fear that someone would divert her that she hastened to accomplish her desire’.15 Moreover, ‘Madame made her keep it secret from her companions and those of her family, so that they could not impede it’.16 It is somewhat perplexing that Jeanne should want to keep such a miraculous conversion secret, yet on such points the chronicle offered little to explain Jeanne’s authoritarian behaviour other than her fervour. Although the sisters found it difficult to reject the compelling persuasion of Jeanne herself, the Annonciade chronicle also documented their own resistance to the social pressures and forces in their range of capabilities. Foremost amongst these were families unwilling to permit their daughters to enter contemplative life. It is possible that Guyard overemphasised the narrative of resistance to convent life among the wider community to demonstrate how the sisters prevailed with divinely inspired persistence. Family members sought out private meetings with the novices to persuade them to return to secular life. The Bodine family tried unsuccessfully to prevent at least one of their daughters from taking her final vow as a professed nun. Mouhet’s brother equally attempted to convince her of the great possessions and worldly riches she might enjoy beyond the cloister, but the inspired Mouhet rejected his arguments.17 In their own ways, the chronicle depicted how all the nuns participated in a religious struggle against different kinds of social pressures for the Annonciade Order to become a reality. Following Jeanne’s death in 1505, the development of the Annonciade Order over the course of the sixteenth century relied on the pre-existing combination of a competent administrator in Gabriel-Maria, powerful ecclesiastical and aristocratic support, and also on the religious women to carry the movement across France. It was the founding nuns who continued Jeanne’s work in establishing branches of the Annonicades, although it is clear that they relied on social networks established by Jeanne to do so. Successive bishops of Albi, Louis d’Amboise and his


nephew of the same name, provided the financial, ecclesiastical and social support to permit the creation of the Albi convent.18 Yet it was five of the original sisters from Bourges, Catherine Gauvinelle, Marguerite Blandine, Marguerite Bodine, Marie Garelle and Louise d’Aventigny, who claimed a particular significance as the founding members of the first new branch of the Order. As the chronicle indicated, it was no easy task to establish without the influence of Jeanne herself, and ‘when they were at Albi, they were forced themselves to see to the advance of the building works’.19 From Albi, many of the original sisters continued to progress the Order of the Annonciades at Rodez, Bordeaux and Agen. Guyard’s text indicated a desire to recognise women’s contribution to institutional religion by embedding women’s experiences in the religious narrative of their era. She worked to make women’s memories a valid source for religious history, by placing the collective eyewitness accounts of the founding nuns side by side with those of influential ecclesiastical officials and published male historians. The chronicle would seem to provide a vision of Jeanne as a proud, forceful and determined individual who commanded respect as a daughter of France and a queen, and who fully expected to participate in developing the ecclesiastical institution of the Catholic Church in France. Indeed, the dynamics of social status are critical to the foundation of the Annonicades in every way. Jeanne was royal, but the women who were responsible for telling her story and establishing her claim to sanctity were of lesser status. Although women at all levels recorded in the chronicle could passionately embrace the spirit of the new Order, the ways this could be demonstrated were distinctly different. Participation in developing religious institutions was shared by many women, although, as the chronicle made clear, the opportunities and methods of doing so were clearly demarcated along lines of social standing.

Claiming autonomy Social status was often a key determinant in other aspects of female monastic interactions with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The election of leaders, for example, was a fundamental issue for communities and could be critical in determining the monastery’s direction, programmes of reform and elite patronage. By the terms of the 1516 Concordat of Bologna, the French monarch obtained the right to nominate appointees to bishoprics, conventual priories, abbeys, and ecclesiastical benefices.20 Yet many convent communities contested the monarch’s imposition of an abbess of his choice on their establishment,


particularly where the right to elect their own abbess or prioress was granted in their rule. Moreover, in theory, convents within the Dominican Order were not considered benefices and were therefore not subject to the nomination of Pope or King.21 Later, the Tridentine reforms added weight to the claims of communities to choose their own leaders, since the Council of Trent had insisted on the community election of abbesses who were required to be 40 years or older. Increasingly, however, over the course of the sixteenth century, monarchs imposed their will across most female institutions. Yet the confusion in the situation of particular communities often allowed for a degree of flexibility in the interpretation and application of these notions. Religious women frequently engaged in the debates and politics concerning elections of community leaders. They could occasionally seize on these opportunities to claim a measure of autonomy, often to impose their notions of monastic reform within, and social interaction beyond, the institutional Church. Even before the Concordat, abbatial elections could be hotly contested and last decades, attesting to their significance for individuals, communities and dynastic progression alike. At Sainte-Croix de Poitiers, the election of Jeanne de Couhé in 1491 was challenged by two other claimants, Marguerite de Vivonne and Isabelle de Bourbon. Vivonne, a nun from Fontevrault, was supported by her brother, the seneschal of Poitou, who had sought to secure his sister’s appointment by arriving in person in the convent before an abbatial election had occurred. Undeterred, the nuns proceeded to vote their own candidate, the former prioress Couhé, as abbess. Vivonne responded by installing soldiers in the abbey where they remained for six months.22 Between 60 and 80 armed retainers with artillery pillaged the abbey with the complicity of André de Vivonne, in retaliation for the nuns’ refusal to elect his sister. None the less, by the nuns’ resistance, Vivonne was eventually forced to recognise the validity of their election, although the community in return agreed to pay a sizeable pension to Marguerite of 250 livres.23 Conflict continued within the abbey community. In 1511, Couhé, on her deathbed, was forced to secure a guarantee from Louis XII of royal protection for the abbey whilst papal bulls arrived to confirm Marie Berland as the next abbess, to whom Couhé had resigned the abbey. Indeed, by 1512, procedures had been instigated by several nuns who opposed the nomination of Berland.24 After 1516, many monastic houses experienced conflict between community and royal power in the matter of abbatial nominations. The opening lines of the chronicle written by nuns at the Benedictine abbey


of Beaumont-lès-Tours in the later sixteenth century identified it as one of the most problematic issues for the sisters over the entirety of the century. In that community, Françoise de Marrafin became abbess of Beaumont seemingly harmoniously on the resignation of her aunt in 1519. Yet Charlotte de la Trémoille met internal opposition when she came to be abbess in 1554 and was noted in the journal specifically as ‘abbess by nomination of the king’.25 Some convents attempted to beat the King to a nomination by proceeding to elect their own abbess first. In 1597, the nuns of the Dominican priory of Nôtre-Dame-de-Prouille near Carcassonne appear to have seized the initiative in electing a fellow sister, Antoinette de Voisins d’Ambres, as their abbess, insisting that 44 nuns had been present in the chapter to conduct a legitimate vote of the community. However, in 1604, a bull from Clement VIII reconfirmed the rights of the monarch by giving the abbey to Jeanne de Lorraine, who had been nominated by Henri IV.26 At Beaumont, the nuns developed a more strategic approach to securing their ‘rights’. Although the first royally nominated abbess, Charlotte de la Trémoille, appears eventually to have been received by the nuns as their community leader, at her death in 1572 the issue of internal monastic control of elections in the face of royal and dynastic interventions again arose. The chronicle described how the prioress and community presented a petition to their superiors to gain permission to elect a new abbess according to their former rights and privileges. The Saint-Martin superiors refused, telling them that such ancient privileges no longer took place and that the King retained the right to elect abbesses. ‘This notwithstanding’, announced the chronicle, ‘the nuns continued to conduct their election by written ballot, as per custom, and to make their choice’.27 This led to the community election of Magdaleine de Montmorency, a nun at Fontevrault, which the chronicle explained in the following terms: ‘and said the Sisters that she had been elected because Madame la constable her mother, and Messieurs her brothers had the power to uphold her right’.28 This strategy reveals one technique for seeking to secure the rights of the convent to elect its own leader, for in protecting their relative’s right to be abbess, the Montmorency family would have upheld the authority of the nuns to decide their abbess. However, in this instance the Montmorency family was not prepared to favour the convent over their dynastic opportunities for advancement through the monarch.29 Most abbatial elections were more complex than a conflict between convent community and the monarch. Familial politics played a pivotal


role in how these claims could be expressed. Convents could sustain and develop dynastic strategies in a number of ways. As Joanne Baker has argued, elite women created networks of kin and affinity within such institutions which they could use to promote familial interests through practical and spiritual means.30 At Beaumont, elite families competed for the prestige associated with patronage of the convent. At no point did the Beaumont chronicle seem surprised or unprepared to accept dynastic intervention, providing it came from a family with whom the convent community could work. The daughter of the Countess of Sancerre, Louise de Bueil, was deemed by the community as unsuitable, it seems, because of the countess’s unwillingness to acknowledge the community’s importance, even in symbolic terms, in accepting her daughter. The chronicle criticised the countess for blatantly attempting to bypass standard monastic procedures. In October 1573, she presented her daughter at Beaumont and insisted that she be made a novice immediately, then professed three days later.31 The chronicle’s authors appeared concerned by the evident lack of respect for the community’s decision-making processes, even if these were only symbolic. Resignation in favour of family members appears to have been a typical course of action to secure dynastic ambitions. Depending on the particular circumstances of the families and favours involved, this could be with the support of the conventual community, ecclesiastical authorities, King and Pope. When in 1565 the abbess of Sainte-Marie de l’Arpajonnie near Millau, Anne d’Arpajon, expressed a desire to resign the abbey in favour of her niece, Louise Ebrard de Saint-Sulpice, Louise’s brothers acted quickly to secure the position. As the Abbé de Marcilhac wrote to his brother, Jacques de Saint-Sulpice, ‘I did not want to lose this opportunity … as you know too well, in these things prompt action is required’, adding ‘ne quorumdam invidia mulieris animum a nobis alienare possit’.32 He had already prepared the requisite paperwork for his brother to present to the King and to have sent on to the Pope, securing for his sister ‘that she enjoy the fruits, revenues, and dependencies of the abbey all her life, as her aunt the previous abbess has, regardless of the edicts and ordinances which [the King] has made to the contrary’.33 The issue of who retained the privileges of the abbey in such situations could often constitute a further vexed question. Henri IV was forced to intervene when Jeanne de Bourbon resigned the abbacy of La Trinité in Poitiers in 1598 in favour of her niece Jeanne Guichard de Pairé, but insisted on maintaining her own honours and privileges as well.34 Of course, as the evidence for early sixteenth-century Sainte-Croix demonstrates, nuns by no means acted as a conglomerate group with


shared interests. When it served their particular purposes, some appealed to the King to intervene in elections. At the Benedictine Abbey of La Trinité in Poitiers in 1538, thirteen nuns used their absence from an election to invite the monarch to favour their chosen candidate instead. They composed a procuration indicating that they would not support Dauphine de Neuville as their abbess, since they had not been present at the time of the election. If it pleased the Pope and King to secure the abbey for Jeanne de Clermont however, they would be content to submit to her rule.35 For some convents, municipal politics was yet another factor in abbatial elections. In 1575, the Ouvriers de la Commune Clôture at Montpellier complicated the matter for the community of SainteCatherine-de Gilles, when the prioress Claire de Sarret was nominated by the four Protestant members of the committee, and Françoise du Gain by its three Catholic members.36 Sarret appears to have been eventually triumphant in this dispute, receiving the royal nomination from Henri III in 1576, in a document stating that her opponent had ‘no title at least a valid one’ and had ‘with the aid of her relatives and force of arms attempted to impose herself’.37 Abbatial candidates by no means demurred from the appearance of politicking involved in such nominations. Agnès de Saint-SimonSandricourt, a nun from Ronceray d’Angers, wrote to the Duchess of Thouars in October 1590, of her hopes to become the next abbess of Saint-Jean-de-Bonneval-lès-Thouars. She wrote quite openly of what she expected securing the position to entail, saying that, as well as the confirmation from the King, the governor was ‘of the opinion that I should set up a form of election to serve as a mémoire or instruction to the nuns there’. Moreover she had consulted with one ‘who understands beneficial matters well’ who told her to send any election result to Rome along with her nomination from the King.38 Yet Saint-Simon’s strategies were superseded, as the prioress of Saint Jean indicated in a letter seeking advice from a Parisian parliamentary lawyer later that October. The prioress Villebeton explained that the community had received a visit from Jeanne de Cossé who informed the convent that she had secured the necessary documents from the King for her niece to be installed as abbess. Pending her niece’s profession as a nun, Cossé left one Madame de La Fougereuze in her stead ‘who would take possession to govern the spiritual and temporal goods. I do not know if we can receive her, not having the provisions from Rome, moreover she is not of our reformed Order and cannot, it seems to me, hold the rank of abbess if she is not dispensed.’39 Villebeton begged the lawyer to send her word on the best course of action.


It would seem that there is very little evidence to demonstrate the application of Tridentine principles of abbatial procedures. Situations in which they appeared to be applied could also suit familial interests. At the Poor Clares convent in Toulouse in 1586, the abbess, Charlotte de Minut, justified her position of authority to speak out on behalf of her fellow sisters in published documents since she had achieved her position through an ‘election made by the majority of the nuns of our community; indeed by the common consent of all’.40 Her position had been obtained, she argued, through correct procedure and popular vote as stipulated by the Council of Trent. Her election by the nuns in December 1584 had been made in the presence of a raft of regional, male ecclesiastical and secular authorities, including Charlotte’s brother, the Baron du Castera, and members of their milieu of parliamentary officials from Toulouse.41 This both confirmed the veracity of the election but probably also acted as a powerful reminder to the nuns of Charlotte’s familial connections and influence. It seems that overwhelmingly communities were unsuccessful in claiming autonomy over familial, royal or papal interference in determining their female leaders. Many communities accepted this situation and worked within the available choices for networks and power to secure a candidate who would be most beneficial to their collective or individual interests. The legal and historical evidence produced by nuns themselves appears to indicate that they actively sought to embed themselves in the processes by which decisions were made, and in doing so, establish themselves as participants with some authority. They appear thus largely to have accepted dynastic, royal or ecclesiastical intervention in the convent, but were concerned to be considered at least as significant stakeholders in the monastic institution.

Dialogues of reform Much has been made of the lack of a coherent reform programme applied to French female communities during the sixteenth century, particularly in relation to the more structured ecclesiastical developments in seventeenth-century monastic communities. Studies of legal and ecclesiastical records appear to present a picture of poor discipline and little spiritual focus in sixteenth-century convents,42 although many communities underwent reforms from the very beginning of the century. Jean-Marie Le Gall has also argued that reform in the Church should be seen as a continual process.43 There were clearly shifts over the sixteenth century as to who was driving the impetus to reform, as well


as distinctly different agendas guiding these initiatives. Monarchs and members of the royal family could be involved in the process by their appointment of reforming abbesses to convents perceived to be in need of discipline.44 After the Council of Trent, reforming theologians and ecclesiastical authorities who attended the Council, like the Cardinal of Lorraine, pushed for acceptance of the Tridentine reform measures as a whole.45 However, the Council’s decrees were never accepted unilaterally in the Gallican Church, and therefore application varied greatly at the local level according to individual communities and bishops.46 The historiography of reform in female monastic communities tends to fashion it largely as the imposition of reform from outside forces upon religious women who accepted it willingly or unwillingly. Although there are some communities like Fontevrault who are well documented as taking opportunities to reform themselves, frequently a reading of the legal and ecclesiastical sources has led historians to depict reform across the sixteenth century as imposed by male institutional authorities on the female world of the convent. Yet many women, both lay and religious, saw themselves as instigators of reform. Laywomen, particularly elite women, were involved in both patronage and reform of monastic communities.47 The correspondence of Marguerite de Navarre, for example, shows her abiding interest in pursuing the reform of female monastic houses.48 Nuns too were capable of identifying and seeking to rectify substantial difficulties in their own communities. In 1499, the nuns of Saint-Césaire of Arles produced a notarial act of their negotiations with the abbess, Catherine de Saint-Michel, concerning role statements for community members (including that of the abbess).49 In fact, in some of the same convents whose legal and ecclesiastical documentation would seem to place the impetus for reform on outside forces, women themselves claimed responsibility for their processes of reform. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Benedictine Beaumont community near Tours had been identified by ecclesiastical reformers as one of the many female communities in need of reform. According to the papal report of 1494, nuns lived with all the gates open, allowing suspect men into the convent, and walking out of the monastery, into public places, châteaux and secular households.50 These concerns about the lack of enclosure as well as other criticisms provoked the introduction of Fontevriste reforms in 1502. The Beaumont chronicle itself informs us of a new impulse to reform in 1532, which was presented as the initiative of the abbess Françoise de Marrafin. With the permission of Clement VII, she invited Minim Father François Bellemère to help


‘her in the reformation of this monastery, which she was undertaking’.51 The chronicle makes no mention of the earlier 1502 reforms so it is unclear whether they were poorly implemented, or omitted from the history to ensure that nothing detracted from the emphasis on the nuns taking control of their own reformation in 1532. When Marrafin died before the newly drawn-up reforms had been introduced, the nuns themselves took measures to see that the reforms were implemented by their superiors. However, the chronicle does not present a spiritual motive for this action, but rather fear that a new abbess might interfere with another idea of what the convent required.52 This account of the 1532 reform process draws attention to the impetus of the convent community to introduce reforms at their own behest, not that of their ecclesiastical superiors, and moreover, to protect their ‘rights’ against a new and unknown abbess. According to the Beaumont chronicle, Charlotte de la Trémoille agreed to respect the status of her predecessor’s reforms and after some clarification, they were sent to the court in Paris for approval. The court rejected the reforms, insisting that the superiors of Saint-Martin could not approve new statutes but only the court-appointed reformers from the abbey of Chezal-Benoît. By the nuns’ account, the Chezal-Benoît fathers ‘left the statutes in their entirety, except in a few places’ after having interviewed the nuns.53 Reading the parliamentary records, the historian Charmarie Blaisdell summarises: ‘the court ordered the abbot of the prestigious male house of Chezal-Benoît … to investigate and reform the nuns’,54 and one might similarly conclude from the 1564 account of the changes required by the Chezal-Benoît fathers.55 Yet comparison to how the chronicle presented the same event demonstrates a very different perspective: La Trémouille accepted the nuns’ request to continue the reform impetus of her predecessor Marrafin, and sought the court’s, then Chezal-Benoît’s, ratification of these statutes, which were accepted with little change. Women demonstrated their deep commitment to institutional struggles even in places where reforms were passionately and, often at length, resisted. These voices can be heard in the accounts of rebellion reported by appalled reformers, and in the punitive measures which invariably followed. In 1540, Madeleine de Bourbon, abbess of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, was still enforcing the reform measures of 1519 and had to seek royal assistance to order Antoinette de Fougières, prioress of the dependent priory of Vellèches, to live according to the rule as dictated by the 1519 reformation.56 The struggles for reform and the divisions between the abbess Anne de Pierrepoint and Benedictine nuns wishing to adopt


the reforms patronised by Jeanne de France at Saint-Laurent de Bourges were recorded in the hagiographic literature intended to exalt the miraculous endeavours of Jeanne.57 ‘There were great difficulties and resistance when one wanted to make the said reformation, principally on the side of the inhabitants and nuns there. For in no way did they want to accept the reforms, so that there was great pain to bring them to order, such as when the locksmiths sealed one gate, the nuns opened another.’58 The reforms of 1521 at Nôtre-Dame de Prouille near Carcassonne, for instance, appear to have divided the nuns between those supporting the reformer, Father Adrien de Milly (including the prioress Jeanne de Séverac), and those who supported the Provincial of Toulouse, among whom numbered the sub-prioress, Gausida Rasca. A group of eighteen nuns led by Rasca locked themselves in the priory church and refused to attend a chapter meeting Milly called to discuss the reform measures. They remained inside singing defiantly, skipping meals and insisting that they would rather die than open the door to him. Milly so feared their violence towards the prioress that he eventually locked the church door from the outside to prevent them hurting her. When the sisters finally agreed to come out, punishments were meted out swiftly. While Milly deposed and punished the sub-prioress Rasca, the Provincial threatened any nun who enacted Milly’s reforms with ex-communication. The remnants of these internal divisions were still being sorted out in the Toulouse parlement as late as 1530.59 Similarly, in the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, when a new master, Martin Grevin, was appointed by the chapter of Nôtre-Dame to proceed with reform, the religious sisters adopted simple methods of resistance that they could enact in their everyday lives.60 An enquiry in 1497 revealed that ‘some of the monks and nuns, in contempt of our ordinances and appointment and the injunctions that have been made by the chapter and governors, make derision and mockeries in the Hôtel-Dieu, and do not want to obey master Martin nor confess to him, as the statutes say, and scoff him and the novices who go to confess to him, showing them the finger and calling them bigots, in order to induce them not to go’.61 In March 1537 a parliamentary arrêt gave extensive punitive powers to the abbot of Saint-Victor and the prior of Saint-Ladre to enact reforms within the Hôtel-Dieu. By November, there had been near-riots between pro- and anti-reform staff, among which a number of the ‘nuns and novices were the most vehement and riotous’.62 One Françoise Cullotte ‘in the middle of the house, among the patients, made a great uproar and injurious noise’,63 another, a novice named Catherine Patine, ‘[cried out] to people outside “Break down the door!” in order to excite the


townspeople to come to their aid’.64 Another ‘heard Perpette and other nuns and novices saying the words: What are these traitors coming to do here?’65 Despite the protests of the sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu and without their participation, the reforms so desired by the governors would eventually take place. By 1540, a new constitution agreed upon by the male supervisory bodies was ratified by the Parisian parlement. As these cases indicate, often reformers left few means for religious women to debate reforms in a rational way. The nuns’ resort to displays of violent, angry and disruptive behaviour may have been the only means by which the women were able to enter into discussion with their supervisors about the changing lifestyle of their institutions. Whilst many of their actions were ultimately counter-productive (leading as they did to even stricter control and punishment), they none the less indicate women’s keen desire to be involved in the institutional reforms to their communities.

Visions of enclosure Historians have argued that reforms like those recommended by the Council of Trent such as the reinforcement of enclosure were interpreted and applied in myriad ways by local groups.66 In addition, reforms reflected an ongoing dialogue between communities, convent, local, familial, ecclesiastical and royal among them. The reform process did not end once legal authorities had approved the recommendations of ecclesiastical officials. Interpretation between various groups about whether the reforms had been implemented seemed to differ markedly. Often nuns felt that they had met the stipulations of reform endeavours whilst ecclesiastical authorities did not. In particular, understanding of key concepts such as enclosure varied between nuns, families, local communities and church authorities, and was often the greatest point of tension in reform procedures. For some religious communities, enclosure was to be embraced and celebrated. For the newly created Order of the Annonciades, the young professed sisters celebrated the moment of enclosure as a religious choice they were actively making. ‘Alas! When will the day come that we are completely enclosed and shut away with blessed Jesus, his dignified mother and the blessed angels?’ lamented the sisters before their monastery buildings were completed.67 For some groups, enclosure served as a practical and symbolic protection from the dangers of the world beyond.68 Yet for others, the imposition of enclosure in a lifestyle that had not previously included it caused bitter feuds. The nuns of


Nôtre-Dame de Nazareth in Aix-en-Provence resisted a variety of reform endeavours throughout the sixteenth century. As late as 1595 lawyers for the nuns were still arguing to the archbishop that as ‘they had not had enclosure when they had entered the monastery’ it would be wrong to apply it retrospectively.69 Agendas of reform could spark fear in the hearts of convent communities. Abbess Renée de Bourbon’s attempts to impose enclosure at Fontevrault caused the nuns to seek the aid of townspeople to break down the newly installed gates.70 In 1506, nuns complained to the secular courts when the archbishop of Auch, Jean de la Trémoille, forbade the community of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers to leave their monastery without the permission of their superiors, on pain of excommunication.71 Archbishop Grimaldi struggled to bring a variety of Avignon convent communities to his view of enclosure in the late sixteenth century. The abbess of the Benedictines of Saint-Laurent d’Avignon could pleasingly report to the archbishop that she had ‘no reason to complain about her nuns, who were well born, peaceful, obedient and of good lives and morals, zealous for the faith and honour of the monastery, and observant of the rule’.72 Yet at the same visit of 1586, Grimaldi reported with horror that ‘the gates of the monastery remained open, by which the nuns could go as far as the street to talk with the laity to the great danger of their conscience and scandal’.73 In response, the abbess argued that this practice caused no scandal to the community, since the visitors were relatives of the nuns and that, without access to the convent, the impoverished sisters would have no donations. When Grimaldi insisted on complete enclosure, the abbess complained that this would imply that there had been bad conduct in need of amendment, bringing scandal to a community where there was none. Moreover, by enclosing the nuns, the abbess posed the threat of internal rebellion or even conversions, for ‘long ago in the time when Monseigneur de Fachinettis was vicar, he had wanted to enclose the monastery with a roue against the practised custom, six professed nuns left the monastery, of whom four became Huguenots to marry’.74 The community agreed to accept all of Grimaldi’s reforms barring that of the roue, insisting that lay women of honour should be able to visit them freely.75 When Grimaldi pressed ahead, they sought appeal from the Pope. As Marc Venard observes, such resistance points to a clear difference in the perception of reform, its meaning and implications for the lifestyle of reformed nuns. Furthermore, it is clear that different perceptions of honour operated between the nuns, who connected it to their elite social status, and their male superiors, who understood all women to be equally susceptible to loss of honour by virtue of their sex.


However, what enclosure entailed in practice was not always so easily understood as the cases above might suggest. At the royal priory of Poissy, there were two sets of walled enclosures; one enclosed the principal buildings of the community, the other surrounded the wider monastic complex. Within the latter walls, nuns could interact with visitors, take exercise and fresh air. Was the liminal space of the second enclosed area legitimate for the ‘reformed’ community? In 1560, the prioress thought not, when she complained that the nuns walking there could hear secular conversations and some of the lay folk called out slurs and denigrated their honour.76 The entry to the refectory lay outside the interior wall, allowing it to be used for the Colloquy of Poissy of 1561.77 Yet Claude d’Espence reported that nuns were able to follow the proceedings, as the prioress and nuns listened from behind a screen specially made for them. Other nuns looked in through the windows of the convent church.78 Technically, enclosure was respected in this instance, but nuns could hear and see the discussions. On other occasions during the colloquy, however, the proceedings clearly contravened the principles of enclosure: one meeting of the participants was held in the chambre priorale, and the Host was processed through the cloisters attended by cardinals, bishops and theologians.79 Visions of reform outlined in the works of church superiors, secular legal authorities and nuns could be quite different. Accepting that both the chroniclers and the fathers from Chezal-Benoît perceived the Beaumont community as successfully reformed after 1564 (albeit each group by their own initiative), what did this entail? Enclosure was to be improved: among other things, the walls were to be raised so that nuns could not observe the goings-on in the street or nearby houses and the infirmary moved so that nuns could not hear the noise of the laity directly outside.80 Separation from local community and social and familial links appears frequently in the stipulations made in the manuscript drawn up by the approved fathers. Yet the convent’s journal and chronicle continued to discuss a wide variety of activities and interactions with the wider world even in the era after it was ‘reformed’. This points to a difference of perception and expectation between varied interest groups about ‘reformed’ communities. The nuns did not seem to think there was anything wrong with the way they continued to sustain some forms of ties beyond the convent, even though they wrote of themselves at this era as being ‘reformed nuns’.81 In many ways, reformed nuns continued to maintain a symbolic presence in the world beyond the convent. The published writings of women such as Anne de Marquets from Poissy, or Charlotte de Minut from the Poor Clares in


Toulouse each came from convents that were ‘reformed’. It is clear from nuns’ writings, correspondence and activities that, whatever form reforms took, in reality they maintained links beyond the convent in ways that enabled them to know about local events, gossip and community activities, as well as wider issues of warfare, political manoeuvres and church politics.82 Enclosure remained permeable to outside influences in many important ways over the sixteenth century and beyond.83 Significantly, nuns’ writings inform us how important knowledge about the activities and news of the local community, of family events and of the national political and religious currents were to their ability to persevere within and contribute to social life beyond the convent. For sixteenth-century nuns, it seems that professed life even in ‘enclosed’ communities was an identity sustained in part by their continued physical or remembered presence in the world beyond.

Constructing obedience One fear of nuns’ continued interaction with the world beyond the convent during the sixteenth century was the prospect of exposure to Protestant views. Any defection to Protestantism could be seen as a failure at some level by the convent community. The chronicle at Beaumont recorded with pride that they had lost no community members to the new confession. It is clear, however, that many nuns across France heard about the new religious ideas. The abbey of NôtreDame d’Audecye in the diocese of Châlons was left with no leader after the marriage of the last abbess with a man from Lorraine who had taken her to live in Germany. This tantalisingly scant detail was reported in the nomination of Renée de Saint-Belin, a nun from La Trinité in Poitiers, as its next abbess.84 Even the 1549 letter of encouragement from Jean Calvin to Philippe de Chasteignier, abbess of Saint-Jean-deBonneval-lès-Thouars, who had evidently professed Protestant leanings, tells us little of her internal spiritual journey within the abbey.85 In June 1560, the abbess of Fontevrault, Louise de Bourbon, sought to quell rumours of heresy within the convent of La Madeleine at Orleans by ordering the nuns to take an oath professing their Catholic faith. Forty complied but twenty-four others declared themselves for the new faith.86 Madeleine d’Arcussia retired from Nôtre-Dame de Nazareth in Aix-en-Provence in 1565, but by 1573 she abjured her errors and asked to return to the convent, where she was listed as its prioress in 1587.87


Few of these women left documentation by which we can understand their decision, or its impact on their convent communities. It seems that in leaving the convent, some women were reacting to dynastic strategies that had placed them there. In the case of Chasteignier, it is possible that this latter motivation coincided with sympathy for Protestant beliefs, for certainly she was one of many women whose abbatial appointment appears to be part of a family strategy – she took over the abbacy from her aunt Louise de Chasteignier,88 and her sisters were also placed at other local abbeys. In 1567, a nun at Sainte-Croix de Poitiers, Françoise de Bourdeille, composed a memoir to justify her actions in seeking release from her religious vows. She argued that, as a nine-year-old, her parents had placed her in the abbey for what she understood was ‘only to learn to read, write and embroider, as one was accustomed to have young ladies instructed’.89 However, she told of how at the age of thirteen she was pressured by a party of relatives, family friends and even Marguerite de Navarre who was passing through Poitiers at the time to take vows as a novice, although she protested vehemently.90 Bourdeille recounted her position as a young girl: ‘shut away inside the monastery, destitute of advice and friends in that place, and in despair to not be able to leave it, even from her parents she heard no news and knew not how to complain about it to them … pressured by the abbess to make her profession to the monastery’.91 In 1549, at eighteen, her family transferred her to Ligueux, where she became abbess on the resignation of her aunt, Jeanne de Bourdeille, and where she remained until 1565, the year she instigated release from her vows. At every possible stage, Bourdeille insisted that her profession had been ‘against the freedom of her conscience’ and that her eventual decision to return to secular life was prompted by the sinfulness of her lack of vocation.92 Bourdeille carefully constructed her actions as guided by a higher responsibility beyond her family, but her memoir (not intended for circulation beyond the secular court for which it was prepared) clearly implicated influential and familial figures in her forced novitiate and profession.93 In February 1572, Charlotte de Bourbon, abbess of Nôtre-Dame de Jouarre, left the abbey with two of her nuns, ostensibly on a visit to the abbess of Paraclet. Instead, they moved steadily north, originally with the intention of heading for Sedan where Charlotte’s sister could receive them, but finally opting for the safety of Heidelberg and the court of Elector Frederick III.94 The story of Charlotte’s defection and her subsequent adoption of Protestantism and marriage to William of Orange is relatively well known. But what of the nuns who remained in the convent? For the abbess herself to be at the heart of the defection as


at Jouarre was not only relatively unusual, but highly significant to the perceptions of good order in the convent. Texts produced by the nuns of Jouarre attempted to reassure ecclesiastical and elite networks of their community’s obedience and discipline, as they explained Charlotte’s behaviour and sentiments towards convent life – both while she was an inmate and after her defection. In doing so, these documents reflected how the nuns made sense to themselves and to the outside world of Charlotte’s choice. Various stories circulated about the cause of Charlotte’s defection. She was reputed to have fled with an archer de la garde whom she planned to marry.95 Damaging tales spread that she had stolen much of the abbey’s movable wealth,96 and one of the first tasks of her sister Louise, abbess of Faremoutiers, upon arriving at Jouarre was to interview eyewitnesses and confirm the intact holdings of the convent’s possessions.97 Only two months after Charlotte’s defection, her family organised a secret investigation that canvassed the convent community for explanation of her actions.98 Charlotte’s unwillingness to enter professed life was no secret to the nuns of Jouarre. Indeed, Charlotte had first declared her feelings in an oral confession in 1559, witnessed by all the sisters in the convent and later confirmed by them in written depositions. A further notarial act of 1565 in which Charlotte insisted she was not willing to enter convent life was signed by Jean Ruzé, a lawyer from the Parlement of Paris, who had been sent by Charlotte’s mother and father to witness her profession.99 Although it seems that the nuns were asked the same questions about Charlotte and about her actions before leaving the convent, their responses focused on different concerns and reveal diverse types of observations. Individual nuns identified different aspects of Charlotte’s behaviour and treatment as important to her final decision, and these aspects were dependent on their own understanding of convent life and ritual. Thus, their accounts, although all reporting on the same event, reveal a variety of expectations for convent life in this period, and, moreover, suggest their differing impressions of the impact of the religious fighting on recent events in their convent. Catherine de Richemont was the first nun recorded in the secret documentation prepared in 1572 for the Duke of Montpensier, Charlotte’s father. She was 64 years old and had been a nun at the convent for some 50 years. Richemont’s account made three specific claims to explain Charlotte’s defection. First, Charlotte’s profession as both nun and abbess were made for the wrong reasons. Richemont attributed no monastic sensibility to Charlotte, instead baldly stating that she had become a nun on the order of her mother. The nun


outlined how the duchess ‘had her importuned and solicited to become a nun by several people, [and] who from reports that her daughter did not want to listen, herself wrote several harsh letters, full of threats, to her’.100 Richemont’s account positioned this as a matter of right and wrong between mother and daughter, rather than as one concerned with the merits of accepting a nun and abbess who lacked appropriate religious convictions. Richemont explained simply that to avoid harsh treatment, ‘she did what her mother wanted’.101 Richemont made evident that those within the convent were aware of Charlotte’s deep unhappiness with her profession. Yet Charlotte was unwilling to reveal them to the duke, her father. ‘She continued always to say, in times of liberty, that she was not professed, and that, if she had not feared that my lord her father would be angry, she would have soon changed her veil.’102 Charlotte’s actions, both in reluctantly accepting profession and in not speaking of her unwillingness to her father, demonstrated her filial piety. However, what Richemont’s version also indicated was the influence of the duke’s position on the entire convent community. Evidently, Charlotte ‘was so fearful a daughter that she never dared to speak of it, for fear of angering him, even though she had spoken of it often to some people who had hidden it from my lord, for fear of irritating him’.103 Despite their sympathy and knowledge of Charlotte’s position, those to whom she confessed her feelings were not prepared to upset the duke by informing him of her unhappiness. According to Richemont’s perceptions of the case, the community’s moral and religious responsibilities to see that Charlotte’s profession was true and freely made did not override the local hierarchy of power, in which the duke was a socially influential patron. Local elites mattered to the convent as much as religious persuasion. Catherine de Richemont was clearly more sympathetic to the duke and attributed the coercion of Charlotte not to him, but to his (dead) wife: she ‘had never heard that the Duke had ever forced his daughter, but on the contrary was angry with his deceased wife that she had attacked his daughter’.104 Although her account gave no indication that the duke confirmed Charlotte’s willingness to be a nun, or even prevented his wife from forcing Charlotte into convent life, Richemont allowed him to be potentially sympathetic towards Charlotte, if her unhappiness had not been kept from him. She positioned the duke as benign and faultless, because Charlotte’s true feelings had not been made known to him. While this tactic enhanced the duke’s favourable position and made him blameless in the events of the profession (and thus Charlotte’s later defection), it was also potentially damaging to the convent community


itself. It was after all they who shielded the duke from Charlotte’s sentiments. Richemont’s account offered little by way of explicit explanation or hesitation about such actions, perhaps because the reason seemed evident to her. By her view, the elite power and prestige that the Bourbon-Montpensier family could bring to the convent mattered more than their religious responsibility to ensure a faithful process, even after the stipulations of Trent that professions be made willingly. Richemont was equally concerned to make clear that the encouragement to flee did not come from within the community. Richemont argued that it was Charlotte’s decision alone to invite François and Georges d’Averly to the convent, and her decision to listen to their advice. It was she and she alone who showed them favour and tolerated their reforming views. Although this was an admission that potentially radical ideas were circulating in the convent, at least among Charlotte and her closest friends, it none the less attributed this entirely to Charlotte, the convent’s abbess. As obedient nuns of the community under Charlotte’s jurisdiction, Richemont suggested that they had no choice but to tolerate the practices of their abbess, and also that the encouragement for Charlotte’s disobedient behaviour in leaving the convent came very definitely from outside the community. Thus, the dominant theme of Catherine de Richemont’s explanation was obedience, principally to social roles and responsibilities beyond the convent walls. Charlotte preferred to obey her mother than risk her wrath. The community chose not to tell the duke of his daughter’s unhappiness because they recognised his power over the community and did not wish to upset him. Richemont’s tale accounted for Charlotte’s behaviour through the apparently understandable motive of filial piety and paternal reverence. It was after all the duke who commissioned the report and investigation within the abbey, so it is perhaps not surprising that nuns like Richemont positioned him so favourably in the events leading up to Charlotte’s defection. Her explanation portrayed a convent deeply respectful of the duke’s position and of his power, as well as obedient to their abbess. By this account the religious ideals of the Tridentine convent mattered little in comparison to the immediate social world beyond the convent’s walls. Catherine de Perthuis was aged around 60, and had been a nun for 46 years when she made her statement for the investigation. Like Richemont, Perthuis firmly placed the direct blame for Charlotte’s defection on François and Georges d’Averly: ‘certainly it was a long time that the Averlys solicited my lady to leave’,105 although she did not elaborate on how she knew this much. In other respects she declared


herself entirely surprised by the events. Indeed, Perthuis was at pains to indicate just how ignorant the sisters were of Charlotte’s plans. The d’Averly brothers ‘led my lady away pretending to visit Madame du Paraclet, and it was a long time that we thought she had only gone to Paraclet, until there came news from those who were with her’.106 It was only then, Perthuis claimed, that they learned Charlotte and her companions had gone to Germany. Perthuis depicted the convent as conscious of the d’Averlys’ influence on Charlotte, and her favour to them, but entirely unaware of Charlotte’s plans to leave. However, like Catherine de Richemont, Perthuis was also conscious of underlying reasons for Charlotte’s defection. She too saw Charlotte’s unwilling profession as a key factor in her later decision, and also apportioned significant blame to the duchess for this, whose threats and the solicitations of others ‘she dared not speak even the 100th part’.107 Perthuis portrayed the Catholic religious community as deeply embedded in the coercion: To trick this poor child, [Perthuis] saw that, when Monsieur Ruzé, now bishop of Angers, came to make her take her profession, he had two letters: one containing gentle words of profession not accustomed to be said so that the abbess did not find them harsh, and another true one which was not read at all, and she heard that if she had not made the profession that her mother would do to her all the rigours in the world.108 Perhaps surprisingly, she demonstrated a willingness to implicate a senior and influential religious figure, the Bishop of Angers, in immoral and inappropriate conduct. She further emphasised by her sympathetic choice of language (‘this poor child’) that Charlotte was too young to make a profession as a nun and even more so to become the community’s abbess (for which the Council of Trent stipulated a minimum age of 40). Perthuis’s depiction of the events surrounding Charlotte’s profession suggested involvement of, and collusion between, both religious and secular elite figures, where concerns beyond the moral and religious mattered most. By her account, no one within the convent was embroiled in these matters. All of the interested individuals and groups she identified were beyond the immediate community of sisters. Catherine de Perthuis’s explanation for Charlotte’s action exposed different tensions and themes to her fellow sister, Catherine de Richemont. Perthuis’s sympathetic reading of Charlotte’s situation led her to identify forces beyond the convent as responsible for actions


which were morally ambiguous. Charlotte’s profession was forced on her by both familial and religious superiors. Not only force but also subterfuge were used on Charlotte to achieve their collective aim of making her abbess. Charlotte, by Perthuis’s interpretation, bore little blame for wanting to leave the convent. Yet her eventual decision to do so was again one made with the influence of outside forces, this time the d’Averly brothers. By Perthuis’s reading of the events, at no time did the sisters in the convent aid or abet in either Charlotte’s profession or flight; instead they were a sympathetic community to whom she could share her sorrow and seek solace. Marie Brette was the oldest nun to be interviewed by the investigators in 1572. The 80-year-old was the grand-prioress of the abbey and had been a nun for 70 years. Thus, like Charlotte, she must have entered the convent in her extreme youth. Like Richemont and Perthuis, Brette also attributed Charlotte’s defection most directly to François and Georges d’Averly, and similarly denied the possibility that the nuns had forewarning of Charlotte’s actions: ‘there were no nuns in the abbey who could have known anything about it other than Jehanne Mousson and Jehanne Vassetz, who left with my lady’.109 Her admission in fact indicated that there was a possibility that some of Charlotte’s favoured friends in the convent might indeed have known her thoughts and intentions. Brette provided an interesting contrast to Perthuis’s pervading sense of sympathetic unity and community amongst the nuns of the convent. Rather than acting as an open community, her declaration suggested that certain nuns could know more than and different information from others, and were privy to the abbess’s intimate opinions. Brette confirmed the information of other nuns that it was common knowledge that Charlotte did not have a personal vocation: ‘she did not know that my lady ever had, of her own free will, wanted to be a nun’,110 although in other respects Charlotte was responsible and disciplined in her tasks as abbess.111 She also declared her opinion that Charlotte made known to the nuns her displeasure at being a nun (if not life in the convent) and particularly the deception and collusion surrounding her profession. Brette ‘did not think that she had ever devotion to wear the habit, that she had heard it infinitely displeased here, having taken it too young, against her will, by force of her mother, who had made her make her profession by strange subtleties and force’.112 What is significant about Brette’s testimony is the indications it can provide about expectations for the women within the convent. It appears plain in the sister’s account that Charlotte was known to be unhappy, and to have shared her opinions about the fraudulent procedure of her profession


with the nuns around her. Brette appeared to have accepted that neither she nor Charlotte had any right to reject the path her parents had chosen for her, even if it made a travesty of her role as a meaningful spiritual leader of the nuns in the community. It is possible perhaps that Brette’s own entry into monastic life at the age of ten followed a similar course. Brette indicates that Charlotte complied with her abbatial responsibilities to the letter, if clearly not in spirit, and this did not strike the older nun as unusual or unacceptable behaviour. It suggests she was familiar and accepting of the phenomenon of placing younger daughters in convents as part of a traditional social, rather than religious, mechanism. Brette’s account provides us with one older woman’s picture of meagre expectations of nuns and abbesses as religiously motivated individuals, and of the meanings of conventual life for women. Radegonde Sarrot was about 56 at the time of her documentation of Charlotte’s defection, and had been a nun for some 42 years. She was one of the few nuns to speak of Charlotte as a social superior. Charlotte was ‘madame Charlotte de Bourbon’ and the ‘young princess’. The significance of the social hierarchy pervaded her account of the causes for Charlotte’s ill-treatment as a child and also in the responses of those around her. Sarrot saw the duke as angry with his wife’s ill-treatment of their daughter, and moreover denied true knowledge of her unhappiness by his retainers: ‘if the servants of my lord had made known to him what my lady the abbess told them, the witness is of the opinion that he would have removed the habit from her’.113 The duke was thus blameless in the reasons for Charlotte’s flight from the abbey. Sarrot was fully aware of the strong practical and financial reasons why Charlotte’s mother and the duke’s retainers sought Charlotte’s profession. In fact, she was the only nun explicitly to mention the financial transaction which underlay her mother’s actions, explaining ‘that she wanted lady Charlotte de Bourbon to relinquish her entitlements to my lord the prince her brother’.114 The financial exchange which Charlotte’s profession would secure was, Sarrot suggested, known to all. For the other sisters, it was perhaps so commonplace and logical a reason for the duchess’s actions that none of them felt it worth mentioning. According to Sarrot, Charlotte was not merely unhappy with life in the convent, but fundamentally and personally incompatible with the religious vocation. Such was the mental anxiety that she suffered from her mother’s pressure, Sarrot recounts, ‘that the apprehension that she had gave her a fever and she said to all the girls in the abbey who went to see her that she did not want to be professed, and that the illness


came from fear that her mother would not treat her well’.115 Sarrot’s sympathy for Charlotte’s plight was evident through her choice of words and manner of depiction. In contrast to the older nun Marie Brette, Sarrot’s search for understanding of Charlotte’s sentiments and behaviour was situated at the internal, personal level: ‘she had never the heart to remain in this charge, quality and habit of religion’.116 As to matters surrounding the fraudulent abbatial ceremony, Sarrot painted a picture not of a unified abbey community, but rather of individuals with particular vested interests in Charlotte’s profession. Those involved in the deception included religious women both inside Jouarre and beyond. Sarrot identified religious women too as helping to trick Charlotte by the exchange of the letters of profession: ‘there were two letters, one simulated, the other ordinary, and when she had presented at the altar one of these letters, sister Cécile de Crue, otherwise called Chauvillat, took it and hid it at her chest’.117 In fact, Cecile de Crue, implicated in the fraudulent ceremony of 1559, was one of the nuns from Jouarre who later acted as a witness to Charlotte’s 1565 notarial act declaring her unhappiness. That act, however, said nothing of the collusion of the nuns and religious community in deceiving the young abbess. Here Sarrot seemed unconcerned about the damaging ramifications of her testimony and accusations. Moreover, unlike the older sisters of the abbey community who testified to the investigators, Sarrot had been sufficiently aware of the deception, and unhappy about it, to have complained at the time. Her account suggested that she was not alone in sensing that the religious intentions of vocation, profession and abbatial election had been violated, ‘about which all the nuns of the convent were unhappy’.118 She was particularly concerned, ‘when my lady made her profession, that none of the girls of the convent ever heard a single word of the reading of her vow’ and complained ‘to Monsieur Ruzé, with several other nuns of the abbey, that they had not heard my lady’s profession’.119 Thus Sarrot’s information implied that there was a collective sense of misconduct in the affair and of the need to report this matter to religious superiors. Moreover, the response Sarrot and the other sisters reportedly received from monsieur Ruzé, Bishop of Angers, was significant: ‘he gave them the response that she was also held to keep the goods of the abbey, as other abbesses had done before’.120 This response seemed at odds with the nature of the complaint the nuns were making. It appeared that they were concerned by the fact that they had been unable to hear, and thus witness, Charlotte’s true and willing profession to become their abbess. (She was evidently crying and unwilling to speak the words, according


to the nuns’ information.) They were hence not convinced that she undertook a true profession as either a nun or the abbey’s leader. Yet, Ruzé’s response addresses a more specific element of the abbatial duties, that she was now held to protect the community’s assets as her predecessors had done. The concerns of Sarrot and her fellow complainants focused on the spiritual; Ruzé’s concern focused on the financial responsibility of the new abbess. In this respect, Sarrot’s account differed markedly from those of the older nuns. Sarrot insisted on both her own and other sisters’ concerns about the procedural violations. Furthermore, she and the sisters who visited Charlotte in her illness were troubled by the potential physical and mental risks of forcing an unwilling girl into religious life. Sarrot’s account, read against those of the older nuns, hinted at a divide within the convent between the older and younger community members. The older sisters, Brette, Richemont and Perthuis, did not make any apparent attempt to complain of procedures that were openly suspect even by their own admissions and accounts. They either accepted or ignored the disrespect of proper religious procedure. For the older generation, the financial, social and political incentives to smooth over awkward procedural difficulties and an unwilling girl ranked more highly than religious sentiments. Sarrot, on the other hand, while aware of these competing priorities, did not expect them to outweigh the individual persuasion of the novice concerned. Marie Beauclerc also represented a slightly younger generation of monastic women than Richemont and Perthuis, and certainly Marie Brette. She was 43 at the time of the investigation and had been a nun for some 30 years. Beauclerc repeated the general consensus that Charlotte had been forced into monastic life by her mother and, importantly, she remarked that one of the specific threats that the duchess made was that ‘if she did not make the profession, she would take her to Fontevrault’.121 This correlates with a statement mentioned by Catherine de Richemont who similarly stated that the duchess’s letters were ‘fulls of threats, to send her to the pit of religion of Fontevrault’.122 The abbey and Order of Fontevrault had established a reputation early in the sixteenth century for its reforms. In the eyes of the nuns reporting to the investigator, the name held symbolic meaning as an establishment of strictly regulated, and moreover undesirable, life. To these nuns, the severity of the rule was not a source of celebration and inspiration, but an indication of an unbearably harsh life. Beauclerc also discussed different aspects of Charlotte’s understanding of her own position to those reported by other nuns. She revealed how


‘for about two years, the lady Charlotte de Bourbon had said to deceased Madame de Reuty, that she was not professed and she had never made vows as the witness had heard Madame de Reuty say’.123 Thus Beauclerc indicated that indeed Charlotte was making her understanding of the lack of validity of her abbatial position known to the nuns, and that there was clearly talk in the convent of Charlotte’s ambiguous commitment to the community. Beauclerc also confirmed Sarrot’s impression that a number of the nuns were concerned with the misconduct in the profession: ‘there were murmurs from the nuns who saw the manifest constraint … lack of will of the abbess, surprised by the two letters of profession and the lovely promises by those who had come to make her take her profession’.124 She went further in confirming Charlotte’s own view, not one voiced by the other nuns interviewed, that this rendered her promises to the abbey null and void: ‘known by all less than legitimate and solemn’.125 Significantly, Beauclerc also reveals that the d’Averly brothers were not the only outside influences on Charlotte who might have convinced her to leave the abbey. She reveals that there were also ‘some others of the claimed reformed religion who frequented the convent who gave her the opinion that she was damning herself in the abbey’.126 Beauclerc was the only nun to admit that other people sympathetic to the cause of the Huguenots were visiting the abbey. Her account furthermore indicates that she was privy to the knowledge of Charlotte’s conversations with these people since she was aware of the Huguenots’ interpretation of the validity of Charlotte’s position. Beauclerc’s account alerts readers to at least two undercurrents in the convent. The nuns’ discussion of the duchess’s threats to send Charlotte to Fontevrault as a justifiable reason why Charlotte might have capitulated suggested their lack of sympathy to the perceived unnecessary severity of that Order. It might explain why nuns in the abbey might have colluded in the profession, so as not to lose the patronage of the Bourbon-Montpensier family to another religious establishment. Furthermore, Beauclerc’s information revealed an abbey open to outside influences and religious ideas, where reforming ideas were clearly entertained and discussed by abbess and nuns. Marie de Méry was the final nun to be interviewed for the 1572 investigation. At 40, she was the youngest nun to make a statement, and had been a nun for 25 years. Her account was to round out the available picture of life within the convent, and more particularly of the pressures it faced over Charlotte’s profession. Méry confirmed the opinion of the other nuns that Charlotte was not a willing participant in the profession


ceremony, to the extent that she ‘cried so much that one could not hear a single word of her profession’.127 Just as the other sisters reported, Méry suspected that Charlotte ‘would never have done it, but for the constraint of her mother’, but importantly added ‘and the induction on her part in the abbey’.128 This was the first admission that the convent community, rather than specific individuals, might have brought pressure to bear on Charlotte. In particular, Méry implicated Cécile de Crue as hiding the letter of profession, but also provided some explanation for Crue’s seemingly cruel behaviour: ‘she had heard Sister Cecile de Crue say that [Charlotte] had to be professed because it was the desire of her mother, whom she would not dare disobey’.129 Her information revealed most explicitly that the whole community sensed the pressure to conform to the duchess’s wishes. Clearly, there are significant consistencies between the stories and explanations offered by the nuns interviewed. Little blame was apportioned to Charlotte for her eventual actions, because each sister identified Charlotte’s profession as problematic, if not invalid. In this respect, the deceased Duchess of Montpensier was the butt of most of the criticism for forcing Charlotte to become a nun, with some sisters also insisting on the role played by the duke’s retainers in concealing Charlotte’s unhappiness from him. Most of those interviewed were careful to justify the duke’s inaction through his ignorance of Charlotte’s true feelings, probably partly motivated by concerns for his ongoing support for the convent. Similarly, most nuns were able to identify the d’Averly brothers as key confidants for Charlotte, and the probable instigators and organisers of her flight from the convent. However, the accounts also disclosed significant differences between the nuns in their perception of the causes of Charlotte’s defection and of the responses of the internal and external community to her plight; as well as their individual perspectives and access to information about the matters concerned. What appears most clearly in their testimony are variances in opinions between the older and younger sisters interviewed. In general, the older nuns, Brette, Richemont and Perthuis, appear to have presented their accounts in terms that expressed practical expectations of convent life. Their accounts were structured by considerations about social order and hierarchy beyond the convent; where convents could represent a vehicle to dispose of younger daughters and thus maintain familial assets intact; or could be female havens of solidarity where women supported each other against the world. Sarrot, Beauclerc and Méry, as the younger members of the community to be interviewed, were attuned to different, perhaps newer, perspectives and concepts. For


these women, Charlotte’s lack of personal vocation was a crucial point of tension about which they were prepared to speak out to their religious superiors. They demonstrated an awareness of the influences of reforming ideas on convent communities, particularly their arguments for vocation to be a fundamental lynchpin of individual professions. Such a high-profile defection was bound to be heralded as a victory for the Huguenots, and to need extensive justification by the lay and ecclesiastical Catholic community. To some extent, the secret information in which these testimonies appeared could have done little to cheer the Catholic authorities. In it, the nuns revealed free and open access to the ideas of Protestantism within the convent community. Moreover, their accounts divulged blatant coercion in a young woman’s profession, breaches to abbatial appointments and dismissal of their complaints over the irregularities in the proceedings. Social and financial imperatives were shown to matter more than religious persuasion and procedures in this case. Much as Jane Couchman has argued for Charlotte’s own emancipatory strategy, the Jouarre nuns too constructed their obedience in ways which protected her father’s honour and permitted his ongoing patronage of the convent.130 The nuns demonstrated the dual focus of their conception of contemporary convent life: constructing their obedience both to the institutional Church, but also, and perhaps more so, to the dynastic patronage which they perceived was so crucial to their continued existence.

Conversations on lay regulation Religious regulation of men and women’s lives did not merely take place within monastic environments. Catholic ecclesiastical courts and Huguenot consistories regulated discipline in the wider community. Although historians are increasingly demonstrating the impact of such moral regulation on the lives of both women and men, the focus of this section will be on the ways in which women created understandings about the role of institutional religious regulation by their responses to these interventions in their lives. Did women accept the regulatory forces of the Catholic and Calvinist Churches? In what ways did they seek to participate in religious regulation of communities themselves? In particular, this section will examine the interactions of women with the newly established Calvinist consistory courts across France. Raymond A. Mentzer Jr’s key research on the work of consistory courts, particularly in the south of France, provides us with much evidence of women’s interaction with the disciplinary bodies of the


Calvinist churches.131 He has observed that women’s representation was lower in rural areas, where husbands and male relatives may have presented to courts on behalf of women.132 Mentzer suggests that the concept of the paterfamilias ideal may have been stronger in rural areas133 and that the elders demonstrated ‘an inclination to disregard and neglect women in religious affairs, if not in all facets of public activity’.134 This was not, however, how women saw their participation in moral affairs if their actions can be taken as an indication. Some women took it upon themselves to regulate the community’s behaviour on behalf of the consistory. For example, after Protestant ministers preached on the sin of debauchery and whoring, a group of Nîmois women gathered outside the house of Vidal Raymond in pursuit of a prostitute hiding within.135 Such female actions and responses were by no means limited to Calvinist women. In 1503 the wife of Claude Girost asked the chapter of the Cathedral of Troyes to investigate the chaplain of Torvilliers for his inappropriate conduct. He had refused to celebrate her return from childbed unless she paid him 5 sols tournois to perform the ceremony. Four other women testified in support of the new mother’s claim and the chaplain was indeed fined for his behaviour.136 In 1558, as a feast-day ecclesiastical procession passed a bystander, Guyotte, widow of a farmer from Jaillard near Troyes, she had shouted to the processing canons of Saint-Pierre that they were more evil than Lutherans and not fit to accompany the Host. This caused such a commotion to other faithful witnesses that she was arrested to explain herself to the chapter of the Cathedral of Troyes.137 Women’s willingness to pronounce publicly on the morals of others in such ways as these indicates that they perceived themselves as playing a key role in moral regulation of their local lay and ecclesiastical communities. Some women attended the consistory but then continued to offend the elders by their behaviour. Others were simply rude to the court. In Coutras, the consistory was shocked when the widow of Jean Berthet, summoned for contracting her daughter’s marriage against the advice offered her by the Church, seemed indifferent to their reprimands: ‘She, whatever remonstrance was made to her of her fault, tried nothing other than obstinately to excuse her fault and did not feel at all guilty. Thus she was sent away by the consistory until another time when God has her more prepared to receive the word of God.’138 Some women refused to acknowledge the consistory’s power to adjudicate on their behaviour by not turning up at all. The Coutras consistory complained in its records in September 1582 of one Marguerite Langlois called again ‘because she has not received the remonstrations that were made to her


three separate times in the name of the consistory and has not sought to obey it, however much she promised to’.139 Mentzer reports how the Nîmes consistory called one woman twelve times to answer charges of malicious slander before they simply excommunicated her in absentia.140 Women also appealed the consistory’s decisions. When ‘Fromentine’ was called before the consistory of Nîmes in 1589 for gambling, dancing, sexual misconduct and prostitution, amongst other things, the elders suspended her from communion. Fromentine declared her intention to appeal and subsequently took her case to the colloquy meeting at Aigues-Mortes. When these authorities confirmed the decision of her local consistory, she proceeded to take her appeal to the provincial synod. Although without success (Fromentine was banished in March 1590), her actions demonstrate both understanding of the available appeal mechanisms and a determination to pursue her case to the fullest extent of her abilities.141 This was by no means a woman who accepted the decision of her local consistory as final and irreversible. When the consistory of Montauban attempted to challenge Charlotte Arbaleste, wife of the prominent Huguenot statesman Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, over the matter of her hairstyle, the full range of possibilities open to a sophisticated female interlocutor is revealed. During the family’s stay in Montauban for the general assembly of 1584, one of the Montauban pastors, Michel Bérault, objected to Arbaleste’s elaborate hairstyle and she was refused communion. Several consistories had made pointed censure about fashionable hairstyling and clothes during the 1580s, as well as the provincial synod that met at Montauban in 1581.142 Arbaleste composed several letters outlining her arguments to the Montauban consistory as well as to prominent sympathisers. She then produced a mémoire of her position where she summarised her perception of events as well as the contents of her interactions with the consistory. Her justificatory mémoire of the incident is written in the third person, perhaps in an attempt to present the case impartially. Unlike the women examined so far, Arbaleste principally argued her case through written documentation and informed the consistory that she had retained copies of all their correspondence, both because she feared ‘that the thing could be badly understood and interpreted’ and to serve her at the next national synod if the need arose.143 Arbaleste’s steadfast refusal to accept the consistory’s disciplinary actions was founded on several tenets reiterated at length across the surviving documentation. She insisted that the consistory had no jurisdiction over her since the household was not of the town.144 There was also, Arbaleste argued, no theological or biblical justification of the


consistory’s ban on her particular hairstyle. She claimed to have searched in vain for passages with which to understand the elders’ decision.145 Indeed, even Bérault himself had ‘preached that gold and precious stones were creations of God and indifferent, which one could use to beautify oneself … which makes me persist that hairstyles are also indifferent’.146 Unsurprisingly for a woman who demonstrated elsewhere her detailed exposure to elite Calvinist politics, theology and administration,147 Arbaleste showed a clear familiarity with the governance of the French Calvinist churches. She claimed to understand better than the local elders of Montauban the central tenets of the hierarchy’s notions of discipline in the Churches.148 The consistory’s position could only be explained, Arbaleste argued, ‘by Monsieur Bérault either having not well understood or reported what was advised on this fact at the general synod’ about which by implication she suggested that she had superior knowledge.149 The matter of her hairstyle was strictly a local interpretation: ‘it was not the ordinance of a national synod, nor of a provincial, nor of a colloquy, but of a single town’.150 Arbaleste reiterated this point in her memoir: ‘it would be a very pernicious thing that the advice of men, even good and holy ones, should be put in place of the commandments of God, as we have experienced too well in the Roman Church’.151 Moreover, she argued that she had been a welcome member at communion in numerous other churches across France, thereby emphasising the inconsistency of the Montauban consistory’s decision with other churches. She insisted that she had not changed her hairstyle, clothing or style of life in fifteen years while attending ‘in some of the great and beautiful Churches of Christianity, like at Sedan, in Germany, England, the Low Countries and those of France’.152 Arbaleste implied here that she was more experienced with a wide variety of consistory groups across the French churches than the locals of Montauban, which may have been true but was unlikely to evoke sympathy for her position. Indeed, it was central to Arbaleste’s argument that the consistory could not provide evidence of their interpretation of the disciplinary actions in the wider institutional ordinances.153 ‘I cannot understand how they call me rebel’, she wrote to the président de Clauzonne, ‘given than I do not demand anything from them but that they show me the article in order to obey it. If there is one, they must not hide it from me, but if they turn the page, they will see at article 26 that there is no power for ministers, consistories, colloquies, and provincial synods to add, change or diminish one, without the advice or consent of the national synod.’154


Beyond defending her own position, Arbaleste saw fit to instruct the Montauban consistory on the Calvinist principles of disciplinary action. She recommended that the consistory members update their familiarity with Calvin’s own interpretation of institutional discipline: ‘I ask that the assembly might like to read what Monsieur Calvin says about it, commenting the passage of St Paul to Timothy which makes mention of it, who declares in his exposition that the apostle intends to reform morals more than clothing.’155 She included a confession of faith among the documents she submitted to the consistory. Although this largely mirrored the confession placed with her testament composed in the preceding year, the Montauban version contains some intriguing additional material. All of the additions to her confession of faith spoke directly of her struggles with the consistory, as she developed her views of the appropriate choice and application of discipline in the churches.156 Through these, Arbaleste declared her willingness to accept discipline of her actions and morals but where a spirit of charity guided the actions of the elders. Excommunications and bans, she insisted, were to be used sparingly and appropriately, and even more pointedly argued that those faithful, where there was no evidence of scandalous conduct but ‘on the contrary, they continue to maintain themselves in modesty, cannot be excluded from the Holy Sacraments, otherwise, if this is done lightly and by stubbornness, it is tyranny in the Church’.157 Finally, Arbaleste insisted that she could not obey the consistory’s demands to alter her hairstyle without the express consent of her husband, who was absent during the dispute.158 Here she invoked biblical interpretation, one which in other circumstances the consistory might have keenly supported. Arbaleste cited Peter, in his Epistle on the subjection of wives to their husbands, and chastised the consistory: ‘Messieurs, you cannot be ignorant, as it appears in the reading of this, that the principal goal of the Apostle is to admonish women to render themselves subject to their husbands.’159 The extant evidence for Arbaleste’s resistance to the consistory, much richer than that available for other women who were not literate or in a position to have their words recorded, points to a difference of opportunities to protest based on status and individual circumstances. Women seem to have shared an argumentative unwillingness to accept consistory regulation of their lives without a fight, when they felt they were aggrieved. Nevertheless, in the absence of a resolution through these means, Arbaleste was forced to action like other women before the consistory, eventually removing her household from the town so that they could receive communion at nearby Villemur.160


Although clearly many women and men accepted the rulings and punishments meted out by ecclesiastical and consistory courts, the resistance of other women points to a different valuation of the authority of such institutional regulation of their lives. Some of the strategies they adopted to encourage or reject moral regulation of their lives were not specific to their sex. Many factors influenced opportunities for resistance to the rule of religious authorities. One was location. It seems likely that in places where Huguenots were not in the majority, this gave people more chance to opt out of that regulatory system. Therefore, in places where the consistory did not represent the dominant religion, the opportunities for dissension would seem logically better. A second consideration is clearly social standing. Status was critical to the outlook and outcome of resistance to ecclesiastical authorities. Few poor women, for example, could afford to rebel against the same group of male authorities who would also be responsible for determining their access to poor relief in times of need.161 Finally, another key component was indeed gender. Even if, as Mentzer argues, some consistories neglected women’s role in religious affairs, women’s interactions suggest that they keenly felt that they were involved in conversations about regulation, and that it was a concern for their lives. Indeed, although men as well as woman protested what they saw as interference of the consistory in their lives, it may be that women were in fact able to continue to reject the authority of the elders more effectively and in more sustained ways. Men’s occupational and public identities as heads of households may have reduced their opportunities to dispute the consistory’s rulings, regardless of how they felt about the decisions that it made.162 Women’s refusal to submit to such bodies certainly does not demonstrate an equal power differential, and yet the consistory courts were often only as powerful as the recognition they were afforded by the laypeople. Thus it was a mutually dependent relationship. * * * Although a sense of passionate commitment to religious beliefs is not necessarily evident in some of the documents examined in this chapter, a survey of women’s voices and actions suggests that they saw themselves playing a crucial role in the institution of religion, a sector of their lives from which they drew profound meaning and context. Moreover, this chapter has examined their contributions to the development of the hierarchy of the churches during the century of reformations.


It suggests that although elite social status enabled women to create the most visible impact on religious hierarchy, as did Jeanne de France in her creation of the new Order of the Annonciades, other women too made different but significant contributions according to their opportunities. Even if the outcome could sometimes be detrimental to the women concerned, their refusal to accept that they were not participants in structural transformations over the century ultimately shaped the ways in which church officials dealt with them.

2 Understanding the Divine

This chapter examines how women contributed to shaping understandings of the supernatural during the sixteenth century by their interpretations of who could have access to it: either by suggesting that they themselves were touched by the divine, or that they knew how to recognise it in others. The evidence drawn on in this chapter was produced by both women and men, and includes canonisation records, testimonies about what people understood to be miraculous, holy and diabolical female behaviour, as well as constructions of martyrdom by female martyrs and their male contemporaries. In many ways, the recognition of the supernatural could be as important in creating ideas about divinity as being the holy person oneself.

Convents promoting divinity Convent communities were among those groups of women most involved in the promotion of concepts of divinity. The institutional setting and its links to ecclesiastical authorities enabled them to understand and interact with the bodies by which their concepts of sanctity might be ratified. Convents could be instrumental in the promotion of candidates for sanctity. In the Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, Isabelle, sister of Saint Louis, was venerated not only as their founder but also for her holy life and the miracles that had occurred in her name since her death in 1270. As early as the 1280s, Agnes of Harcourt, third abbess of Longchamp, had compiled a vernacular hagiographical text designed to promote Isabelle’s claims for canonisation, probably intended to coincide with the proceedings underway for her brother, Louis IX.1 In 1521, the Longchamp community received approval through a papal bull to celebrate Isabelle’s office at Longchamp. The nuns had been 46

Understanding the Divine 47

prompted to seek permission ‘after the kindness of God shown by several miracles in the monastery of Longchamp to declare and approve the glorious and excellent miracles of madame saint Ysabel of France’.2 In particular, they acted after a miracle which had cured the then novice Jeanne Charphaude in 1516 and which had been documented with a tableau hanging over the entrance to the abbey church.3 A hagiography probably produced by Robert Messier around 1518 expands upon Harcourt’s thirteenth-century text, and may have been prepared as part of the proceedings which led Pope Leo X to grant the community their special office. Indeed, Messier was specifically identified in the ratification manuscript for his efforts in promoting the Longchamp nuns’ case for Isabelle.4 Although much of Messier’s life drew on Harcourt’s thirteenth-century information, scholars have noted the addition of new elements of her sanctity – her abject and humble existence at Longchamp and a mystical facet to her piety.5 The continued significance of Isabelle’s sanctity for the Longchamp community during the turbulent years of the sixteenth century is attested by additions to this manuscript of further miracles through the century completed by another hand.6 An added incentive for female monastic communities to promote a holy figure in their midst was the possibility of spiritual tourism. Blessed Françoise d’Amboise, Duchess of Brittany and later a Carmelite nun, was not officially beatified until 1863; nevertheless her reputation as a devout and holy woman grew during her lifetime and was sustained after her death in 1485. Indeed, the contestation over her place of burial attests to the contemporary significance of her spiritual patronage. She was not buried in the grave prepared 28 years earlier alongside her husband, Pierre II, Duke of Brittany, in the collegial church of Nôtre-Dame in Nantes, but instead, the nuns of her community claimed that she had expressed a wish to be buried in the Carmelite (formerly Benedictine) community of Nôtre-Dame de Couëts.7 This was contested by the canons of Nôtre-Dame, who argued that more people would be able to visit her grave if she were buried in a publicly accessible location, rather than in the church of an enclosed convent.8 In 1492, the diocesan authorities agreed to the nuns’ compromise: Françoise’s body would be placed in a crypt attached to the nuns’ choir, which communicated with the chapel by a grilled door. The chapel itself was accessible to the general public, thereby permitting the faithful to pray in front of her tomb.9 When Françoise’s tomb was opened in order to move her body to the new location, her corpse was discovered to be completely preserved – an important sign of her sanctity.


Two lives were written in the years following Françoise’s death, ensuring that her holy reputation was sustained in the sixteenth century. One, produced shortly after her death, was composed by Françoise’s confessor, Matthieu de la Croix, who was also vicar to the community that moved to the monastery at Couëts. Then, in 1543, Jean de Montay, a Parisian Carmelite, produced another manuscript text documenting Françoise’s life.10 Françoise’s thaumaturgic capacity after death was most likely a source of community revenue but also certainly of spiritual significance. In fact, the 1554 inventory of the community indicates that many of the fifty or so nuns were themselves physically delicate.11 It is possible that their noble and bourgeois families chose this community not only because of its sympathetic mitigated Carmelite rule (the sickly Françoise had herself been twice forced to abandon her attempts to follow the reformed, austere Poor Clare rule before she became a Carmelite), but also perhaps because they hoped the proximity of the nuns to the holy woman’s healing powers might improve their daughters’ constitutions. When Nantes seemed likely to fall to Protestant forces in 1569, the community made arrangements to protect their most valuable asset. Françoise’s tomb was again opened, and her body was transferred to an unmarked location within the enclosed grounds. Whilst the community itself moved to the safety of the parish of La Fosse, they were unwilling to allow their sacred asset, for which they had fought hard against the canons of Nôtre-Dame in Nantes, to be removed from their lands. It was not until much later in the century, when Henri IV’s abjuration signalled an end to the religious wars, that the nuns determined that political stability was assured and Françoise’s body was returned to its tomb in the crypt. Her thaumaturgic abilities remained unharmed, and her tomb became once again an object of pilgrims’ devotions.12 Such relics were keenly sought and exchanged between convent communities. When in 1562 the abbess of Chelles, Renée de Bourbon, heard that the holy relic of Christ’s tear (at the moment of Lazarus’ resuscitation) had been taken from Vendôme to the abbey of Longchamp by a priest for safe-keeping from Huguenot attack, she exerted her elite status, as a princess of royal blood and daughter of the house of Vendôme and Bourbon, to ensure it was transferred to her monastery. Such was the significance of the relic that the matter had to be adjudicated between Longchamp and Chelles in the Parisian parlement, which eventually found in favour of Chelles. A priest, Claude Haton, recorded in his memoirs that Renée ‘had it carried to the abbey of Chelles, where there were a great number of noble religious women, princesses of


the houses of France, where the holy tear remained from this time until 1575 or 1576, when it was returned to Vendôme’.13 Haton’s record of the event echoes once again the importance of social status in religious matters, even to the determination of the rightful home of relics. While sixteenth-century women celebrated the achievements of recognised female saints and martyrs, commissioned male ecclesiastical authorities to produce hagiographic texts of women related to their Order or family, and contested rights to retain holy relics, only a few women were responsible for constructing a vision of holiness themselves. Françoise Guyard’s hagiographic text of the founder of the Annonicade Order, Jeanne de France, provides a rare opportunity to understand how a sixteenth-century woman could construct the sanctity of a comtemporary woman. Guyard first needed to establish her personal authority for producing a hagiographic text. She argued that the nuns would be negligent if they did not commit to paper their memories of their foundress. Thus Guyard’s link to the founding members of the convent made her ideally placed to record their memories. Moreover, she argued that the text was never originally intended to serve an external community, but purely the other nuns.14 Nevertheless, Guyard suggested that the text originally intended for the internal study of the Annonciades sisters would be wasted if it were not permitted to serve a more holy purpose if it possibly could. Circulation of the original text appears to have encouraged the nuns to consider the possibility that the document might be used as part of a procedure for canonisation for their founder, Jeanne. In addition, in 1562, the convent in Bourges was attacked by Huguenots who tossed Jeanne’s body and many associated relics into the River Cher, thereby destroying many of the physical objects which the community cherished as relics of their foundress. Guyard had herself produced an eyewitness account of these events recorded in some manuscripts of the chronicle.15 Guyard’s narrative of the convent’s foundation now served to reinstate the Catholic community’s claim to sanctity for Jeanne. It documented a defiant Catholic spiritual site despite the attempts at destruction by the Huguenots and devoted more focus to the virtues of Jeanne herself, her life and the miracles which had occurred in her lifetime and since. Promotion for canonisation was a process that frequently required both popular support and significant investment from a wealthy patron. If Guyard’s history was to be used to seek patronage for such a canonisation promotion (or even simply for patronage of the rebuilding of the convent itself), it needed to be written in a way that would appeal not


only to the internal community of sisters, but also to external readers.16 Indeed, in 1562, just after the damage to the convent and destruction of Jeanne’s body by Huguenot forces, Catherine de Medici visited the town. She and the Cardinal of Lorraine were to become key benefactors in the repairs to the convent.17 Complex issues surrounded the construction of female sanctity in sixteenth-century France. Guyard needed to fashion the existing memories of the real Jeanne with an understanding of divinity and contemporary models of female saintly behaviour. It was a careful balancing act between the woman the nuns remembered and the Jeanne who might suit canonisation. Moreover, a complicating factor in promoting Jeanne for canonisation in the 1560s was a lack of contemporary examples of precisely what constituted holy female behaviour in the Catholic Reformation Church. After the criticism of Protestant reformers across Europe, the Church sought to establish standardised canonisation procedures and understandings of saintly behaviour. After 1523, no new saints were created for 65 years.18 There were only six more formal canonisations before the end of the century, the first under Sixtus V in 1588. Thus, at the time when Guyard was compiling a case for Jeanne’s sanctity, there were few clear models of what approved saintly behaviour might be. There was of course a difference between sixteenth-century women’s accreditation of pre-existing holy figures, or sites associated with them, and their role in the creation of a new saint. As this chapter will explore, women as well as men were involved as witnesses and recipients of miracles. With Jeanne de France, women went further, creating recognition of her holy status through the production of a female-authored hagiographic text. This was rare, perhaps unique, in sixteenth-century France.19 Study of various manuscripts of Françoise Guyard’s text, as well as the internal evidence, suggests that in the early 1560s, Guyard searched to place Jeanne’s memory and actions in a wider context, which would appeal to a wider, lay and ecclesiastical audience. To do so, she contextualised Jeanne primarily in the contemporary historical, rather than theological, literature. Guyard included several chapters at the beginning of the text where she discussed Jeanne’s royal genealogy and the history of her life before the divorce that had permitted her the opportunity to establish the new Order. For the initial chapters in which Guyard discussed Jeanne’s noble descent, she explained that she had set down ‘as close as we could according to what one can know and find in writing by the Chronicles of France and the Annals of Aquitaine’, two popular historical texts by Jean Bouchet and Nicole Gilles republished


several times in the sixteenth century to which Guyard evidently had access.20 A brief comparison with these texts indicates that Guyard largely copied entire paragraphs word for word from particularly Bouchet’s French history. Most scholars who have examined Guyard’s chronicle of the Annonciades have thus assumed that these chapters hold little intrinsic interest. However, a closer reading seems to provide evidence of how Guyard did not merely transcribe but carefully selected her material to produce a re-visioning of history that suited her particular purposes. First, Guyard had to make a decision about where to commence Jeanne’s genealogy. She explained that, although Jeanne was related to Saint Louis, it would take too long to discuss all the kings between his reign and her own time.21 Although she did not have the space to comment on all the kings since the thirteenth century, Guyard neatly drew readers’ attention to the lineage which connected the proposed saint, Jeanne, to the recognised saint, Louis – thereby establishing a holy genealogy which united the royal blood. Guyard provided no real explanation of why she decided to commence her specific discussion with Charles V, Jeanne’s great-grandfather – perhaps her motive was the direct name link to Charles IX, the current king who had recently acceded to the throne of France in 1560, and who might number among the potential patrons of the convent. A study of the text of Bouchet’s Annales d’Aquitaine reveals that Bouchet devoted much more space to the reign of each monarch than Guyard had space or interest to do in hers.22 Therefore, Guyard made decisions about the kind of information from Bouchet’s text that would be most relevant to include in her own. For example, Bouchet devoted sixteen pages to discussing national and international diplomacy, war, court politics and manoeuvres during the reign of Charles V,23 and finished with an epitaph summarising Charles’s moral attributes in which he says: ‘He was one of the wisest and most prudent who ever was among all the kings of France, and who best arranged his affairs to his great honour, and to common profit.’ ‘He always governed by advice and loved above all things justice, revering and honouring it’ and ‘who for his prudence was called the wise’.24 Of these pages, Guyard retained simply: ‘He was one of the wisest and most prudent kings who was ever among all the kings of France and who best arranged his affairs to his great honour, and to common profit, such that by his prudence he was called the Wise King. He always governed by advice and loved above all justice, revering and honouring it.’25 Guyard thus retained only the information pertinent to her own enquiry – that is, the establishment of


a moral genealogy of the kings who preceded Jeanne. For Charles V, Charles VI, Charles VII and then Louis XI, Guyard followed the same strategy – isolating the information in Bouchet’s text which highlighted the spiritual and moral qualities of Jeanne’s forebears. She also created a narrative in which a good king was one who patronised religious institutions – emphasising royal investment in religious artworks, architecture and interactions with holy figures. Moreover, Guyard fashioned a different vision of women’s contribution to religious history by her omissions and inclusions of Bouchet’s source text. In particular, Guyard was concerned to inscribe women into national history as positive forces. Where Bouchet explains that Louis XI (Jeanne’s father) ‘did not believe at all’ in his wife Charlotte of Savoy, because she was from the house of Savoy, in his decision to elect a regent for his son Charles, Guyard omitted this section of the text, and later added elsewhere that Jeanne’s mother ‘was a virtuous lady full of great tolerance and patience which was very necessary to her, being with the king’.26 She also noted how Louis recommended that his son should govern with the counsel of his sister, Anne de France.27 Equally, Guyard referred to Anne of Brittany (for whom Louis XII divorced Jeanne) as an ‘honourable and virtuous lady’ even though Guyard continued to call Jeanne the ‘true and legitimate wife’ of Louis XII.28 In such ways, Guyard’s text made efforts to draw attention to women’s participation in contemporary national history and to make women visible in religious history and patronage in France. Through the construction of a spiritual heritage of saintly royal forebears, recalling the significance of royal women to the spiritual history of France, and reminding her readers of the importance of royal religious patronage, Guyard aimed to speak with those she perceived to be among the most influential patrons of her era: the king, Charles IX, and his mother, Catherine de Medici. Guyard was careful to produce a text that indicated that a good king was one who was a faithful patron and protector of the Catholic Church. She drew a connection between the monarch of her own era, Charles IX, and his ancestry, which included both Jeanne and their shared lineage of royal divinity, a strategy which was surely designed to inspire fervour and funds from royal readers. In these introductory sections of her text, Guyard also reproduced other kinds of information pertinent to promoting Jeanne’s sanctity. One of the most striking elements in her chapter on Jeanne’s genealogy is the lengthy inclusion of some nine paragraphs pertaining to Jeanne d’Arc (by comparison to an average three to four paragraphs on each


king). Although the text is largely straight from Bouchet (with the notable omission of battle details, military manoeuvres and lists of nobles present at the various events of Jeanne d’Arc’s life), its very inclusion is significant. Jeanne d’Arc was not officially recognised as a saint until the early twentieth century, yet Guyard was suggesting by the inclusion that Jeanne d’Arc might be read as a model of saintly behaviour which Jeanne had mirrored. Put simply, both were positioned as weak, mild-mannered women who were driven with God’s encouragement to stand out and interact in a man’s world. In omitting Bouchet’s description of battle action, Guyard simply writes: ‘The said Maid … had in battle great victories in the towns of Orleans, Paris, and other places, which we omit to discuss for brevity except that it was a divine thing which enabled her to do what men could not.’29 Jeanne is an example of how a woman could sometimes achieve what no man could manage: Jeanne d’Arc through battle, and Jeanne de France through her struggle to create a new religious Order against the advice of every church official she encountered, from her personal spiritual advisor to Pope Alexander VI who initially rejected her request to establish the Order. Guyard was also careful not to suggest that Jeanne de France might be construed as too manly in her institutional endeavours. She indicated that when Jeanne acted in ways out of keeping with her sex, she was seized by the fervour of doing God’s work. Moreover, the chronicle included a speech by Gabriel-Maria to the sisters after Jeanne’s death in which he highlighted her virtues.30 One such virtue identified by Guyard throughout the text (as well as in Gabriel-Maria’s speech) was Jeanne’s patience. Guyard reminded her readers of the ritual humiliation she received at the hands of both her father and husband, although this highlighted a less than magnanimous aspect of the characters of both Louis XI and Louis XII. Nevertheless, it was necessary to Guyard’s construction of a saintly Jeanne that she suffer and thus demonstrate her divinely inspired patience. By the seventeenth century, a principal theme in the vitae of recognised holy women was suffering (often in illness) as a heroic response to testing by God.31 Jeanne’s suffering during her marriage, where ‘she was so poorly treated and so little loved by her husband’, enabled her to demonstrate her great patience.32 When the divorce was announced, Jeanne ‘accepted it humbly, constantly and patiently, yet with much affliction of the heart’.33 One of Jeanne’s most recent historians, Jean-François Drèze, has discussed at length the nature of her devotio moderna mariale in the context of the turn of the sixteenth century and its significance to her actions and decisions in founding the Annonciade Order.34 Although


the mystic vision of the Virgin which inspired the establishment of the Annonicade Order is duly reported in Guyard’s text, she does not principally dwell on the mystic qualities of Jeanne’s sanctity.35 The text avoids detailed discussion of theological understanding; rather, it is a document that deals primarily with the practical and the worldly. Naturally, the intervention of the divine is recorded in such events as miracles, but Guyard’s document is largely a biography of a virtuous and determined individual interacting in the earthly realm. Guyard’s text is a fascinating view of how hagiography could be perceived and re-visioned from within a female religious community during the sixteenth century. In the transfer of the text from an internal readership to an external bid for patronage and potential canonisation, Guyard adapted published historical sources with which her readers would be familiar. In doing so, she edited the public view of religious history to fit her desired goal of demonstrating Jeanne’s clear predestination for sainthood. By creating a moral genealogy of Jeanne’s ancestors, and highlighting the importance of royal women to the spiritual history of France and through emphasising the holy example of Jeanne d’Arc (both meek yet brave in matters more commonly the domain of men), Guyard developed a narrative in which Jeanne was indeed the chosen servant of God’s work on earth. Not only did her family heritage endow her with the spiritual credentials for the task, but her sex and even her name, Jeanne, bestowed on her particular capabilities which would enable her to manoeuvre within the church hierarchy and achieve spiritual glory in the foundation of the Annonciade Order. In the early seventeenth century, the episcopal court in Bourges compiled a list of authorised miracles, stemming from Guyard’s compilation, which could be used in a canonisation process. The longevity and suitability of the document Guyard created is attested by the fact that Latin copies of her work were used for Jeanne’s canonisation process of 1773.36

Early sixteenth-century holy women Jeanne de France was by no means the only woman of her era who was recognised as saintly in her lifetime and beyond. Louise de Savoie was recognised as blessed from the time of her death in 1503, although her official beatification did not occur until 1839.37 Catherine de Saulx, one of Louise’s former ladies of honour who accompanied her into the Poor Clare convent at Orbe as a professed nun, composed a record of her mistress’s virtues in 1507.38 Like Guyard’s work, the text was ostensibly conceived as a pedagogical work for the other nuns of the convent, yet


it too could serve as a hagiographical text to promote Louise’s sanctity. Here Saulx insisted at length on Louise’s obedience to her dynastic duties as an elite noblewoman. Louise, grand-daughter of Charles VII, was required to accept marriage instead of the convent life she wished for. Saulx describes how Louise bore with patience the eleven years of marriage to the equally devout Hugues de Châlons until his death in 1490 enabled her to follow her religious fervour into the notably austere reformed Poor Clare community at Orbe in 1492. Like Jeanne de France, Louise de Savoie was presented in the text as passionately devoted, even inordinately forceful, in her religious fervour. It was not sufficient for Louise to enjoy a religious life herself; she was evidently driven to persuade her female social inferiors to do likewise. Saulx reports how Louise often: preached to her women to become Cordelières and had a marvellous desire for it, and often said to them – I do not know how you can stand to remain in the world and to be married, for you see the great tribulations and sorrows that there are. When one has a good virtuous husband, one loses him and you see what sorrow this is. And when he is bad and poorly mannered, it is a thing of great anguish. So if you believe me you will keep yourself from that. And they responded – we do not want to be nuns, for God has never granted us that goodness to have desire and devotion for it. And to this she said to them – pray to God, and he will give you the will.39 Yet, as with Jeanne de France, Saulx insists that Louise’s attentions to them were such that two of her ladies of honour, herself and Charlotte de Saint-Maurice, also agreed to become nuns. Indeed, speaking of her religious conversion, Saulx was convinced that the transformation was nothing short of miraculous: ‘the holy orisons of the Lady and her holy merits penetrated her [Saulx] with this grace … that where it had not been previously her intention to become a nun … this devoted Lady, who loved her so, attracted her to it by her pious prayers that she made to God about it’.40 Convent attempts to secure holy recognition for Louise de Savoie might have been undertaken during the sixteenth century were it not for the impact of reforming ideas. In 1531, the Orbe nuns were ordered by reformist Berne officials to attend Guillaume Farel’s sermons, and were deeply conscious of the Protestant threat to their continued existence.41 By July of that year, the community had managed to send some of their members to Nozeroy in the Franche-Comté with the assistance of


Philiberte de Luxembourg, Princess of Orange, although the rest were commanded to remain by the Berne authorities.42 The persistent worship, and sustained familial patronage, of two holy women in the convent, Philippine de Châlons and Louise de Savoie, is attested by the fact that their remains at the Orbe convent were also removed from the convent in 1531 under the protection of Philiberte de Luxembourg and taken to Nozeroy, where they were hidden for safekeeping in the church of the Cordeliers.43 Much of the Orbe community’s sixteenthcentury history and that of its sister Poor Clare convents of Vevey, Geneva (documented by the future abbess, Jeanne de Jussie) and Chambery, concerned a practical search for refuge which was hardly compatible with the efforts required to promote Louise de Savoie’s holy status. The case for sanctity of another early sixteenth-century woman, Marguerite de Lorraine, was in fact encouraged by the Annonciade nuns of Bourges. It was at their behest that Yves Magistri, a Franciscan from Saint-François de Laval, produced his hagiographic text in 1585 in which the lives of Jeanne de France and her near-contemporary Marguerite sat side by side.44 Magistri identified women as a powerful source of patronage and support for the claims of sanctity, prefacing the second section of his text which dealt with Marguerite’s life to Eleanor de Bourbon, abbess of Fontevrault, and explaining that he had a ‘good number of female relatives who have often prayed’ that he produce the text.45 Magistri also declared his intention to present his text to Cardinal of Rouen, Charles de Bourbon, who was related to the two women whose holy status Magistri promoted. Marguerite’s beatification was not granted until 1921, although she too enjoyed informal holy recognition during the sixteenth century. Marguerite similarly demonstrated her obedience to the dynastic ambitions of her family, despite harbouring a desire to become a nun: similarities with Jeanne to which Magistri’s text could not help but connect in the readers’ mind. She married René d’Alençon and bore three children before she was widowed four years later in 1492 at the age of thirty.46 After dutifully seeing to her children’s education and ensuring the good and holy governance of her lands as Duchess of Alençon, Marguerite retired to lead a pseudoreligious life at her chateau of Essai where she and (apparently) likeminded women followed the prayers and rules of the reformed Poor Clares.47 She formally took vows in 1519 as a novice of the Poor Clares at Argentan, a convent she had founded, before dying in 1521.48 The influence of her daughter-in-law, Marguerite de Navarre, was crucial in developing Marguerite’s plans for the convent and guaranteeing its


financial security: ‘As long as the Lord gives me life, I will have your convent completed, according to what I know of your holy design,’ Marguerite promised her mother-in-law.49 In her will, Marguerite de Lorraine constituted both her son and daughter-in-law to ‘be fathers, protectors, and benefactors, they and their successors, of the nuns and convent of Sainte-Claire d’Argentan, as their perpetual patrons and founders’.50 In recalling Marguerite de Lorraine’s holy status, the Annonciade sisters may also have been calling for a female patron like the dutiful Marguerite de Navarre from amongst the elite women of their own era.

Women identifying sanctity Laywomen at all social levels were involved in recognition of sanctity in those around them. Pilgrimages to devotional sites, and intercessory prayers to those who women and men perceived to be divine, helped to create ideas about what the divine meant to them and how (and by whom) it could be accessed. In the Touraine region, the chapel of Saint Catherine de Fierbois was a significant local site for divine healing throughout the later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. A sixteenth-century manuscript recorded some 245 miracles attributed to St Catherine of Alexandria which took place between 1375 and 1536. The 238th miracle, for example, concerned Jehanne Cazaude, who had given birth to twelve children and prayed to St Catherine for a painless delivery during her next pregnancy.51 In Guyard’s collation of miracles mediated by Jeanne de France, she included the testimony provided by Marie Pot, who was serving Jeanne de France on her deathbed, and was witness to the miraculous light that emanated from her body at the moment of her death.52 Even if Pot herself did not elaborate on the theological meaning of her vision, she did evidently consider her divine experience worthy of drawing to the attention of Guyard for the broader collection of Jeanne’s miracles. Yet it was not only in support of female candidates to sanctity that women’s words, visions and deeds concerning the divine were significant. In 1513, canonisation proceedings for St François de Paule included some 24 women among the 50 lay testimonies (seven more were ecclesiastics) recorded in Tours. By contrast to the 48 per cent of female witness statements from France, only two women were interviewed in the 102 testimonies (2 per cent) included in the concurrent Calabrian proceedings for Paule.53 It was after all the local community who created the possibility for official church recognition of holy figures


by praying for their intervention or visiting a pilgrimage site associated with the cult. Indeed, the testimonies for Paule reveal that women were instrumental in circulating information and perceptions about the holy figure. The wife of Hilaire Bohomme, a midwife who was devoted to the memory of Paule, propagated his holy reputation in matters of conception and birth to her female clientele. Bernard Chevalier’s analysis of the statements demonstrate the correspondence between testimonies about knowledge of the saint’s intercessional powers stemming from community dialogue and transmitted through such networks.54 In officiating over the procedures of saintly status, ecclesiastical authorities were often ratifying the choices of the local populace as to whom they perceived to be holy, and to be effective divine intercessors. If the local church authorities recorded and authenticated miracles for sainthood documentation, they could only choose which were valid from those presented to them by the community. On the other hand, there were many factors at stake in the decision about who might become a saint, blessed or venerable. The specific inclinations of local church authorities and the Pope, or the pressure that could be brought to bear on the papacy by religious Orders, monarchs or other groups, could all play a part.55 David Gentilcore has also noted that class was a factor: poor women did not usually become saints.56 Indeed the Annonciade community in Bourges identified Marguerite de Lorraine as a fitting companion in status and qualities for their promotion of Jeanne de France. Elite patronage for the promotion of both women, as well as their piety, humility and charity, would have undoubtedly influenced the perception of their holy status among both church officials and the local population. Concepts of sanctity and divine healing were thus dynamic, and both local popular ratification as well as that of the Church hierarchy could influence perceptions held by both groups.

Understanding the supernatural Beyond identifying and attesting to cases of sanctity, women’s understanding of divinity infiltrated other events and visions that they perceived to be miraculous. The later sixteenth-century journal compiled by the nuns of Beaumont-lès-Tours reported several miracles in 1583 which signified to the community God’s call for Catholics to amend their ways. Miraculous objects in the sky over Paris and Brie were recorded as portents for Catholics to repent. Similar tales of the appearance of a naked, hairless woman holding a bird in a field in Brie57 and


the child who miraculously spoke at his own baptism ceremony58 told Catholic listeners, and by extension the Beaumont readers, to atone for their sins. By reporting the miraculous visions of others in their era, women authorised and accredited them with meaning in their own lives. Identifying supernatural events was not merely a matter for ecclesiastical officials, but one in which the whole community was involved. In 1537, an inquiry was established by the dean and Official of Montivilliers to determine the veracity of a miracle that had occurred in Harfleur.59 There, Blanche La Moyne, a young servant in the household of Pierre Bourgnes, had been sifting flour on the feast-day of the translation of St Martin, when her hand had become caught in a large sieve. All physical attempts to remove her hand caused her intense pain yet after being taken to the parish church of Saint-Martin, prayers to St Martin offered, and La Moyne confessed, the sieve slipped from her hand, leaving her in no pain and with no injury. In response to this miraculous event, the curé organised a procession of priests, La Moyne and her sieve, about the town of Harfleur. The sieve was eventually placed in the church under the image of St Martin in thanks and recognition for his intervention. The depositions that followed included male and female eyewitnesses to the events which occurred in the home of Bourgnes from the householders, visiting friends, the parish priest and an eyewitness to the ceremonies which occurred in the church. What is revealed is how men and women constructed the events as miraculous according to their context on the event. Before the intervention in the matter of ecclesiastical officials in the church of Saint-Martin, several people had witnessed or considered the events that had occurred and formed a judgement about their natural or supernatural cause. It is this area of their testimony, where eyewitnesses made individual assessments of the situation based on their own and collective understanding of the matter, which is of interest here. This is not intended to suggest that upon La Moyne’s arrival at the church all the ecclesiastical officials agreed about what they witnessed and did. Indeed, part of the process of the depositions was about determining whether the priests’ actions were appropriate in treating the event as divine and its outcome as effected by holy intercession. Blanche Morel was the twelve-year-old daughter of Jeanne Morelle, a friend visiting Pierre Bourgnes’ poorly mother. Blanche testified that she had heard La Moyne’s mistress agree to allow La Moyne to sift the flour and further specify that she should begin by sifting flour to prepare as pap for Bourgnes’ infant.60 Blanche accompanied La Moyne about her


work and heard her say before she commenced that she feared sifting and trembled, to which young Blanche had replied that if it pleased God, nothing would happen to her.61 The testimony of La Moyne herself provides some understanding of her fears. She deposed both that she was fearful of the work, because in her hometown of Breaute she had not been accustomed to do it,62 and because she was meant to have sifted the flour on the night before the feast-day.63 After La Moyne’s arm became stuck in the apparatus, she begged Blanche to fetch her mother. When Jeanne Morelle appeared, La Moyne cried out that she had lost her arm, to which Morelle replied that it was probably nothing but cramp. After several more unsuccessful attempts to pull La Moyne’s arm from the sieve, Blanche reported how her mother, Morelle, told La Moyne that her best hope would be to pray to God and to St Martin for assistance, which La Moyne began to do.64 Blanche detailed how Morelle and another friend, Guyonne, helped La Moyne to the chamber of her mistress and they were debating what action to take when Pierre Bourgnes and a priest Jean Bonard arrived. By Blanche’s account, La Moyne was fearful of working and that, after various struggles to extract her hand from the sieve as a consequence of a natural accident, the women had concluded that the cause could only be supernatural and that God and St Martin would be the only intercessors who could lift their own punishment upon her for labouring on the feast-day. Forty-year-old Jehanne Morelle explained how she had been visiting Pierre Bourgnes’ mother on the day of the miracle. She concurred with her daughter that La Moyne’s mistress had agreed that the servant should prepare the flour. Morelle also confirmed that her first thought had been that the accident was a simple one. Yet when her attempts to pull La Moyne’s hand from the sieve failed and appeared to cause the young servant intense pain, Morelle attributed the unexplained events to supernatural forces. God or St Martin, she concluded, was punishing La Moyne for working on St Martin’s feast-day. She reprimanded her friend, La Moyne’s mistress, to this effect.65 When Pierre Bourgnes and the priest Bonard arrived, the decision was made to take La Moyne to the church. By the time La Moyne was examined in the church by the canon of Nôtre-Dame de Rouen and the lieutenant of the bailiff of Caux, Morelle heard the servant confess that her mistress had asked her to work and that this must have been against the will of God.66 Morelle was the only witness to mention this information, which would not perhaps have been in the interest of the householders, but another deposition by a lawyer who was in the church at the time they arrived there, noted seeing a woman accompany La Moyne in her interactions with the


church officials who was comforting her and wiping her brow.67 This woman, perhaps Morelle, may have both heard and helped to fashion the way Blanche La Moyne and the priests in the church saw the events. Certainly, Morelle appears in all the testimonies that document events within the household as the dominant figure in the determination of the accident’s cause and on the most appropriate course of action. The testimony of Pierre Bourgnes, La Moyne’s 29-year-old master, reveals different preoccupations and perspectives on the supernatural events. He had been at the celebrations of the wedding of his wife’s brother on the day in question. He reported seeing Blanche dancing at the festivities and questioned her as to her presence there. Blanche explained that Pierre’s ailing mother, whom she was in charge of nursing, had allowed her time to hear a sermon in the church of Saint-Martin, but Blanche had met a friend who persuaded her to join the celebrations instead.68 Pierre insisted that he had sent her home, but not to work on making bread, or preparing the flour for it, as it was a feast-day. With his wife and a priest, Jean Bonard, Pierre returned later to discover La Moyne being tended by the visiting female friends of his mother who had come to her aid, her hand inextricably caught in the sieve. Pierre described how these women had decided to take her to the church after vespers to avoid any scandal that might stem from the discovery of her working injury. Pierre, however, insisted that she be taken immediately to pray for God’s help, which the women apparently did straightaway. In her own testimony, Pierre’s 20-year-old wife, Jeanne, largely confirmed his account of the events and she too claimed to have personally forbidden Blanche to undertake any work on the feast-day.69 The depositions of Bourgnes and his wife appear to reveal a particular concern to depict their own behaviour in a suitable light – carefully detailing their opposition to La Moyne working on that day, and emphasising Bourgnes’ insistence on taking La Moyne to the church immediately. Neither Pierre nor his wife, whose entire experiences of the events were made in the company of priests at their home and in the church, seemed to have offered an opinion on the nature of the illness at the time of the event or in their testimony afterwards. Yet the witness statements of the women who were initially present reveal how they had concluded that the event was supernatural before the ecclesiastical intervention, and it is probable that this directed the course of religious intervention which followed. Much of the evidence presented so far in this chapter involves laywomen and men’s involvement in discussions of sanctity and the miraculous in the early sixteenth century. Institutional regulation of


such issues (if not lay perceptions) became more tightly controlled after the Council of Trent. At the Council, church officials sought to establish firmer church rulings on who could access divine intervention. The Tridentine Church recognised the ordained priest as the only individual who could perform sacred rituals and ratified the exorcist as the only official authority who could determine if the cause of an illness was supernatural.70 None the less, like canonisation proceedings, ecclesiastical officials could only determine the notions of the laity by working with the information and cases presented before them. This relied on laypeople identifying a supernatural cause for an event and then seeking ecclesiastical assistance to cure it. Cases of possession could be met with varied degrees of acceptance and patronage by laypeople, and women could be instrumental in deciding public opinion about the matter. Anita M. Walker and Edmund H. Dickerman’s analysis of the testimony of Anne Chevreau, who the claimed demoniac Marthe Brossier had accused of witchcraft causing her possession, suggests that Chevreau carefully deconstructed Brossier’s actions as attributable to rational, non-supernatural causes, although she did not deny the reality of witchcraft or possession generally.71 Sometimes local communities could be initially unreceptive to claims of supernatural behaviour. In 1577, 20-year-old Marguerite Obry from Villiers attempted to join the townspeople’s pilgrimage to Nôtre-Dame du Mont. Yet she experienced great torment and difficulty proceeding along the route, which was later attributed to her demonic possession. When the group arrived at the church, Obry claimed that she could not enter the building because she was held back by an invisible force. Obry’s demon was no match for the attendant women who had accompanied her along the pilgrimage. One ‘of the women who was in her company took her by the body and pushed her inside by force’, dismissing the supernatural cause for Obry’s trepidation.72 Yet eventually Obry’s continued curious behaviour caused her family and the households in which she was a servant to seek spiritual explanations. The support of elite women in such cases could be instrumental. In 1580, her uncle living in Chantilly sent for Obry in order to introduce her to Madame la Connêtable of Chantilly. She took pity on the girl and was able to provide a sum of money for her to be taken to Beauvais to see the bishop and determine if she was indeed possessed by demons.73 At Soissons in 1582, Nicole le Roy had experienced visions of ghosts, which prompted a variety of opinions ranging from the medical to the supernatural among the local community.74 Her strange behaviour was identified by local church officials as the work of an evil


spirit, but it was the intervention of Catherine de Bourbon, abbess of Nôtre-Dame de Soissons, which proved decisive. Bourbon permitted the Holy Cross and relic of the Virgin Mary’s belt to be removed from the abbey in order to lay them upon Le Roy. When confronted with these deeply significant objects from the female monastic community, Le Roy reported a painful pricking sensation to her face that brought about a miraculous cure to her possession.75 Such a result also served to increase the devotional status of Nôtre-Dame de Soissons’ relics. Historians have recently focused on diabolical possession as one way which predominantly laywomen could enter into dialogue with officials about their spiritual concerns.76 Moshe Sluhovsky has argued that possession often revealed matters of immediate spiritual anxiety in women’s lives77 and Michelle Marshman that exorcism (or rather possession) could empower certain women in some contexts.78 Possession also appears to have enabled some religious women to express spiritual anxieties and concerns. At the elite Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre des Nonnains in Lyons, reforms to the community’s lifestyle were eventually imposed in 1517 after a bitter feud between the original inmates and abbess, and reformers and reformed nuns introduced from Saint-Laurent de Bourges.79 The abbess, Françoise d’Albon, was deposed and many of the protesting nuns left the convent which was slowly repopulated with a new generation of less wealthy sisters.80 In 1526, one of the younger sisters, eighteen-year-old Antoinette de Groslée, who had witnessed the struggles for reform, but who remained in the convent, began to experience apparitions and possession by the spirit of a former inmate, Alis de Theizé, who had paid particular attention to Groslée as a young novice. It was Groslée who identified the spirit as that of Theizé, who had left the convent at the height of the reform drama and since died, and this identification was ratified by the abbess, Antoinette d’Armagnac. Armagnac concluded from dialogue with Groslée’s possessor that Theizé’s spirit remained in purgatory and could not rest until her mortal remains were reinterred in the grounds of the convent community. Theizé was duly disinterred and reburied with her original community, and Groslée was eventually released from her possession. Later, a mollified Theizé appeared to the nuns in the habit of the reformed community. When Adrien de Montalembert published his account of these events in 1528, his concern was to promote the experience as evidence of the heresy of Lutheran views about the non-existence of purgatory.81 Yet other contemporary interpretations of the events also existed. Despite


her rejection of its merits in her lifetime, Theizé’s apparition also ratified the justness of the community’s reforms, by finally appearing at peace in the new reformed attire of the community. This significance was first identified by the reforming abbess, Armagnac, whose interpretation was accredited by the eye-witness theologians and archbishops. In addition, the possession seemed to have allowed Groslée to express some of her own spiritual concerns, including guilt about the lack of reconciliation between the older nuns with the reformists, and a concern to rehabilitate Theizé’s reputation after her death.82 Certainly Theizé transformed from a symbol of all that was bad about the old ways of the community into a divine messenger approving the reforms. Furthermore, that women in Saint-Pierre des Nonnains may have seen the potential for possession to express their own concerns seems apparent in a second possession that occurred around the same time. Montalembert’s account reveals that a young novice, placed in the convent against her will by her relatives, also began to experience fits and visions just after Groslée.83 It is possible that this novice saw an opportunity to voice her unwillingness to enter convent life.84 Like cases of demonic possession, most witchcraft accusations were not brought forward typically by elite jurists versed in contemporary demonology but by local communities whose notions of diabolical intervention did not stem from familiarity with the works of demonologists. The opinions of local women in cases of witchcraft were often critical to their subsequent outcome before secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Marc Venard has noted that the witnesses in the witchcraft trials of Bédarrides, Châteauneuf and Avignon for 1582 and 1583 were in the majority women who were perceived to be the representatives of ‘common knowledge’.85 In the cases of women investigated for sorcery, the female community was perhaps also most likely to be able to attest to suspects’ everyday activities. The power of testimony founded on ‘common repute’ was sufficient to warrant investigation of the actions of Marie Martin, a 50-year-old widow originally from Wacquemolin, but living in Neufville le Roy.86 These unidentified sources attested that ‘death came to people she had threatened, or to their livestock’.87 Martin eventually confessed to the crimes, admitting that she communicated directly and willingly with a diabolic spirit Cerberus, who empowered her to cause harm and death. Indeed, it was her aunt Louise Morel, also a witch, who had first introduced her to Cerberus and to the spells and enchantments which the spirit enabled her to perform.88 Martin claimed that she had used Cerberus’s power and a diabolical powder made of human bones to kill


at least eleven people as well as animals in Neufville le Roy.89 Yet the initial investigating judge was unwilling to accredit a woman’s claims, or a female hereditary claim, to such supernatural power and influence, saying that the stories were ‘so strange and detestable, that one could scarcely believe a woman had confessed them’.90 Both he and the subsequent panel who examined Martin in Montdidier preferred to believe in a rational, natural cause to Martin’s pretensions, rather than her claims to particular supernatural attention. They debated whether Martin might suffer ‘from a melancholic humour and perturbation of the mind’.91 Nevertheless, when Martin persisted in her claims before both secular and ecclesiastical examinations, she was eventually condemned to be strangled, hanged and burned as a witch in June 1586. Some women continued to claim supernatural intervention in their healing practices despite the Tridentine Church’s position that the only recognised living religious healer was the exorcist. In 1577, Barbe Dorée a healer from Senlis admitted that she placed a pigeon on the stomach of a patient whilst invoking the intervention of saints. She further advised that a mass be celebrated for the following nine days in the local church. Yet as Jean Bodin, a member of the magistracy in Laon, revealed in his influential 1580 treatise on witchcraft, La Démonomanie des sorciers, the words uttered at the same time as the treatment could be inspired by the Devil, even if they seemed ostensibly Christian in sentiment.92 Barbe Dorée eventually admitted during her trial that she treated her patients, not with divine assistance but with the help of simple remedies and phrases that Satan had taught her. Similarly Jeanne Harvillier, from Verbery, near Compiègne, was condemned to the stake in 1578 because she too ‘had begged the Devil to heal her patient’.93 Bodin complained about the laxity of his fellow jurists in pursuing witchcraft cases, and his text was designed to heighten awareness of such dangerous collusion between women and the Devil, but when the courts were faced with cases against witches, secular authorities were sceptical and their sentences could often be minimal.94 Were authorities unwilling to believe that even the Devil could invest such power in a woman? Like Marie Martin, other women whose unusual behaviour required explanation frequently offered understandings of their own about the supernatural – divine or diabolical – nature of their illness. In the celebrated case of possession concerning sixteen-year-old Nicole Obri in 1565 at Wrevin, Obri was seized by the spirit of her recently deceased grandfather who spoke through her. She was alone in the church, praying over her grandfather’s grave when he appeared before her, and


then entered her body.95 Nicole understood the miraculous event herself to be a divine message from her grandfather, recounting to her parents his message that, having died suddenly, he had not completed the pilgrimages that he had promised to carry out. Yet when Obri’s illness did not diminish as the family attempted to fulfil their relative’s devotional commitments, they decided to consult ecclesiastical advice.96 It was then that Obri’s voice was identified by a Dominican monk, Pierre de la Motte, as a satanic force, even though it declared itself to be from God, and from Obri’s grandfather, when interviewed. It was only much later that the demon inside Obri declared openly it was in fact a demon.97 Obri’s identification of the source of her voice as supernatural was ratified by her family and ecclesiastical authorities, yet her initial determination of its divine source was contested by Catholic officials. In the 1599 case of Marthe Brossier, her claim to be a vessel of a supernatural presence was hotly contested by both medical and ecclesiastical officials. Medical examiners cast doubt upon the ratification given to her claims by provincial priests who had confirmed her own opinion to be possessed by a demon.98 The Parisian physicians who examined her critiqued Brossier’s understanding of her diabolical possession, especially the spirit’s poor understanding of Latin and theological concepts. The evidence of her father, that Marthe ‘always read books about diabolism and principally that of the devil of Laon’, seemed to confirm the trickery.99 In short, Marthe’s assertion that she harboured a supernatural presence, even a diabolical one, was dismissed and allusions made that her father had promoted her claims as a source of gaining income from faithful Catholics sympathetic to Marthe’s plight.100 In general, when a woman claimed herself to be touched by the divine, ecclesiastical officials were uncomfortable with the assertion. The initial claims of Obri, for example, to harbour God’s message or that of a good angel were rejected by Catholic authorities in favour of diabolic possession. It seems that secular and ecclesiastical authorities had less difficulty accepting that a diabolical spirit might choose the vessel of a woman to conduct his malevolent activities, but needed more convincing when a woman herself claimed to be touched by the supernatural – even the diabolical, dismissing for instance Brossier’s interpretation of her own demonic possession.

Female martyrs French Calvinism may have eschewed worship of the saints, and dismissed what the consistories saw as folkloric, superstitious beliefs, yet


this did not mean that Calvinist women could not participate in creating Protestant understandings of relationships to the divine.101 Martyrdom to the cause offered select French Calvinist women an opportunity to celebrate exceptional holy relationships, both as martyrs themselves and as witnesses to the martyrdom of others. Jean Crespin’s Histoire des martyrs provides a number of case histories of women condemned to death for their allegiance to reformed beliefs in France.102 Although it must be acknowledged that the words Crespin ascribed to the women are mediated by his own perceptions of appropriate behaviour and words of male and female martyrs, nevertheless even the words Crespin assigned to female martyrs can provide the source of a different understanding of female martyrdom to that which he identified himself. In his discussion of the young noble widow Philippe de Luns, damoiselle de Graveron, who was condemned to death in Paris in September 1557, Crespin framed his report of her actions and court testimony as an example of the miraculous constancy and magnanimity displayed by the young woman. Crespin noted her steadfastness as she approached the site of her martyrdom, and was compelled to report the poignant ‘excellent beauty’ of her rosy face even at this moment.103 He concluded discussion of Luns’ case with a celebration of the triumph of the martyr’s unassailable fidelity to her cause, despite her natural ‘infirmity of a delicate woman’. Indeed, Crespin argued that God demonstrated his power by bestowing such heroic courage on an imbecilic woman.104 For Crespin, then, it was only through divine intervention that Luns was able to provide such a demonstration of female constancy given the sex’s natural tendency for weakness and imbecility.105 How, then, did women construct their own martyrdom as it can be understood through the documentation Crespin provided on their cases? How did they conceptualise martyrdom as rendering them closer to the divine? Certainly, there were similarities in the way women perceived their act, although the consistency of their descriptions also urges caution about interpreting this as uniquely a female (rather than Crespin’s) vision of female martyrdom. In particular, women symbolised death through martyrdom as marriage to the divine. Anne Audebert, the widow of an apothecary in Orleans, celebrated her death in 1549 as the most joyous of occasions. As the rope was placed around her neck, she cried out, ‘My God, the beautiful belt that my spouse gives me! I was engaged on a Saturday for my first marriage, but in this second marriage, I will be married this Saturday to my spouse Jesus Christ.’106 Philippe de Luns equally enacted martyrdom as a divine re-marriage, changing from her mourning attire to rich ‘garments of joy, as to receive this


happy triumph and be joined to her spouse Jesus Christ’.107 Similarly, when her death sentence was announced in 1562, La Glée, a martyr from Chavigny, thanked God for permitting her to wear his necklace (the noose around her neck) and dressed as for her impending wedding.108 In such ways, women promoted a notion that martyrdom brought them into a particular, intimate relationship with the divine. Like professed nuns as brides of Christ, martyrdom enabled Protestant women to imagine a similar elect proximity to the divine experience. The heightened significance of the marital relationship could be affirming but also problematic. The relatives of La Glée, for example, tried to persuade her to abjure her faith by recalling her maternal responsibilities to her children. When her children were presented to her, we are told that La Glée was momentarily caught between her conflicting maternal and religious duties. Yet, after shedding tears for her beloved children (and thereby demonstrating to readers that she was not unwomanly), Crespin recounts how she regained her courage. Indeed, she neatly recast the responsibility for her children onto her future husband as head of the household she conceptualised in her martyrdom. ‘I love my children well, but not for them, nor for others, would I deny the truth, nor my God who is their father, and who will provide for their needs.’109 La Glée, as an obedient and loyal wife should, entrusted her children’s well-being to the male head of her new divine household. By prioritising the marital role – and the duties of a wife to be subject to her husband – over her maternal role, La Glée retained her independence to follow her personal religious convictions. In such ways, female martyrs interpreted their sacrifice as a special relationship to the divine beyond that of the average woman sympathetic to the cause of reform. Interestingly, by using the notion of divine union through marriage, they appear to have conceptualised their unique proximity to God in terms not dissimilar to the Catholic female ‘elect’; that is, nuns who were also the brides of Christ. Unlike the idea of a relationship to God as a father figure, the marital union may have offered more conceptual potential for women as an equitable, or at least consensual, relationship between a male and female protagonist. * * * In summary, women unmistakably participated in creating understandings of the divine and diabolical, through their testimonies, actions and patronage. Whether these notions were accepted by the communities and individuals with whom they interacted clearly depended on many


factors. Even if it were to reject women’s interpretations of supernatural influence, or to attribute it to diabolical rather than divine causation, women’s opinions forced clarification from ecclesiastical and secular authorities, as well as local communities, of what they understood by divinity. The very act of providing their views, actions and perceptions of events that women witnessed added to the continual discussion over the century about meanings of the supernatural in the lives of people across France.

3 Religious Knowledge

Women have always participated in intellectual reflections about religion. They, like men, wanted to understand the complexities of religious notions and many desired to contribute to debates which constructed points of theology. Many women who wrote texts concerned with religion did participate in shaping how religious notions were understood and applied by demonstrating their own interpretations in their writing. Both lay and religious women, Catholic and Calvinist, produced a range of spiritual and devotional texts over the course of the sixteenth century in manuscript and printed forms. This chapter is not concerned with assessing whether women’s opinions conformed to orthodox confessional ideas, but focuses instead on how women’s religious writings and speech engaged with religious ideas over the century, and what forums they used to do so.

Marian and meditative spiritual interlocutions Historians such as Etienne Delaruelle have argued that there was little innovation in the intellectual developments of religious life during the late fifteenth century. Although there is evidence of a renewal in lay religious sensibilities, Delaruelle argues that these represent a return to traditional notions, rather than new creative development.1 Did this reflect the situation in contemporary women’s literature as well, or were women producing texts which challenged notions about lay religious interlocution at the turn of the century? Several historians have pointed to a rise in spiritual literature addressing women in the early sixteenth century.2 Some were dedicated to lay noble female patrons and others to religious women, but printers also targeted a wider literate female reading public with contemplative 70

Religious Knowledge 71

devotional literature. Most of the devotional works produced by women in this era were necessarily those of literate women, most commonly noblewomen. It would be unwise to conclude that women of other social levels were less interested or engaged in thinking about such concepts. Instead it should be recognised that composition of literature was one means by which literate women could express their devotion, whereas another female devotee might provide alms or charity, or go on pilgrimage, as expressions of her religious beliefs. In France, women’s spiritual literature demonstrates awareness of two contemporary trends in devotional literature: a kind of devotio moderna mariale exemplified in the practical work of Jeanne de France and the poetry of Catherine d’Amboise; and the meditative pilgrimage traditions stemming from Cistercian mysticism, pursued in the prose works of Gabrielle de Bourbon and Catherine d’Amboise. Jean-François Drèze has discussed at length the impact of the devotio moderna movement first explored in Frenchwomen’s literature in the late fifteenth-century writings of the Carmelite duchess St Françoise d’Amboise.3 The specific devotio moderna mariale tradition was characterised by imitation of Mary, rather than of Christ, in an introspective meditative piety and practical asceticism.4 Its focus on the female and on a range of devotional practices rendered it accessible particularly to women. Drèze argues that Jeanne de France’s reforming actions in Bourges and her foundation of the Annonciade Order, which imitated the virtues of Mary, are evidence of a practical mysticism of the devotio modern mariale tradition.5 Mary was a complex role model for women. For some women writers, she represented unattainable perfection. It was precisely in her difference from other women that Mary could be held apart as a semi-divine spiritual power. The verse of Catherine d’Amboise to Mary celebrated her immaculate conception and virginity: ‘God showed her always immaculate … the purest of all vessels, the most beautiful ever in the world.’6 Yet for other women, it was Mary’s maternal and caring role, one with which women could identify, that rendered her suitable to their varied causes. In the work of Gabrielle de Bourbon, emphasis was placed on bodily qualities to which other women could relate. Bourbon spoke as Mary in her meditative work on Christ’s Passion, begging Jesus to afford her recognition as his mother: ‘And have you forgotten the nine months that I carried you in my belly, and the time that I nursed you carrying you into Egypt … and so many other pains that I endured for you which have been easy to carry when you called me by the name of mother, and now on this hour of my greatest tribulation, you name me woman?’7 This keenly felt lamentation on the rejection of her


maternal role suggests the religious significance that women could invest in identification with Mary in her, and perhaps their own, role as a mother. Women’s early sixteenth-century writings certainly emphasised and celebrated the particular role of Mary, especially as an intercessor. Indeed Jeanne’s sister, Anne de France, who was not especially distinguished by contemporaries for noteworthy religious sensibility, also highlighted Mary for special commentary in her instructional writings. Anne composed an advice manual for her daughter Susanne, more widely intended to be useful for young noblewomen. In it she counselled her female readers to commend ‘your souls to him in your affairs, and also to the gentle Virgin Mary, begging her in her grace, to be your advocate to her dear son’; ‘commend yourself wholly to the Virgin Mary, in all your needs and affairs’.8 The concept of Mary as an ‘advocate’ particularly for women in their prayers is perhaps not surprising, but few women pointed to other female or male saints as alternative intercessors. Devotion to Mary appeared supreme. Catherine d’Amboise, in her poetic work, also demonstrated this contemporary trend. She composed a series of epistles, the first of which lamented her misery and sorrow to Christ. Another spoke to the Virgin, whom she described as her ‘mistress and friend’.9 In the final epistle Catherine devised Christ’s response to her supplications, and in his voice wrote sympathetically of ‘your pitiful letter founded in grief where you describe in your humility … your sins, hoping to amend yourself’.10 His compassionate reply to her lamentation was in part mediated, Christ explained, by the fact that ‘you have elected my mother for your advocate and to guide your affair, you are prudent for … she is queen of my empire’.11 Catherine thus constructed a supportive answer to her plight in part because of her choice to direct her prayers to Mary. Apart from the Marian focus in women’s writings which may well represent a continuity in women’s religious devotions of which we simply have more substantial textual evidence by this era, the sixteenthcentury Marian devotion emphasised a mysticism which linked it to the devotional literature of the spiritual pilgrimage. Evelyne BerriotSalvadore has examined the contemporary trends for this kind of literary exercise in meditation such as those by Jehan Henry and Jean Bouchet (some of which were intended for noble female readers), as a context for the work of the early sixteenth-century noblewoman, Gabrielle de Bourbon. Her series of prose works appear to form a coherent development of spiritual enlightenment, described through the pilgrimage of the soul on a journey of self-discovery to union with


the divine.12 Catherine d’Amboise, writing in the same era, also produced a prose text documenting the path of a miserable worldly reader to discovery of patience and self-realisation. Such works were especially relevant to laywomen who, like their male counterparts, had to reconcile the demands of worldly existence with the call for spiritual mental retreat. The struggle for noblewomen to fulfil their familial responsibilities to households, husbands and children, set against the desire for complete unity with God, is also borne out in the hagiographic literature concerning contemporary noblewomen. Jeanne de France, Marguerite de Lorraine, Françoise d’Amboise and Louise de Savoie each resigned herself to the strategic demands of dynastic politics before committing to conventual life in later years. For many women though, the latter path, available only through divorce or widowhood and some financial independence, was not possible. Meditative literature which promised union with God through a purely mental exercise offered an alternative to the reality of a contemplative life. Although such works were clearly embedded in a meditative literary tradition that encompassed both male and female authors, those texts by noble laywomen often documented a particularly female construction of religious enlightenment. For women, it was female virtues and characters who helped the protagonists achieve divine union. The texts of both Catherine d’Amboise and Gabrielle de Bourbon encouraged a perception of female co-operation and solidarity, and a consequent empowering strength of religious conviction. Amboise’s Traicté de Morale began with the protagonist, the Unconscious Lady, alone in her room contemplating the fortune of the world, wondering ‘why the good are often persecuted by fortune and the bad chosen for great authority’.13 A young man in black intrudes into her solitary reverie, entering her room to present her with unhappy news. The Unconscious Lady is rendered ‘passive and as if dead’, with no resistance or spirit to conquer the misfortunes that have befallen her.14 The young man has breached her private space and his disruptive information reduces her to passivity and powerlessness, only to be eased by the appearance of Lady Reason. Lady Reason declares that it is ‘self-knowledge’ that ‘makes people rise up from the swoon of ignorance’.15 She explains the fortune against whom the Unconscious Lady riles, and feels powerless, is in fact the working of God. Furthermore, Lady Reason argues that ‘often adversities are sent to the good by God … to draw them away or prevent them from sin’.16 Reason proceeds to illustrate the miseries of the world by reminding her of the transitory nature and unpredictability of human life, counting


‘the wars, discords, worries, problems, melancholies, adversities, illnesses, inconveniences and other misfortunes that humans have …’.17 Hence, Lady Reason advises the Unconscious Lady that she must have patience to cope as best possible with the time she must spend on earth and the two set off ‘on the path to go to Patience and her dwelling’.18 Each step of the journey is marked by the appearance of personified virtues until they arrive at a castle of ‘consideration of divine providence’ where Patience sits in a walled garden.19 She receives them and, having recounted the sorrows of Jesus until the women are ‘all bathed in tears’, the protagonists resolve to remain ‘with Patience until the end of [their] days’.20 Gabrielle de Bourbon described a similar scenario of female solidarity and support in her Voyage spirituel. The narrator begins ‘dreaming of the concerns of the world’ when the Devoted Soul appears before her and demands that she act as scribe on a journey of spiritual discovery.21 The pilgrimage ‘to the noble city of good rest’ is undertaken by five female characters: Devout Soul, Lady Hope, Lady Force, Good Will and Knowledge, and their scribe, Gabrielle.22 During the seven-day journey, the group encounters a series of characters who guide or test their faith. For example, the women encounter a nun who directs them to the correct but more difficult of two pathways. Doubting her, they follow another, easier road encouraged by two men who lead them to a palace of luxury and ease. The women realise their mistake in trusting the men and return to the nun’s path. Throughout the work, the women rely on the individual strengths of each to guide them correctly. Gabrielle de Bourbon’s Voyage Spirituel promoted a co-operative religious devotion amongst women. Whilst aimed at personal spiritual development, her work suggested that this could be achieved through support and shared knowledge between the female protagonists and the women they encountered, encouraging each other to continue. They are aided in their journey by Knowledge, who encourages them to resist male advice and instead rely on themselves and each other. Gabrielle de Bourbon’s Voyage Spirituel begins from a position where men are outside the locus of power; they are peripheral to the story, and sometimes hindrances to the eventual goal. So too in her Le Fort Chasteau, female virtues and characters also guide the protagonists to spiritual development. The castle in that work houses a schoolroom for female students, whose teachers are Faith, Hope and Charity.23 As with other contemporary women writers, in Gabrielle de Bourbon’s work, Mary was recognised as the ‘true example and guide to all those [women] who want to go by this path’.24


Female authors often presented a conflicting view about the value of their work in relation to the development of theological ideas. On the one hand, their texts showed women as disseminators of the divine message and as valuable interlocutors in the interpretation of Scripture. Gabrielle de Bourbon celebrated the role of witnesses to the biblical events: ‘The notaries are the four evangelists and above all well beloved John who spoke as one who saw it. There were several witnesses, but above all the glorious mother of God, the Magdalene so loved by him.’25 Catherine d’Amboise had her protagonist follow the path to the home of Holy Scripture. She ‘recounted to us all night stories of virtuous people from times past who by patience are now in heaven rewarded. … of Job, Toby and several others.’26 Yet, on the other hand, the female narrators, especially Bourbon, eschewed the significance of their own role in the composition of religious texts. Bourbon claimed only that she acted as an obedient scribe to the divine message, to which she herself contributed nothing: ‘certainly my understanding is not sufficient to put into writing all that I saw there … [except] with the aid of He who commands me to make this little treatise … knowing Him so kind that He demands nothing of His creatures but the good will to obey Him.’27 None the less, the humility of Bourbon’s claim for her literary endeavour as merely an act of transcription belied a significant conceptual contribution that her work made. In the Petit traicté des doulleurs de la Passion, Bourbon’s guide argues: ‘If you need lofty knowledge of contemplation, come to the foot of the Holy Cross for, in one well used hour, you will learn more than in one year listening to the lessons of all the theologians of the world.’28 Here she developed a notion that one could bypass theological works to attain the divine via meditative exercises such as her own work. This could be particularly empowering to women. In the Voyage spirituel, Bourbon described how her work, intended for ‘simple people who do not understand Holy Scripture anymore than me’, could nevertheless be valuable ‘to put them on the right path’.29 Bourbon did not suggest her work was a theological text, but rather an instructional work, but one that might have more impact than those of her learned contemporaries. In Le Fort Chasteau, Bourbon explained that divine grace could bestow intellect according to the necessity of the context: ‘For to each He gives his graces, to those of great intellect well founded in knowledge, He guides them to put into writing lofty and profitable matters. And to simple people and feminine understandings He grants them that great grace to give them to know and be able to describe little contemplations which will be more pleasant for poor little women and simple people to hear than the lofty and profound writings of the holy


doctors.’30 Bourbon was arguing that women’s meditative works could bring people closer to union with God than theological texts to which they had little access. The seemingly contradictory messages about women’s ability to contribute to religious discussion must be contextualised in the discourse surrounding women’s religious and literary productions. Gabrielle de Bourbon, the author, was concerned to frame her participation in terms acceptable to her contemporaries, adopting typical humility topos used by both male and female writers of her era. So too did Catherine d’Amboise who protested her insufficiency, yet demonstrated a thorough knowledge of biblical, classical and contemporary literature in her Traicté de Morale. Nevertheless, in their writings, both women promoted the possibility for women to derive religious knowledge themselves based on their equal access to meditative spiritual experiences. Moreover, neither author denied women’s capacity for rational, intellectual contributions as well as the spiritual and intuitive. Theologians themselves understood reason as the discovery of the divine. Augustine in De ordine defined it as ‘the motion of the mind capable of discerning and connecting those things that it knows, by which it comes to an understanding of God and the soul’.31 In the twelfth century, Alain de Lille similarly concluded that reason leads to religious understanding, being in itself ‘the son of God, the Word’.32 The greatest knowledge reason could determine was knowledge of God and Christianity. Already Christine de Pizan had appropriated Lady Reason, conventionally attainable only by men, to serve as a guide to women in the Cité des Dames, encouraging them to have faith in their own understanding. Female authors in the sixteenth century continued, in Pizan’s tradition, to emphasise women’s rational capacities and presented reason as a guide to Christian understanding for women. Many of the decisions the protagonists make along the pilgrimage of Bourbon’s Voyage Spiritual are aided by the information given by the female character, Knowledge. Bourbon argued that, even in spiritual matters, knowledge was a most valuable asset. Similarly, for Catherine d’Amboise, what wrests the Unconscious Lady from her frustration at her lack of resistance to the world’s evils, are two female characters, Reason and Patience. Lady Reason in the Traicté de Morale was the guide to female spiritual enlightenment. As Lady Reason explains, self-knowledge brings power, resistance and strength. It is Christian rationality, coupled with the outwardly feminine passive characteristic patience, which gave women a selfknowledge and inner strength to cope with misfortunes of body and situation. Catherine d’Amboise showed that in a religious context,


women could support and encourage each other to greater spiritual fulfilment, at least in part by appropriating traditionally masculine characteristics such as reason. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that such female-authored texts that made claims for female equality concerning religious interlocution were directed only to female readers. Gabrielle de Bourbon suggested that her meditative exercises were for both women and unlearned people generally. Catherine d’Amboise’s representations of noble life largely portrayed a masculine perspective. Her examples of life’s misfortunes reminded readers of the perils of emperors, kings and princes who worried about their realms and lands.33 She then lamented the difficulties faced by warriors and soldiers who suffered in battle and travelled far and wide with no rest.34 Next were men of justice, chancellors, presidents, lawyers, councillors and so forth; merchants merited attention too since their trade could take them too far off and dangerous lands and across oceans.35 Even the pains of poor labourers and tradespeople working day and night for their living warranted consideration.36 Only then did she particularly discuss noble female circumstances, married women in large households who were poorly treated, and finally the pressing concerns of widows.37 Catherine d’Amboise made no particular claims to instruct either men or women in her text, but her examples suggest that she did not circumscribe her readership only to women.

Humanist, evangelical and reforming ideas Women’s responses to the new spiritual directions offered by humanism, evangelical and reforming ideas reflect a similar desire to participate in religious discussion and to disseminate their views on religious thought. In many ways, the religious position of Marguerite de Navarre reflected those of the women of the early sixteenth century. Unlike them, however, Marguerite is perhaps the female author whose evangelical views were most widely spread through the printed press (mostly posthumously) and have received relatively significant scholarly analysis. Although she by no means abandoned support for Catholic institutions, Marguerite composed a number of devotional works such as her chansons spirituelles, and texts that engaged with the new Reformist theology and politics. Following humanist views, the Meaux intellectual circle, with whose members she exchanged views on points of doctrine, favoured translation into the vernacular – a point on which she would confront the conservative Sorbonne theologians.38 Perhaps


because of the subtlety of her views, and in part the result of her actions in favour of Catholic institutional reform and protection to radical thinkers, Marguerite was perceived by contemporaries as sympathetic to the Protestant cause.39 However, being the King’s sister offered no exemption from the doctrinal examination of the Sorbonne Theological faculty. Her first printed work, the 1531 Miroir de l’Ame pecheresse, was censured by the Sorbonne because of her inclusion of vernacular translations of the Psalms,40 and many of her other religious works were to remain manuscript until after her death. Much of Marguerite’s oeuvre reflected her evangelical persuasion. The Bible remained for Marguerite the ultimate authoritative source in doctrinal matters as well as spiritual fulfilment. In Le Navire, written after the death of her brother François I in 1547, Marguerite constructed a conversation between herself and François, in which he recommends that she take the Bible, ‘which you can and must read endlessly’.41 Marguerite used the authority of François, as both a much loved King and as one elect into Heaven and thus informed of the ‘right’ beliefs, to support reform in the Church. Through faith too, Marguerite promoted a vision of equality in religious understanding for women and men. Women as well as men are capable of exhorting fellow Christians to salvation by their faith, as the steadfast Chambermaid demonstrates in the Le Malade.42 Marguerite, like women writers of the early sixteenth century, dignified the unlearned, including women, with the gift of divine truth through their simple faith: in l’Inquisiteur, it is innocent children whose simple beliefs are upheld as right Christian teachings. In addition, Marguerite’s devotional writings that focus on the universally accessible attainment of divine union through pious meditation, reflected both evangelical interests as well as a continuation of those concerns reflected in earlier women’s writings. The opening address to her readers in the Miroir focused like those of Bourbon and Amboise on her insufficiency as a female author: ‘Restrain yourself, without going further, to the matter, Excusing the rhyme and the language, Seeing that it is the work of a woman, Who has neither science nor knowledge, Just a desire that any can see, That the gift of God the creator bestows.’43 Her later works interiorised religious understanding further, as Marguerite turned to mystical experience. The large poetic work of Prisons followed the path to spiritual enlightenment of the hero as he was liberated from three prisons of the secular world. Even in the Heptaméron, the devisants enjoyed commented scriptural readings from Oisille each morning, ‘that it seemed to them to have never heard a sermon that was so profitable to them’, ‘it seemed that the


Holy Spirit, full of love and kindness, spoke by her mouth’.44 In such ways, Marguerite’s work continued preoccupations displayed in her female predecessors’ works, even if, as with other female authors, printers showed less inclination to promote her religious views than her seemingly more secular Heptaméron. Marguerite too was determined to show women engaged in contemporary intellectual discussions about religion, as capable of the highest spiritual attainments, and increasingly exploring the possibilities of mysticism as a means to provide women (and the unlearned more generally) with an equality of spiritual access on par with learned men. Some convent communities housed literate women who could devote themselves to scholastic endeavours. Jeanne de France stipulated that recruits to her newly founded Annonciade Order were to be literate. Later Marguerite de Navarre not only supported various female establishments across France with financial support but also sustained friendship and learned correspondence with nuns about theological and humanist issues. In 1549, she was evidently corresponding with the abbess of Fontevrault about her notion of divine love.45 Claude Bectone, abbess at the convent of Saint-Honorat near Tarascon, received visits from Marguerite and their poetic works were published in the same editions.46 Bectone was said to have also corresponded with other intellectuals and was named by contemporaries among the most learned women of France. Guillaume Paradin cited Marguerite and four nuns from Saint-Honorat including Bectone for their learning in his Histoire de nostre temps (1550–56).47 Women in monastic communities were the focus of particular spiritual instruction of ecclesiastics during the sixteenth century. When the writer and monk Denys Faucher was installed to undertake a process of reform in the convent of Sainte-Marthe in Tarascon during the 1530s, he emphasised the significance of an intellectual reform underpinning moral regulation. Arguing that women of equal intellect to men should receive equal instruction, Faucher instituted readings and commentaries on the Bible and Holy Fathers and recommended that they would best understand religion by study of philosophy and sciences, and knowledge of Latin.48 Other authors translated texts from Latin for the use of convents, as did Nicole Caling who published his translation, Le sentier et l’adresse de devotion et contemplation intellectuelle, for the Annonciade sisters of Nôtre-Dame de Fargues in Albi.49 Jehan Henry who composed meditative and pedagogical works for women also wrote for both active and contemplative communities.50 Henry, however, was sceptical about nuns’ desire to pursue theological knowledge themselves, as he warned


in his Le livre de reformation utile et profitable pour toutes religieuses: ‘Some women do not content themselves with the voice of their ordinary pastor, thus each morning they would hear a new one. It does not suffice for them to hear what is necessary for them to know such as the commandments of God, the twelves articles of faith, the evil that they must avoid, and the good that one must summon … thus all their understanding and knowledge is applied to inquiring and knowing the mystical and allegorical meanings which are in the Holy Scripture. By which they fall into this cursed temptation of error.’51 The relative learning of literate women in convents meant that they were an audience with potential access to the textual transmission of reformed theology. Evidence across France suggests that convents lost members to the Protestant movement, although it is difficult to pinpoint the specific reason for these departures as purely based on theological alignment with the new beliefs. For some religious women, however, correspondence remains of their discussions with reformers. Catherine de Villarzel, prioress of the Dominicans of Estavayer in the Francophone Swiss lands, entered into epistolary exchange with her local reformed pastor, Jean Fathon. Still extant is his response to her letter of 1541: ‘by which I have understood the good will and Christian affection which you have to serve God and live according to his Holy Word’.52 He advised her that ‘As much as is possible, exert yourself to read the Holy Scriptures’.53 Although one nun from this convent left in 1550 and became a schoolmistress, Villarzel herself remained prioress until her death in 1546.54 Although we cannot know with certainty, it is possible that convent superiors like Villarzel may have engaged reformers with religious discussion as a strategic manoeuvre in the hopes that the promises of future conversion may have safeguarded the community from dissolution. In France, Philippe Chasteignier, abbess at Saint-Jean-de-Bonneval near Thouars, engaged Jean Calvin in correspondence. He responded to her letter in 1549, with nothing short of amazement that the reformed message had penetrated the monastic community: ‘Indeed, it is a kind of miracle when He is pleased to make His glorious light shine in the place of such deep darkness.’55 ‘For if the lies of Satan wherewith he has blinded and bewitched the wretched world reign everywhere at present, they have their chief seat in those unhappy prisons which he has reared up, that he may keep souls in twofold captivity.’56 Calvin’s description of the convent as a prison may well have met a sympathetic response with Chasteignier, as it seems likely that she was placed there as part of a dynastic strategy to place family members in ecclesiastical positions of


power. Chasteignier became abbess on the resignation of her aunt, Louise, in 1543.57 Her younger sister, Françoise, was a nun and later prioress of another local monastery. Their nephew, Henri-Louis, became bishop of Poitiers in the early seventeenth century. Calvin referred in the letter to Philippe as ‘you and your associates’ as though she had informed him that more than one was in favour of abandoning convent life, and appeared to be preparing the women for the potential hardships they would face in quitting the monastic community: ‘And let us not think it strange, if for His name’s sake we be chased from one place to another, and that we must forsake the place of our birth, to transport ourselves to some unknown place, for we must even be ready to depart from this world whensoever He shall call us away.’58 Chasteignier apparently did leave the convent in 1557 for Geneva with eight of the nine nuns in the community.59 For other women, however, familiarity with the Scriptures did not convert them to Protestantism, but instead was harnessed to reject the new ideas. When the town of Bourges was taken for the Huguenots in 1562, the founding establishment of the Annonciade Order was the subject of many attempts to convert its inmates and then outright attack. In the account left by an eyewitness, the nun Françoise Guyard, the abbess Gabrielle de Hardouin refuted the arguments put to her by the Huguenot captain Sourcelles as to why the nuns should leave the community. Sourcelles, Guyard informs us, attempted to ‘dispute Holy Scripture with our Mother. And, as she had much learning and a clear mind, she silenced him with five or six words, by which he was most confounded.’60 When Sourcelles insisted that they receive ministry from a pastor, Hardouin responded ‘that they had no need of his instruction, that they had readings of the Holy Scriptures every day, and that they remembered well all that their preachers told them in their sermons’.61 Significantly, the nuns’ intellectual strength lay in both their thorough knowledge of the Bible and also their retention of its interpretation by Catholic Church officials.

Proselytising and preaching In the first half of the sixteenth century, it may have been mostly noblewomen whose religious views were transmitted via written forms, mostly manuscript. Yet many women were actively engaged with disseminating the messages of the new religious ideas stemming from Geneva, and in order to do so, were necessarily engaged in interpreting the theological notions that underpinned them. Women did not need


to be literate in order to preach, but might have memorised their understanding from hearing Scripture read aloud and Protestant ideas discussed. Likewise, Natalie Zemon Davis’s survey of female converts to Protestantism indicates that they were not necessarily literate.62 In the south, numerous women were investigated alongside men for spreading the reforming ideas through both preaching and teaching. In 1549, after being denounced as a Protestant by the parlement of Grenoble, Françoise Collombière fled to Geneva for safety, from where she continued to promote evangelical views in France through her correspondence with her husband. When her actions came to the attention of the parlement, who had commissioned a councillor to investigate the source of new ideas spreading through the town of Romans and nearby regions, she was condemned in absentia and her effigy burned in the market square.63 At the same time, the councillor discovered that other women were in possession of reformist literature. Indeed, of the eleven arrests made at the time, six were of women.64 A schoolmistress, Jeanne Malhète, wife of Antoine Tavanel, was fined and condemned to join a public procession through the streets of Romans for possessing copies of the Catéchisme de Genève by Calvin and La forme des prières ecclésiastiques, avec la manière d’administrer les sacremens.65 In 1555, a former Poor Clare nun, Marguerite Nivette, came to the attention of the town council in Montélimar when her school for girls was rumoured to be ‘the place where the inhabitants gather to hear preaching’.66 In 1556, she and another woman were discovered to be preaching in secret at Montélimar. They held nocturnal meetings in the town but their activities were confirmed when suspect literature was found in the house of Nivette.67 In 1557 a certain Jacqueline, also in Montélimar, was accused by the town council and chapter for ‘secretly preaching’ heretical views.68 Indeed, women may have been more successful preachers of the new ideas than men, because they were less likely to raise suspicion of local authorities. However, if they did remain hidden from official investigation, we are not likely to have much record of their activities. Male contemporaries – both Catholic and Protestant – were by no means in favour of female preaching. Theologians critiqued women who sought to preach their views to a mixed-sex public. Parisian theologian François Le Picart reinforced the conventional Church view in his published sermons of 1566 that it is prohibited for women to preach and teach in public places; but privately a mother may teach her children and others in her household, like servants. The abbess can teach her nuns. But in public and


in full congregation, it is not a woman’s place to teach, and it is repugnant for them to preach. And the reason is that to preach is to have authority, and the natural and proper condition of women is one of subjection.69 In 1561, the French Calvinist synod which met in Lyons condemned the actions of the Huguenot church at Sauzet in the Drôme region, where, while a pastor was being found for the parish, the congregation was reminded ‘that the women of the said place should not meddle in making public readings or prayers’.70 Catholic observers were at something of a loss to explain women’s attraction to Protestantism. The chronicler Georges Bosquet, from Toulouse, proposed that women were attracted to the reforming ideas largely because it represented a novelty. He like many male authors seemed unable to conceive of women’s deep engagement with the intellectual notions which underpinned the new movement, although he admired their enthusiasm for austerity which the new religion promoted.71 In Troyes, Protestant chronicler Nicolas Pithou was appalled by the lasciviousness of one Catholic preacher. A certain brother Gille was heard to complain about women ‘who meddled in reading the Holy Scripture in the vernacular’ since it was not ‘for them to read Holy Scripture, it’s like giving raw meat to children’. He went on to joke, however, that ‘if there is a young women who has a New Testament, let her come to me in my chamber, and I will explain to her the passages she doesn’t understand’.72 Pithou’s account suggests that Gille, like other Catholic contemporaries, did not take seriously women’s desire to understand Scripture for themselves. Sexual motives were commonly used to explain what contemporaries observed as women’s particular attraction to Protestantism. Timothy Watson has recently argued that, in the early days of the formation of reforming communities at Lyons, groups came together in secret to study and worship using pre-existing networks of sociability, which served to maintain social boundaries. Secret emerging Huguenot groups rarely crossed the existing social boundaries and Protestants did not accept such social flexibility as appropriate for religious purposes.73 Certainly Catholic onlookers found women’s attendance at nocturnal mixed-sex worship a source of horror and indicative of their real attraction to Protestant ideas. The priest Claude Haton recorded on several occasions his vision of Protestant gatherings as orgies where respectable women were forced to become sexual slaves to the male congregation.74 Yet on this point, Huguenot authors were either silent or emphasised


the decorous, chaste women who attended such gatherings. It is a testament to women’s deeply held religious convictions that women did attend nocturnal Huguenot worship, given the prevalence of this kind of damaging perception and the risks that female members of such congregations incurred. Indeed, it is not by any means evident that male reformist authors expected women to engage with their ideas. Calvin himself appears to have made little initial effort to address women as serious interlocutors about reforming ideas, regarding them mainly as a source of funds and support as Charmarie Blaisdell has analysed from his extant exchanges with male and female correspondents.75 However, his letters to women do reveal something of their expectations from him. In particular, his 1546 correspondence with Madame de Falais appears to indicate that she was concerned that he should make his theological views accessible to those who were not proficient in Latin: you were complaining lately of Monsieur enjoying himself all alone in the reading of my Commentary [commentary on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians which he had dedicated to her husband]. You request me also to have some thought of those who only understand French, that they also may partake, and you ask for my sermons. Well, if there had been a demand for putting them forth, I would indeed have set about it in good earnest, but that will not be this year.76 Madame de Falais clearly seems to have pursued this rather unsatisfactory answer since in a following letter Calvin reiterated: ‘As for my promise, to which you hold me bound, I shall discharge myself of it, when God shall have vouchsafed me the wherewith to do so.’77 Irrespective of what Calvin thought, his correspondence appears to suggest that women anticipated reciprocity for the financial support and patronage that they could provide: they expected some intellectual consideration and discussion from Calvin, and were concerned that reformist ideas should be accessible to them as well. Women themselves were eager to hear about the new ideas. At Valence, when a Genevan founded a school in 1557 to spread new ideas, women and students were those noted as attending, swelling numbers to such an extent that a regular priest was installed for their ministry.78 In 1555, witnesses in Troyes testified that the chambermaid Jeanne Fournel had been seen with a New Testament in French in her hands.79 According to the Catholic convert Florimond de Raemond, Theodore


Beza gave an hour of his instruction at Geneva in French specifically for women refugees in Geneva, ‘interpreting Holy Scripture for them’.80 Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard’s study of women’s religious understanding represented in Jean Crespin’s martyrology demonstrates that most citations stemmed from the vernacular Bible, although as she points out, it is unclear what Crespin’s role was in streamlining their religious views for publication.81 It seems likely, however, that women’s access to the reforming ideas came mostly through vernacular translations or oration. Later records of female martyrs’ testimonies and defence of their faith often demonstrated their knowledge of Calvinist tenets of belief as they were examined by Catholic theologians. Two sisters, Radegonde and Claude Foucault, who were taken prisoner in Paris in January 1588 for their Reformed religious beliefs, astonished contemporaries with their explication of theology. As the Parisian chronicler Pierre de l’Estoile recorded, when Henri III visited them in prison, he listened an hour while a great dispute went on. These poor women responded to the questions and objections of these doctors so resolutely and pertinently, even on the main points of controversy … that the King was amazed … and it was not possible to vanquish them. … The King said that he had never seen women defend themselves so well, nor so well-informed. And the doctors had to agree.82 The women were later martyred in June 1588 for their religious convictions and were duly recorded in Crespin’s martyrology for their sacrifice to the Protestant cause.83 Similarly, another martyr, the young widow Philippe de Luns whose examination before her death in 1557 was recorded by Crespin, demonstrated a thorough knowledge of Protestant theology. Yet her examiners seemed unable to believe that she might have learned this from her own reading. Asked where she had learned these doctrines, Luns responded from her study of the New Testament. Later when the doctors asked again who had instructed her in her beliefs, Luns reiterated that she had no instructor but the text of the New Testament.84 Even in their last hours, women continued their religious conversations. Anne du Bourg recounted how his conviction had been maintained during his time at the Conciergerie prison by fellow inmate Marguerite le Riche, who revitalised his faith through conversation and gestures from the window of her cell.85


Later sixteenth-century contemplative literature The learned and literary Dominican nun from the Priory of Saint-Louis at Poissy, Anne de Marquets, occupies an important place in women’s development of intellectual notions within the Catholic Church,86 although debate exists about the extent to which she intended her work to reach an audience beyond her select recipients. Certainly Marquets claimed in the second edition of her Sonets, prieres et devises en forme de pasquins of 1562 that the work had initially been printed without her consent. Nevertheless, what seems less in doubt is that the message behind her work was intended to engage with the ideas to which she had been exposed at the Colloquy of Poissy held in the grounds of her priory in September 1561. Even though her own confessional orientation appears to have been moderate, it should be no surprise that her poetic work which maintained the supremacy of Catholic faith should have been seized as propaganda after the failure of the colloquy to reconcile the confessional divide. Marquets’ poetic work was the subject of Protestant retorts that critiqued a woman for entering the theological debate at all.87 Nevertheless, Marquets was responsible for further printed poetry and full editions in the sixteenth century, although both major texts published in her lifetime presented her contribution in less offensive guises: in collaboration with fellow moderate Catholic theologian Claude d’Espence, and as a translator of the Latin work of moderate Flaminio De rebus divinis carmina.88 Significantly, her most original contribution to Catholic doctrine, the Sonets spirituels, was published posthumously in 1605. Moreover, mirroring earlier women writers, Evelyne BerriotSalvadore observes a shift in Marquets’ production from the worldly combative poetry of 1561 to her later religious engagement as demonstrated by the more interiorised mystical interests of the 1605 Sonets. The Catholic lay poet from Toulouse, Gabrielle de Coignard, is often linked to Marquets because of their similar devotional techniques and literary developments. When Coignard’s daughters, Jane and Catherine Mansecal, first published her work posthumously in 1594, they argued that it could inspire other devoted women but also spark God’s grace on earth, even the second coming.89 Coignard herself was more circumspect about the utility of her devotional verse, and wrote in one piece of her desire that her poetic work remain hidden. Neither the Mansecal sisters nor Coignard posited the verses as the product of theological study: She was not nor had any desire to be a great clergesse, not that she did not honour learned ladies, but she said that it was to know


everything to not ignore the means to salvation. That was her science, her precepts and maxims, the commandments of God; her theory, to know and contemplate divine goodness, wisdom and power; her practice, the works of divine mercy; her thoughts and her writings, praises of God.90 Coignard, like women before her, sought direct revelation that could be achieved through the spiritual journey that her verse mapped out. She advocated the value of a self-knowledge developed through spiritual discipline: ‘I do not want to know anything, to appear learned, Very happy is he who knows only himself.’91 As Colette H. Winn has argued, Coignard’s poetry followed a meditative evolution, progressively eschewing worldly concerns in favour of intense contemplation of the divine realm.92 Both Coignard and Marquets display similar concerns to reclaim women as contributors to the development of Catholicism. Marquets’ compositions were composed over a large span of the later sixteenth century but scholars have observed thematic areas of consistency in her work. Her focus on a didactic aim and her desire to represent women’s positive contribution to religion, notions clearly evident in the sonnets, emerge first in her earlier work.93 As Gary Ferguson’s careful reading of her oeuvre has demonstrated, Marquets was keen to defend the female sex by celebrating exemplars of biblical history. She developed a vision of a community of women bound by shared female experiences, but also emphasising a sisterhood of female sanctity and devotion.94 Similarly, Coignard also focused on feminine religious role models, often like herself mothers and wives.95 Winn has argued that Coignard’s Complainte de la Vierge Marie displays a striking level of identification with, and analogy between, Coignard and Mary.96 In such ways, Marquets and Coignard echoed many of the concerns of early women religious writers whose works and careers argued strongly for recognition of female participation in the development of religious action and thought. Several scholars have argued that the works by Marquets and Coignard signal the rise of a specifically feminised devotional practice which reached its zenith in the devotional activities of women in seventeenth-century France.97 Gary Ferguson has argued that women appeared to play an increasing role in the renewal of spiritual life of the Tridentine Church, as demonstrated by their devotional literature.98 Yet the analysis of women’s religious writing presented in this chapter would appear to suggest that it was not women’s interest as authors in meditative, interiorised literature that changed over the course of the


sixteenth century, but perhaps rather that by the later sixteenth century this coincided with wider trends, and publications by male authors, in the Catholic Church. Of course, women did not work in a vacuum and they too responded to contemporary spiritual trends, but we should also ask to what extent women’s concepts of devotional literature predated and sustained interest in this field of religious engagement? It seems equally possible that, as the devotional techniques of spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and of the meditations of Louis de Grenada began to circulate in France at the same period,99 women may have found a receptive audience among both contemporary readers and publishers willing to engage with their own meditative literature.

Didacticism, pedagogy, and religious history Many women were involved in religious instruction, as mothers, schoolteachers, governesses, convent educators and as authors of texts with didactic aims. Both Catholics and Protestants recognised women’s particular significance as mothers in shaping the faith of their children. In the abjuration documents of two women from Rodez in 1569, Claire Ayme and her daughter-in-law Françoise Doulcete both confessed their fault in following Calvinist doctrines themselves, but also in having led their children to heretical assemblies, to the great scandal of their relatives.100 Indeed, images of women as teachers of religious belief are extant from at least the thirteenth century.101 Such a role necessarily meant that women had to interpret religious ideas in order to transmit them. Although few women suggested as much in their works, the religious responsibilities of women as mothers or maternal figures permitted them to contribute to the religious understanding of the next generation of the entire populace. What did the duty of teaching religious practices and thought to children entail for women? Anne de France wrote in her advice manual to her daughter that she ought to teach her children or the women in her care at court ‘first the articles of faith, the commandments of the law, and in what manner they might sin; also the seven mortal sins and how one must confess, their behaviour in church and at preaching, and how in great reverence and humility of heart, they must receive their creator’.102 Anne recommended her daughter also teach practices of devotion: ‘you should induce them to devotion and … they should never cease serving God, to hear mass each day, say their hours and other devotions, pray for the deceased, be confessed often and give alms’.103 Yet to console them in their energetic youth, Anne also advised


that young charges were also to be permitted singing, dancing and other honest activities.104 Other women adopted a pedagogical role beyond instruction of their own children. As Danièle Alexandre-Bidon has explored, even instruction of the alphabet was laden with religious meaning since the alphabet was understood as a divine precept.105 By the later sixteenth century, female and male schoolteachers could be identified as reformist sympathisers if they used Genevan materials to teach children their ABC. In Normandy, a 1566 survey of the region of Mortain recorded that the wife of a tanner Michel Féron ‘boarded little girls whom she instructed in the catechism of Geneva’.106 Féron, who freely confessed his own Huguenot faith, nevertheless insisted that his wife was simply teaching two small girls sewing work and to read, with texts which came from Paris, not Geneva.107 In Troyes, Nicolas Pithou recounted how one poor woman was imprisoned in 1571 for ‘teaching one of the children to read with a palette or ABC, printed at Geneva, containing prayers in French, that those of the religion are accustomed to say in the evening and morning’. She maintained that she simply used the text for the letters, not its doctrinal implications.108 Yet other women, both Protestant and Catholic, embraced opportunities to produce pedagogical religious texts. In the case of Georgette de Montenay, her Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes, published in 1571, were clearly intended to proselytise for the Huguenot cause.109 Alison M. Saunders has argued that Montenay and her Huguenot counterpart, Beza, were exceptional in exploiting the emblem format for religious polemic rather than a more straightforward Christian moral didacticism.110 Montenay targeted her work to other women and Sara F. Matthews Grieco’s recent analysis on the author’s choice of depictions of male and female behaviour, leads her to conclude that ‘not only did she refuse the misogynist ethic of her predecessors, but she also proposed, in place of current canons of female conduct, a model of educated and spiritually superior womankind, as well as a more equitable vision of relations between the sexes’.111 Similarly, although they were promoting a Catholic viewpoint, the Du Verger women, a Parisian governess and her daughter, display similar objectives in their pedagogical text Le Verger fertile des vertus of 1595. Their work, framed as a dialogue between an experienced governess and a young mother, Modeste, seeking advice on how best to raise her own daughter as a good Catholic, speaks particularly to a female readership. When the protagonist Modeste delves into a complex point of theology, the authors use the opportunity to eschew ostensible debate on doctrinal matters. ‘Your


proposition and question is more appropriate to be decided by lawyers and theologians than by us,’ the governess observes at one point, but then proceeds to give her own opinion on the matter nevertheless.112 The work is equally emblematic, although not visually, containing exemplary tales of good and bad behaviour from a wide range of sources from biblical, patristic, hagiographic and popular devotional literature, to classical and natural history texts. Like Montenay, although perhaps less explicitly, the Du Vergers participated in constructions of contemporary religious pedagogy by interpreting the religious significance of such sources for their designated audience of laywomen. Some women provided pedagogical materials for a more circumscribed audience. The desire to leave a record of the exemplary behaviour of relatives, or a demonstration of God’s grace to the family, drove some women to produce family histories. While Protestant men trawled the archives to produce religio-political history, their womenfolk contributed family history from readily available local sources. Charlotte Arbaleste and her second husband Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, were devout Huguenots.113 In 1584 Arbaleste began to write a memoir of her husband as an exemplary life for her son, to which she continued adding until her son’s death in 1605. The memoir concentrated largely on public and historical concerns and in particular on DuplessisMornay’s military, diplomatic and political accomplishments. Arbaleste used his family’s and her own memories to record details of her husband’s family environment and analysed his religious thought through his various published and manuscript writings.114 She justified her decision to write the memoir of her husband as providing her son with a role model of Huguenot conduct. Yet, as Donna Donald has argued elsewhere, this allowed Arbaleste to become the prime mediator of the father to his son, and also of Duplessis-Mornay’s image to a wider readership.115 Indeed, Arbaleste was responsible for embedding DuplessisMornay as a main protagonist in the history of the Calvinist leadership in France. It was she who was responsible for defining him as such to a wider audience. Arbaleste’s memoir combined biography and also autobiography as she informed readers about her own life as the spouse of a Huguenot leader. On many occasions, she spoke of the important tasks with which Duplessis-Mornay entrusted her as evidence of her competence in the family’s domestic and public affairs. For Arbaleste, concepts of public and private held little meaning, as she depicted a collective marital entity of herself and her husband. By Arbaleste’s account, the DuplessisMornay of the ‘public’ arena was also a father and head of his family,


and Charlotte his partner, mother of their children, and manager of their household. Arbaleste also specified the role she played in her husband’s political endeavours and, in her discussion of the circumstances and production of Duplessis-Mornay’s literary and political works, she presents herself as a sophisticated and privileged interlocutor in his oeuvre’s development.116 The Mémoires suggested that much of the political and religious endeavours of her husband occurred in the household. Arbaleste was able to report on the theological discussions of the synod at Saumur of 1596 because many of those who attended came to discuss politics in her home.117 Her memoir bore witness to their combined endeavours on behalf of the Huguenot struggle for recognition in France. In short, Arbaleste’s identification as the wife of DuplessisMornay allowed her not only the opportunity to write the biography of her husband, but also to discuss her own range of political, religious and familial activities which impacted upon Duplessis-Mornay’s life and thus the history of the Calvinist movement in France. The memoirs of the Protestant author Renée Burlamacchi, titled the life and death of Michele Burlamacchi (her father), traced his family’s religious, financial and social fortunes over the course of the sixteenth century.118 Renée, the daughter of a rich merchant family from Lucca, was born in the chateau of Montargis, where Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara, sheltered religious refugees. Burlamacchi recounted how her father fled Lucca in 1567 and sought refuge in Paris with his young wife Chiara. However, because of the religious fighting, the family was largely itinerant for the next two decades. In 1585, five years after his wife passed away, Michele Burlamacchi moved with his children to the Italian refuge in Geneva. The following year, Renée married Cesare Balbani, a wealthy merchant from Lucca. Following his death in 1621, Renée later married Agrippa d’Aubigné who had moved to Geneva in 1620. Burlamacchi most likely composed her memoir after 1621. Her history was a familial and collective one, and the narrative organised around a sequence of divinely ordained trials, through which the family’s faith was strengthened. Burlamacchi’s account is characteristic of Protestant narratives more generally, in which the notion of predestination was clearly evident.119 For French Huguenots, family history could take on particular significance. After the unprecedented St Bartholomew’s massacre in 1572, those who remained celebrated familial survival against the odds, provided evidence of God’s mercy and commemorated relatives who died in the conflicts in their family histories. Family histories in the hands of Huguenot authors were often intended to inspire and maintain


Protestant faith in future generations of the families concerned. Protestant women used family history to commemorate relatives lost or to demonstrate God’s mercy in protecting the family members. Both accounts by Arbaleste and Burlamacchi had a particular impetus to recount their experiences of the massacre as a witness to the Protestant community of God’s mercy in saving their families. The large digression, relative to the size of each text, to recount this event is indicative of the massacre’s significance in their lives and in shaping their identities as Protestant survivors. These two accounts are the only two known to be written by Huguenot women who experienced the massacre themselves. Arbaleste narrated both her own and her future husband’s escape from Paris. Arbaleste described hiding with her daughter for days, moving from house to house as the troubles spread, before she was finally able to flee the city. As she escaped in a boat, soldiers discovered her and threatened to drown her. She recalled one soldier’s words more than twenty years later: ‘saying to me that if I were a man, I would not escape so easily’.120 Burlamacchi’s account retained less tension although it too was the tale of one who experienced the events at first hand. Burlamacchi was however only four years old at the time. The restrained account she provided of her experience suggests that it may be less her own memories (and the emotions attached to them) than a re-telling from her family members. Burlamacchi recalled how, in order to save their lives, her parents were forced to flee, leaving her and her brother and sister behind with one of their servants. The children were eventually protected in the household of the Duke of Guise who planned to rebaptise the children as Catholics.121 Burlamacchi’s tale was a demonstration of the grace of God as she described how ‘God fortified so much our [family members] that none of them succumbed to the temptation, not even the little children, that M. de Guise had made plans to have raised in the Roman religion.’122 Women were also responsible for promoting recognition of new forms of martyrs for the French Calvinist churches. The female biographer of Eleanor de Roye, Princess of Condé, composed an account of the noblewomen’s pious death as propaganda for the Protestant cause. Published anonymously in 1564, the letter promoted Roye for inclusion in a canon of exemplary Protestant women, arguing that ‘she surpasses all those women who had ever been celebrated by histories and, in a word, nothing ever was to be found in her heart but virtue’.123 The narrator argued for recognition of women who were not martyrs in the narrow typology conceived and promoted by authors such as Crespin, but who met women’s own ideas about a Protestant female canon of good behaviour


achievable to a broader group of women: ‘And I am not astonished if in your country many wise ladies decide to propose her as an image and mirror of pudicity in the institution of the morals of their daughters.’124 The histories of Protestant women reveal their own experiences as Huguenot wives and mothers, and both Arbaleste’s and Burlamacchi’s texts devoted considerable space to the portrayal of other women in their circle of acquaintances. Arbaleste’s memoir provided, for example, a portrait of Françoise du Bec, her mother-in-law, who was shown as an exemplary Huguenot wife and mother. In Burlamacchi’s account, Magdelaine Calandrini was depicted as a good Huguenot mother who stepped in to help raise the Burlamacchi children when Renée’s mother died. These representations of good female Protestant conduct, specific to female-authored texts, show how important Huguenot women who proposed to record Protestant history felt it was to leave to their descendants examples of glorious exemplary behaviour, not only of men but of women as well. By inscribing women into the narrative of Protestant history in ways that male texts did not, they offered a different perspective on the past, revealing the multifaceted roles women played in spreading Protestant doctrines and values.125 Family histories by Catholic women, in which they documented births, marriages and deaths using family records and their own memories, recounted tales of triumph for future generations of the family to emulate. Jeanne du Laurens (1563–1635) composed an account of hard work and persistence against life’s challenges, in what was ostensibly the history of her father and brothers, one of whom became physician to the king, Henri IV. However, Du Laurens’ depiction of her widowed mother’s exemplary work in keeping the family together and allowing her sons to pursue medical studies also embedded women’s familial duties as key to Catholic history. Jeanne du Laurens composed what she termed a ‘Genealogy of the Messieurs du Laurens’, a pedagogical text directed to her children, in 1631.126 Du Laurens was particularly keen to emphasise the role of her mother in raising ten children after her father’s death, as a testament to the value of maternal educational duties. As Jeanne described her brother once saying: ‘fathers and mothers owe these two things to their children: to instruct them well, and to raise them honestly … for [with these beginnings] what little they might have, they have enough’.127 Her declared intention was, like works by some Protestant female authors, to demonstrate ‘the effects of the good nurturing and instruction which all our family had, as well as the grace of God’.128 Jeanne frequently recalled her mother’s remarks about God’s favour to the family: ‘that God had always aided the family


to the present and that He would aid them to the end, putting all her confidence in God’.129 As Du Laurens concluded, her history demonstrated that ‘Means and nobility have not raised this family, but virtue combined with divine grace. Thus, I exhort all those who belong to me to live well in the love and fear of God, and in all good virtue.’130 Du Laurens’ history is essentially the history of how her widowed mother was able to raise and place her ten children successfully, a testament to the role of a good Catholic mother and widow.131 As Nadine Kuperty-Tsur has argued, Catholic authors tended to be more confident that they could influence their own destinies whereas Protestant memorialists were more passive, accepting a divine plan that they might not necessarily be able to make sense of.132 In Du Laurens’ account, God is ultimately responsible for bringing about the family’s continued good fortunes, but her mother is an active and hardworking participant in its success. Women’s historical writings demonstrate engagement with emerging contemporary ideas about religious traditions, and the propaganda potential, of historical writing.133 Both Catholic and Protestant theology celebrated the family as a key locus of religious instruction and encouraged women to express their religious fervour through this forum. The domestication of faith encouraged women to develop new forms of historical writing which were located in the household and familial setting. Female-authored religious histories showed how crucial women could be as guardians of historical religious narratives and by embedding religion sentiment to future generations in their role as religious educators. However, more than that, across the confessional divide, women’s texts indicated a strong desire to show women as active participants in the religious history of their century, according to the means available to them. Their religious histories posed questions about what constituted a valid part of the religious historical record, whether it be their own memories as women of differing social, or confessional groups, or their access, interest and valuation of particular source materials. Whether in direct and conscious opposition to the prevailing views of male writers and academies, or simply by pursuing their own agendas of what constituted subjects of religious interest, women’s religious histories pushed the boundaries of what was considered important as religious history. * * * In conclusion, women’s writings and engagements with religious ideas over the century indicate both gender-specific interpretations and


highly individual visions of religious beliefs. The forums for their theological and intellectual participation were often distinct from those of men entering the same discussion. Since the complex and sophisticated manner in which individual women engaged with doctrine deserves much more space than can be provided here, conclusions point to the similarities between female authors about their interlocution. Here it seems that although the forms and outlets of women’s intellectual and theological participation evolved over the century in response to trends in literature, printing and women’s own circumstances, continuities in female religious discussion clearly exist. Women predominantly eschewed theological and spiritual insight based on text-based learning, even where they demonstrated clear knowledge of the latter. This may have had some basis in the modesty topos women frequently espoused, but it was also often in order to embrace a more intuitive, introspective and direct personal relationship with divine knowledge. Women by no means perceived the latter as a secondary or lesser form of access to religious wisdom. Furthermore, female authors commonly sought to embed women as both role models and protagonists in religious history across the confessional divide. In doing so, women indicated their desire and intention to contribute to the processes by which religious understanding both was created in their own time and would be perceived in the future.

4 Visible Religious Practices

In Chapter 3, emphasis was placed on women’s written and verbal expressions of religious knowledge. This chapter by contrast examines how women expressed religious sensibilities through non-verbal means, in visible, often visual, religious practices. How did women leave their mark in contemporary religion through their actions? The activities and practices analysed here all, at some level, conformed to collective norms and social expectations within particular confessional identities. Beyond this, however, what can be ascertained about how women’s spiritual actions and devotional practices informed, and were expressions of, their religious sensibilities? Many activities clearly identified a woman’s confessional allegiance. What personal religious meaning did participation in certain devotional practices have for individual women? Moreover, were these meanings more broadly gendered, so that the same devotional practice might have different meanings for women and men? Historians have debated how best to integrate the study of devotional practices into the broader history of religious cultures. A. N. Galpern has posited a theory of change, and ebbing religious fervour, over the early sixteenth century as a result of his analysis of the decline in particular themes for religious life. For example, his research in the Champagne region suggested that those activities which informed religious life of the laity at the turn of the century – parish confraternities, mystery plays, mediation through the Virgin and saints – declined in popularity by the 1530s as a result of concerns about the validity of these activities.1 Other historians, however, prefer to see devotional practices not simply as reflections of social beliefs, but also as having a more continuous role in creating devotional meanings.2 Indeed, much of the evidence presented in this chapter examines devotional practices that women sustained 96

Visible Religious Practices 97

across the century of reforms and explores how their meanings were transformed over this period.

Women’s participation in religious ceremonies Women were frequently noted by contemporaries for their greater piety than men and were visible participants in a range of devotional practices. Larissa J. Taylor’s research on the sermons of preachers suggests that Catholic women were considered more regular in their church attendance than men.3 Certainly, an author such as Anne de France instructed her elite female readers to hear mass once a day.4 It is less certain, however, whether working women could equally attend with such regularity regardless of their dedication to Catholic ritual practices. The early days of the Protestant movement in France could offer new opportunities to women to demonstrate their religious convictions, through their participation in religious ceremonies. Some women hosted illicit assemblies in their homes. In Dijon, in the days before a Calvinist church was formally founded in 1561, one assembly took place in the home of Jeanne Chenevière. Although the Dijon courts attempted to repress such gatherings as heretical, this conventicle was evidently sufficiently strong to be supplied with a predicant to serve its needs.5 Moreover, in such early assemblies women could enjoy something of a ceremonial role unheard of in conventional Catholic services. The report of a cleric who spied on a Protestant gathering in a Dijon haberdasher’s house in 1561 revealed that ‘there were two women close by [the preacher], each holding a candelabra and bright candles to lighten up [the room] for him’.6 Here, then, women were able to perform the role of a kind of assistant to the pastor in a mixed-sex religious environment, directly enabling the preacher to read. At one assembly, the mother-in-law of the lawyer De Presle, in whose house the worship took place, even took the trouble to welcome the undercover Catholic informant, proudly saying: ‘My friend, do you not see beautiful work here?’7 Women constituted a considerable proportion of the attendance at illegal Protestant gatherings, making their religious convictions known at least to their fellow participants in such ways. Historians have suggested that women were less likely to join the Protestant church than men, and while the Dijon evidence would seem to confirm that men were in the majority, women’s attendance at illicit assemblies in such large numbers indicates considerable female allegiance to the new ideas.8 Women suffered symbolically more than men by attending these


gatherings, because of the serious risk to their reputation from social scandal caused by their appearance in secretive, often nocturnal, mixedsex forums. The views of Catholics about what they perceived to be barely concealed orgiastic rites of lust were commonly circulated.9 Two clandestine reports concerning illicit Dijon assemblies in 1561, including a list of the attendees whom the informants could recognise, indicate a notable presence of women, who constituted one third of the identified congregation. Our cleric observing the haberdasher’s assembly identified 42 individuals, of whom 14 (33.3 per cent) were women.10 His counterpart Bénigne de Loysie, who reported on the gathering at the lawyer de Presle’s house, identified 77 attendees, including 25 women (32.4 per cent). Dijon’s female attendance in the early Protestant church is almost identical to the role of a 1560 Montpellier assembly, which recorded 343 women (31 per cent) among the 1,100 attendees.11 What is perhaps more remarkable is that in each case in Dijon, about half of these women attended not with male partners, but independently – even though some were specified as wives.12 At the haberdasher’s assembly, seven of the 14 women were without male accompaniment, and at the lawyer’s, 13 of the 25 attended without a male chaperon. The other female participants were listed with husbands, or as daughters or servants of male attendees. Moreover, the evidence of these reports from Dijon suggests that female attendance reflected a broad spectrum of the populace. This would seem to indicate that attraction to Protestantism, for whatever reasons, was not limited to learned or elite participation. The women who attended independently of men and who were recognised by the witnesses ranged from relatively elite women, wives of professional men such as ‘the wife of the lord councillor Bretagne and another woman with her wearing a Parisian-style hood’, ‘a demoiselle who was veiled’; ‘Mademoiselle Macheco, widow of the lieutenant prevost’; ‘the wife of Maître Louy Privey’; to wives of tradesmen including ‘the wife of Blaise the silversmith’; ‘the daughter of Jehan Faulconier, dyer’ to ‘the chambermaid of Maître Jehan de Frasans who has a birthmark on her cheek’.13 This detailed documentation about the early days of the attendance of Protestant conventicles is worthy of discussion given that much of the other evidence available to assess women’s and men’s participation in the movement primarily stems from sources produced in other contexts. Arguments have been made for and against the strength of religious convictions of the sexes from abjuration records. Barbara B. Diefendorf has argued from analysis of the Coutances 1588 abjuration list that the high proportion of women who remained Protestant may be testimony


to women’s strength of convictions.14 Raymond A. Mentzer Jr and Andrew Spicer, however, observe that men, especially as heads of households, were more likely to abjure because of professional exigencies, while female members could maintain the family’s faith.15 When the attendance lists assessed here are compared to other evidence from Dijon, different patterns of participation seem to emerge. The 1561 list of those arrested for their attendance would seem to favour arrest of male participants, since only seven of the 32 (22 per cent) were women, and of these, only two women were arrested with their husbands, suggesting that men may have been arrested as representative of a joint attendance.16 Similarly, quite a different representation of the gendering of the Calvinist community of Dijon can be ascertained from lists of those sympathisers on whom a tax was imposed in 1568 for the creation and maintenance of a town captain and 20 arquebusiers. By this survey, as one might expect, only five of 143 (3 per cent) Calvinist households taxed were female-headed, primarily by widows. Finally, a list of conversions by Dijon Calvinists to Catholicism dating from October 1568 indicated that only 15 of the 77 (19 per cent) individuals listed were women, and all these women did so at the same time as their husband (or in one case a widow with her adult son). 17 Thus from the basis of a range of different kinds of information, quite varied representations of the Calvinist community, and the participation of women within it, can be seen. From the perspective of this chapter’s concern with women’s participation in a range of pious and spiritual activities, the lists compiled of the attendees at early illicit Protestant assemblies might provide historians with a rare opportunity to perceive the reception of new ideas among a wide spectrum of the Dijon female community, and moreover, their willingness to act on it by attending visible devotional activities. Once the French Calvinist churches were formed, lists of Communion attendees were gathered, practices for services formalised, temples for sites of worships constructed, and a court of Elders created. Opportunities to participate in the religious ceremonies of the churches by those other than the male leaders would seem vastly reduced, although women continued to debate the authority of the consistories to decide on matters of moral regulation and their access to communion.18 In locations where the recognised Calvinist churches were no longer persecuted, attendance at religious services began to represent for women not only a religious commitment to Calvinism, but also a reflection of the local social hierarchy. Women were often called before the consistory to be disciplined for disputes that concerned their desire to


demonstrate the social order of the community through their seating in church. Women appeared to dominate disputes over rights to particular pews, and two noblewomen even engaged in a shoving match for advancement in the queue for communion at Ganges.19 In such ways, women’s attendance at and participation in Protestant worship would seem to reflect its evolving meanings over the century from a clandestine activity that gathered people of varied social classes and both sexes together in devotional activity, to one which in established Calvinist churches mirrored the gender and social order beyond the temple walls. Although this would seem to suggest a decreasing female contribution to the practices of the Calvinist Church, their active (perhaps dominant) involvement in using Communion as a means of establishing their place in the wider community indicates how women may have shaped this devotional practice for new social (if not religious) meanings.

Collective devotional organisations The evidence of Catholic women’s participation in formalised collective religious activities such as religious confraternities during the sixteenth century remains a vexed issue. Natalie Zemon Davis has suggested that women were generally excluded from confraternity membership;20 Galpern, on the other hand, posits that the situation is less clear since male names could occlude the participation of female partners.21 At the turn of the century, confraternities often stemmed from occupational identities. The female guild of the new linen merchants in Rouen, for which detailed records remain for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicates that the guildswomen were also members of the confraternity of Sainte-Barbe at the church of Saint-Jacques.22 This confraternity was founded in 1456 and all mistresses paid a sum of 2.5 sols upon entry to the guild. The confraternity appears to have concerned the religious and social aspects of the female collective, while the guild proper (or at least its extant archives) dealt with practical issues of apprenticeships, court cases, occupational disputes and the like. This was reflected in the financial contribution of the mistresses of the guild, who paid five sols at the time of swearing their oath to the guild: 2.5 sols were to go to the confraternity, and the rest to the ‘the business of the trade’.23 Similarly, apprentices paid 15 deniers to the confraternity and 15 for the guild’s ‘business’ affairs. The regulations of the confraternity of the company, as it was referred to in its records, stated that when a beadle died, all the mistresses of the guild were required to attend her funeral. When a mistress died, the confraternity would hold ‘vigils: 9 psalms, 9 lessons,


a mass with a deacon and sub-deacon, and an ordinary mass’, which the beadles were responsible for attending.24 Beadles were also required to attend mass on the Sunday before St Barbe’s day and St Genevieve’s day.25 Such devotional activities were part of the range of collective experience of being part of the linen merchants’ professional community, one which must have been relatively rare since few female-only guilds existed in France by the sixteenth century, although several associated with the cloth trade appear to have existed in Rouen.26 At the same time, women could participate in the devotional activities of occupational confraternities and guilds of their husbands. The 1576 statutes of the apothecaries of Amiens stated for the feast of St Luke the compulsory attendance of ‘all the physicians and apothecaries with their wives and widows of physicians and apothecaries’.27 Women in medical providers’ families could share both the ritual ceremonies of the medical corporate body and its collective devotional consciousness and status. The statutes also demanded that ‘the costs of the church, as much on that day as during the year, each will contribute to it, and widows in equal portion’.28 Although clearly at a financial cost to widows, this regulation allowed some women to enjoy a sense of contributing to a spiritual outlet on an equal basis to male members. Women appear to have dominated traditional, parish-based confraternities in the second half of the century. From his study of confraternities in Troyes, Galpern argues that over the latter half of the century, local parish confraternity memberships dwindled. Yet the remaining members were often women. His analysis indicates that where only one member of 23 (4 per cent) in the Saint-Fiacre’s confraternity at Saint-Remy’s church was female in 1571, five of the remaining seven (71 per cent) were by 1591. Similarly, only two women among the 18 (11 per cent) were specifically named in the Saint-Syre’s confraternity in 1571, but five of the six (83 per cent) members were women in 1591. Galpern observed that where membership remained consistent over the period, suggesting the continued popularity of the congregation, so too did the male membership. The confraternity of Saint-Fiacre at Saint-James’ church had 22 men named among its 31 members (71 per cent) in 1563, and 27 of 34 members (79 per cent) in 1594.29 Male names, Galpern argues, may cover the participation of their female relatives,30 but the evidence suggests that parish confraternities seemed less attractive to the devotional needs of the later sixteenth-century populace at large.31 Moreover, those who appeared to find meaning in their activities were women. Confraternity activities varied in some respects, but particularly devotional practices might attract female participants. Pierre Lançon


argues that the dominance of women in the confraternities of the rosary in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rouergue can perhaps be explained by the nature of these organisations’ activities.32 The Rosary confraternity had no banquets or meetings that required women to attend public forums. Members were obliged instead to recite the Marian psalter at least weekly, a series of prayers which women could achieve in their own homes.33 Similarly, members need only be familiar with a number of basic everyday prayers at the time of entry. After 1562, Marc Venard has argued, the Catholic counter-movement to Protestantism became more creative and its religious life reinvigorated.34 Philip Benedict has analysed the membership list of one newly established confraternity in Rouen, the General Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, founded in 1561. It enrolled 1,241 members in the first twelve months, including numerous female members.35 Indeed Benedict calculated that 60 per cent of the members were female and argued that this might indicate that women were more strongly and traditionally Catholic than men.36 Yet the city-wide Holy Sacrament confraternity that women numerically dominated was a new religious development, speaking to the concerns of the mid-century Catholic laity. Did these women perceive their participation as an opportunity to maintain the vitality of their traditional Catholicity (which we might posit for their continued attendance in parish-based confraternities) or rather an occasion to demonstrate a new relationship to a reinvigorated confraternity movement? Certainly, historians have argued that confraternities specifically for women founded in the seventeenth century, by both elite city women and Church officials, offered new devotional outlets for lay female piety.37 Yet women’s relationships to the emerging new devotional congregations of the later century appear ambiguous. In Avignon, elite women supported, financially and by their membership, the foundation of the mixed-sex confraternity of Christian Doctrine, composed of both priests and laypeople, which was established in 1591. Sybille Mazan was known as its Capitainesse.38 Yet the devotion of many of these laywomen was eventually directed towards a more traditional spiritual outlet, the enclosed convent. Venard observes that some of the first Ursulines to join the convent in Avignon were previously members of the Christian Doctrine congregation in which women mixed with ecclesiastical members.39 Similar patterns of lay female piety converted into formalised religious Orders mark the seventeenth century.40 Over the course of the sixteenth century, the locus of confraternal activities shifted, at its most simple, from occupational guild and local


parish environments, to broader political and military affiliations, and then to those frequently city-wide congregations united by individual and deeply personal devotion. Although a small proportion of women enjoyed membership in the first two kinds, it was perhaps in the third that they were able to embrace the confraternity movement, both in continuing to support the older parish-based movements when men moved away, but also in providing practical and financial support for the new devotional gatherings of the later century.

Processions and festivals Another form of visible collective religious participation for women as well as men came through their involvement in ritual processions and festivities. Women in both Catholic lay and convent environments were involved in processions, and it was an opportunity for interaction between communities. At the Benedictine abbey of Beaumont-lès-Tours, sixteenth-century custom allowed that on the Tuesday of Rogation the convent’s superiors from the monastery of Saint-Martin processed through the abbey church ‘followed by a multitude of secular people of both sexes’. The abbey’s gates were opened for three hours during which time anyone could freely enter the monastery. In such ways, the lay public could briefly partake of the community’s spirituality through their devotion and visit inside its walls. Beaumont was officially an enclosed community, yet when the abbess attempted to put a stop to the Rogation practice in 1602 on the grounds that it compromised the community’s claustration, it was their superiors who protested, indeed threatening to excommunicate them.41 Convents were often responsible for upholding Catholic traditions of veneration and procession of relics through the sixteenth century. This could help increase the visibility and significance of a monastic establishment to the wider local community, enhancing its spiritual patronage and probably also encouraging benefactors. In 1575, the canons of Sainte-Radegonde, superiors of the abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, refused to carry the abbey’s most significant relic, a fragment of the Holy Cross, on procession with their legs and feet bare, unless the abbess paid them 5 sols. They argued that the act of humility had only ever been performed out of a spirit of devotion by particular canons and not by necessity of tradition. Jeanne de Bourbon-Montpensier, abbess of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, on the other hand, who composed an act of her negotiations with the canons about the matter insisted that the act of processing the relic barefoot was both ‘noble and ancient’ and that the


canons’ decisions could impact upon the piety of the laity at large. She argued that ‘the refusal … of this noble and ancient observance [is] to the scandal and diminution of our religion … the scandal could not be greater and will come to the attention of common people’.42 Compromise was reached when the canons accepted instead of the 5 sols an annual gift from the abbey of silk stockings. By committing their differing understandings to the written record, the community and canons established notions about the procession’s spiritual content, as well as the influence they anticipated public veneration and devotion of the relics to have on the wider community of laypeople. In other written forms too women contributed to an understanding of the significance and impact of processional activities to Catholic France. In 1583, the diarist at Beaumont-lès-Tours recorded in detail the celebrated series of processions blanches which had occurred in the north of France. These had been precipitated by a number of miraculous events: visions in the skies over Paris; the apparition of a hairless, naked woman holding a child and bird in a village near Bayeux where the infant called on the witnesses to amend their ways; wheat in a mill in Brie which turned into blood rather than flour; an infant who miraculously preached to the congregation at its own baptism; and two angels who appeared in a field to two small children.43 The latter event caused the local community, barefoot and dressed entirely in white, to undertake a procession of the Host as far as Nôtre-Dame de Paris, singing and praying to God and the Virgin to have mercy on them. The diarist notes that some participants walked as far as 24 leagues as part of the procession on its way to Paris. According to her account, this sparked a wave of devotional processions from the frontiers of Germany, the Ardennes, Brie and Champagne through to Paris. Her account emphasised the swelling tide of piety which the progressive pilgrimage created, from the first procession in Germany of 4,000 people, to 7,000 to 12,000, peaking at 18,000 people by the time it reached the church of Saint-Fiacre in Brie. The Beaumont journal created, by its discussion of these events, a sense of excitement within its own community about a growing wave of Catholic support sweeping the country, but also a strong belief that such processional movements could make a difference. At Châlons, the diarist reported that the pilgrims inspired the Catholic faithful: ‘Having seen the devotion of the pilgrims of St Nicolas, they resolved to make a similar procession as them with those of their surrounding region’; and at Rheims, the singing of the pilgrims at Nôtre-Dame was such that ‘several heretics … converted to the Catholic religion’.44 Through documentation of, and circulation of ideas about, such devotional


movements, the female diarist emphasised the possibility of such actions to inspire and convert others, thus allowing the possibility of a missionary role for those outside of the male ecclesiastical model in the re-conquest of the heart of France. To Huguenot women, however, such processions and festive occasions could be opportunities to signal their own religious persuasion.45 Their actions on feast-days particularly drew suspicion of their sympathies in the early days of the spread of reformed ideas. Louise Arnaude from Romans came to the attention of local inquisitors in 1549 when the local community testified that she and a female friend had hired a rural property to which they had retired during Lent and where they had indulged in desserts and other forbidden foods. A local cleric reported that, on the eve of a feast-day, he had heard that Louise’s friend had a leg of ham in her bed rather than a pillow.46 In Troyes in 1555, the actions of a female servant during Lent implicated the entire household. Jeanne Fournel was seen ‘throwing chicken feathers out of the house of her master at the time of Lent’,47 and this led to claims that the household was enjoying poultry which Fournel plucked and prepared.48 Other women showed no respect to the religious significance of feast-days by continuing to work. In 1560, Bénigne Michelot and her son Laurent were fined by the parliamentary court at Dijon for their irreverent and seditious behaviour ‘for having on the Tuesday feast-day of last Easter made bales of their merchandise, loaded them on to a cart and ridden around the town to go to the fair, to the great scandal of all’.49

Ceremonies of death The observation and practices of the rites of passage were one area where women and men could demonstrate their confessional allegiance. Huguenots could decide to have their children baptised in their own home rather than in the parish church by the local priest. The regulation of marriages was a point of particular interest to Calvinist consistories. The practice of funeral and burial ceremonies also identified women and men as sympathetic to Calvinist teachings. Protestant teachings rejected as superstitions Catholic deathbed rites as well as intercessionary prayers and concepts such as purgatory.50 Women and men could demonstrate their religious convictions through the preparations and instructions that they left in wills regarding the manner of their own rites. In her testament composed in 1583, a Huguenot woman, Charlotte Arbaleste, left no detailed instructions as to the manner of her funeral, prayers, rites and location of her grave, as


might a Catholic. Instead she left her burial arrangements in the hands of her husband.51 But preparing such instructions was no guarantee that they would be implemented, particularly in families divided by confessional allegiances. In Troyes, Marie de Montsaujon, wife of Antoine de Villemor, notary and procureur, asked to be buried with no ceremony, consistent with her and her husband’s Calvinist beliefs. Ignoring her daughter’s last wishes in preference to her own beliefs in appropriate conduct, Montsaujon’s mother, Barbe, who remained Catholic, arranged for her priest to perform last rites, provoking familial dispute with Montsaujon’s husband, who refused to allow the Catholic ceremony.52 As most deaths occurred in the female sphere of the sickbed and household, women were often involved in the contests surrounding deathbed rites. In 1558 in Troyes, the Protestant Claude Boissonnot lay mortally ill in bed as his Catholic wife and Calvinist co-religionaries fought over the manner of his deathbed ceremonies. His wife had evidently convinced Boissonnot to allow her to call a priest to perform the last rites. Meanwhile, his Protestant friends attempted to strengthen his religious convictions to reject his wife’s proposition.53 Women, who traditionally tended the sick and dying, were ideally placed to use their palliative role as an opportunity to persuade the dying of their own religious views. Other women came under community suspicion for harbouring Protestant views as a result of their behaviour surrounding the death of relatives. Philippe de Luns, the 23-year-old widow of the seigneur de Graveron, was extensively interviewed by her interrogators after her arrest at the assembly of the reformed church in Paris in September 1557. Following Crespin’s account of her interrogations, one of the issues to which her inquisitors paid particular attention was the nature of religious rites which she had arranged to have conducted following the death of her husband in May. The inquisitors asked if she had buried him in her garden, to which she replied that she had in fact taken his body to the city’s public hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu ‘to be buried with the poor (as she could demonstrate by the attestation), without other superstitious ceremonies’.54 When asked if she believed prayers were necessary for the deceased, she responded that ‘there was no need to conduct prayers for the deceased, and that she had read it so in the New Testament’.55 The widow Louise Arnaude was interrogated by the local inquisitor at Romans in 1549, to whom she expressed the view that there was no point praying for her husband ‘since he was either in paradise or hell’. However, another witness, Damoiselle Monde


Suzanne, was able to testify that Arnaude had in fact arranged to have masses said for her husband.56 Although the confessions may have been distinct, interpreting women’s behaviour as an indication of their religious beliefs could be challenging. Before French Calvinist communities obtained their own burial space, significant tensions could surround funeral and burial practices. Penny Roberts has discussed how Catholic communities could also refuse those who they perceived as Huguenots from sharing the communal burial space (often a matter of family tradition) after their death. In 1562 Catholic vine-growers’ wives in Beaune dragged the corpse of a Huguenot mason Pierre Petot away, to have it buried in a field.57 For Catholic women, it could be just as significant to their demonstration of religious convictions to provide copious detail about their desired funeral ceremonies, such as the number of poor in attendance, or the masses and prayers to be offered. In 1519, Jeanne Mahiel, widow of a prosecutor in the Parisian parliament, requested her burial in her parish church of Saint-Séverin, ‘near the place she was accustomed to sit and attend service … which is to the right side of the high altar’.58 Here the location of her burial was intended to reflect and continue the devotional practices of her life. Claire Dolan’s research into sixteenth-century wills in Aix demonstrates an increasing specificity of Catholic ritual over the course of the later sixteenth century. Her data indicate, for example, that the percentage of testators who specified the number of poor required to attend their funerals augmented from 27.6 per cent in 1550, to 52 per cent by 1594.59 Where Catholic testators were buried was also important, as many chose to be buried not in their parish grounds but in local convents. Their choice of convent could attest their sympathy with the lifestyles of a particular monastic community. Dolan’s analysis suggests that a testator’s choice of burial in a convent was not bound by strong traditions, but rather the current popularity of an Order or establishment. Thus, alignment with a new emerging Order or a traditional old one could have meaning for one’s spiritual allegiances within Catholicism.60 As such, convents could attract income, recognition and popular support through requests for burial and prayers performed by the monastic community. The late sixteenth-century journal kept by the nuns at Beaumont-lès-Tours recorded the death and donations of benefactors as well as the prayers to be offered by the community. Funding for obits could be both complicated and strictly applied by monastic communities. One contributor to the Beaumont journal documented the convent’s rationale behind a particular series of vigils and masses for


Damoiselle Françoise de Liniers. The income for the obit she founded had been given to her daughter, a nun in the abbey, Marguerite Cottin. The nuns rationalised that the ceremonies did not need to be conducted until after 62-year-old Cottin’s death in 1582, since the funds were temporarily diverted to provide Cottin’s pension during her lifetime.61 When contagion broke out in October 1585 in Tours, the Beaumont nuns recorded in horror in their journal the death of a local townswoman Jacqueline Saulvageau, wife of Jehan d’Albin. When she and her premature child died from a fever at the height of an outbreak, the nuns lamented how she had been ‘interred at the cemetery of St Jacques by Jacques Loriou and a woman who had nursed her with no priest nor cleric nor any funeral ceremony and without having been confessed nor received the sacrament’. The Beaumont diarist concluded her discussion of Saulvageau’s demise with an affirmation of her own beliefs in the significance of such ceremonies: ‘God, his sacred mother and Monsieur St Roch preserve us from such a pitiable and deplorable fate.’62

Devotional art and architecture Coupled with demonstrations of their belief in the continued importance of deathbed and funerary rituals in words and actions, Catholic women also testified to the ongoing significance of devotional art created for funeral monuments. This was, of course, a highly elite expression of devotion: only a few women had the financial means to fund painted or sculpted artwork for their own or a relative’s tomb. Women, as well as men, were responsible for commissioning largescale sculpture such as entombment scenes to adorn private chapels and burial sites in churches.63 Often projects were commissioned by a donor couple. Jeanne de Poix and her husband, Raoul de Lannoy, seigneur de Folleville, planned an entombment scene for the private chapel that they were constructing at the time Lannoy wrote his will in 1512. The finished product proudly referred to in Poix’s 1524 will as completed by the effort of herself and her son, is adorned with busts and arms of both husband and wife.64 Moreover, it appeared to have spiritual and devotional significance to Poix beyond that of simply fulfilling her husband’s wishes. She requested in her will that mass be said for her in front of the sepulchre.65 Elite women commissioned sculpted work of this kind most commonly as widows, although it is less clear whether many were initiated by the women in their widowhood. Jacquelyne de Laignes, for example, donated a scene of the entombment of Christ, with six-foot figures, to


be placed in her family chapel in the church of Cahource, in the 1520s. This appears to have been the completion of a joint project commenced in the lifetime of her husband, Nicolas de Moustier.66 Arthuse de Melun, widow of the seigneur de La Chapelle, donated an entombment for the church of Chapelle-Rainsoun around 1522. In 1525 she also founded a weekly mass at the sepulchre, and her tomb lies next to her husband in this church.67 Anne de Polignanc oversaw the completion of the Verteuil seigneurial chapel and the entombment to adorn it after the death of her husband, François de la Rochefoucault, in 1533.68 This evidence should not imply that widows could not draw spiritual expression from these practices, but simply that it is difficult to detect a particular trend, even amongst wealthy women, for initiating patronage of religious artwork on this scale without prior allocation of the funds by their late husbands. Indeed, sometimes widows were unable to maintain the financial outlay to see such a joint project through to completion. Marguerite de Baudricourt, widow of Geuffroy de Saint-Belin, who had two daughters to support, negotiated with the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church at Chaumont-en-Bassigny about relinquishing familial possession to the church community of unfinished religious sculptures that had been intended to adorn an entombment scene planned by the couple before her husband’s death.69 Where women did seem to be responsible for the initial inspiration behind devotional art, the objects were typically smaller-scale. In Paris, women donated religious artwork among their bequests, often stipulating placement and design. For example, in her testament prepared in 1547, Thierrye Langlois, wife of seigneur de Nainville, allocated 20 écus d’or to be used to make a tapestry for the high altar in her parish church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont.70 As Galpern argues, artwork of these kinds commissioned by such women could play a part in transmitting the donor’s religious sensibilities to the wider viewing public.71 Although entombment art seems particularly a devotional artistic tradition of the first half of the century, laywomen continued to commission funeral and devotional monuments despite the financial and practical restrictions imposed by the religious wars. Antoinette de Bourbon, dowager duchess of Guise, foundress of Nôtre-Dame at Joinville, donated to the community around 1567 an entombment scene to be placed in the choir of the church.72 Renée d’Amboise stipulated in her 1561 will that she wanted to be buried in a stone tomb engraved with her arms near the sculpture she had earlier donated to Nôtre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers.73 This sepulchre had been constructed after the death of her son Louis de Clermont, and completed in 1555.


It seems probable that Renée intended it as a family burial site. It was her Amboise arms and the symbols of a widow that were engraved upon the work. Here it seems that dynastic and pious interests coalesced, and the sepulchre attested to the family’s confessional allegiance. Renée’s daughter, the abbess Jeanne de Clermont, was also buried near the sepulchre and was depicted as one of the kneeling figures to the side of the monument, as if participating at first hand in the scene of Christ’s entombment.74 As well as individual elite laywomen, convent communities were among the more significant female patrons of religious art and architecture.75 Monasteries were one of the few female patrons of large-scale religious architecture, on the occasions where renovations and new buildings were undertaken during the sixteenth century. After Huguenot attacks on the abbey of Fontevrault in 1562, the abbess Louise de Bourbon commenced a programme of repairs and new construction. She secured donations from royal and noble families, including her own, in order to create and pave the cloister and gallery in the abbey. A large-scale project to construct a new dormitory of 24 cells was underwritten by a promise of 10,000 livres from Catherine de Medici, who visited the abbey in 1567. But when the funds were not forthcoming, the construction work was unable to be completed until the abbacy of Eleanor de Bourbon in the late sixteenth century.76 There is little comparative material to indicate that Huguenot women could generally contribute to the design and programme of French Calvinist temples when they began to be constructed in the later sixteenth century, other than through their financial contributions.77 Nor do they appear to have been identified as responsible for Calvinist inscriptions on religious edifices or on secular buildings that appear from the mid-sixteenth century.78 Even relatively wealthy monastic communities such as Fontevrault struggled to achieve architectural projects without the security of largescale funding, but convents were able to commission and produce smaller devotional artwork. Louise de Bourbon founded five new bells for the abbey church at Fontevrault and one of her most significant extant artistic commissions concerned the chapter room. In 1562, Thomas Pot was commissioned to paint fresco scenes of the life of Christ and the Virgin, which were later embellished with portraits of Fontevrault’s abbesses as eyewitnesses to the Biblical events.79 Around 1575, Louise also donated a nine-piece tapestry of the Apocalypse for the room.80 This work, bearing the Bourbon arms, demonstrates how devotional artwork even within convents could attest to the alignment of spiritual and dynastic interests.


Where monasteries survived the wars, the later sixteenth century into the seventeenth was often a time of literal and spiritual rebuilding. However, it is difficult to attribute this to a new fervour of the Catholic Reformation or simply the practical and financial challenges of constructing new buildings and commissioning artwork during times of war. Certainly, the records of a community such as Beaumont-lès-Tours indicate that abbesses throughout the century acted as patrons of devotional art despite the upheavals which forced the community to evacuate on several occasions. For example, in 1566 the abbess Charlotte de La Trémoille had three new bells made for the community whose Latin inscriptions were reproduced in the convent’s chronicle.81 The toll of convent bells marked not only the devotions of the religious community, but also its presence in the spiritual life of the wider community beyond. In 1587, new wooden statues of the Virgin and Saint Benedict, each two and a half foot high, were commissioned by the community for use in chapels devoted to them.82 Joan Evans has argued that the new Catholic Reformation emphasis on hagiology began to be demonstrated in the artwork within Benedictine female communities with paired statues of St Benedict and St Scholastica, such as those at Nôtre-Dame de la Couture at Le Mans, and the single statue of St Scholastica at Nôtre-Dame de Jouarre.83 Such artistic projects might have been small by contrast to those undertaken in the following century, but they testified to the ongoing significance of devotional art to a community such as Beaumont – each commissioned piece carefully documented in the convent’s history of its most important events. The translation of the Beaumont abbey relics into new reliquaries in 1650 enumerated a huge diversity of devotional objects held in the community: some of which had been given to the abbey for safekeeping during the religious troubles of the sixteenth century, others which the abbey had acquired from the destruction of other monastic houses. The oldest nuns were able to explain how relics of St Romain had come to the abbey: ‘gathered from the debris of the reliquary of La Trimouille, made by the heretics in the seigneurial chapter of Isle-Bouchard in 1562’ and those of St Venant, ‘from the reliquaries of Saint-Martin-de-Tours, when the relics of the saints were burned and the reliquaries melted in 1562’.84 The religious wars not only caused relics to be hidden, exchanged and relocated among the convent and lay Catholic faithful, but when times were safer, convent communities could reiterate their beliefs in the intercessional powers of these devotional objects by commissioning new shrines and reliquaries to contain them.


Religious women, particularly abbesses, were responsible for obtaining and maintaining literature for women within the convent. Even well after the introduction of print, religious women continued to patronise manuscript production for specific luxurious copies that they required. The colophon of La forme et maniere de consacrer les religieuses de l’ordre des Chartreux explains its provenance and audience on the first page: ‘Written in the year 1559 for dame Franchoise de la Haye, spouse of J. C. redemptor and saviour of those who are his.’85 Louise d’Amoncourt recorded a small autobiographical inscription in a richly decorated book of hours and psalter: ‘Loyse d’Amoncourt who came into this church at the age of seven, in 1549.’86 ‘Sunday, the seventeenth July 1600, I was consecrated abbess, by Monsieur the bishop of Coutences.’87 Of course, abbesses and individual nuns were also the object of dedications in both manuscript and published texts like those composed by Jehan Henry or Yves Magistri discussed in previous chapters. Nuns were often presented with books, especially from other women, as gifts at their profession.88 Catherine Lobgeois recorded on the flyleaf of her psalter that it had been given to her by dame Kateline Brochon.89 In 1538, Anthoinette de Saveuses, a nun at Dunkirk, was sent two breviaries by her English friend living at Calais, Honor Lisle.90 A nun Helene de Monctsoreau received a book of hours as a gift from her sister, Madame Dobizor, the flyleaf recorded.91 Both manuscripts and printed texts were the object of female gift-giving throughout the sixteenth century. A fifteenth-century Dominican psalter contains a small history of its reception amongst several women of the same family. One inscription explains that ‘This present psalter is for the use of sister Marie de Pardieu, which her aunt sister Ysabeau de Waudricourt gave her for her profession, the year fifteen fourteen’. A later hand indicates that Pardieu intended to continue the aunt–niece inheritance tradition, explaining that the book belonged to ‘sister Marie de Pardieu and to sister Susanne de Mailloc, her niece. Remaining with the survivor of these two’.92 Literate laywomen may have read many texts, but those recorded as belonging to their own libraries were commonly works of personal devotion.93 Larissa Taylor’s reading of contemporary sermons suggests that preachers certainly assumed that female listeners had access to devotional books.94 Women sometimes owned several books of hours to the exclusion of all other (recorded) material. Sandra Penketh has argued that an examination of medieval books of hours that include female portraits reveals evidence of ‘active participation in personal worship’ by women book owners.95 Such works could be texts for personal devotion but also demonstrations of women’s desire to enjoy


an accessible form of personal religious art. In 1522, notaries listed the library of Isabeau Boursier, the widow of Jean Hamelin, merchant and bourgeois of Paris, as ‘A book of Hours, usage of Paris, printed letters, A little book of Hours, on parchment, printed letters’ and finally, a more luxurious, ‘Two books of Hours, on parchment, printed letters, historiated, with gold lettering, of which one is covered in camel skin and the other covered in black velvet’.96 Social status might have affected the quality of the binding and decoration but not the choice of reading material: only the binding and decorations varied according to their relative wealth. In 1521, Agnès de la Cour, wife of Lucas des Ouches, a saddler and bourgeois of Paris, owned three works: Vita Christi, ‘Messel for use in Paris’, and her ‘Hours hand written, on parchment, covered in black serge cloth and with two clasps of gilded silver’.97 Scholars are increasingly analysing the devotional and symbolic meanings of book ownership, beyond the words and ideas contained in them.98 Virginia Reinburg’s study of books of hours suggests that personal additions to such texts demonstrate how the laity could create new meanings for more traditional devotional practices. Her study has identified how literate and non-literate participants could use such texts as repositories for other spiritual expressions, writing in confraternity memberships, bequests or pasting in pilgrimage amulets and images.99 Indeed flyleaf details can provide historical evidence for women’s participation in other devotional practices. One fifteenth-century book of hours included a flyleaf entry detailing the ‘fraternities to which Jehan Le Megnen and his wife belong’ which were all in Parisian churches. A second list documented those in which their two daughters, Jehanne and Guillemette, were members.100 Bibles and books of hours were often chosen to record the family’s history because they were ones which the writer assumed would remain in the possession of the family. Perhaps these were one of the few available sources of permanent paper in a household. Louise Baillet’s hours is one example that included a list of children born to her and Bauldoin du Viviez as well as those of a second couple, Jehan Pottin and Heleine Cocquel.101 Kathleen Ashley has argued that such books of hours can be considered repositories of a collective family memory, deliberately selected because of their religious significance.102 Through such practices, Catholic families could fashion a particular pious history and identity, much as noblewomen did through their funeral monuments. Protestant women could differentiate themselves from Catholics by a rejection of luxurious devotional objects and especially by their choice of clothing. Typically, they were considered to dress more austerely,


although Calvinist consistories sometimes struggled to enforce sumptuary regulations.103 To a Catholic observer in Toulouse, Georges Bosquet, Huguenot women’s fervour for austerity of dress was something to be emulated by Catholic women, ‘which our preachers have not been able to obtain from Catholic women by holy admonitions that they make to them about it’.104 Certainly, to a Huguenot eyewitness such as Nicolas Pithou, Protestant women’s modesty of dress was a source of considerable pride as he reported the 1594 publication of a booklet by the bishop René Benoist, which critiqued Catholic women’s extravagant dress.105 Yet Calvinist women were also reportedly wearing symbols of their faith. An anti-Calvinist French physician, Jérôme Bolsec, mocked Genevan women who apparently wore Calvin’s image as a necklace.106 Similarly, the Huguenot author Pithou reported the comments of a Catholic critic who in 1557 complained that Huguenot women in Troyes carried ‘in front of them the psalms in French hanging from a gold chain’.107 Daniel W. Hardy has argued that Calvinist reformers varied about the utility of visual representations to mediate religious beliefs.108 It may be that women took it upon themselves to adapt the Calvinist message to forms such as jewellery that already represented for them the precious, significant and valuable. Here, then, may be an example of Huguenot women’s participation in personal devotional art. In addition, we have already seen how important it was to a Huguenot woman like Charlotte Arbaleste to maintain social distinctions through her dress despite her strong Calvinist convictions. Objectification of Calvinist faith, through the image of Calvin or the vernacular psalms, may have provided women with a visible sign of their faith that also seemed appropriate to their class.109 More common than reports of women wearing pages or booklets of the translated psalms were indications that women were reading or singing them. In particular, singing could mark a Protestant affiliation that was accessible to those who were not literate. Certainly elite contemporaries noted the popularity of psalm-singing as a way of the unlearned signifying their confessional allegiance. In Dijon, Jean de Tavannes observed in his Mémoires how ‘women and tradespeople enjoyed singing the psalms’.110 In Troyes, the servant Jeanne Fournel was observed by the community who reported the household for suspect religious beliefs in 1555, ‘having heard her several times singing the psalms of Marot’.111 Davis’s survey of the literacy of Protestant women in 1570s Lyons, a group comprised mostly from families of craftsmen, merchants or professionals, indicates that a significant proportion were unable to write their names.112 In such ways as singing and recitation of


psalms then, the unlearned, including women, could align themselves publicly if they chose, or at least share in one of the devotional activities of Calvinism.

Women’s charitable activities One of the areas of women’s devotional life that crossed social and confessional boundaries was their charity work, although female charitable action and its meanings differed between religious and class identities. Catholic female testators appear to have commonly left funds for charitable bequests, proportionately more than male will-makers.113 Sometimes these were made to the collective poor of the parish, as did Thierrye Langlois, wife of Pierre Bonnier, who in February 1547, left 20 écus d’or ‘to the community of the poor of the parish’ of Saint-Etienne-duMont in Paris among her donations. However, wills could also reveal a longer history of almsgiving by women. Langlois also left 45 sols tournois each to two poor women whom she identified as Jeanne and la Bâtelarde, who had evidently frequented her parish church.114 The 1543 will of Louise Loiseux, the widow of a Parisian apothecary and spicer, revealed a pattern of local charity in her neighbourhood: leaving ‘to a good old woman, who begs for her living and comes each Saturday to the house, the sum of ten sols six deniers tournois’.115 The latter example suggests both the existence of such charitable practice among the lay community as well as an expectation of such among the poor. For Protestants, however, historians have argued that the testament declined as a source of such bequests to communal charitable purposes such as poor relief. Martin Dinges has argued that in Calvinist communities where everyone was expected to donate to the church and its collectively organised relief programmes, bequests were smaller than among Catholics who faced a wider choice of beneficiaries and may have felt more individual responsibility to help the poor.116 Lists of donors on Calvinist relief registers, such as that studied by Raymond A. Mentzer for Nîmes, largely identify male heads of households.117 Women were essential, however, to the everyday practice of charity in both Catholic and Protestant communities. Although the selection of recipients under organised consistory, municipal or ecclesiastical authorities largely remained in the hands of male administrators, these organisations relied on women to raise funds, run hospitals and orphanages, or to provide support for the needy in their community. Women of the poorer social levels might be responsible for bringing the plight of a neighbour or relative to the attention of a parish priest or the relief


council. In April 1583 Thienette Moureau, the wife of a cloth worker, came to the governors of the poor relief council in Tours to seek assistance in resolving the welfare of three children that her kin, Mathurin Moureau, a cloth worker, had left in her care. Mathurin had since disappeared. Often women had cared for the poor, ill or infants before they received relief support. One of Moureau’s children, for example, had been taken in by a relative, Jacquine Charbonneau, and the youngest child, a two-year-old girl, remained in Thienette’s care.118 Female neighbours lent support according to their means. In March 1582 Martine, the 60-year-old widow of Jehan de la Roche, struck down by a paralysis, had lain ill for more than a year and a half in bed. She had not been able to pay the ‘rent of a little room in which she is lodged without the charity of her female neighbours and friends, and was helped by the said alms’.119 Renée Guillotier, a widow, cared for an orphaned infant girl whose father had lived in her street before the case came before the poor relief council in August 1591.120 Poor relief petitions reveal the contributions of many female relatives, neighbours and parish members in helping those around them, often for significant periods of time, before their cases came to the council’s attention. As well as women who witnessed the plight of those around them by proximity of location and sometimes situation, women often managed the day-to-day operations of charity hospitals and orphanages. Nuns from active religious communities often ran local hospitals at least until the middle of the century when administration was taken over by secular officials in many places.121 Eight professed nuns with a number of novices still ran the everyday operations of the Hôtel-Dieu in Orleans in 1581.122 Often working with meagre amenities, these women devoted themselves to the hard labour of a nursing life because it contributed to the spiritual development of the sisters who undertook it. In this framework, nuns worked for the salvation of both their own and their patients’ souls. Secular women too often managed such facilities in towns where the demand was too small to require a religious community to service it, and also increasingly after the middle of the century when municipal officials supervised the organisations. In Poitiers, Jehanne de Tongrelou, a merchant’s widow, governed the almshouse of Nôtre-Dame-la-Grande from 1535 until 1542, and donated many of her household utensils to it. She was still involved in the running of the almshouse at least until 1549.123 In 1550, Catherine de la Cour, a Franciscan tertiary, obtained permission from the council in Poitiers to serve the plague-stricken without payment. She was to be given the same food as the poor, was to clothe herself at her own expense and to


lead an ‘honest and religious life’.124 In Paris, the orphanage established at Port Saint-Landry in 1570 retained three widows to provide services to the children and a male employee to manage its books.125 Moreover, women of middling and elite status were responsible for fundraising drives on behalf of charitable institutions. In Poitiers, women led the annual collection of linen among the parishes, always a significant expenditure for hospitals in terms of finances and labour for its laundering. The council’s records of this well-established system indicated that the collectors of linen for Poitiers’ hospitals were assumed to be women.126 In Rouen, inspired by Father Poissevin’s Lenten sermon in the cathedral in 1570, ‘several notable ladies of this town gathered as much in deniers as in linens from the parishes and households’.127 Other elite women visited hospitals to console the poor and sick, and brought conserves and other home-made remedies. Poor relief organisations too benefited from these female endeavours. In Le Puy, in 1599, elite women fundraised for alms on behalf of the poor of the town.128 Women at all levels directed their devotional energies towards hospitals under both ecclesiastical and municipal administration, contributing funds and their services, a pattern which would continue into the seventeenth century. * * * To conclude, women desired to leave their mark on contemporary religious cultures through an array of actions, as well as verbal and written practice. With the development of reforming views over the century, observation of devotional practices once those of the general community increasingly came to represent clear confessional allegiances. Yet for women, some aspects of their outward expressions of piety remained consistent as appropriate female conduct, such as charitable practices, regardless of their confessional position. Charity was embraced by many women as a means to participate in devout behaviour. Women’s participation in devotional activities of religious life seems to point, at least among Catholic women, to patterns of continuity in the outlets for such expression. Confraternities, processional events and devotional art all remained important sources of female spiritual expression. Moreover, women’s continued activities in such forums adapted to changed realities, both mirroring and creating new understandings of active religious cultures over the century.

5 Religious Politics and Violence

This chapter explores women’s participation in religious politics, particularly in the second half of the sixteenth century, when religious differences were transformed into violent conflict in many parts of France. In recent years, historians have increasingly looked to understand women’s involvement in political action by terms that take into account the context of female opportunities for power. Research by Sharon Kettering, for example, has questioned the extent of noblewomen’s powerlessness in the light of their involvement in domestic patronage and household service and politics.1 Robert J. Kalas’s case study of the career of Jeanne de Gontault noted how her ceremonial role at court serving the Valois queens gave her the opportunity to voice opinions to the queens in a ‘female world … where some degree of political power was possible for the wealthy, landed elite’.2 Kristen Neuschel’s study of noblewomen in times of war argues that they participated in warfare in important material and symbolic ways.3 This chapter expands such arguments to examine how women of diverse social levels found means to contribute to political actions or military manoeuvres, and to demonstrate their allegiances to the political factions. It contends that women at all levels experienced the devastation to property and lives wrought by the religious violence and sought to express responses with the means at their disposal.

Women and national religious politics Women entered into debates on a national scale, often through publication, about the religious troubles that France experienced during the sixteenth century. Several women in the royal family were actively involved in politics despite the fact that Salic law prevented them from 118

Religious Politics and Violence 119

ascending the throne.4 Anne de France was unofficial regent for her brother, Charles VIII, during his minority. Louise de Savoie was twice regent for her son, François I. Her granddaughter, Jeanne d’Albret, ruled the neighbouring territory of Navarre to the south of France and led the Reformed faction. Catherine de Medici, as regent and Queen Mother, played a dominant role during the period of the religious wars whilst her sons ruled. Despite the presence of powerful women in French political life, contemporaries were uncomfortable with the concept of female political participation. Chronicler Pierre de l’Estoile recorded in his notebooks many of the popular verses circulating in Paris during the religious fighting. Some particularly criticised female political action, such as that of Catherine de Medici, as did ‘the Verses against the Italians’ which circulated in Paris in July 1575: Those Gallic fathers, formerly unconquered, Would blush with shame, even if conquered By a brave, honoured warrior who ruled in Rome. But we without shame submit supinely While a woman masters us entirely. When a woman rules, it is a coward’s home.5 None the less, certain women sought to celebrate the value of female advice and influence in the past for their own purposes. Catherine des Roches reminded Henri III that kings had been successfully guided by the words of women in the past: ‘To punish the English and rebel subjects, one of our Kings heeded the advice of a Maiden.’6 Having recalled Jeanne d’Arc, Des Roches continued: ‘Thus I beg you to hear what your virtue divinely inspires in my poor mind.’7 Catherine des Roches proceeded to extol the virtues of a benevolent king, praising Henri’s attributes, to which she significantly included ‘the virtuous love of your wise mother’.8 While many male political commentators abhorred the Queen Mother’s political actions, Catherine lauded Henri and Catherine de Medici’s intense maternal–filial relationship of advice and love, which mirrored her own with her mother, Madeleine. Women, especially royal women, contributed a discernable political presence and often exercised an audible voice on matters of national religious politics. Women in the royal family were more able than other women to document their contribution to the religio-political situation. Jeanne d’Albret and Catherine de Medici in particular harnessed the power of the press for propaganda purposes. Women skilfully negotiated


stereotypes about female political participation and showed political sophistication. Jeanne d’Albret’s response to the Lettre d’un Cardinal envoyée à la Royne de Navarre written by Georges d’Armagnac in 1563 was an expression of her determination not to surrender Huguenot religious views to the power of a much larger Catholic France. Here, she appealed to maternal duty: ‘you have made a reply which I find touching, which is that I should prefer to be poor and to serve God: But … [I am] hoping, instead of diminishing my son’s goods, honours and greatness, to increase them by the sole means that all Christians must seek.’9 In this way, Jeanne defended her actions in the increasingly violent conflicts of the religious dissension as an extension of her role as a mother to give her child Henri de Navarre all she could. Jeanne would be negligent in her maternal responsibilities if she were not to strive for her son’s rights and inheritance. Similarly, Jeanne d’Albret’s memoirs were clearly intended as a public political document, defending her actions both as a woman and as the Huguenot leader. Her printed memoirs were a public defence of both her and her son’s political actions between 1560 and 1568, completed as the second civil war ended. As well as clarifying her motives as queen, Jeanne also defended her political action as a woman. She made a clear reply to a pamphlet, Responce à un certain escript publié par l’Admiral et ses adhérans, by Antoine Fleury, which had suggested that the Reformed faction had taken up the cause of the Huguenot Prince de Condé in 1568 because of the ‘weakness of a woman and a young prince’.10 She replied vehemently: I wanted very much … to silence those who accused me of having rushed into this cause with my eyes closed, as has some badly advised writer … ill-informed of my character … what I have written of it above will be sufficient proof of this stupidly invented lie. I will not amuse myself with that disdainful epitaph of the weakness of women, for if I wanted to undertake here a defence of my sex; I have enough reason and examples against this charitable person, who speaks of it almost as if moved by pity, to show him that he has abused the term in this case.11 Jeanne d’Albret’s 1568 series of published letters to members of the royal family, the Cardinal of Bourbon and Elizabeth of England laid out a series of arguments to justify her political actions. Insisting to the king that her primary hope was always for peace, nevertheless the poor observation of the Edicts of Pacification (Amboise and Longjumeau) had left her no option but to retreat from this position.12 To Catherine de


Medici, she reiterated that her loyalty could be counted in the following order: ‘to the service of my God, my King, my country and my blood’.13 She identified the Cardinal of Lorraine, in her letters to the King and his brother, as the primary reason why information on the true state of desolation in France had not reached them.14 To the Cardinal of Bourbon, she linked the cause of the ecclesiastical community with her own as a woman: both were bound to work for peace.15 The memoirs of the Catholic Marguerite de Valois were begun in 1593 and first published in 1628 but these were modelled on a more reflective, considered mode of literature than Albret’s politically engaged justificatory memoir. As Nadine Kuperty-Tsur observes, the fact that Marguerite de Valois commences her narrative from the time she came to live with her mother at court suggests that she considered her political career to be the main focus of the text, and perhaps of most significance to her self-understanding. Nevertheless, the depiction of her earlier childhood memories also set up the context for her later actions, and in particular her strong and innate Catholic faith, which she claimed was never shaken. Marguerite was concerned to portray her strong religious convictions and counter an impression that her actions might otherwise suggest.16 In respect of her political marriage to the Huguenot leader, Henri de Navarre, Marguerite compared the sacrifice she made of her religious convictions for the good of the nation to the plight of Moses.17 As a contribution to contemporary political manoeuvres, Marguerite’s political document, the Declaration du roi de Navarre, written in 1574, is also relevant. This defence, written for her husband, Henri de Navarre, to read as his own composition, was carefully crafted to absolve him of involvement in the plot of the Malcontents. The critical research of Eliane Viennot concerning Marguerite’s political and literary writings has drawn attention to Marguerite’s rhetorical skills and political awareness in excusing her husband’s activities without implicating others.18 Marguerite constructed a biography for Henri that skilfully recast his political actions as those of a loyal subject of the Crown. Although Henri IV appeared not to consider his sister Catherine capable of political contribution other than through her marriage, contemporary Huguenot women resisted this limited vision of their political influence. For example, Catherine de Parthenay’s allegorical ballets, for which the dialogue and stage directions were published in Tours in 1593, indicate the political views of a Huguenot woman on the role that her mistress Catherine might play in the religious politics of France. In both ballets performed by Parthenay, her children and entourage, in front of the King and his sister in Tours in 1593, Parthenay made clear that victory would come to Henri only with the contribution of his sister, Catherine.19 In the


first, Catherine was depicted as Diana spreading joy and light to the rays of Apollo (Henri) and as the cause of his peaceful future. In the second, Spain was represented as Medea, who menaced France and Navarre with defeat, before a Sybil announces that Henri and Catherine would be honoured by victory. Parthenay’s emphasis in both was that that Henri should not neglect the influence of his sister in the fortunes of France, indeed that women held the fate of France in their power. Elite women were highly visible in the affairs of the Catholic League, particularly as they used the printing press to contribute to national religious politics. After the murder of the Duke of Guise in 1588, his mother and widow both appeared as authors in inflammatory pamphlets addressed to Henri III. Women’s political motivations were constructed, and justified, in relation to their roles as mothers and wives, although in these contexts it was none the less aggressive: ‘Be assured that you will pay twice over for the death of my two children one day,’ wrote Anne d’Este, the duke’s mother, ‘and that as long as I live, I will try by every means to avenge their death’.20 Moreover, although it is uncertain that such material was personally authored by the women under whose names it was published, at least Anne d’Este appears to have been politically active in rousing support for the League cause in other ways as well. After the King’s death, the eyewitness diarist Pierre de l’Estoile reported (disparagingly) that d’Este ‘betook herself to the Cordeliers, mounted the high altar, and harangued the people on the death of the tyrant [Henri III], showing thereby great immodesty for a woman’.21 L’Estoile’s description of d’Este’s speech suggests, however, that she reiterated the claims made in printed literature and echoed a similar provocative stance through other mechanisms of political contribution. Huguenot women in Paris were also prepared to speak out in criticism of the Catholic League. Camille Morel, one of the most highly educated humanist women of her age, converted to Protestantism towards the end of the sixteenth century. When in 1591 Camille’s cousin by marriage, Gilbert Filet de la Curée, clashed with papal soldiers fighting the cause of the League and stole their banner representing the papal keys, the Parisian commentator Pierre de l’Estoile recorded one of Morel’s anti-papal poems circulating in the city which bantered: ‘Rome is lower than ever, little can she do if she escapes, / Who will defend her now, since the Curé [Filet de la Curée] beat the Pope? / And you, poor people, forbidden from the gate of Paradise, / No longer fear his censure, we have the keys.’22 Intelligent, witty verse, particularly if it could be easily remembered and circulated by word of mouth, could be a powerful element in the propaganda wars of religious politics.


Women in convents were also visible in national political discussion through their published writings. The nun Anne de Marquets, who witnessed and celebrated the 1561 Colloquy of Poissy from her position inside the royal priory of Saint-Louis, found her poetry circulated in print as a contribution to Catholic political propaganda. As Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore has observed, the Huguenot response to her poetry focused less on what she had to say about Catholic theology and more on a critique of her vanity and pride at having written the text at all.23 Whether Marquets’ intention was ever to participate in the national political discourse through her poetry, it nevertheless made an impact at that level. For all her opponents’ denigration, the very fact that it did draw a response suggests that what Marquets had to contribute was perceived to matter. The political motivations of another nun are less ambiguous in her contribution to published literature. The abbess of the Poor Clares in Toulouse, Charlotte de Minut, was the daughter of a prominent parliamentary family of the city. Minut’s opportunity for apostolic speech came by publishing posthumously the literary works of her brother, Gabriel de Minut. In each of the two works that she saw through to publication, Charlotte included a lengthy preface. Gabriel de Minut’s discourse De la beauté, Charlotte prefaced to Catherine de Medici.24 The other work, Morbi Gallos. Infestantis salubris curatio et sancta medicina: Hoc Est, Malorum, quae intestinum crudeleque Gallorum bellum inflammant, remedium, discussed, as its title indicates, the contemporary grievous state of France.25 The abbess addressed this work to Pope Sixtus V. Minut argued that her duties as abbess forced her to protect the Catholic Church, as she was bound by her conscience to act according to her faith. Charlotte frequently reminded Sixtus of her authority to speak out on behalf of her charges. As an abbess, Charlotte argued that she was justified in addressing the Pope as one charged with important responsibilities for the well-being of other women. An abbess might be subject to male superiors within the greater church hierarchy, but in the context of her monastic community, she was the authority. Charlotte saw contemporary French abbesses as powerful interlocutors, acting as community leaders and religious representatives in life and in print. She drew on the example of Abraham who spoke to the Lord on behalf of his people: hers were her charges, her fellow nuns: I, inferior in virtue and holiness of life, not only to this holy Patriarch, but also to many others of my kind in my Order, pushed on by a marvellous anguish and great necessity, I throw myself at your sovereign


paternity, consecrating devoutly this little work of my brother … as testimony of my devoted servitude and most humble obedience, simply exposed in this epistle in my common language, not having borrowed from elsewhere a style more elegant or the eloquence worthy of your Holiness.26 She reminded Sixtus of his power and responsibilities as God’s intercessor on Earth, just as she was intercessor for her charges in the convent.27 In De la beauté, dedicated to Catherine de Medici, Charlotte presented herself as a mother to her nuns, just as Catherine was represented as mother of the nation: ‘France, of which, as of our good king, you could rightly be called mother.’28 Charlotte sought to establish a common bond, by which Catherine would appreciate both her need for help and how she could be so bold as to advise her. Moreover, Minut argued that her right to speak out was justified because God’s grace was given to all. She wrote to Sixtus with the conviction of one burning with the true faith and desire to ignite that in all those whom she could influence: At such opportunity, I address myself to your Holiness, even though I am (o Holy Father) too small for your grandeur … Nevertheless, following the Father of light who is God, who shines his light on the good and the bad, and sends rain on the just and the unjust, reserving his special graces of the remission of sins for those who with a living faith invoke him in truth.29 She saw that her publication entailed a kind of martyrdom which she was willing to risk for the glory of the Catholic Church: ‘I, almost weighed down by such afflictions and poverty, none the less with a lightness of spirit, following the Psalmist, who wished to speak of the evidence of his Lord without any shame in the presence of earthly rulers.’30 Charlotte’s notion of herself as a sacrificial lamb for the greater good of the Catholic Church gave her extraordinary confidence. Minut uses the common ‘we’ to describe Sixtus and herself, as they shared the duty to protect the Catholic Church each in their own manner. Sixtus was a fellow participant in God’s true Church: ‘the state of our profession, of which you are, and have always been, is greatly honoured, and all those who depend on it, in receiving the honour and the consolation, and owing much hope on it, of the number of which we are’.31 It was certainly not typical for women to be seen to instruct others and far from usual for provincial abbesses to share their views on


international matters. Throughout her work, Minut adopted typical Renaissance literary topoi, disclosing feelings of hesitancy and unworthiness as a woman addressing public figures.32 She recognised that she lacked the educational and literary skills of a man.33 She thus conformed to conventional expectations of her behaviour, seemingly doubting her intellectual worth and detracting from her stature as a valid commentator and counsellor on public affairs. Yet at the same time, she clearly announced the preface as her own work, not borrowed from elsewhere, and affirmed her right to be recognised as its author. The ‘self’ of the prefaces reflected the conflict that arose from her desire to adopt two coexisting, yet opposing discourses: female conformity to the expectations of patriarchal culture, and rhetorical space that allowed for female religio-political speech under extreme circumstances. Minut advised Catherine by stating diplomatically what it was that she prayed God would instruct the Queen Mother to do. Charlotte depicted Catherine as responsible for some peace in the kingdom in the past,34 and counselled a policy of peace again.35 In concluding her preface, Charlotte twice more indicated how she hoped God would recommend Catherine to act: ‘I will pray always to God for you, Madame … to … deliver us from the infernal violence.’36 Charlotte was speculating on what God might counsel. By merely telling Catherine what she prayed God would instruct the Queen Mother to do in the conflict, Charlotte could not be accused of actually advising Catherine herself. Charlotte more directly warned Sixtus, as the head of the Catholic Church, to take a firm stand: ‘you are he … holding the first rank in Christianity, O most religious Holy Father. The keys are given to you by God, in these terrestrial places … in order to deliver penitent souls blackened by sin.’37 Charlotte implied that good Catholic citizens in France were waiting for Sixtus to act.38 Minut was deeply conscious that her action, advising the head of the Catholic Church and intermediary of God on his responsibilities, was audacious: ‘I hope so much in your goodness and clemency, that you will received my good intention, pardoning my stupidity.’39 In some ways, her appeal to Catherine de Medici was more circumspect than her instruction to the Pope, but in the case of the latter she was able to claim that she spoke to a fellow religious as one seized by fervour to act for Catholic France. With Catherine, Minut appeared less sure that a similar appeal would justify bold speech to a woman whose faith seemed politically motivated and perhaps was perceived to be ambiguous.


Military manoeuvres Most women were involved in the miliary conflict itself, either as participants or as victims of its destructive force. Nancy L. Roelker has argued that once the Protestant cause developed into a military movement in the later sixteenth century, women’s opportunities for leadership were diminished.40 While it is true that few women were able to influence religious fighting in the kinds of strategic ways that the Huguenot leader Jeanne d’Albret employed, many did participate in the conflicts in important ways.41 Elite women, some of whom controlled the governance of towns and regions in the absence of their husbands, were able to patronise their preferred faction in the religious conflicts. Vézélay’s submission to King Henri IV, in Apri1 1594, was negotiated under the auspices of the widow of the former governor, sieur de Pluvot, even though their son, Edmé de Rochefort Pluvot, was the current administrator.42 Henri IV’s ordinance ratifying Vézélay’s loyalty to the Crown mirrored this presentation of their respective roles, acknowledging in his response the ‘prudence and wise conduct of the lady widow of my lord of Pluvot, and the lord of Rochefort-Pluvot, his son’.43 Other wealthy women were able to lend money to promote the interests of their favoured religious cause.44 Although this kind of action may not have differed from the actions of their male counterparts, contemporaries acknowledged the power of women to influence the course of the wars by such actions. Noblewomen could use expectations of femininity to support troops and thus particular religious factions.45 Claire de Saint-Point, wife of the governor of Le Puy, Saint-Vidal, entered heated negotiations with the town council of Le Puy whilst her husband was with the Duke of Nemours in 1589. When Saint-Point passed on her husband’s request for a loan of 15,000 écus and munitions for his army force, the council rescinded their previous promise because they could not provide the sum required. The councillors informed Saint-Point that no more than 4,000–5,000 could be loaned,46 ‘And the lady began to cry and wail’. Threatening that she would ‘leave the town with her children and send word to the lord her husband to return … Some of the notables of the council left to convince her not to leave the town … and the council proposed and ordered that the loan be levied and gave her the money.’47 Saint-Point’s tears and threats to recall her husband to the town successfully ensured his request for funds for the Catholic League were met. Some convent communities were also deeply embedded in the religious violence and supported various factions in their area. The


Abbey of Sainte-Perrine de La Villette argued in the seventeenth century for the monarch to remember their previous loyalty to the Crown when faced with attack from Catholic League forces. In 1591 when League forces appeared to be preparing to lay siege to Compiègne, the convent filled the monastery with arms and munitions and prepared to defend it. ‘The Leaguers having come to attack it, were repulsed with an unexpected vigour and this resistance gave the King the time to send help to the town of Compiègne.’48 Convent support could also be provided in powerful, symbolic ways, offering prayers for the troops or making available their church for a politically aligned confraternity. In 1590, when the Poor Clare community of Le Puy found themselves so destitute that they sought refuge in Lyons, the symbolic significance of the loss was such that their move was fiercely resisted in the town. One contemporary memorialist, Jean Burel, wrote that it was not right ‘for such a holy community to abandon us, for by their holy life, prayers and orisons, we are vanquishers of our enemies’.49 Convents too kept track of the movement of troops and military events. Those recorded in the Beaumont nuns’ journal occurred well beyond the boundaries of Tours and it seems likely that the sisters received notification of events through letters and printed broadsheets. Several printed documents are embedded in the Beaumont journal. A copy of the King’s edict, Sur la reunion de ses subjects a l’eglise Catholicque, Apostoloqie & Romains (Tours, veufve de Rene Siffleau, 1585) is inserted in events for the year 1585, for example.50 Their appearance in the convent’s journal suggests a wider engagement with the military manoeuvres of the time. Certainly, some of the nuns may have been involved in such conflict, but, through prayers and the creation of a groundswell of Catholic support for such actions, the record of such events also represented a means by which nuns could participate in the conflict. Reports of the movement of troops and the progress of battles were similarly detailed.51 The journal included extensive discussion of Catholic League political manoeuvres, and demonstrated its primary allegiance to Guise, rather than royal, politics.52 When the Beaumont sisters began to compile a second document during the late sixteenth century, a chronicle defined by a coherent narrative, national political events retained a place in the work where they documented the triumph of Catholicism or impacted on the Beaumont sisters personally. Thus the chronicle authors celebrated the Duke of Guise’s military defeats of Henri de Navarre’s troops in 158753 and documented how Henri III had asked churches and monasteries, like Beaumont, to pray that he might have a son to maintain the Catholic succession in France.54


Women could also influence military manoeuvres by offering tangible support in lodgings and supplies to the forces as these groups moved through their area. Some women, especially tavern owners, were involved in housing the various military leaders who passed through their area. At Le Puy, Vidalle Belheulhe appeared in many accounts in the early 1590s for providing food and accommodation to the town’s counsellors and governors, as well as the captains and soldiers who accompanied them in manoeuvres in the vicinity, although the demarcation between her livelihood and political persuasion cannot be clearly distinguished.55 Other women tended the injured after the conflict. Burel singled out the elite women of Le Puy as worthy of particular attention in his journal, who ‘spared nothing for the injured … carrying jams and water to the camp, and the injured placed in several houses of the town … I did not want to forget to record this, for it is a praiseworthy thing’.56 The names of many more were recorded in the town’s accounts as distributing food to the wounded, lodging others and even keeping watch over the bodies of dead soldiers.57 Women were recognised by contemporaries as crucial networks of communication to political and military actions. Women’s letters, like those of their male contemporaries, passed on important details of political and military significance. Compared to sources such as printed texts, Mark Greengrass has argued recently that insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of correspondence for the development of informal networks in French Protestantism.58 The letters concerning Huguenot political activities passed between Charlotte Arbaleste, other noblewomen and Arbaleste’s husband Philippe Duplessis-Mornay indicate a highly successful network of information.59 Elisabeth, Duchess of Bouillon, complained to her sister CharlotteBrabantine about the seizure of the latter’s private letters to her: ‘having been taken two days from here, your letters have been seen by others as well as me … sent back from the governor into the hands of he who commands the Châtelet, who having opened them lost none of them’.60 Evidence of women’s coded correspondence, a response to the situation described by Elisabeth, testifies to the political value of its messages; those of Catherine de Parthenay to Charlotte Arbaleste, as well as Duplessis-Mornay to his wife and other Huguenot women, interspersed sections in numerical codes with passages discussing other political events.61 The impact of women’s strategic communication was certainly recognised by contemporaries. In Toulouse, women are mentioned as having remained in the city, while their male relatives escaped.


Catholics complained that women were passing on vital information about the preparations of the city’s defences. In 1567 in Dijon at the outbreak of renewed trouble, Huguenot women were expelled from the town, not just their husbands, because it was recognised that wives could run messages to the enemy.62 Calvinist women could act as go-betweens in places like Dijon which were close to Genevan support. In May 1562, two Protestant chambermaids in Dijon, Claudine Chouchet and Thenette Bassot, were expelled from the town, having recently returned from Geneva, where they had been for several years.63 Edmond Belle’s argument that such women were acting as a means of less detectable communication between their employers in Dijon and promoters of the reform in Geneva seems likely given that the masters of Chouchet and Bassot later declared openly for the reform.64 Moreover, it was not simply a matter of transmitting key facts to men who could act on the information. Correspondence between women also broached military and political affairs. Sometimes this was simply because these were matters which affected women’s everyday lives. Marguerite Pellant, the concierge of the château of Doué in Anjou, wrote to the Duchess of Thouars in June 1585 describing the extent of damage to their properties as a result of the soldiers billeted in the chateau. Pellant complained bitterly of the receveur who had taken the keys to the gate from her, from which had stemmed great disorder in the household.65 Nevertheless, he had permitted numerous Huguenots to take refuge in the château, using a great deal of wood and livestock supplies for them and the soldiers. In this letter to her mistress, it seems that, for Pellant, the religious significance of the Huguenot troops was secondary to the impact that their billeting had on Pellant’s occupational status. Pellant was primarily concerned to depict herself as a competent and capable administrator who could have protected the family’s possessions more effectively than her male counterpart. On other occasions, though, correspondence could express women’s engagement with the underlying religious causes that such political events represented. Catherine de Parthenay wrote to Charlotte Arbaleste in 1597 of her conversations with Henri IV about faith and Huguenot politics.66 Elisabeth, Duchess of Bouillon, celebrated the Edict of Nantes in a letter written in October 1598 to her sister Charlotte-Brabantine, which coincided with the latter’s marriage to Claude, Duke of la Trémoille and Thouars. Elisabeth wrote mischievously: ‘The edict of the king could have rendered this contentment of longer duration than you had hoped.’67


Poor women offered town councils the opportunity to demonstrate their political loyalties by raising the profile of their family’s military participation in their relief petitions. In royalist Tours, poor Catholic women addressing the town relief bureau reminded the councillors of the contributions made by their husbands and fathers to the Catholic cause. Florentine Despaigne, who was caring for her aged mother and three young children, begged the governors ‘to impart your alms having regard to the fact that her said husband is in the service of the King’.68 Jehanne, the widow of Thomas Bemict, begged the administrators for assistance after ‘her husband was killed in the army of the King at the assault of Fontenay by the Huguenots’.69 The supplications of such poor women and families encouraged the council to demonstrate their own allegiances in the conflict by prioritising their relief. Finally, some women engaged in the fighting themselves. Some women acted as supply runners; the memorialist Jacques Gaches noted the presence of women in this role at the July 1586 attack on Le MasSainte-Puelles, in which the army of Monsieur de Joyeuse was held back: It is not just to forget to report here the services provided by the women carrying everything necessary to refresh the soldiers and repair the breach, notwithstanding the artillery that continued to fall. It was noted that, one of them having been killed by a shot, she who followed her did not withdraw at all but occupied her place.70 Other women performed acts of protest themselves, which were often violent. In Troyes, the Catholic wife of the merchant Saillart harassed two wealthy Huguenot women, her social superiors, in the street, badgering them with insults until they could take refuge in a sympathetic household.71 In his chapter on a number of Huguenots condemned to death in Toulouse, the Catholic historian Bosquet reported the execution of a woman who had smeared excrement in the church of Taur72 and another known as la Broquière, ‘a great enemy of the Catholics, against whom she had prodigiously fought with firearms’.73 An eyewitness to the taking of Auxerre in 1567 reported how the Huguenot captain Musnier and his wife set fire to the belltower of the church of Saint-Père. He insisted that the fire itself was lit by the order of Musnier’s wife, saying as she did, ‘I want to see this Babylon brought down’.74 Jean Crespin’s martyrology also indicates that women were capable of vicious attacks on their religious enemies in bloody battles. The Huguenot Machane de Margaritis was defiled and hanged by her feet in a tree by women from the town of Aix.75 Women it seems were capable of a vast


range of action to contribute to their desired outcome in the military conflicts of the wars of religion.

Constructing visions of violence Women created historical visions of the religious violence and upheavals for varied audiences. The majority of the documents analysed here were created for practical reasons, often to seek financial support, rather than with the intention to engage in an intellectual discussion about the historical representation of the era.76 What such documents indicate is women’s ability to frame their experiences of the religious conflicts in terms appropriate to the context of their supplication. The evidence bears witness to women’s demonstration of their rhetorical skills, the eloquence of their petitions, their financial and fundraising acumen, and their willingness to resort to legal procedures to protect what they felt were their rights. Individual women could petition successfully on their own behalf, as indeed Penny Roberts has observed that Protestant noblewomen and urban widows did. These requests, she argues, were sometimes easier to respond to than that of a whole community.77 In reality, women were often responsible for restitution of family goods after religious violence had forced the family, or male head of the household, into exile. Other women were left to support the remaining family members as widows. In the early 1570s, Toulouse municipal accounts were filled with the inventoried claims of Huguenots who demanded the return of, or compensation for, properties that the Catholic governors of Toulouse, or capitouls, had seized and sold in their absence.78 Women pleaded both as the legatees of a deceased husband or father, and also where male family members were still exiled or imprisoned. Widows of those Huguenots hanged in 1568 at Toulouse numbered among those seeking restitution of their goods in 1572.79 When the prominent Huguenot lawyer Jean de Coras was at Réalmont, his young wife, Jacquette de Bussi, returned to Toulouse to recover the family’s possessions. Her correspondence to Coras indicated her struggle to uncover the pathways by which their goods had been redistributed and from whom she should seek redress. One tenant complained to Bussi because he had paid six months’ rent to Bussi’s son and now the family of the new female owner, allocated the property by the capitouls, were demanding rent payments for the same period.80 Apart from return of their immovable property, Coras outlined what he expected Bussi to recover of his movable possessions.81 Coras also expected that Bussi’s presence, rather than his own, might have


advantages to the recovery of their goods, instructing her to employ ‘the most kind and gracious means that you can use, imploring the intercession of the wife and daughters of the man if need be, for it might be that they will have more humanity than him’.82 Yet what Bussi found in Toulouse was great disorder, and her protracted attempts to ascertain the location of Coras’ works filled her very practical correspondence to him.83 Many of the documents in which women, often collectively, depicted religious violence were petitions to particular authorities ranging from ecclesiastical officials, town councils and monarchs to the papacy. Female monastic communities provide rich documentation of the ways in which women framed their experiences of the contemporary upheavals in the hope of a sympathetic response. Some were intended to seek remuneration for losses sustained; others begged exemption from certain taxes; and a few sought protection from hostile local populations. In Protestant-held areas, convents were not only the target of religious violence but also of sustained efforts to disband their communities, since their occupants were seen as symbols of Catholic superstitions and abuse. As the Assembly for Dauphiné declared in January 1563, Huguenot governors were exhorted to make monks and nuns leave and to send them back to their relatives where possible.84 However, in some instances, close family connections that extended across the confessional divide could spare communities from extensive damage. For example, Françoise I de La Rochefoucauld managed to safeguard the convent of Benedictine Nôtre-Dame de Saintes, near Bordeaux, from the demolition that the Prince of Condé had ordered, because her brother was a Calvinist soldier.85 Madeleine de Bourbon, abbess of Sainte-Croix de Poitiers, managed to spare her convent during the first religious troubles of 1562, because she was the sister of leading Huguenot, Louis, Prince of Condé.86 Convents in particular were accustomed to assuming a dependent role. Religious women relied on the outside intervention of the local bishop to administer the sacraments. Generally, female communities were supervised locally, unlike male religious Orders which were overseen by the Order’s own superiors and the pope. Where enclosure had been successfully enforced, convents further relied on the financial support of the church hierarchy. According to the rules of St Clare, Poor Clares had traditionally depended on begging for their livelihood, yet enclosed Poor Clares were prevented from gaining access to their customary sources of income outside the convent walls. Religious women were often forced to depend on spontaneous charity from the outside or to appeal to secular and ecclesiastical authorities for assistance.


Nuns in the Francophone Swiss territories which came under the jurisdiction of Protestant councils during the sixteenth century found themselves in the unusual position of seeking safeguards for their continued existence from the very authorities that disapproved of their lifestyle. In 1534, the Poor Clares of Geneva wrote in complaint to the Genevan council about the disruptions to their worship and life. People had entered their convent during vespers, not out of devotion but in order to disrupt the service, steal sacred objects and smash images.87 It seems likely that this letter was composed by the same Jeanne de Jussie who was later abbess of the community when it was exiled to Annecy, and who recorded a detailed history of its confrontation with Geneva’s new governing officials.88 The Poor Clares of Orbe were more successful in gaining the support of their local council. In a letter of 1541 they thanked the councillors for providing annual alms to the community: ‘For surely, Messieurs, we are in great and extreme poverty and need in all things, that we have nothing to live on and know not what to do.’89 The sisters argued that it was not violence and destruction which had dented the coffers of the community, but rather transitions in the mentalities of charitable giving which the new religion had encouraged for ‘since this lutherie, people no longer want to give us alms’.90 French communities similarly petitioned authorities for assistance. Some sought exemption from taxation. In 1569, the abbess of Beaumont-lès-Tours, Charlotte de la Trémoille, in a letter to the cardinals of Lorraine and Bourbon, described how the community of sixty women had been forced to disband three times since the ‘troubles caused by the adversaries of our holy faith’.91 She told of the destruction to their properties, agricultural supplies and conventual possessions, but also the danger to their persons. The nuns at the dependent priory at Menetou, near Vierzon, had been held captive and ordered to hand over all their possessions ‘up to their clothing’.92 To meet their share of debts and subsidies for taxation, the convent had been forced to offer its lands for sale, yet no buyer could be found without losing more than half the value of the properties. Such reasons underpinned La Trémoille’s argument to be excused from the current subsidy, but she pushed her claim further, planning for the future and asking to be exempt ‘as much for the present as for others which could be exacted in the future’.93 Many impoverished convents in France, particularly Poor Clare communities, became expert at begging assistance in correspondence to targeted sources of patronage. As Claire Dolan has observed, the Poor Clare convent in Aix effectively addressed both ecclesiastical and secular leaders far and wide in their drive for funds. To the archbishop they


insisted on their ‘great poverty and necessity and have neither wheat nor money to buy any’.94 The monarch too was sympathetic to the plight depicted by the community, and in 1571 offered funds, ‘as much as a result of the past wars and troubles which have occurred in our realm as for the goods made and alms which formerly one gave to them now frozen and much diminished’.95 Nuns generally insisted on the reciprocity of these financial arrangements, offering prayers for the continued health of Protestant and Catholic benefactors alike. That such promises were highly valued is demonstrated in the Aix town council accounts. The council recorded that they had visited the Poor Clares and provided ‘some alms to give them the occasion to pray God for the prosperity of the town’.96 In Toulouse the female community of Saint-Claire at Saint Cyprien sought financial assistance from secular authorities throughout the 1580s and 1590s. The sisters’ letters to the capitouls of Toulouse in 1584 outlined their urgent need: ‘being very poor and in extreme necessity of illness’.97 In return, they too promised a spiritual reward for the governors and town in praying ‘for the maintenance and conservation of this poor town and so that it pleases God to give you a very happy and long life’.98 In 1593 little changed in the convent’s circumstances, although the detail of their supplication was more highly developed. The community reminded the governors that their foundation was based on the notion of ‘sovereign poverty living from alms that it pleases good people to give them which are currently very small’ and categorised their specific needs: ‘having no means to have wood for their heating nor wheat, wine, oil nor salt for the maintenance of the poor life’.99 Furthermore, in promising prayers, the sisters now framed their act in a national, rather than purely local, perspective: ‘the poor supplicants increasingly obliged to continue to pray God for your conservation and for the peace and union of this poor realm and tranquil state of the present city’.100 It is possible that the Poor Clares of Saint-Cyprien had taken up some of the rhetorical strategies adopted by their local and denominational counterparts, the Poor Clares of Saint-Salin in Toulouse. Their abbess, Charlotte de Minut, in her published texts of 1586 to Pope Sixtus V and Catherine de Medici, made little secret of her desire to seek their financial assistance. By her own description, the Poor Clares convent in Toulouse had been prosperous prior to the destruction caused by the French civil conflict of the second half of the sixteenth century.101 According to the rules of St Clare, Poor Clares had traditionally depended on begging for their livelihood, as Minut indicated: ‘with the


aid of charitable people, donations from the people of the parish of Albade, near the Garonne river, where we are still at present, there happily doing the divine service, succeeding each other in reasonable numbers’.102 Charlotte’s convent had been rocked by the destructive religious fighting brought about by the wars of religion in France, bringing ‘common desolation to all the people of France, and especially us, who are reduced to extreme poverty not being able to have our lands worked, by such incursions and hostility of war, just as we have no means to repair our ruined monastery because of its age’.103 However, as Minut’s pleas suggest, the devastated lands were generally capable of producing only low financial returns and the Toulousain community’s religious upheavals and shifts to new centres of spiritual focus resulted in the Poor Clares being perhaps no longer supported by public donations as in the past.104 She described a prosperous convent diminished by the ravages of the civil war: ‘we who are reduced to extreme poverty, by such incursions and hostilities of war not able freely to work our lands: just as we have no means to repair our convent’.105 The practical and financial problems of the convent were not only the result of the physical degradation of their lands. Minut explained her frustration and fear in not being able to care sufficiently for her fellow sisters: all generally are oppressed at the present time, under this heavy yoke, particularly our poor monasteries reduced to extreme poverty, by the incursions and hostility of war, not able to work our lands nor enjoy the few things we have by the privileges and concessions of the holy Fathers: for my part in this poor house, I am at the height of anguish. I would say before God, Madame, if I could, I would willingly wish the dissolution of this poor life, fearing to succumb and watch the ruin of these poor nuns, if God does not take pity on us.106 The abbess admitted she might be forced to disband the convent, a seeming failure of her maternal nurturing role. She appealed to Catherine for understanding of the magnitude of this action, as one mother to another. Minut suggested Catherine would be negligent in her own maternal duties if she did not lend support and care to her children, the populace of France. Moreover, Charlotte argued that she sought Sixtus’ intercession because her convent was a significant and long-held Catholic site. ‘[T]o better demonstrate our antiquity, it was in the lifetime of Saint Claire, seven years before her death, that she sent nuns from her monastery of


Saint Damien, in the town of Assisi in Italy into these parts where they were received very kindly, near to Toulouse.’107 It was strategically important because, although the city of Toulouse supported the Catholic League, it was surrounded by Huguenot lands. Charlotte implied that the Poor Clare convent was a powerful and crucial site of dissemination of Catholic doctrine in southern France, ‘whence have left several Abbesses and nuns, to provide for other monasteries and to spread the holy service, such as at Levignac, Leitoure, Bayonne and other places’.108 Charlotte indicated that the Poor Clare convent was an ancient property of the Catholic Church and one that should not be allowed to slip away from its control. Following religious violence, some convents not only begged benefactors for alms but also resorted to legal intervention to secure restitution of their goods. The well-established Benedictine community of Saint-Pierre des Nonnains in Lyons created a vision of the sisters as naïve victims of crafty profiteers who exploited the religious violence of 1562, and the community’s retirement to a priory at Morancé, to remove many of the convent’s prized possessions. Damage had mostly come at the hands of Huguenots and the community had incurred ‘great and inestimable losses as much of sacred and profane goods and movable as well as immovable by the ruin and demolition of their churches and houses done by those who call themselves of the reformed church’.109 Claude Gosset had been installed by the Huguenots in the complex with his wife and family. The Gossets had ‘stolen, pillaged and removed the most beautiful and precious of their sacred and profane goods’.110 Some of the convent’s possessions had since been discovered hidden in local homes. Moreover, a wall had been smashed through so that the site now communicated directly with the street and the building of a Huguenot temple had commenced on one of their lands close by. The nuns asked for repairs to be made to their physical properties and the thieves imprisoned for restitution of their goods. Although the Lyons nuns placed their hopes for legal recompense, not all Catholic officials were optimistic of a positive result in such situations. In 1570, Jacques de Saint-Sulpice wrote to his sister, Louse Ebrard, abbess of Sainte-Marie de l’Arpajonnie near Millau, and her aunt, the former abbess, who complained that they were not able to exploit the convent’s properties to sustain the community. Where they proposed legal redress, Saint-Sulpice was doubtful of a successful outcome, even if they were legally entitled to recompense, for ‘today force overrides justice and there is no one who is master of his possession, not even the king’.111


After 1562, some monastic communities found themselves in areas controlled by a Huguenot majority and were forced to negotiate with the new authorities. In 1562, Guyonne de Montcausson, abbess of the Dominicans of Saint-Guilhen at Montpellier, was ordered by the consuls of the town to hand over the treasury of the monastery for safekeeping ‘given the troubles’.112 The community expected such demonstrations of obedience to Huguenot authorities to pay dividends in times of need. When their own buildings were rendered uninhabitable, the community demanded that the consuls provide them with alternative housing arrangements in which to live and conduct the divine service as compensation for their losses as instructed by the royal edicts of pacification.113 The nuns of the Poor Clare community whose properties were also ruined in the religious fighting were, for example, allocated the house of the lawyer Jean Allard, a ‘seditious rebel and fugitive’, whose property was forfeited in 1569 after he was declared an enemy of the King.114 Some convents discovered to their surprise that conflict could arise with Catholic ecclesiastical authorities and other religious communities. The Cistercians of Nôtre-Dame de Rieunette, near Carcassonne, were forced to flee their complex and relocate in the Cité at Carcassonne in 1568 when Rieunette was pillaged by Huguenot forces. However, they quickly discovered that the convent’s superiors and administrators, the Cistercian abbots of Villelongue, ‘instead of conserving [their goods] to return to the nuns and an abbess named by Your Majesty and to conduct the service, sold the monastery generally with all its dependences and put it into the hands of the nobility of the region who still hold it’.115 In Montpellier, two female communities spent much of the 1560s at law against each other for restitution of their properties and rights. After the destruction of their convent buildings in 1563, the Dominicans of Saint-Guilhen had successfully petitioned the consuls for replacement accommodation. At the time the Augustinian Priory of Sainte-Catherine had been vacant because that community had fled the violence for the relative safety of their rural properties. On their return, the sisters discovered the community of Saint-Guilhen occupying their buildings with no intention of leaving. Each community resorted to different authorities to justify their position: from the town council who offered use of the buildings to Saint-Guilhen, and the lieutenant-général of Languedoc who ordered that Saint-Guilhen vacate the site within three months. Lionne de Montcausson, abbess of Saint-Guilhen, secured permission, with the agreement of Sainte-Catherine’s abbess Claude de Borne, to remain in one section of the complex for a further six months,


reiterating ‘the churches, edifices and buildings of the abbey of Saint-Guilhem having been entirely ruined, demolished and razed and by this means rendered inhabitable [the sisters] not knowing afterwards where to retire to or lodge to conduct the divine service’.116 Yet when at the end of this period the Dominicans refused to relocate, Borne secured royal rulings in her favour: ‘The claimant is from the Order of Saint Augustine and Montcausson is of the Order of Saint Dominic, and there is only one church in the convent and … divine service cannot be conducted there according to the two orders.’117 After 1567, both communities evacuated in the renewed violence. The nuns of St Catherine moved to the priory at Arboras where they were forced to remain after their convent complex was razed in their absence. Like the Poor Clares of Montpellier, the Saint-Guilhen community were eventually rehoused in the house of a deceased local citizen.118 Beyond the convent, laywomen also adopted collective approaches as a means to seek financial compensation or justice for their losses. Arlette Farge has argued that women and children featured in violent protests during the Wars of Religion as a powerful symbol of ‘the passage from the present to the future’ which had to be safeguarded.119 The eyewitness Jean Burel reported in 1593 the actions of a group of butchers’ wives in Le Puy who, in the absence of their husbands, protested at the theft of their livestock (and livelihood) by the Duke de Nemours’ troops, ‘crying around the town, enraged, saying that their husbands were prisoners and their livestock and all their goods stolen, threatening to beat the councillors’.120 Such techniques could indeed bring about action. When in the same year a tax was imposed to pay the local garrison of troops, a large party of women, having already beaten the tax collectors themselves, went to see the premier consul, Sieur de Lantenas, ‘telling him that if he came out of his house, that they would rip out the hair of his beard. Seeing the people so upset, a council in the king’s court was assembled, not daring to gather in the town hall.’121 As the attacks of the Catholic League forces reached Tours in the 1590s, descriptions of related property destruction, injuries and death increased in the poor relief records in Tours. Female supplicants spoke of the devastation of lands and houses during the factional conflicts, and illness, injury and desertion by husbands, to plead the best possible case for their cause. The widow Magdelaine Borgea described how during the League fighting of the early 1590s ‘when the leaguers and rebels took the suburbs of Saint Symphorien’, her two properties, described in loving (and notarial) detail, ‘one composed of three rooms with fireplaces, and attic’, ‘the other on the bridges composed of a bedroom


with fireplace and attic’, were burned down, leaving her with no provision to maintain herself in her old age.122 Once she had lost ‘the little furniture that she had which was all the means she had to help and provide for herself in her old age’, she was ‘forced to ask for alms from people of means, to her great regret’.123 Another widow used the same events to portray her plight as that of a victim of war. She claimed that when her husband Pierre Moret witnessed the destruction to his home and goods on the bridges of Tours, ‘the day the League were on the bridge’ he became so distraught that he fell ill and later died, leaving his widow and three children to beg the administrators for assistance.124 This woman chose to construct her widowhood and dire circumstances as a direct result of the fighting of the religious wars. Women also selectively petitioned those figures of justice or authorities that they felt were most appropriate or sympathetic to their plight. When the royal family visited Troyes in 1564, Huguenot widows presented their request for assistance to the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. The women, ‘prostrating themselves on their knees and showing their little children, began to cry all together, with one loud and striking voice, accompanied by crying and wailing: Justice, Mercy!’125 As Penny Roberts has remarked for Protestant supplications, petitions were often fairly conservative and parochial,126 and as these examples show, women’s petitions in general were no exception. The protests and petitions of women indicated that they understood methods of collective action and how to exploit ideals of ‘good women’ as obedient nuns, dutiful wives and mothers, by which they could make their political and religious views known. Not all women’s accounts of religious devastation occurred in practical documents such as petitions. Other women created narratives of the effects of violence in literary forums. The poet, lawyer’s wife and host of a humanist literary circle, Madeleine des Roches, used her poetry. During the siege of Poitiers in 1569, she had lost several properties. In 1579, she addressed Henri III in her poetry to plead her case for compensation: ‘I saw two houses that I had in the suburb to be no more than embers … These houses could well have been worth two thousand livres.’127 Louise Bourgeois constructed her experiences in the suburbs, then interior, of Paris during the 1590 siege as part of her explanation of why she became a midwife. The family had been living in Saint Germain when her neighbour had word from her husband of the impending approach of soldiers, and advised her to retire with their goods inside the walls of Paris. Bourgeois, whose husband was away with the army, did likewise with her mother and three children, leaving their properties


in the hands of an elderly woman. She described how the King’s troops, then the Lasquenets, destroyed the houses her father had built less than five years previously. Bourgeois then recounted how they were forced to sell the goods ‘piece by piece’ to maintain themselves in the city, and how, in order to earn some income, she began to undertake needlework. It was after the family returned from Tours, with a pressing need to generate revenue, that she was convinced by her own midwife to begin training for that profession.128 Bourgeois, ever practical, did not dwell on the emotions that such a sight of destruction sparked in her, yet the extended discussion of the episode and the details regarding the devastation of the family heritage seem to bear witness to its deep significance for her. Other women lamented the loss of different kinds of possessions. The sisters of the Annonciades in Bourges witnessed with horror the violence wrought to the body of their beloved foundress, Jeanne de France, by Huguenot soldiers who attacked Bourges in 1562. Françoise Guyard, who also compiled the Order’s first chronicle, produced an eyewitness account of the traumatic events that was included in some manuscript editions of the chronicle. Later, details about the fresh blood that flowed from Jeanne’s stabbed corpse were to become deeply significant in her canonisation procedure.129 For the grieving Annonciades, the loss of their foundress’s body would have deep spiritual and practical implications, and would instigate their attempts to establish her sanctity.130 Finally, emotive expression found a forum for some women in poetic and literary documents in which they expressed their anger and sorrow. Some documents were published as propaganda during the conflicts. When Marie de Brames’ father, the governor and commander of the town and citadel of Cusset and supporter of the Catholic League, was murdered in 1597, her Regrets expressed the impact such deaths had at a personal familial level: ‘his sad mother … Having killed her support, and robbed her of what made her most happy … you martyr his wife and family.’131 Marie le Prevost’s husband was also killed in the religious fighting and her opinions, published in his tombeau, could be those of a mother or wife on either side of the conflict, epitomising her grief and reflecting the reality of the conflict for many women: ‘Cursed is the war and the rage and the envy of those who make our husbands lose their lives … those who make so many orphans and widows.’132 Examining historical narratives produced by nuns during periods of violence and upheavals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ulrike Strasser suggests that such accounts can be read as women’s


histories of trauma. She argues provocatively that it is fruitful to address the aspects of victimisation and suffering which such chronicles can reveal, for ‘[o]nly the historical account that acknowledges women as victims speaks meaningfully of women as active resisters’.133 The documents examined here, both the practical and the literary, offer opportunities to see victimisation and also resistance in women’s works. Women constructed visions of the religious violence that situated them as powerless victims, yet this was often in the very practical documents by which such constructions might enable them to recover their assets, financial independence or secure recognition of their plight. Thus their positioning as a victim of religious troubles was one part of a strategy to procure their long-term resistance to its effects. Similarly, in literary works where women express emotional facets of their experiences, including fear, anger and grief, this release may have been crucial to their psychological recovery. Thus it may be appropriate to term such texts by women as other forms of survival narratives, similar to those produced by nuns in convent chronicles and laywomen in family histories. * * * In conclusion, women could and did contribute to religious warfare in myriad ways that have not received detailed historical attention to date. Their published political role has warranted most scholarly attention for, as Barbara B. Diefendorf has argued, ‘[t]he extreme circumstances of the League years, and particularly of the siege of 1590, provided unusual opportunities for women to play a public role in religion and politics, which in this case were identical’.134 Further, she has suggested that the violence and bitter feuding of the Catholic moderates and Leaguers in the late sixteenth century eventually turned women’s public fervour inwards, as they sought refuge and expression of their faith in the cloisters.135 While this is very likely to be true for a certain group of women, particularly those devout women who were actively engaged in Counter-Reformation Catholic movements of the seventeenth century, this chapter has sought to show how many fervent women did find space to participate even in the military and political actions of the religious warfare from which their involvement has been assumed to be diminished or even absent. For some women, provisioning the troops or tending the wounded in their area may have been among the most effective means by which they could demonstrate their support for a


particular religious faction. Through their creation of visions of the violence in testimony, petitions, letters begging support from patrons, and sorrowful collections of poetry for loved ones killed, women documented their own experiences of the violence – as victims certainly, but also as sophisticated rhetoricians, observers, fundraising strategists and, most significantly, resilient survivors.

Conclusions

Perhaps more than any other issue, religion was central to everyone’s life in sixteenth-century France. Life-choices were governed by it, life-stages marked by it, people’s life-purpose judged by it. Rich and poor, young and old, women and men, participated in defining religious cultures and expressions in myriad ways. This study has focused on women’s contributions to religion in various aspects during the century of reforms. In doing so, it has acknowledged how people’s fashioning of religious speech and actions was often governed by things other than their gender. A number of the avenues for contribution examined in this text are by no means the exclusive preserve of women. Nevertheless, this work has also revealed how the opportunities for and the nature and meanings of female participation in facets of religious cultures could be distinctly different to those of men. Moreover, a focus on female religious contributions, rather than the perceptions of men, suggests that women frequently disregarded or were simply unaware of expectations and limitations placed upon them. Women accepted responsibility as individual Christians to secure their own salvation and acted accordingly. Without wishing to deny women’s complex and highly personal religious comprehension, activities, and relationships, it is clear that contemporary ideas about appropriate behaviour for men and women affected women’s experiences across Catholic and Protestant churches, and in lay and monastic contexts. Women engaged with the institutions of the churches about their direction and the position of women within them. Female ideas about supernatural possibilities and interaction assessed the validity of such occurrences in their communities, often with great influence, but sometimes were doubted by ecclesiastical officials because they were the ideas of women. Opportunities for speech and action during wartime, and to structure the meaning of violence in 143


their lives, were common to women across all contexts. Moreover, in written, verbal and visual contexts, women showed a marked desire to embed themselves, and women generally, in the religious developments of their own time and to leave a legacy of their participation for religious history. Everywhere, women demonstrated their expectations that what they said and did mattered to them and consequently to the functioning of contemporary religious cultures. How does a religious history of this period look different as a result of recognising women’s involvement? First, polarisation of the confessions as a divide, and of monastic or lay experiences, works to obscure the many similarities in women’s religious lives. Second, periodisation, definitions and concepts may need some nuancing. For example, developments in convent regulation seem a more continual evolution than the term ‘reform’, especially in the singular, implies. Likewise, literary discussion of an emerging late sixteenth-century feminine devotional literature seems to ignore a discernable female and particularly introspective meditative tradition across the entire century. Third, visions of religious history as the imposition of reforms, practices, or ideas, of and by male ecclesiastical authorities, upon women seems to deny women agency in interacting about, and ultimately fashioning, outcomes on these issues. France’s different experiences of the century of reform from its European neighbours suggests that at least some of women’s actions and responses to the renewal of religious life were similarly distinctive. In the monastic context, the impact of Tridentine reforms was less decisive on a broad scale than perhaps in contemporary Italian or Spanish territories. Instead, continuous dialogues of reform were to mark the century. The mystic literary tradition in France seemed to have more impact among the female laity than within the convent, until it seems the very end of the century. In some regions, just as in some of the Swiss territories, the dominance of Huguenot forces and beliefs denied the possibility of the contemplative religious vocation. Convents rarely remained as bastions of Catholicism in these regions in the way English convents in the Low Countries may have been for English Catholicism. While evidence for enforced monarchisation can be found, it does not seem to constitute quite the systematic widespread elite practice of contemporary Venice. In France, the influence of national and dynastic politics could be widely felt because of the royal privilege of abbatial appointments in ways not experienced by other European countries. Naturally, there are also many similarities between women’s experiences of monastic life in France and elsewhere. The sophisticated demonstration of legal knowledge in pursuing the rights of convent and sisters seems widespread. The participation

Conclusions 145

of women in creating historical documentation of their religious experiences, of reforming threats, institutional changes and renewal of faith, seems shared by monastic communities across Europe. For sixteenth-century laywomen there is perhaps less European literature with which to compare their experiences. The activities of Catholic laywomen as the dominant and disparate female religious culture are challenging to summarise and compare across Europe. Devotional practices were sustained and renewed by women, often in the face of diminishing male participation. Yet women equally embraced the new visions of confraternal life that emerged at the end of the century. A determination to see women represented in religious history and debates appears common to both confessions and European women more broadly. Despite institutional changes to its organisation, charity as an outlet for female spiritual expression appeared to cross the confessional divide, a trend that would seem to be consistent with female behaviour elsewhere in Europe. Frenchwomen’s participation in religious politics and warfare similarly crossed the confessions, but the sustained nature of conflict in France seems largely unlike other areas of Europe. The history of the Protestant party in France ranged from persecution to a relatively stable and recognised organisational, but still minority, position. A significant number of women were intellectually engaged with the reforming views although Protestant women in France do not appear to have been numerically dominant as they were in some minority radical movements in other parts of Europe. During this period, Huguenot women do not appear to have embraced the meditative journal writing traditions of contemporary Protestant Englishwomen. French Calvinist women’s experience of pious practices often concerned, as a minority confession, demonstrating resistance to the dominant Catholic devotional activities. From my reading of female works and actions, women had few doubts about the value of their contribution to the developments of the confessions over the course of the sixteenth century. Although it has very much affected the landscape of religion as depicted by historians, it is not altogether certain that it always mattered to women what men wrote or thought about female activities. Moreover, I think women would be surprised to see that their contributions have seemed to count for so little in the history of religious life in that century. This is one tradition at least that need not continue beyond the twenty-first century.

Notes Introduction 1 For examples of how the opinions of the key theologians about women have been fruitfully analysed, see L. Roper, ‘Luther: Sex, Marriage and Motherhood’, History Today, 33, 1983, 33–8; S. C. Karant-Nunn, ‘The Transmission of Luther’s Teachings on Women and Matrimony: The Case of Zwickau’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 77, 1986, 31–46; J. D. Douglass, ‘Christian Freedom: What Calvin Learned at the School of Women’, 53, 2, Church History, 1984, 155–73; J. D. Douglass, Women, Freedom, and Calvin, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1985; M. Potter, ‘Gender Equality and Gender Hierarchy in Calvin’s Theology’, Signs, 11, 4, 1986, 725–39. 2 See recent discussions by S. Rosa and D. Van Kley, ‘Religion and the Historical Discipline: A Reply to Mack Holt and Henry Heller’, French Historical Studies, 21, 4, 1998, 611–29. 3 M. P. Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18, 2, 1993, 524–51, 551. 4 T. Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle, Paris, Champion, 1997, p. xiii. Disappointingly, Wanagffelen’s survey includes only one detailed study of a woman, Marguerite de Navarre, largely analysed from the perspective of commentators and historians on her work. 5 Here I follow Moi’s adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu in arguing for ‘the immense variability of gender as a social factor’. Emphasis in the original. Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 288. 6 M. U. Chrisman, ‘Women and the Reformation in Strasbourg, 1490–1530’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 62, 1972, 143–67; M. E. Wiesner, ‘Women’s Responses to the Reformation’, The German People and the Reformation (ed.) R. Hsia, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1988, 148–72; N. L. Roelker, ‘The Appeal of Calvinism to French Noblewomen in the Sixteenth Century’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2, 1972, 391–418; Roelker, ‘The Role of Noblewomen in the French Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 63, 1972, 168–95; N. Z. Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1975, 65–95; S. Marshall Wyntjes, ‘Women and Religious Choices in the Sixteenth Century Netherlands’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 75, 1984, 276–89. 7 Roelker, ‘The Appeal of Calvinism’; ‘The Role of Noblewomen’. 8 L. Roper, The Holy Household: Women and morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989. 9 K. Norberg, ‘Women, the Family, and the Counter-Reformation: Women’s Confraternities in the Seventeenth Century’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 6, 1978, 55–63; B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Les 146

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10

11

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13 14 15 16 17 18

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20

21

Divisions religieuses dans les familles parisiennes avant la Saint-Barthélemy’, Histoire, Economie et Société, 7, 1, 1988, 55–77; B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Houses Divided: Religious Schism in Sixteenth-Century Parisian Families’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, (eds) S. Zimmerman and R. F. E. Weissman, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1989, 80–99; B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France’, Journal of Modern History, 68, 2, 1996, 1–43. E. Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 1988, 62–80; J. Umble, ‘Women and Choice: An Examination of the Martyr’s Mirror’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 64, 1990, 135–45. M. E. Wiesner, ‘Ideology Meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation’, Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, (eds) A. C. Fix and S. C. Karant-Nunn, Kirksville, Missouri, Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, vol. 18, 1992, pp. 181–95; M. E. Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany, (trans.) J. Skocir and M. Wiesner, Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1996; M. Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1998. See Diane Willen’s argument on the futility of assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the Reformation for women in ‘Women and Religion in Early Modern England’, in Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Private and Public Worlds, (ed.) S. Marshall, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 158. Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’. Roelker, ‘The Appeal of Calvinism’; Marshall Wyntjes, ‘Women and Religious Choices’. R. A. Mentzer Jr, ‘La Place et le rôle des femmes dans les églises réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions. 46, 113, 2001, 119–32, 119. L. Roper, The Holy Household; Roper, ‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 92, 2001, 290–302. Available in English translation: Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation, London, Burns & Oates, 1977. As an example of this argument, see Luebke’s summation of the current research, in The Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings, (ed.) D. Luebke, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, p. 9. S. Karant-Nunn, ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 13, 1982, 17–42; P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720, London, Routledge, 1993; S. M. Johnson, ‘Luther’s Reformation and (un)Holy Matrimony’, Journal of Family History, 17, 3, 1992, 271–88. See, for example, in the French context, B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Discerning Spirits: Women and Spiritual Authority in Counter-Reformation France’, Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women, (eds) M. Mikesell and A. Seeff, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2003, 241–65. Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation; P. R. Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan, New York, Routledge, 2002;


22

23

24 25 26

27

28

29 30

G. Zarri, Le sante vive: cultura e religiosita femminile nella prima età moderna, Turin, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. C. Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; U. Strasser, ‘Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, Decorated Relics, and the Contest over Women’s Place in the Public Sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 90, 1999, 255–88; E. A. Lehfeldt, ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 1999, 1009–30; E. A. Lehfeldt, ‘Convents as Litigants: Dowry and Inheritance Disputes in Early-Modern Spain’, Journal of Social History, 33, 3, 2000, 645–64; E. A. Lehfeldt, ‘Gender, Order, and the Meaning of Monasticism during the reign of Isabel and Ferdinand’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 93, 2002, 145–71. N. Z. Davis, Women on the Margins: Three seventeenth-century lives, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995; E. Arenal and S. Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, (trans.) A. Powell, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1989; E. Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2000; S. Broomhall, ‘Women as First Nations’ Missionaries in France’, forthcoming in a collection being prepared by Nora Jaffary, Gender, Race and Religion in the New World. C. Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret, Doubleday, New York, 1994, p. xii. See, for example, P. D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983. G. Reynes, Couvent de femmes: la vie religieuse contemplative dans la France des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Fayard, 1987; E. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-century France, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990; E. Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001; B. B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Besides a number of long histories of individual monastic communities, I am aware of only one survey of sixteenth-century female monastic life: C. Blaisdell, ‘Religion, Gender, and Class: Nuns and Authority in Early Modern France’, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, (ed.) M. Wolfe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, 147–68. M. E. Wiesner, ‘Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18, 3, 1987, 311–21, L. Roper, ‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 92, 2001, 290–302. A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-century Champagne, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 2. C. Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002; Wiesner (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation; K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy, Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2003; J. Bilinkoff, ‘Woman with a Mission: Teresa of Avila and the Apostolic Model’, in Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento, (eds) G. Barone, M. Caffiero and F. Scroza Barcellona, Turin, Rosenberg and Sellier, 1994, 295–305; A. Weber, Teresa of

Notes 149 Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990. 31 P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992. 32 L. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, London, Routledge, 1994; Witchcraze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2004. 33 On the value of the predominance of the printed book in understanding sixteenth-century religion generally, see A. Pettegree, P. Nelles and P. Conner (eds), The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001.

1 Institutional Religion 1 Françoise Guyard, La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) J.-F. Bonnefoy, Paris, Editions franciscaines, 1937, p. 48. 2 Ibid., p. 300. 3 P. Annaert, ‘Femmes d’église et femmes de pouvoir aux origines de l’Annonciade de France’, Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes, 38, 1998, 201. 4 See further discussion of hagiographic texts in Chapter 2. 5 La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, pp. 88–9. 6 Ibid., p. 91. 7 J.-F. Bonnefoy, ‘Les Intentions de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois et l’Ordre de l’Annonciade’, Archivum franciscanum historicum, 31, 1938, 3–16. 8 See J. Trochu, Françoise d’Amboise: Duchesse et Carmélite, 1427–1485, Nantes, Lanoë, 1984, pp. 60 and 72. 9 La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 100. 10 Ibid., p. 100. 11 Ibid., p. 165. 12 Ibid., p. 169. 13 Ibid., pp. 168–9. 14 Ibid., p. 170. 15 Ibid., p. 172. 16 Ibid., p. 172. 17 Ibid., p. 173. 18 On the history of this convent, see Louis de Lacger, ‘Histoire des Annonciades de Fargues à Albi’, Revue d’histoire franciscaine, 5, 1928, 100–67. 19 La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 266. 20 S. Moreau-Rendu, Le Prieuré royal de Saint-Louis de Poissy, Colmar, Imprimerie Alsatia, 1968, p. 143. 21 R. P. Mortier, Histoire des Maîtres Généraux de l’ordre des Frères prêcheurs, vol. 5: 1487–1589, Paris, Alphonse Picard, 1911, pp. 305–6. 22 F. Dupuis, ‘Un Procès au XVe siècle’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 12, 1845, 266. AD de la Vienne, 2 H 1, Liasses 2, 36, 58. 23 Ibid., 268. 24 AD de la Vienne, 2 H 1, Liasse 2. 25 AD d’Indre-et-Loire, H 794 Chronique de Beaumont-lès-Tours. For accessibility, citations come from Grandmaison’s edition of the text. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) C. de Grandmaison (Mémoires de la Société


26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42

43 44 45

46

47

Archéologique de Touraine, vol. 26), Tours, Rouillé-Ladevèze, 1877, p. 21. See also on Beaumont particularly S. Broomhall, ‘Familial and Social Networks in the Later Sixteenth-century French Convent’, Early Modern Convent Voices: The World and the Cloister, (ed.) Thomas M. Carr, Studies on Early Modern France, 11, forthcoming. AD de l’Aude, H 329. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 30. See J. Baker, ‘Female Monasticism and Family Strategy: The Guises and Saint Pierre de Reims’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 28, 4, 1997, 1091–108. For a similar study of dynastic politics in monastic institutions, see Joan Davies, ‘The Montmorencys and the Abbey of Sainte Trinité, Caen: Politics, Profit and Reform’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53, 4, 2002, 665–85. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 30. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 46. AD de la Vienne, 2 H 2, Liasse 19. Ibid. See AD de l’Hérault, 63 H 51. AD de l’Hérault, 63 H 54. Lettres missives originales du seizième siècle, tirées des archives du duc de La Trémoille, (eds) P. Marchegay and H. Imbert, Niort, L. Clouzot, 1881, pp. 340–1. Ibid., pp. 342–3. Minut, preface to Gabriel de Minut, Morbi Gallos: Infestantis salubris curatio et saincta medicina: HOC EST, Malorum, quae intestinum crudeleque Gallorum bellum inflammant, remedium, Lyon, Barthélemy Honorat, 1587, pp. 8–9. AD du Tarn-et-Garonne, H 238, Approbation par le F. Pierre Casterian, de l’ordre des Frères Mineurs, provincial d’Aquitaine, de l’election faites par ces religieuses de Charlotte de Minut pour leur abbesse, le 21 decembre 1584. See, for example, C. Blaisdell, ‘Religion, Gender, and Class: Nuns and Authority in Early Modern France’, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, (ed.) M. Wolfe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 147–68, 149. J.-M. Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes: France (1480–1560), Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2001, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 70–4. M. Venard, ‘Catholicism and Resistance to the Reformation in France, 1555–1585’, in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, (eds) P. Benedict, G. Marnef, H. van Nierop and M. Venard, Amsterdam, Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1999, pp. 133–48, 137. F. Rocquain, La France et Rome pendant les guerres de religion, Paris, Champion, 1924; V. Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la réforme catholique: essai historique sur l’introduction en France des décrets du concile de Trente (1563–1615), Geneva, Slatkine, 1975; T. I. Crimando, ‘Two French Views of the Council of Trent’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 2, 1988, 169–86. This corresponds with Diefendorf’s assessment of seventeenth-century Paris, where she argues reform was perhaps less coherent than historians have depicted and where ‘it was not the church but rather individual donors who

Notes 151

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72

built the convents of the Catholic revival’. B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Contradictions of the Century of the Saints: Aristocratic Patronage and the Convents of Counter-Reformation Paris’, French Historical Studies, 3, 24, 2001, 469–99, 499. B. Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, p. 169. M.-R. Bonnet (ed.), ‘Une Transaction en langue provençale concernant le couvent des religieuses de Saint-Césaire d’Arles en 1499’, Provence historique, 48, 191, 1998, 69–99. P. Imbart de la Tour, Les origines de la Réforme, vol. 3: L’évangélisme (1521–1538), Geneva, Slatkine, 1978, p. 304. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 21. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 23. Blaisdell, ‘Religion, Gender, and Class’, 152. BM de Tours, ms 1332, reforms stipulated by Chezal-Benoît fathers to Beaumont-lès-Tours, 1564. AD de la Vienne, 2 H 1, Liasses 3 and 83. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, 142–5, and discussion in J.-F. Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu: Politique et mystique chez Jeanne de France, Paris, Beauchesne, 1991, p. 210. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 143. See AD de l’Aude, H 336–37. For a fuller account of these struggles for recognition, see S. Broomhall, ‘Hospital Nursing by Women Religious: the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris’, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, chapter 3. 30/11/1497 (AN, L 533, cote 4, original, parchemin) in L’Hotel-Dieu de Paris au Moyen Age: Histoire et Documents, vol.1, Documents (1316–1552), (ed.) E. Coyecque, H. Champion, Paris, 1891, pp. 308–10. ‘Enquête sur le tumulte du 6 novembre’ (AN L 5368) in Coyecque, L’HotelDieu de Paris au Moyen Age, vol. 1, p. 377. Coyecque, L’Hotel-Dieu de Paris au Moyen Age, vol. 1, p. 377. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 379. C. Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret, New York, Doubleday, 1994, xii; E. A. Lehfeldt, ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 1999, 1009–30. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 209. C. F. Klaus, ‘Architecture and Sexual Identity: Jeanne de Jussie’s Narrative of the Reformation of Geneva’, Feminist Studies, 29, 2, 2003, 279–97. AD Bouches-du Rhone dep Aix 1 G 1145 cited in C. Dolan, Entre Tours et Clochers: les gens d’Eglise a Aix-en-Provence au XVIe siècle, Sherbrooke, Editions de l’Université de Sherbrooke/Aix-en-Provence, Edisud, 1981, p. 62. J. K. McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 414. AD de la Vienne, 2 H 1, Liasse 2. Cited in M. Venard, L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVIe siècle, Université de Lille III, Service de reproduction des thèses, 1980, vol. 2, p. 1193.

152 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 73 Cited in M. Venard, L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVIe siècle, Université de Lille III, Service de reproduction des thèses, 1980, vol. 2, p. 1194. 74 Ibid., p. 1194. 75 Ibid., p. 1195. 76 AD de Versailles, 73 H 123 cited in Moreau-Rendu, Le Prieuré royal de SaintLouis de Poissy, p. 74. 77 Moreau-Rendu, Le Prieuré royal de Saint-Louis de Poissy, p. 63. 78 Ibid., p. 164. 79 Ibid., p. 164. 80 BM de Tours, ms 1332, fol. Aii r. 81 Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 51. 82 See Broomhall, ‘Familial and Social Networks in the Later Sixteenth-century French Convent’, forthcoming. 83 Diefendorf, for example, discusses the continued permeability of the reformed convents of the seventeenth century as both a positive and negative for monastic communities. Diefendorf, ‘Contradictions of the Century of the Saints’, 485. 84 AD de la Vienne, 2 H 2, Liasse 19. 85 Letters of John Calvin, (ed.) J. Bonnet, (1858) vol. 2, New York, Burt Franklin, 1972, pp. 229–30. 86 A. Jubien, L’Abbesse Marie de Bretagne et la Réforme de l’ordre de Fontevrault, Angers, E. Barassé, 1872, pp. 54–5. 87 Dolan, Entre Tours et Clochers, p. 87. 88 AD de la Vienne, Abbaye de Saint-Jean-de-Bonneval, Liasse unique. 89 AD de la Vienne, 2 H 1, Liasse 3. For accessibility, citations are from Barbier’s transcription. A. Barbier, ‘Une Soeur de Brantôme, religieuse de l’Abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Poitiers’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 16, 1893, 10. 90 Ibid., 10. 91 Ibid., 11. 92 Ibid., 12. 93 Other elite families, however, appear to have been exceptionally cautious in placing daughters in monasteries. The notarial act produced by Guillaume Briçonnet and his wife, Claude de Leveville, at the time their daughter Anne entered the monastery of Chelles in 1529, insisted repeatedly on the evidence for Anne’s personal vocation. Recueil d’actes notariés relatifs à l’histoire de Paris et de ses environs au XVIe siècle, vol. 1 (ed.) E. Coyecque, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1905, p. 221. 94 Delaborde still provides one of the most thorough accounts of Charlotte’s life, see J. Delaborde, Charlotte de Bourbon, princesse d’Orange, Paris, Fischbacher, 1888. 95 See discussion between Catherine de Lorraine to Renée de Ferrara to this effect in BN ms fr 3230 cited in H. de la Ferrière-Percy, Une Véritable Abbesse de Jouarre, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1891, p. 231. 96 Ferrière-Percy, Une Véritable Abbesse de Jouarre, pp. 230–1. 97 AN Trésor des Chartes, J 954/33, Procès verbal d’enquête et audition de témoins relativement à la retraite de Dame Charlotte de Bourbon, Abbesse de Jouarre qui étoit partie de son abbaye le 6 février, avec deux chariots chargées d’effets pour se retirer en Allemagne. (6 February 1572).

Notes 153 98 BN, ms fr 3182, Instruction originales du Président Barjot pour consulter l’affaire de Charlotte de Bourbon, princesse d’Orange, du 21 juillet 1578; Information secrette … aux fins de trouver … ceux qui ont suborné Mme Charlotte de Bourbon, abbesse de Juerre; Mémoire touchant Madame la Princesse d’Orange sur la nullité de sa profession. Copy also in BN, Clairambault 1114, Information de l’évasion de Charlotte de Bourbon, abbesse de Jouarre. 99 AN, J 772/11 Acte de protestation de Charlotte de Bourbon, abbesse de Jouarre contre ses voeux. (25 August 1565) See also Jane Couchman, ‘Charlotte de Bourbon’s Correspondence: Using Words to Implement Emancipation’, Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, (eds) C. H. Winn and D. Kuizenga, New York, Garland Publishing, 1997, pp. 101–15. 100 BN ms 3182. For accessibility, citations come from Delaborde’s transcription, Delaborde, Charlotte de Bourbon, p. 38. 101 Ibid., p. 39. 102 Ibid., p. 39. 103 Ibid., p. 39. 104 Ibid., p. 39. 105 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 106 Ibid., p. 40. 107 Ibid., p. 40. 108 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 109 Ibid., p. 41. 110 Ibid., p. 41. 111 Ibid., p. 42. 112 Ibid., p. 42. 113 Ibid., p. 43. 114 Ibid., p. 43. 115 Ibid., pp. 42–3. 116 Ibid., p. 43. 117 Ibid., p. 43. 118 Ibid., p. 43. 119 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 120 Ibid., p. 44. 121 Ibid., p. 44. 122 Ibid., p. 38. 123 Ibid., p. 44. 124 Ibid., p. 44. 125 Ibid., p. 45. 126 Ibid., p. 44. 127 Ibid., p. 45. 128 Ibid., p. 45. 129 Ibid., p. 45. 130 Couchman, ‘Charlotte de Bourbon’s Correspondence’, 104. 131 ‘Disciplina nervus eccelsiae: The Calvinist reform of Morals’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18, 1, 1987, 89–116; ‘Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1989, 373–89; ‘Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches’, Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in Reformed Tradition, (ed.) R. A. Mentzer, Kirksville, Mo., Truman State University Press, 1994,


132 133 134 135

136

137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159 160

pp. 97–128; ‘The Persistence of “Superstition and Idolatry” among Rural French Calvinists’, Church History, 65, 1996, 220–33; ‘Morals and Moral Regulation in Protestant France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31, 1, 2000, 1–20; ‘La Place et le rôle des femmes dans les églises réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 46, 113, 2001, 119–32. Mentzer, ‘Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural’, pp. 388–9. Ibid., pp. 388–9. Mentzer, ‘Marking the Taboo’, p. 125. Philippe Chareyre, ‘ “The Greatest Difficulties One Must Bear to follow Jesus Christ”: Morality at Sixteenth-Century Nîmes’, Sin and the Calvinists, (ed.) Mentzer, pp. 63–96, 75. AD de l’Aube, Chapitre de la Cathédrale de Troyes, G 4189 cited in summary in Inventaire sommaire des Archives départementales antiérieures à 1790: Aube, Archives ecclésiastique série G (clergé séculier), (eds) H. Arbois de Jubainville, and F. André, vol. 2, Paris, Alphonse Picard, 1896, p. 332. Ibid., p. 231. ‘Le registre consistorial de Coutras, 1582–1584’, (eds) A. Soman and E. Labrousse, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 126, 1980, 193–228, 202. Ibid., 203. Mentzer, ‘Marking the Taboo’, p. 114. Chareyre, ‘ “The Greatest Difficulties” ’, p. 76. Ibid., pp. 86–7. Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, (ed.) Henriette de Witt, vol. 2, Paris, Mme Vve Jules Renouard, 1868, p. 302. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., pp. 299–300. Ibid., p. 300. See further discussion of this aspect in Broomhall and Winn, ‘La notion d’égalité au sein du couple dans les Mémoires de Charlotte Arbaleste’, Albineana, 18, forthcoming. Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, vol. 2, pp. 277 and 286. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., pp. 308–9. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 277. For example, ibid., p. 296. Madame de Mornay au president de Clauzonne, Avril 1585, reprinted in H. Imbert, La Coiffure de Madame du Plessis-Mornay, Niort, L. Clouzot, 1880, p. 13. Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, vol. 2, p. 89. Comparison between confession of faith in Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, vol. 2, 289–95 and that included in her 1583 testament in Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, vol. 2, Paris, Treuttel et Wurtz, 1824, pp. 257–69. Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, vol. 2, p. 294. For example, ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 298. On Arbaleste’s clash with the Consistory, see also Joshua Rosenthal’s reading of Mornay’s use of matrimonial identity and theological authority in

Notes 155 ‘L’Affaire de la coiffure: l’autorité théologique et l’identité matrimoniale chez Mornay’, Albineana, 18, forthcoming. 161 See R. A. Mentzer and A. Spicer, ‘Introduction: Être protestant’, and M. Dinges, ‘Huguenot Poor Relief and Health Care in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) R. A. Mentzer and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 4 and 157–74. 162 Mentzer and Spincer, ‘Epilogue’, Society and Culture the Huguenot World, p. 229.

2 Understanding the Divine 1 The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt: The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis XI and Longchamp, (ed.) S. L. Field, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, p. 11. 2 BN ms fr 11662, fol. 15 r. 3 Ibid., fol. 15 r. 4 Ibid., fol. 16 r. 5 See website of Les Elumineurs Ltd, textmanuscripts.com, where a description of this manuscript is provided. The first published life of Isabelle in 1619 appears to have derived its information and pitch of Isabelle’s sanctity from this source. See also analysis of the construction of Isabelle’s life in the seventeenth century by Jesuit Nicolas Caussin in T. Worcerster, ‘ “Neither Married nor Cloistered”: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 2, 1999, 457–72. 6 The later miracles on ff. 35–7 occurred c. 1530 and appear to have been added at Longchamp by a second hand after 1550 and probably before 1569. www.textmanuscripts.com 7 J. Trochu, Françoise d’Amboise: Duchesse et Carmélite, 1427–1485, Nantes, Lanoë, 1984, p. 123. 8 Ibid., p. 124. 9 Ibid., p. 124. 10 Ibid., p. 130. Christophe Leroy, Les saintes ardeurs de Mere Francoise d’Amboise, Paris, 1621. 11 Ibid., p. 131. 12 Ibid., p. 129. 13 Claude Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, vol. 1, (ed.) L. Bourquin, Paris, Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2001, p. 337. 14 Some biographical notes about Jeanne were compiled by Guyard’s uncle, Blessed Gabriel-Maria, see J.-F. Bonnefoy, ‘Bibliographie de l’Annonciade’, Collectanea Franciscana, 13, 1943, 122. 15 Guyard’s account was transcribed into the seventeenth-century text of Paulin du Gast, then into Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, Paris, Louis Vivès, 1856, pp. 210–20. 16 Guyard, La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) J.-F. Bonnefoy, Paris, Editions franciscaines, 1937, p. 49. 17 Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, p. 219. 18 Peter Burke’s analysis of Counter-Reformation saints suggests that the ideal candidate was male, Italian or Spanish, noble and clerical. P. Burke, ‘How to


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32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, (ed.) K. von Greyerz, London, Allen and Unwin, 1984, p. 49. Agnes de Harcourt’s text about Isabelle de France is a thirteenth-century example. The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt, (ed.) Field. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 53. Ibid., pp. 53–4. Jean Bouchet, Les annales d’Aquitaine, faicts & gestes en sommaire des roys de France, & d’Angleterre, & païs de Naples & de Milan, Poitiers, J. et E. de Marnef, 1557. Ibid., fols. 119–27. Ibid., fol. 127 v. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 54. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., pp. 240–1. R. M. Bell, Holy Anorexia, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 175. On Counter-Reformation constructions of female sanctity, see also G. Zarri, ‘From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650’, (trans.) Keith Botsford, and S. F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Models of Female Sanctity in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy’, both in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, (eds) L. Scaraffia and G. Zarri, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 83–112 and 159–75. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 81. Ibid., p. 82. J.-F. Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu: Politique et mystique chez Jeanne de France, Paris, Beauchesne, 1991. La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, pp. 84–5. Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu, p. 33. A. M. Jeanneret, ‘Notice sur l’origine et l’établissement du monastère de Sainte Claire d’Orbe et sur sa translation à Evian’, in Catherine de Saulx, Vie de Tres Haulte, tres puissainte et tres Illustre dame, Madame Loyse de Savoye, Geneva, Jules Guillaume Fick, 1860, p. 18. Vie de … Madame Loyse de Savoye, pp. 55–6. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Jeanneret, ‘Notice sur l’origine’, p. 29. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 20. Yves Magistri, Mirouers et guydes fort propres pour les dames et damoiselles de France, (1585) Sint Truiden, Instituut voor Franciscaanse geschiedenis, 1996. Ibid., p. 190. René Guérin, Abrégé de la Vie de la Bienheureuse Marguerite de Lorraine, Séez, Ch. Leconte, 1934, p. 6. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Cited in H. de la Ferrière-Percy, Marguerite d’Angoulême, son livre de dépenses (1540–1549), Paris, Auguste Aubry, 1862, p. 197.

Notes 157 50 Ferrière-Percy, Marguerite d’Angoulême, p. 31. 51 AD d’Indre et Loire, 1 J 1165 Les déclarations faites à la chapelle de Sainte Catherine de Fierbois, près de Sainte-Maure en Touraine, de 245 miracles arrivés de 1375 à 1536. The Bibliothèque Nationale copy (BN ms fr 1045), is an earlier version of the text, including 237 miracles from 1375 until 1470, and has been published as Livre des miracles de Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, (ed.) Y. Chauvin, Poitiers, Société des Archives historiques de Poitou, 1976. 52 La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) Bonnefoy, p. 233. In 1618 the archbishop of Bourges was able to compile a list of some 130 authenticated miracles. See also Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu, p. 150. 53 B. Chevalier, ‘Saint François de Paule à Tours d’après le process de canonization’, in S. Francesco di Paola: Chiesa e società del suo tempo (atti del convegno internazionale di studio, Paola, 20–24 maggio 1983), Rome, Curia Generalizia dell’Ordine dei Minimi, 1984, pp. 184–208, 192. 54 Ibid., 203. 55 For discussion of concepts of late medieval sainthood and community dynamics, see A. M. Kleinberg, Prophets in their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992. For typologies of sainthood, see A. Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Rome, Ecole française de Rome, 1981; and P. Delooz, ‘Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church’, Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, (ed.) Stephen Wilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 189–216. 56 D. Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 170. 57 Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) C. de Grandmaison, (Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Touraine, vol. 26), Tours, RouilléLadevèze, 1877, p. 72. 58 Ibid., p. 73. 59 AD de la Seine-Maritime, 54 H 41. 60 Ibid., fol. 7 r. 61 Ibid., fols 7 r–v. 62 Ibid., fol. 10 r. 63 Ibid., fol. 9 v. 64 Ibid., fols 7 v–8 r. 65 Ibid., fol. 8 v. 66 Ibid., fol. 9 r. 67 Ibid., fol. 2 r. 68 Ibid., fol. 2 v. and fol. 9 v. 69 Ibid., fol. 4 r. 70 For background, see R. Kieckhefer, ‘The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft and Magic in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994, 355–85. 71 See article by A. M. Walker and E. H. Dickerman, ‘ “A Woman under the Influence”: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, 3, 1991, 534–54.

158 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 72 D. Charles Blendecq, Cinq histoires admirables, esquelles est montré comme miraculeusement par la vertu & puissance du S. Sacrement de l’Autel, a esté chassé Beelzebub, Paris, Guillaume Chaudière, 1582, histoire 4, 65. 73 Ibid., histoire 4, 69. 74 Ibid., histoire 3, 46. 75 Ibid., histoire 3, 80. 76 M. Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, 4, 1996, 1044. 77 Ibid., 1049. 78 Marshman, ‘Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom’, The Journal of Religious History, 23, 3, 1999, 265–81. 79 AD du Rhône, 27 H 22 discusses reforms to the abbey. The elite status of the abbey is attested by the preuves de noblesse provided by nuns at the turn of the century, 27 H 48. See also A. Coville, ‘Une Visite de Saint Pierre de Lyon en 1503’, Revue d’histoire de Lyon, 1912, 243–72. 80 Coville, ‘Une Visite de Saint Pierre de Lyon en 1503’, 271. 81 See closing lines of Adrien de Montalembert, La Merveilleuse histoire de l’esperit qui depuis naguères c’est [sic] apparu au monastère des religieuses de Sainct-Pierre de Lyon, Lyon, A. Brun, 1887. 82 Ibid., fol. Diiir. 83 Ibid., fol. Giiir. 84 I have been unable to locate the text in which Montalembert completes this account. He introduces the case here, but explains that he has written about it elsewhere. See also for Lyons two later sixteenth-century exorcisms: of 22-year-old Catherine Poncet from the parish of Peaugre, near Nancy, and widow Perinette Pinay, in J. Benedicti, La Triomphante Victoire de la Vièrge Marie sur sept malins esprits finalement chassés du corps d’une femme dans l’église des Cordeliers de Lyon, Lyon, Benoît Rigaud, 1583, as cited in H. L. and J. Baudrier, Bibliographie lyonnaise recherches sur les imprimeurs, libraires, relieurs, et fondeurs de lettres de Lyon au XVIe siècle, vol. 3, Paris, F. de Nobelé, 1964, 376. See also an earlier edition in 1582, as cited in Baudrier, vol. 4, p. 94. 85 M. Venard, L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVIe siècle, Université de Lille III, Service de reproduction des theses, 1980, vol. 2, p. 1348. 86 Louis Le Caron, De la tranquilité d’esprit, Paris, J. du Puys, 1588, pp. 168–9. 87 Ibid., pp. 164–5. 88 Ibid., pp. 169–70. 89 Ibid., pp. 171–2. 90 Ibid., p. 166. 91 Ibid., pp. 166–7. 92 Jean Bodin, De la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580) Paris Jacques du Puys, 1587, fol. 272 v. 93 Ibid., fols aiijr–v. 94 R. Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 12. 95 Jean Boulaese, L’Abbregée histoire du grand miracle par nostre Sauveur & Seigneur Jesus-Christ en la saincte Hostie du sacrement de l’Autel, faict à Laon 1566, Paris, Thomas Belot, 1573, fol. 4 r. 96 Ibid., fol. 4 v.

Notes 159 97 Ibid., fols 7v–8r. 98 Michel Marescot, Discours veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, pretendue demoniaque, Paris, Mamert Patisson, 1599, p. 39. 99 Ibid., p. 39. 100 Ibid., p. 40. 101 Kevin C. Robbins argues that the French Calvinist Churches agreed in theory about the diabolical alignment between magical practices and women, yet spent little time pursuing cases in consistories. Robbins, ‘Magical Emasculation, Popular Anticlericalism, and the Limits of the Reformation in Western France circa 1590’, Journal of Social History, 31, 1, 1997, 61–83. Mentzer provides examples of the consistory admonishing women for healing practices in ‘La Place et le rôle des femmes dans les églises réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 46, 113, 2001, 125. See also B. Gordon, ‘Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation’, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (eds) Gordon and P. Marshall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 109; Sluhovsky, ‘Calvinist Miracles and the Concept of the Miraculous in Sixteenth-century Huguenot Thought’, Renaissance and Reformation 19, 2, 1995, 5–25. 102 On Crespin, see L. Racaut, ‘Religious Polemic and Huguenot Self-perception and Identity, 1554–1619’, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) Mentzer and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 29–43; Catharine Randall Coats, ‘Reconstituting the Textual Body in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des martyrs (1564)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44, 1, 1991, 62–85. 103 Jean Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), vol. 1, Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, 1885, p. 576. 104 Ibid., p. 578. 105 Crespin’s view follows similar idea expressed in Calvin’s letter to the female prisoners in Paris, 1557, also published in the Histoire des Martyrs. 106 Ibid., p. 541. 107 Ibid., p. 567. 108 Histoire ecclésiastique des Eglises réformées au royaume de France, Paris, Fischbacher, vol. 2, 1884, p. 699. Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs, vol. 3, p. 318. 109 Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs, vol. 3, p. 318.

3 Religious Knowledge 1 E. Delaruelle, ‘La vie religieuse dans les pays de langue française à la fin du XVe siècle’, La piété populaire au moyen age, Turin, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980, pp. 7 and 30. 2 G. Hasenohr, ‘Aspects de la litérature de spiritualité en langue française (1480–1520)’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France, 1991, 29–45; Gabrielle de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles, 1510–1516, (ed.) E. Berriot-Salvadore, Paris, Champion, 1999, p. 30. 3 J.-F. Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu: Politique et mystique chez Jeanne de France, Paris, Beauchesne, 1991, p. 176.

160 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 4 Ibid., pp. 173–4; and Delaruelle, ‘La vie religieuse dans les pays de langue française à la fin du Xve siècle’, p. 20. 5 Drèze, Raison d’Etat, raison de Dieu, p. 188. 6 BN ms fr 2282, 12 r. 7 Gabrielle de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Berriot-Salvadore, pp. 75–6. 8 Anne de France, Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, (ed.) A-M. Chazaud, Marseilles, Lafitte Reprints, 1978, pp. 26, 128–9. 9 BN ms fr 2282, fol. 6 v. 10 Ibid., fols 13 r–v. 11 Ibid., fol. 14 r. 12 de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Berriot-Salvadore, pp. 32, 36–7. 13 BN n.a.f. 19738, fol. 1 r. 14 Ibid., fol. 1 r. 15 Ibid., fol. 2 r. 16 Ibid., fol. 4 v. 17 Ibid., fol. 6 v. 18 Ibid., fol. 11 r. 19 Ibid., fol. 12 v. 20 Ibid., fols 15 r, 15 v. 21 Mazarine ms 978, fol. 1 v. 22 Ibid., fol. 1 v. 23 Ibid., fols 39 r-v. 24 Ibid., fol. 18 v. 25 Ibid., fol. 42 r. 26 Ibid., fol. 12 r. 27 Ibid., fol. 35 r. 28 de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Berriot-Salvadore, p. 87. 29 Mazarine ms 978, fol. 29 r. 30 Ibid., fol. 39 v. 31 J. Fleming, Reason and the Lover, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 37. 32 Ibid., p. 31. 33 BN n.a.f. 19738, fol. 6 v. 34 Ibid., fol. 7 r. 35 Ibid., fol. 7 r. 36 Ibid., fol. 7 r. 37 Ibid., fol. 7 r. 38 See H. Vose, ‘Marguerite d’Angoûleme: A Study in Sixteenth-century Spirituality, Based on her 1521–1524 Correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet’, PhD thesis, The University of Western Australia, 1985. 39 P. Jourda, ‘Tableau chronologique des publications de Marguerite de Navarre’, Revue du Seizième Siècle, 1925–26, 209–55; and A. Lefranc, Les Idées religieuses de Marguerite de Navarre d’après son œuvre poétique, Geneva, Slatkine, 1969; G. Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1992. 40 B. Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, p. 176. 41 Les Dernières Poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, (ed.) Lefranc, Paris, Colin, 1896, p. 396.

Notes 161 42 Published in Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane, (ed.) V. L. Saulnier, Paris, Droz, 1946. 43 Le Miroir de Treschrestienne Princesse Marguerite de France, Royne de Navarre, Duchesse D’Alençon & du Berry: auquel elle voit & son neant, & son tout. Paris, Antoine Augereau, 1533, fol. 1 r. 44 Prologue, Day 5 and Day 8, cited in Jean-Jacques Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, Bulletin philologique et historique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1956–60, p. 382 n. 1. 45 Ingrid Akerlund, Sixteenth-Century French Women Writers: Marguerite d’Angoulême, Anne de Graville, the Lyonnese School, Jeanne de Jussie, Marie Dentière, Camille de Morel (Studies in French Literature 67) Lewiston, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003, p. 22. 46 See list of publications in Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, appendix 1. 47 Ibid., p. 144. 48 P. Imbart de la Tour, Les Origines de la Réforme, vol 3: L’évangélisme (1521–1538), Geneva, Slatkine, 1978, p. 349. 49 L. de Lacger, ‘Histoire des Annonciades de Fargues à Albi’, Revue d’histoire franciscaine, 5, 1928, 134. 50 de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles, 1510–1516, (ed.) E. Berriot-Salvadore, p. 30. 51 Cited in J.-M. Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes: France (1480–1560), Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2001, p. 187. 52 Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue française, (ed.) A.-L. Herminjard, vol. 7, Nieuwkoop, B. De Graaf, 1966, p. 142. 53 Ibid., p. 143. 54 Ibid., p. 142 n. 2. 55 Letters of John Calvin, (ed.) J. Bonnet, (1858) vol. 2, New York, Burt Franklin, 1972, p. 229. 56 Ibid., p. 229. 57 AD de la Vienne, Abbaye de Saint-Jean-de-Bonneval, Liasse unique. 58 Letters of John Calvin, (ed.) Bonnet, p. 230. 59 I have not been able to find evidence of this much repeated detail: only three documents of the period survive in the single file on the abbey at the AD de la Vienne. 60 Cited in T. Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, Paris, Louis Vivès, 1856, p. 215. 61 Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, p. 217. 62 N. Z. Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1975, p. 80. 63 Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, p. 386. 64 Ibid., p. 386. 65 E. Arnaud, Histoire des protestants du Dauphiné aux XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles, vol. 1, Geneva, Slatkine, 1970, pp. 26–7. 66 Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, p. 388. 67 Arnaud, Histoire des protestants du Dauphiné, vol. 1, p. 32. 68 Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, p. 388. 69 François LePicart, Les Sermons et instructions chrestiennes, pour tous les iours de caresme, & feries de Pasques, Paris, Nicholas Chesneau, 1566, fol. 173, in


70 71 72

73

74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82

83

84 85 86

87

88

L. Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 177 (Taylor’s translation). Articles arrestez au synode tenu à Lyon, 25 Novembre 1561, in Documents protestants inédits du XVIe siècle, (ed.) E. Arnaud, Paris, Grassart, 1872, p. 30. Georges Bosquet, Histoire de M. G. Bosquet sur les troubles advenus en la ville de Tolose l’an 1562, Toulouse, R. Colomiez, 1595, p. 50. Nicolas Pithou de Chamgobert, Chronique de Troyes et de la Champagne durant les guerres de Religion (1524–1594), (ed.) P-E. Leroy, Presses universitaires de Reims, vol. 1, 1998, p. 189 n. 2. Timothy Watson, ‘Preaching, Printing, Psalm-singing: The Making and Unmaking of the Reformed Church in Lyon, 1550–1572’, in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) R. A. Mentzer Jr and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 16–17. Claude Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, vol. 1: 1553–65, (ed.) L. Bourquin, Paris, Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2001, pp. 4–5, 160. C. J. Blaisdell, ‘Calvin’s Letters to Women: The Courting of Ladies in High Places’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 13, 3, 1982, 67–84. Letters of John Calvin, (ed.) J. Bonnet, (1858) vol. 2, New York, Burt Franklin, 1972, p. 77. Ibid., p. 86. Arnaud, Histoire des protestants du Dauphiné, vol. 1, p. 33. Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, (ed.) Leroy, vol. 1, p. 143. Livre VII, pp. 5 and 7, cited in Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, p. 383. M. Carbonnier-Burkard, ‘La Réforme en langues des femmes’, La Religion de ma mère: Les femmes et la transmission de la foi, (ed.) J. Delumeau, Paris, Les Editions du Cerf, 1992, p. 182. Pierre de l’Estoile, The Paris of Henry of Navarre as seen by Pierre de l’Estoile: Selections from his Mémoires-Journaux (trans. and ed.) N. L. Roelker, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1958, p. 139. Yet it must be said that his account of their discussion made them rather reluctant heroines. Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, vol. 3, 1889, p. 827. Crespin, Histoire des martyrs, vol. 1, p. 566. Ibid., p. 669. For contemporary discussion about Poissy and its nuns, both criticism and praise, see G. Ferguson, ‘The Stakes of Sanctity and Sinfulness: Tales of the Priory of Poissy (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)’, in Female Saints and Sinners: Saintes et mondaines (France 1450–1650), (eds) J. Britnell and A. Moss, University of Durham, Durham Modern Language Series, 2002, pp. 59–78. E. Berriot-Salvadore, ‘Une nonnain latinisante: Anne de Marquets’, Poésie et bible de la Renaissance à l’âge classique: 1550–1680: Actes du Colloque de Besançon des 25 et 26 mars 1997, (eds) P. Blum et A. Mantero, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1999, p. 185. On her moderate views, see Anne de Marquets, Sonets spirituels, (ed.) G. Ferguson, Geneva, Droz, 1997, p. 27.

Notes 163 89 Preface to Gabrielle de Coignard, Œuvres Chestiennes [sic] de Feu [sic] Dame Gabrielle de Coignard (Toulouse, Pierre Jagourt and Bernard Carles, 1594), Macon, Protat, 1890, pp. 4–5. 90 Gabrielle de Coignard, Œuvres chrétiennes, (ed.) C. H. Winn, Geneva, Droz, 1995, pp. 129–30. 91 Ibid., p. 288. 92 See Winn’s insightful introduction to the programme of Coignard’s spiritual work in Gabrielle de Coignard, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Winn. 93 Anne de Marquets, Sonets spirituels, (ed.) Ferguson, p. 30. 94 See his arguments in Ibid., pp. 60–3; Ferguson, ‘Biblical Exegesis and Social and Theological Commentary in the Sonets spirituels of Anne de Marquets’, Oeuvres et critiques, 20, 2, 1995, pp. 111–21; Ferguson, entry on Anne de Marquets in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, (ed.) E. Martin Sartori, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1999, pp. 344–6; as well as H. Fournier, ‘La voix textuelle des Sonnets spirituels de Anne de Marquets’, Etudes littéraires, 20, 2, 1987, 77–92; C. Yandell, ‘ “L’Habit ne fait pas la nonne”: Controversy and Authority in Anne de Marquets’, Mediaevalia, 1999, 157–80. 95 Coignard, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Winn, p. 80. 96 Ibid., pp. 84–7. See also P. Sommers, ‘Gendered Readings of The Book of Judith: Guillaume du Bartas and Gabrielle de Coignard’, Romance Quarterly, 48, 4, 2001, 211–20. 97 T. C. Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570–1613, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 86; Coignard, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Winn, p. 80; Marquets, Sonets spirituels, (ed.) Ferguson, p. 57; Ferguson, ‘The Feminisation of Devotion: Gabrielle de Coignard, Anne de Marquets, and François de Sales’, in Women’s Writings in the French Renaissance: Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7–9 July 1997, (eds) P. Ford and G. Jondorf, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 187–206. 98 G. Ferguson, ‘Le Chapelet et la Plume, ou, quand la religieuse se fait écrivain: le cas du prieuré de Poissy (1562–1621)’, Nouvelle Revue du seizième siècle, 19, 2, 2001, 98. 99 Coignard, Oeuvres spirituelles, (ed.) Winn, p. 45. 100 Cited in full in T. Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle, Paris, Champion, 1997, pp. 493–4. 101 D. Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Des femmes de bonne foi: La religion des mères au Moyen-Age’, in La Religion de ma mère, (ed.) Delumeau, p. 93. 102 Anne de France, Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, (ed.) A.-M. Chazaud, Marseilles, Lafitte Reprints, 1978, pp. 104–5. 103 Ibid., p. 105. 104 Ibid., pp. 92–3. 105 Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Des femmes de bonne foi: La religion des mères au Moyen-Age’, p. 92. 106 Procès-verbal of 1566 cited in M. Reulos, ‘Les débuts des Communautés réformées dans l’actuel département de la Manche’, Revue du Département de la Manche, 24, 1982, 37. 107 Ibid., p. 38. 108 Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, (ed.) P.-E. Leroy, vol. 2, 2000, pp. 677–8.

164 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 109 Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes, ou Devises Chrestiennes, Composées par Damoiselle Georgette de Montenay, Lyon, Jean Marcorelle, 1571. 110 Alison M. Saunders, ‘The Sixteenth-century French Emblem Book as a Form of Religious Literature’, in The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book, (eds) A. Pettegree, P. Nelles and P. Conner, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001, p. 40. 111 S. F. Matthews Grieco, ‘Georgette de Montenay: A Different Voice in Sixteenth-century Emblematics’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47, 1994, 795. 112 Madame and Philippe du Verger, Le Verger Fertile des Vertus Plein de toute diversité, de fruicts & fleurs pour l’ytilité ornement & saincte instruction de la petite jeunesse (1595), (eds) S. Broomhall and C. H. Winn, Paris, Champion, 2004, p. 122. 113 See also C. Randall, ‘Shouting down Abraham: How Sixteenth-century Huguenot Women Found Their Voice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50, 1997, 411–42. See Broomhall and Winn’s comparative study of the memoirs and testaments of Arbaleste and Burlamacchi in ‘The Problematics of SelfRepresentation in Early Modern Women’s Memoirs’, Tangence, forthcoming. 114 On Duplessis-Mornay’s political career, see Hugues Daussy, Les Huguenots et le roi. Le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1572–1600), Geneva, Droz, 2002. 115 See Donna Donald, ‘La mère comme médiatrice: les relations dans la famille Mornay’, forthcoming in Albineana. 116 For further discussion of this aspect of Arbaleste’s contribution, see Broomhall and Winn, ‘La notion d’égalité au sein du couple dans les Mémoires de Charlotte Arbaleste’, forthcoming in Albineana. 117 Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, (ed.) Henriette de Witt, vol. 1, Paris, Mme Vve Jules Renouard, 1868, p. 306. 118 Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, ms. suppl. 84. Mémoires concernant Michel Burlamacchi et sa famille, par Mademoiselle Renée Burlamacchi. 119 On Protestant memoir writing, see N. Kuperty-Tsur, Se dire à la Renaissance: Les Mémoires au XVIe siècle, Paris, J. Vrin, 1997, p. 39. 120 Mémoires de Madame de Mornay, (ed.) Witt, vol. 1, p. 66. 121 Mémoires concernant Michel Burlamacchi, fol. 4 r–v. 122 Ibid., fol. 4 v. 123 Epistre d’une Damoiselle Françoise à une sienne amie dame estrangere, sur la mort d’excellente et vertueuse Dame, Leonor de Roy, princesse de Condé, Contenant le Testament & dernière volonté d’icelle, Ensemble, le tombeau de ladite Dame, n.p. [1564], fol. Bi v. 124 Ibid., fol. Bi v. 125 Other than as martyrs as they are discussed in Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs. 126 Généalogie de Messieurs du Laurens, descrite par moy Jeanne du Laurens, veufve à M. Gleyse, & couchée nayvement en ces termes, BM d’Aix, ms 843. Citations from the edition of Une famille au XVIe siècle, (ed.) C. de Ribbe, Paris, Joseph Albanel, 1868. 127 Ibid., p. 51. 128 Ibid., p. 70. 129 Ibid., p. 61. 130 Ibid., p. 98. 131 Ibid., p. 69.

Notes 165 132 Kuperty-Tsur, Se dire à la Renaissance, p. 192. 133 On early modern historiography, see D. R. Kelley, ‘History as a Calling: The Case of La Popelinière’, in Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, (eds) A. Molho and J. A. Tedeschi, Florence, G. C. Sansoni, 1971, pp. 771–89; on women’s history writing, see Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

4 Visible Religious Practices 1 A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-century Champagne, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 198. 2 See discussion and commentary on recent works adopting this approach in N. Z. Davis, ‘From “Popular Religion” to Religious Cultures’, in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, (ed.) S. Ozment, St Louis, Center for Reformation Research, 1982, pp. 324–5. 3 L. Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 72. 4 Anne de France, Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, (ed.) A.-M. Chazaud, Marseilles, Lafitte Reprints, 1978, p. 105. 5 E. Belle, La Réforme à Dijon: des origines à la fin de la Lieutenant Générale de Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes (1530–1570), Dijon, Damidot Frères, 1911, p. 34. 6 Reproduced in ibid., p. 163. 7 Ibid., p. 167. 8 See Philip Benedict’s assessment based on attendance and abjuration lists, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 88. Benedict cites Louise Guiraud’s evidence of a Calvinist assembly role from Montpellier of 1560 where 757 men and 343 women were in attendance, from her Etudes sur la Réforme à Montpellier (Montpellier, 1918), vol. 2, pp. 346–78, cited Benedict, p. 88 n. 1. 9 See discussion in Chapter 3. 10 Reproduced in Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, pp. 164–5. 11 Guiraud, Etudes sur la Réforme à Montpellier, vol. 2, pp. 346–78, cited Benedict, Rouen During the Wars of Religion, p. 88 n. 1. 12 Reproduced in Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, pp. 166–8. 13 Ibid., p. 167. 14 B. B. Diefendorf, ‘Houses Divided: Religious Schism in Sixteenth-century Parisian Families’, Urban Life in the Renaissance, (eds) S. Zimmerman and R. F. E. Weissman, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1989, p. 84. 15 R. A. Mentzer Jr and A. Spicer, ‘Epilogue’, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) Mentzer and Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 229. 16 Reproduced in Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, pp. 170–1. 17 Ibid., pp. 207–8. 18 See Chapter 1. 19 R. A. Mentzer, ‘Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches’, in Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in Reformed Tradition, (ed.) Mentzer, Kirksville, MO, Truman State University Press, 1994, p. 115.

166 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 20 N. Z. Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1975, p. 75. Although there is a wide body of literature about confraternities at this period in France, only a small number address questions of gender representation. 21 Galpern, The Religions of the People, p. 60. 22 AD Seine-Maritime, Liasse 5 E 506. C. Ouin-Lacroix, Histoire des anciennes corporations d’Arts et métiers et des confréries religieuses de la capitale de la Normandie, Rouen, Lacointe Freres, 1850, p. 507, although he identifies the church as St Denis. 23 AD Seine-Maritime, Liasse 5 E 506. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 The confraternity itself may have been a mixed one, however, since the records refer to ‘tous freres et soeurs de ladite confrerie’. AD de la SeineMaritime, Liasse 5 E 506. Benedict notes four in sixteenth-century Rouen, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, p. 24. 27 Recueil des monuments inédits de l’histoire du tiers état: première série, chartes, coutumes, actes municipaux, statuts des corporations d’arts et metiers des villes et communes de France, region du nord, (ed.) A. Thierry, vol. 2, Paris, FirminDidot, 1853, p. 849. 28 Ibid., p. 850. 29 Galpern, The Religions of the People, p. 190. 30 Ibid., p. 60. 31 Ibid., p. 190. 32 Lançon estimates approximately 55–65 per cent of the total congregation was female, although this seems to refer largely to the seventeenth century as the earliest membership list stems from 1590. Pierre Lançon, ‘Les Confréries du Rosaire en Rouergue aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Annales du Midi, 96, 166, 1984, 131. 33 Ibid., 123. 34 M. Venard, ‘Catholicism and Resistance to the Reformation in France, 1555–1585’, in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, (eds) P. Benedict, G. Marnef, H. van Nierop and M. Venard, Amsterdam, Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1999, p. 147. 35 Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, p. 83. 36 Ibid., p. 86. 37 K. Norberg, ‘Women, the Family, and the Counter-Reformation: Women’s Confraternities in the Seventeenth Century’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 6, 1978, 55–63. 38 Venard, L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVIe siècle, Université de Lille III, Service de reproduction des theses, 1980, vol. 2, 1220, p. 1255. 39 Ibid., pp. 1254–6. 40 For the example of nursing orders, C. Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France, London, Routledge, 1989. 41 See Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) C. de Grandmaison (Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Touraine, vol. 26), Tours, RouilléLadevèze, 1877, p. 254. This was later overturned by the Pope on appeal from

Notes 167

42

43 44 45

46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66

Beaumont, on the basis that the superiors had no power to issue an excommunication. X. Barbier de Montault, ‘Le Trésor de l’Abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Poitiers avant la Révolution’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 4, 1881, 219. AD d’Indre-et-Loire, H 796, Journal historique de Beaumont-lès-Tours, 72. Ibid., 74. Not all Huguenots gave up such festivities, however. See R. A. Mentzer Jr, ‘The Persistence of “Superstition and Idolatry” among Rural French Calvinists’, Church History, 65, 2, 1996, 220–33. J.-J. Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, Bulletin philologique et historique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1956–60, 387. Nicolas Pithou de Chamgobert, Chronique de Troyes et de la Champagne durant les guerres de Religion (1524–1594), (ed.) P.-E. Leroy, Presses universitaires de Reims, (livre d’accompagnement) 1998, vol. 1, 1998, p. 143. Ibid., p. 142. Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, p. 28, n. 2. P. Roberts, ‘Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-century France’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe, (eds) B. Gordon and P. Marshall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 134. 1583 testament in Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, vol. 2, Paris, Treuttel et Wurtz, 1824, pp. 257–69. Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, vol. 1, p. 131. Ibid., pp. 196–7. Jean Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, vol. 1, 1885, p. 566. Ibid., p. 566. Hemardinquer, ‘Les femmes dans la Réforme en Dauphiné’, 387, n. 1. Histoire ecclésiastique des Eglises réformées au royaume de France, Paris, Fischbacher, vol. 1, 1883, p. 865, cited in Roberts, ‘Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-century France’, p. 132. Recueil d’actes notariés relatifs à l’histoire de Paris et de ses environs au XVIe siècle, vol. 1, (ed.) E. Coyecque, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1905, p. 70. C. Dolan, Entre Tours et Clochers: les gens d’Eglise a Aix-en-Provence au XVIe siecle, Sherbrooke, Editions de l’Universite de Sherbrooke/Aix-en-Provence, Edisud, 1981, p. 111. See ibid., p. 123. AD d’Indre-et-Loire, H 796, 149. Ibid., 193–4. My discussion here uses William H. Forsyth’s survey of Entombment sculpture in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France as a basis, The Entombment of Christ: French Sculpture of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1970. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 135, n. 20. Ibid., pp. 52–3.

168 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75

76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 194. Recueil d’actes notariés relatifs à l’histoire de Paris et de ses environs au XVIe siècle, vol. 2, (ed.) E. Coyecque, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1923, p. 158. A. N. Galpern, ‘The Legacy of Late Medieval Religion in Sixteenth-century Champagne’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, (eds) C. Trinkhaus with H. A. Oberman, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1974, p. 174. Forsyth, The Entombment of Christ, p. 158. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 145. For studies of contemporary religious patronage in Francophone convents to the north of France, see A. G. Pearson, ‘Personal Worship, Gender, and the Devotional Portrait Diptych’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31, 1, 2000, 99–122; A. G. Pearson, ‘Nuns, Images, and the Ideals of Women’s Monasticism: Two Paintings from the Cistercian Convent of Flines’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 4.2, 2001, 1356–402. S. Poignant, L’Abbaye de Fontevrault et les filles de Louis XIV, Paris, Nouvelles editions latines, 1966, p. 69. See P. C. Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, Grand Rapids MI, William B. Eerdmans, 1999; D. Gaimster and R. Gilchrist (eds), The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580, Leeds, Maney, 2003. H. Gelin, ‘Inscriptions huguenotes: Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge, etc.’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme, français, 11, 1893, 565–88; Gelin, ‘Inscriptions concernant l’histoire du protestantisme français: CharenteInférieure’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 79, 1930, 482–85. Poignant, L’Abbaye de Fontevrault et les filles de Louis XIV, p. 69. Ibid., p. 70. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 27. Ibid., p. 49. J. Evans, Monastic Iconography in France, from the Renaissance to the Revolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 11. Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 248. Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques, Farnborough, Gregg International, 1968, vol. 6, p. 357. V. Leroquais, Les Psautiers manuscrits latins des bilbiothèques publique de France, vol. 1, Macon, Protat, 1940–1, pp. 246–7. Catalogue général des manuscrits, vol. 6, pp. 84–5. On books generally in gift exchange and culture, see N. Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, p. 45. Catalogue général des manuscrits, vol. 6, pp. 85–6. The Lisle Letters (trans. and ed.) M. St Clare Byrne, vol. 5, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 119. Leroquais, Les Livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, vol. 2, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1927, p. 162.

Notes 169 92 Leroquais, Les Psautiers manuscrits latins, vol. 2, pp. 26–7. 93 See discussion of female book ownership in Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, pp. 36–43. 94 Taylor, Soldiers of Christ, p. 173. 95 S. Penketh, ‘Women and Books of Hours’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, (eds) J. H. M. Taylor and L. Smith, London, The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 1996, p. 280. 96 Recueil d’actes notariés, vol. 1, p. 55. 97 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 27. 98 See Davis, The Gift; V. Reinburg, ‘Books of Hours’, in The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book, (eds) A. Pettegree, P. Nelles and P. Conner, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001, pp. 68–82; K. Ashley, ‘Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32, 1, 2002, 145–65. 99 Reinburg, ‘Books of Hours’, p. 71. 100 Catalogue général des manuscrits, vol. 7, p. 61. 101 Ibid., vol. 6, p. 86. 102 Ashley, ‘Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours’, p. 159. 103 See Chapter 1. 104 Georges Bosquet, Histoire de M.G. Bosquet sur les troubles advenus en la ville de Tolose l’an 1562, Toulouse, R. Colomiez, 1595, p. 50. 105 Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, vol. 2, p. 997. 106 Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, doctrines, constance et mort de Jean Calvin jadis ministere de Geneve (1577), cited in M. G. Winkler, ‘Calvin’s Portrait: Representation, Image, or Icon?’, in Seeing beyond the Word, (ed.) Finney, p. 243. 107 Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, vol. 1, p. 189, n. 2. 108 Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Calvinism and the Visual Arts: A Theological Introduction’, in Seeing beyond the Word, (ed.) Finney, pp. 1–16. 109 On the interaction between Protestant costume and class, see the confrontation with Arbaleste, discussed in Chapter 1. 110 Mémoires de Gaspard de S. Tavannes, p. 190 cited in Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, p. 28. 111 Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, vol. 1, p. 143. 112 Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, p. 80. 113 No study that I am aware of has focused specifically on women’s pious bequests in sixteenth-century France. For medieval and seventeenthcentury evidence on this subject, see M. C. Howell, ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past & Present, 150, 1996, 3–45; D. Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Des femmes de bonne foi: la religion des mères au Moyen-Age’, La Religion de ma Mère: Les femmes et la transmission de la foi, (ed.) J. Delumeau, Paris, Les Editions du Cerf, 1992, pp. 91–122; J. S. W. Helt, ‘Women, Memory and Will-making in Elizabethan England’, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (eds) B. Gordon and P. Marshall, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 188–205; P. T. Hoffman, ‘Wills and Statistics: Tobit Analysis and the Counter-Reformation in Lyon’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14, 4, 1984, 813–34. 114 Recueil d’actes notariés, vol. 2, pp. 158–9. 115 Ibid., p. 487.

170 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 116 M. Dinges, ‘Huguenot Poor Relief and Health care in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) R. A. Mentzer Jr and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 163. 117 Mentzer, ‘Organizational Endeavour and Charitable Impulse in Sixteenthcentury Nîmes: The Care of Protestant Nîmes’, French History, 5, 1, 1991, 17. 118 AM Tours, GG 4, carton 1, pièce 163. 119 AM Tours, GG 3, carton 1, pièce 155. 120 AM Tours, GG 5, carton 1, pièce 231. 121 See further discussion on women’s work in hospital nursing in S. Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, chapter 3. 122 AD du Loiret, E 3, administration of the Hôtel-Dieu of Orléans. 123 P. Rambaud, ‘Le rôle des femmes au point de vue de l’assistance publique à Poitiers’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 3 (1909), xxvii. 124 Ibid., xl. 125 A. Dupoux, Sur les pas de Monsieur Vincent. Trois cents ans d’histoire parisienne de l’enfance abandonnée, Paris, Revue de l’Assistance publique à Paris, 1958, p. 27. 126 See, for example, the records for 1591, cited in Rambaud, ‘Le rôle des femmes au point de vue de l’assistance publique à Poitiers’, p. xxxii. 127 C. de Robillard de Beaurepaire, ‘Notes extraites des premières registres de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Rouen’, Extrait du Précis des travaux de l’Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen, Rouen, H. Boissel, [1870], pp. 9–10. 128 Jean Burel, Mémoires de Jean Burel: Journal d’un bourgeois du Puy à l’époque des guerres de religion publiés et annotés par Augustin Chassaing, (eds) B. and P. Rivet, vol. 2, Saint-Vidal, Centre d’Etude de la Vallée de la Borne, 1983, pp. 469–70.

5 Religious Politics and Violence 1 S. Kettering, ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’, The Historical Journal, 32, 1989, 817–41; ‘The Household Service of Early Modern French Noblewomen’, French Historical Studies, 20, 1997, 55–85. 2 R. J. Kalas, ‘The Noble Widow’s Place in the Patriarchal Household: The Life and Career of Jeanne de Gontault’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 24, 1993, 538. 3 K. B. Neuschel, ‘Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth-century France’, in Changing Identities in Early Modern France, (ed.) M. Wolfe, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, p. 125. 4 S. Hanley, ‘The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate over Female Exclusion’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, (ed.) H. L. Smith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 289–304. 5 The Paris of Henry of Navarre as seen by Pierre de l’Estoile: Selections from his Mémoires-Journaux, (trans. and ed.) N. L. Roelker, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1958, p. 43. 6 Catherine des Roches, Les Œuvres, (ed.) A. R. Larsen, Geneva, Droz, 1993, p. 299. 7 Ibid., p. 299.

Notes 171 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., p. 301. Jeanne d’Albret, Mémoires et poésies, (ed.) Ruble, Geneva, Slatkine, 1970, p. 22. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., pp. 91–3. Jane Couchman also refers to this passage in her article ‘What is “Personal” about Sixteenth-century French Women’s Personal Writings?’ Atlantis, 19, 1, 1993, 18–19. Lettres de treshaute, tresvertueuse, & treschrestienne Princess, IANE Royne de Navarre, 1568, fol. Aii r. On Jeanne’s work as a Huguenot propagandist, see N. L. Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret, 1528–1572, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 301–11. Lettres de treshaute, tresvertueuse, & treschrestienne Princess, IANE Royne de Navarre, 1568, fol. A ii v. Ibid., fol. B ii r. Ibid., fol. B iii r. N. Kuperty-Tsur, Se dire à la Renaissance: Les Mémoires au XVIe siècle, Paris, J. Vrin, 1997, p. 121. Ibid., 149. See introduction to Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires et Discours, (ed.) E. Viennot, Saint Etienne, Publications de l’Université Saint-Etienne, 2004, p. 34. Catherine de Parthenay, Dame de Rohan, Ballets allégoriques en vers, 1592–1593, (ed.) R. Ritter, Paris, Champion, 1928. Anne d’Este, Les Regrets de Madame de Nemours, Paris, Hubert Velu, 1589, p. 14. The Paris of Henry of Navarre, (ed. and trans.) Roelker, p. 183. S. F. Will, ‘Camille de Morel: A Prodigy of the Renaissance’, PMLA, 1936, 117. E. Berriot-Salvadore, ‘ “Une nonnain latinisante”: Anne de Marquets’, Poésie et bible de la Renaissance à l’âge classique: 1550–1680: Actes du Colloque de Besançon des 25 et 26 mars 1997, (eds) P. Blum and A. Mantero, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1999, p. 185. Charlotte de Minut, ‘Epistre à Royne’, in De la beauté, avec la Paule-graphie par Gabriel de Minut, Lyon, Barthélemy Honorat, 1587. See comparative discussion of these texts in Broomhall, ‘ “In my opinion”: Charlotte de Minut and Female Political Discussion in Print in Sixteenth-century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31, 1, Spring 2000, 25–45. Morbi Gallos. Infestantis salubris curatio et sancta medicina: Hoc Est, Malorum, quae intestinum crudeleque Gallorum bellum inflammant, remedium, Lyon, Barthélemy Honorat, 1587. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 15. De la beauté, pp. 8–9. Morbi Gallos, pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 9. De la beauté, p. 17. Morbi Gallos, pp. 4–5. De la beauté, p. 11. Ibid., p. 14. De la beauté, p. 18. Morbi Gallos, pp. 6–7.

172 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 38 Morbi Gallos, p. 13. 39 Ibid., p. 7. 40 Roelker, ‘The Role of Noblewomen in the French Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 63, 1972, 168–95. 41 S. A. Finley-Croswhite has surveyed a vast range of noblewomen’s political activities in Dijon in her ‘Engendering the Wars of Religion: Female Agency during the Catholic League in Dijon’, French Historical Studies, 20, 1997, 127–54. 42 Reproduced in A. Challe, Histoire des guerres du Calvinisme et de la Ligue, vol. 2, Geneva, Mégariotis, 1978, pp. 341–7. 43 Reproduced in ibid., p. 348. 44 Jean Burel, Mémoires de Jean Burel: Journal d’un bourgeois du Puy à l’époque des Guerres de religion publiés et annotés par Augustin Chassaing, (eds) B. and P. Rivet, vol. 2, Saint-Vidal, Centre d’Etude de la Vallée de la Borne, 1983, p. 834. 45 Indeed, Finley-Croswhite claims that ‘female agency in wartime was rooted in more generalized female services in the domestic sphere’. ‘Engendering the Wars of Religion’, p. 147. 46 Burel, Mémoires de Jean Burel, vol. 2, pp. 223–4. 47 Ibid., p. 224. 48 Cited in P. and M-L. Biver, Abbayes, monastères, couvents de femmes a paris des origines à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1975, pp. 474–5. 49 Mémoires de Jean Burel, vol. 2, p. 215. 50 AD d’Indre-et-Loire, H 796, Journal historique de Beaumont-lès-Tours, pp. 175–90. 51 Ibid., p. 173. 52 See extensive discussion of Catholic league political manouevres, ibid., pp. 172–5 and 219–28. 53 Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) C. de Grandmaison (Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Touraine, vol. 26), Tours, RouilléLadevèze, 1877, pp. 41–2. 54 Ibid., pp. 41–2. 55 Mémoires de Jean Burel, vol. 2, pp. 229, 238 n. 1, 242 n. 1, 267 n. 1, 269 n. 1, 272. 56 Ibid., p. 289. 57 Ibid., pp. 228 n. 1, 281. 58 Mark Greengrass, ‘Informal Networks in Sixteenth-century France Protestantism’, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) R. A. Mentzer Jr and A. Spicer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 78–97. 59 Many examples can be found in Mémoires et correspondance de DuplessisMornay, 12 vols, Paris, Treuttel et Wurtz, 1824. 60 AN, Chartrier de Thouars, 1 AP 333, November [1596]. 61 See, for example, Catherine de Parthenay to Charlotte Arbaleste, 27 February 1597, Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, vol. 7, pp. 166–9; Duplessis-Mornay to the Duchess of Beaufort, 14 November 1597, vol. 7, p. 428; Duplessis-Mornay to Arbaleste, 25 January 1597, vol. 7, p. 126; Duplessis-Mornay to Arbaleste, 8 December 1597, vol. 7, pp. 434–6.

Notes 173 62 Reproduced in E. Belle, La Réforme à Dijon: des origines à la fin de la Lieutenant Générale de Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes (1530–1570), Dijon, Damidot, 1911, p. 119. 63 Ibid., p. 29. 64 Ibid., p. 29 n. 4. 65 Lettres missives originales du seizième siècle, tirées des archives du duc de La Trémoille, (eds) P. Marchegay and H. Imbert, Niort, L. Clouzot, 1881, pp. 297–8. 66 Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, vol. 7, pp. 166–9. 67 AN 1 AP 333, 18 October 1598. 68 AM Tours, GG 5, Carton 1, pièce 40, 17 May 1591. 69 AM Tours, GG 2, unpaginated loose sheets, 1573–4. 70 Jacques Gaches, Mémoires sur les Guerres de Religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc (1555–1610), (ed.) C. Pradel, (1879–94) Geneva, Slatkine, 1970, p. 337. 71 Nicolas Pithou de Chamgobert, Chronique de Troyes et de la Champagne durant les guerres de Religion (1524–1594), (ed.) P.-E. Leroy, Presses universitaires de Reims, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 210–11. 72 Georges Bosquet, Histoire de M.G. Bosquet sur les troubles advenus en la ville de Tolose l’an 1562, Toulouse, R. Colomiez, 1595, p. 150. 73 Bosquet, Histoire de M.G. Bosquet, pp. 150–1. 74 Account of Joseph Panier, cited in Challe, Histoire des guerres du Calvinisme et de la Ligue, vol. 2, pp. 311–12. 75 Jean Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), vol. 3, Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, 1889, 384–7. 76 See, on this aspect, discussion in Chapter 3. 77 Penny Roberts, ‘Huguenot Petitioning during the Wars of Religion’, in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, (eds) Mentzer and Spicer, pp. 74–5. 78 See, for example, AM Toulouse, GG 830–7 on municipal sales of Huguenot possessions, and compensation provided, 1562–74. 79 AM Toulouse, GG 830. 80 December 1570, Lettres de Coras, celles de sa femme, de son fils et de ses amis, (ed.) C. Pradel, Albi, G.-M. Nougiès, 1880, p. 27. 81 Ibid., p. 28. 82 Ibid., p. 28. 83 Ibid., pp. 29–31. 84 L’assemblée de la noblesse et commun estat du pais de Dauphiné, teneue à Valence, 27 January 1563, in Documents protestants inédits du XVIe siècle, (ed.) E. Arnaud, Paris, Grassart, 1872, p. 51. 85 H. Feiss, ‘ “Consecrated to Christ, Nuns of this Church Community”: The Benedictines of Nôtre-Dame de Saintes 1047–1972’, American Benedictine Review, 45, 3, 1994, p. 294. 86 L. Coudanne, ‘Le Temps des réformes’, Histoire de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix de Poitiers: Quatorze siècles de vie monastique, Poitiers, Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1986, p. 252. 87 Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue française, (ed.) A.-L. Herminjard, vol. 3, Nieuwkoop, B. De Graaf, 1965, p. 222.

174 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France 88 Jeanne de Jussie, Le Levain du calvinisme, ou commencement de l’hérésie de Genève, Chambery, Frères Du Four, 1611. 89 Correspondance des réformateurs, (ed.) Herminjard, vol. 7, 1966, p. 3. 90 Ibid., p. 4. 91 Chronique de l’Abbaye de Beaumont-Lez-Tours, (ed.) Grandmaison, p. 188. 92 Ibid., p. 188. 93 Ibid., p. 189. 94 AD des Bouches du Rhone, G 401 cited in C. Dolan, Entre Tours et Clochers: les gens d’Eglise à Aix-en-Provence au XVIe siècle, Sherbrooke, Editions de l’Université de Sherbrooke/Aix-en-Provence, Edisud, 1981, p. 42. 95 AC de la ville d’Aix, CC 155 cited ibid., p. 43. 96 AC de la ville d’Aix, FF 10, fol. 145 and BB 93, fol. 14 cited ibid., 43. 97 AM Toulouse, GG 823. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Minut, De la beauté, 11–12. On religious violence in Toulouse, see J. Davies, ‘Persecution and Protestantism: Toulouse, 1562–1575’, The Historical Journal, 22, 1, 1979, 31–51; M. Greengrass, ‘The Anatomy of a Religious Riot in Toulouse in May 1562’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34, 3, 1983, 367–91. 102 Morbi Gallos, p. 11. 103 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 104 Dolan provides an example of the Clarisse convent in Aix-en-Provence needing continual aid from religious, municipal and royal sources in order to sustain itself through the sixteenth century, because spontaneous public donations were not sufficient. See her Entre Tours et Clochers, pp. 42–4. 105 De la beauté, pp. 11–12. 106 Ibid., p. 12. 107 Morbi Gallos, pp. 9–10. 108 Ibid., p. 9. 109 AD du Rhone, 27 H 56. 110 Ibid. 111 E. Cabié (ed.), Guerres de Religion dans le Sud-Ouest de la France et principalement dans le Quercy. D’après les papiers des seigneurs de Saint-Sulpice de 1561 à 1590, Geneva: Slatkine, 1975, p. 151. 112 AD de l’Hérault, 62 H 3. 113 Ibid. 114 AD de l’Hérault, 63 H 42. 115 AD de l’Aude, H 316, Cistercians of Nôtre-Dame de Rieunette, abbess Cecile de Noe, c. 1654. 116 AD de l’Hérault, 62 H 3. 117 Ibid. See also AD de l’Hérault, 63 H 57. 118 AD de l’Hérault, 62 H 3. 119 A. Farge, ‘Protesters Plain to See’, in A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, vol. 3, (eds) N. Z. Davis and A. Farge, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 497. 120 Mémoires de Jean Burel, vol. 2, pp. 352–3. 121 Ibid., p. 354.

Notes 175 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129 130 131

132 133

134

135

AM Tours, GG 5, Carton 1, pièce 16, 19 April 1592. AM Tours, GG 5, Carton 5, pièce 16. AM Tours, GG 5, Carton 1, pièce 22, 27 December 1592. Pithou, Chronique de Troyes, vol. 2, 552. Roberts, ‘Huguenot Petitioning during the Wars of Religion’, pp. 62–77. Madeleine des Roches, Les Œuvres, (ed.) Larsen, p. 172. Louise Bourgeois, Observations diverses sur la sterilité, perte de fruits, foecondité, accouchements, et maladies des femmes et enfants nouveaux naiz, Deuxième livre, Paris, Abraham Saugrain, 1617, pp. 104–8. T. Moulinet, Vie de la Bienheureuse Jeanne de Valois, Paris, Louis Vivès, 1856, pp. 210–20. See further discussion in Chapter 2. Marie de Brames, Les Regrets de Damoiselle M de B, Lyon, 1597, in Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles: morales, facetieuses, historiques, (eds) A. de Montaiglon and K. Rothschild, Paris, Bibliothèque Elzevirienne, 1858, p. 149. Marie de Prevost, Le Tombeau de feu Missire François du Parc, Pierre Salliere, 1590, p. 7. U. Strasser, ‘Cloistering Women’s Past: Conflicting Accounts of Enclosure in a Seventeenth-century Munich Nunnery’, Gender in Early Modern German History (ed.) U. Rublack, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 242. B. B. Diefendorf, ‘An Age of Gold? Parisian Women, the Holy League and the Roots of Catholic Renewal’, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, (ed.) Wolfe, p. 176. Diefendorf, ‘An Age of Gold?’ p. 185.

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Archives départementales de l’Aude H 329–336 Couvent de Prouille

Archives départementales de la Vienne 2 H 1 Sainte-Croix de Poitiers 2 H 2 Abbaye de La Trinité

Archives départementales de l’Haute-Garonne 205 H Prieure de Lespinasse 209 H Clarisses du Salin 211 H Clarisses de Levignac

Archives départementales de l’Hérault 61 H Clarisses de Beziers 62 H Abbaye de Saint-Guilhen de Montpellier 63 H Nôtre-Dame de Saint-Gilles, Sainte-Catherine de Saint-Gilles

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180 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Jean Bodin, De la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Paris, Jacques du Puys, 1587. Georges Bosquet, Histoire de M. G. Bosquet sur les troubles advenus en la ville de Tolose l’an 1562, Toulouse, R. Colomiez, 1595. Jean Bouchet, Les annales d’Aquitaine, faicts & gestes en sommaire des roys de France, & d’Angleterre, & païs de Naples & de Milan, Poitiers, J. et E. de Marnef, 1557. Jehan Boulaese, L’Abbregée histoire du grand miracle par nostre Seigneur & Seigneur Jesus-Christ en la saincte Hostie du sacrement de l’Autel, faict à 1566, Paris, Thomas Belot, 1573. Catherine de Bourbon, Lettres et poésies de Catherine de Bourbon, princesse de France, infante de Navarre, duchesse de Bar (1570–1603), (ed.) R. Ritter, Paris, H. Champion, 1927. Gabrielle de Bourbon, Oeuvres spirituelles 1510–1516, (ed.) E. Berriot-Salvadore, Paris, Champion, 1999. Louise Bourgeois, Observations diverses sur la sterilité, perte de fruits, foecondité, accouchements, et maladies des femmes et enfants nouveaux naiz, Paris, Abraham Saugrain, 1617. Jean Burel, Mémoires de Jean Burel: Journal d’un bourgeois du Puy à l’époque des guerres de religion publiés et annotés par Augustin Chassaing, (eds) B. and P. Rivet, 2 vols, Saint-Vidal, Centre d’Etude de la Vallée de la Borne, 1983. Jean Calvin, Letters of John Calvin, (ed.) J. Bonnet, (1858) 4 vols, New York, Burt Franklin, 1972. Catherine de Clèves, Pleurs et souspirs lamentables, de Madame de Guyse: sur la mort & assasinat a son espoux, Monseigneur le Duc de Guyse, le vendredy vingt-troisieme iour de Decembre, 1588, Paris, François le Jeune, 1589. Gabrielle de Coignard, ( Jane and Catherine de Mansecal), Œuvres Chrestiennes, de feu dame Gabrielle de Coignard, Vefve à feu Monsieur de Mansecal, Sieur de Miremont, President en la Cour de Parlement de Tholose, Tournon, Jacques Faure, 1595. Gabrielle de Coignard, Œuvres Chestiennes [sic] de Feu [sic] Dame Gabrielle de Coignard (Toulouse, Pierre Jagourt and Bernard Carles, 1594) Macon, Protat, 1890. Gabrielle de Coignard, Œuvres chrétiennes, (ed.) C. H. Winn, Geneva, Droz, 1995. Gabrielle de Coignard, Spiritual Sonnets, (ed. and trans.) M. E. Gregg, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003. Jean de Coras, Jacqueline de Bussi et al, Lettres de Coras, celles de sa femme, de son fils et de ses amis, (ed.) C. Pradel, Albi, G.-M. Nougiès, 1880. Jean Crespin, Histoire des Martyrs persecutez et mis à mort pour la verité de lévangile, Depuis le temps des apostres jusques à present (1619), Toulouse, Société de Livres Religieux, vol. 1, 1885, vol. 2, 1887, vol. 3, 1889. Marie Dentière, Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin, (ed.) Mary B. McKinley, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Œuvres de Mes Dames des Roches de Poetiers Mere et Fille, Paris, Abel L’Angelier, 1578. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Secondes Œuvres de Mes-dames des Roches de Poictiers, Mere & Fille, Poitiers, Nicolas Courtoys, 1583. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Œuvres, (ed.) A. R. Larsen, Geneva, Droz, 1993. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, Les Secondes Œuvres, (ed.) A. R. Larsen, Geneva, Droz, 1998.

Select Bibliography 181 Jeanne du Laurens, Une famille au XVIe siècle, (ed.) C. de Ribbe, Paris, Joseph Albanel, 1868. Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Charlotte Arbaleste et al., Mémoires et correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, 12 vols, Paris, Treuttel et Wurtz, 1824. Madame and Philippe du Verger, Le Verger Fertile des Vertus Plein de toute diversité, de fruicts & fleurs pour l’ytilité ornement & saincte instruction de la petite ieunesse, Paris, François Jacquin, 1595. Madame and Philippe du Verger, Le Verger Fertile des Vertus Plein de toute diversité, de fruicts & fleurs pour l’ytilité ornement & saincte instruction de la petite jeunesse (1595), (eds) S. Broomhall and C.H. Winn, Paris, Champion, 2004. Jacqueline d’Entremont, ‘Lettre inédite de Jacqueline, comtesse d’Entrement’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 4, 1856, 468. Anne d’Este, Les regrets de madame de Nemours sur la mort de Messeigneurs de Guyse, ses enfans, Paris, Hubert Velu, 1589. Pierre Foucher, ‘Extraits de la chronique de Pierre Foucher’, (ed.) E. Molinier, Documents historiques bas-latins, provençaux et français, vol. 2, Limoges, Veuve H. Ducourtieux, 1885, 42–57. Jacques Gaches, Mémoires sur les Guerres de Religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc (1555–1610), (ed.) C. Pradel (1879–94), Geneva, Slatkine, 1970. Françoise Guyard, La Chronique de l’Annonciade, (ed.) J.-F. Bonnefoy, Paris, Editions franciscaines, 1937. Agnes d’Harcourt, The Writings of Agnes of Harcourt: The Life of Isabelle of France and the Letter on Louis XI and Longchamp, (ed.) S. L. Field, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Claude Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton, vol. 1, 1553–65, vol. 2, 1566–72, (ed.) L. Bourquin, Paris, Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2001, 2003. Jeanne de Jussie, Le Levain du calvinisme, ou commencement de l’hérésie de Genève, Chambery, Frères Du Four, 1611. Jeanne de Jussie, Le Levain du calvinisme, ou commencement de l’hérésie de Genève (1611), Geneva, Jules-Guillaume Fick, 1853. Louis Le Caron, De la Tranquilité d’Esprit, Livre Singulier, plus un discours sur le procès criminel faict à une sorcière condamnée à mort par Arrest de la Court de Parlement, Paris, Jacques Du Puy, 1588. Guillaume Le Riche, Journal de Guillaume et de Michel Le Riche, avocats du roi à Saint-Maixent (de 1534 à 1586), Geneva, Slatkine, 1971. Pierre de l’Estoile, The Paris of Henry of Navarre as seen by Pierre de l’Estoile: Selections from his Mémoires-Journaux, (trans. and ed.) N. L. Roelker, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1958. Yves Magistri, Miroyers et guides fort propres pour les Dames et Damoiselles de France, (Bourges, Pierre Bouhier, 1585), Sint-Truiden, Institut voor franciscaanse geschiedenis, 1996. Michel Marescot, Discours veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, pretendue demoniaque, Paris, Mamert Patisson, 1599. Anne de Marquets, Sonets, prières et devises en forme de pasquins pour l’assemblée de Messieurs les Prélats et Docteurs, tenue à Poissy, Paris, veuve Guillaume Morel, 1566. Anne de Marquets (trans.), Les Divines Poésies de Marc Antoine Flaminius: Contenantes diverses Prieres Meditations, Hymnes et actions de graces à Dieu: Mises

182 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France en François, avec le Latin respondant l’un à l’autre. Avec plusieurs Sonnets & Cantiques ou Chansons Spirituelles pour louer Dieu, Paris, Nicolas Chesneau, 1569. Anne de Marquets, Sonets spirituels, (ed.) G. Ferguson, Geneva, Droz, 1997. Anne de Marquets, ‘Naissance des échanges polémiques à la veille des guerres civiles: Anne de Marquets et son adversaire protestant: texte intégral, avec une introduction et des annotations’, (ed.) A. Gendre, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 62, 2000, 317–57. Catherine de Medici, Lettres de la Royne du vingtquatriesme de Iuillet, envoyées à monseigneur le duc de nemours, Gouverneur & Lieutenant general pour le Roy ès païs de Lyonnois, etc ou à son Lieutenant, Lyon, Benoît Rigaud, 1563. Catherine de Medici, Remonstrance faitte au Roy. Par la Royne Mere à la fin de ces [sic] jours, sur choses advenues au Royaume de France, depuis l’An mil cents cinq huictante quatre, & les causes pourquoy, Blois, Pierre Tochet, 1589. Étienne Médicis, Le Livre De Podio, ou Chronique d’Étienne Médicis, (ed.) A. Chassain, 2 vols, Le Puy-en-Velay, M.-P. Marchessou, 1869, 1874. Charlotte and Gabriel de Minut, Morbi Gallos. Infestantis salubris curatio et sancta medicina: Hoc Est, Malorum, quae intestinum crudeleque Gallorum bellum inflammant, remedium, Lyon, Barthélemy Honorat, 1587. Charlotte and Gabriel Minut, De la beauté, avec la Paule-graphie par Gabriel de Minut, Lyon, Barthélemy Honorat, 1587. Adrien de Montalembert, La Merveilleuse histoire de l’esperit qui depuis naguères c’est [sic] apparu au monastère des religieuses de Sainct-Pierre de Lyon, Lyon, A. Brun, 1887. Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes, Composees par Damoiselle Georgette de Montenay, Lyon, Jean Marcorelle, 1571. Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes (1571), (intro.) C.N. Smith, Continental Emblem Books No. 15, Menston, The Scolar Press, 1973. Flandrine de Nassau, ‘Correspondence’, (ed.) P. Marchegay, Archives historiques de Poitou, Poitiers, H. Oudin, 1872, 203–96. Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de lame pecherresse, auquel elle recongnoist ses faultes et pechez aussi ses graces et benefices a elle faictz par Jesuchrist son espoux, La Marguerite tresnoble et precieuse sest preposee a ceulx qui de bon cueur la cerchoient, Alençon, Simon du Bois, 1531. Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de Treschrestienne Princesse Marguerite de France, Royne de Navarre, Duchesse D’Alençon & du Berry: auquel elle voit & son neant, & son tout, Paris, Antoine Augereau, 1533. Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, entre tresnoble et excellente princesse ma dame Marguerite de France, sœur unique du Roy nostre sire, par la grace de dieu Royne de Navarre, duchesse Dalencon et Berry, Et lame saincte de defuncte ma dame Charlote de France, fille aysnee dudit sieur, et niepce de ladicte dame Royne. Le Miroir de lame pecherresse: auquel elle recongnoist ses faultes et pechez, aussy les graces et benefices a elle faictz par Jesus Christ son espoux. Discord estant en lhomme par la contrariete de Lesperit et de la Chair: et sa paix par vie spirituelle. Une oraison a nostre seignr Jesus Christ, Alençon, Simon du Bois, 1533. Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron des Nouvelles de tresillustre et tresexcellente Princesse Marguerite de Valois, Royne de Navarre. Remis en son vray ordre, confus au paravant en sa première impression, Paris, Jean Cavellier, 1559. Marguerite de Navarre, Les Dernières Poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, (ed.) A. Lefranc, Paris, Colin, 1896.

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192 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Klipffel, H., Le Colloque de Poissy. Etude sur la crise religieuse et politique de 1561, Paris, Librairie internationale, 1867. Kuperty-Tsur, N., Se dire à la Renaissance: Les Mémoires au XVIe siècle, Paris, J. Vrin, 1997. Kuperty-Tsur, N., ‘Le moi, sujet de l’histoire’, Nouvelle Revue du Seizième Siècle, 19, 1, 2001, 63–81. Labande-Mailfert, Y., R. Favreau, L. Coudanne, J. Marcadé and R. Gazeau, Histoire de l’Abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Poitiers, Poitiers, Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1986. Lacger, L. de, ‘Histoire des Annonciades de Fargues à Albi’, Revue d’histoire franciscaine, 5, 1928, 100–67. Lambert, E., Histoire de Marguerite de Lorraine, Argentan, Barbier, 1854. Lambin, R. A., Femmes de paix: La coexistence religieuse et les dames de la noblesse en France, 1520–1630, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2003. Lançon, P., ‘Les Confréries du Rosaire en Rouergue aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Annales du Midi, 96, 166, 1984, 121–33. Lazard, M., Images littéraires de la femme à la Renaissance, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1985. Lazard, M., Les avenues de Féminye. Les femmes et la Renaissance, Paris, Fayard, 2001. Lebrun, F. (ed.), Histoire des catholiques en France: du XVe siècle à nos jours, Toulouse, Privat, 1980. Le Gall, J.-M., Les Moines au temps des Réformes: France (1480–1560), Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2001. Lefranc, A., Les Idées religieuses de Marguerite de Navarre d’après son oeuvre poétique, Geneva, Slatkine, 1969. Lehfeldt, E. A., ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 1999, 1009–30. Lehfeldt, E. A., ‘Convents as Litigants: Dowry and Inheritance Disputes in Early Modern Spain’, Journal of Social History, 33, 3, 2000, 645–64. Lehfeldt, E. A., ‘Gender, Order, and the Meaning of Monasticism during the Reign of Isabel and Ferdinand’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 93, 2002, 145–71. Léonard, E. G., Histoire générale du protestantisme, 2 vols, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1961. Leroquais, V., Les Livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, vol. 2, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1927. Leroquais, V., Les Psautiers manuscrits latins des bilbiothèques publique de France, Macon, Protat, 1940–1. Lewis, G. J., By Women, for women, about women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenthcentury Germany, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996. Lierheimer, L., ‘Redefining Convent Space: Ideals of Female Community among Seventeenth-century Ursuline Nuns’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 24, 1997, 211–20. Lowe, K. J. P., ‘Female Strategies for Success in a Male-ordered World: The Benedictine Community of Le Murate in Florence in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, Women in the Church, (eds) W. J. Sheils and D. Wood, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990, 209–21. Lowe, K. J. P., ‘Elections of Abbesses and Notions of Identity in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Italy, with Special Reference to Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54, 2001, 389–429.

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196 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Reynes, G., Couvent de femmes: la vie religieuse contemplative dans la France des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Fayard, 1987. Robbins, K. C., ‘Magical Emasculation, Popular Anticlericalism, and the Limits of the Reformation in Western France circa 1590’, Journal of Social History, 31,1, 1997, 61–83. Roberts, P., ‘Religious Conflict and the Urban Setting: Troyes during the French Wars of Religion’, French History, 6, 3, 1992, 259–78. Roberts, P., ‘The Most Crucial Battle of the Wars of Religion? The Conflict over Sites for Reformed Worship in Sixteenth-century France’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 89, 1998, 247–67. Robillard de Beaurepaire, C. de, ‘Notes extraites des premières registres de l’HôtelDieu de Rouen’, Extrait du Précis des travaux de l’Académie des Sciences, BellesLettres et Arts de Rouen, Rouen, H. Boissel [1870]. Rocquain, F., La France et Rome pendant les guerres de religion, Paris, Champion, 1924. Roelker, N. L., ‘The Appeal of Calvinism to French Noblewomen in the Sixteenth Century’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2, 1972, 391–418. Roelker, N. L., ‘The Role of Noblewomen in the French Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 63, 1972, 168–95. Roper, L., ‘Luther: Sex, Marriage and Motherhood’, History Today, 33, 1983, 33–8. Roper, L., The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989. Roper, L., Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, London, Routledge, 1994. Roper, L., ‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archiv f ür Reformationsgeschichte, 92, 2001, 290–302. Roper, L., Witchcraze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2004. Rosa, S. and D. Van Kley, ‘Religion and the Historical Discipline: A Reply to Mack Holt and Henry Heller’, French Historical Studies, 21, 4, 1998, 611–29. Roserot de Melin, J., ‘Etudes sur les relations du Saint Siège et l’Eglise de France dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, Rome et Poissy 1560–1’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, Paris, 1921–2, 47–151. Rublack, U. (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ruble, A. de, Le Colloque de Poissy, Paris, H. Champion, 1889. S. Francesco di Paola, Chiesa e societa’ del suo tempo: atti del convegno internazionale di studio, Paola, 20–24 maggio 1983 Rome, Curia Generalizia dell’Ordine dei Minimi, 1984. Sampson Vera Tudela, E., Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2000. Scarraffia, L. and G. Zarri (eds), Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999. Schotel, G. D. J., Jean Diodati, s’Gravenhage, P. H. Noordenhorp, 1844. Schroeder, H. J., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, St Louis, B. Herder, 1960. Seiler, M. H., ‘Anne de Marquets, poétesse catholique du XVIe siècle’, PhD thesis, Catholic University of America, 1931.

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198 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Viguerie, J. de, ‘La Réforme de Fontevraud de la fin de XVe siècle à la fin des guerres de religion’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 65, 174, 1979, 107–17. Vose, H., ‘Marguerite d’Angoûleme: A Study in Sixteenth-century spirituality, based on her 1521–1524 correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet’, PhD thesis, The University of Western Australia, 1985. Walker, A. M. and E. H. Dickerman, ‘ “A Woman under the Influence”: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, 3, 1991, 534–54. Walker, A. M. and E. H. Dickerman, ‘The Haunted Girl: Possession, Witchcraft and Healing in Sixteenth-century Louviers’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 23, 1996, 207–18. Walker, C., ‘ “Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letterwriting in Early Modern English Convents’, Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, (ed.) J. Daybell, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 1999, 159–76. Walker, C., ‘Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenthcentury English Cloisters’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 1999, 397–418. Walker, C., Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wanegffelen, T., Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle, Paris, Champion, 1997. Weaver, F. E., ‘Women and Religion in Early Modern France: A Bibliographical Essay on the State of the Question’, The Catholic Historical Review, 67, 1981, 50–9. Weber, A., Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990. Weiss, N., ‘La réforme à Bourges au XVIe siècle’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1904, 23–75. Wengler, E. M., ‘Women, Religion, and Reform in Sixteenth-century Geneva’, PhD thesis, Boston College, 1999. Wiesner, M. E., ‘Beyond Women and the Family: Towards a Gender Analysis of the Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 18, 3, 1987, 311–21. Wiesner, M. E., ‘Women’s Responses to the Reformation’, The German People and the Reformation, (ed.) R. Hsia, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1988, 148–72. Wiesner, M. E., ‘Nuns, Wives, and Mothers: Women and the Reformation in Germany’, Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Private and Public Worlds, (ed.) S. Marshall, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989. Wiesner, M. E., ‘Ideology Meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation’, Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, (eds) A. C. Fix and S. C. Karant-Nunn, Kirksville, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 18, 1992, 181–95. Wiesner, M. E. (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany, (trans.) J. Skocir and M. Wiesner, Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1996. Will, S. F., ‘Camille de Morel: A Prodigy of the Renaissance’, PMLA, 1936, 83–119. Willaert, L., Après le concile de Trente: La restauration catholique 1563–1648, Tournai, Bloud et Gay, 1960. Wolfe, M. (ed.), Changing Identities in Early Modern France Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997. Wolff, P. (ed.), Histoire de Toulouse, Toulouse, Privat, 1974.

Select Bibliography 199 Wood, D. (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993. Woodford, C., ‘Women as Historians: The Case of Early Modern German Convents’, German Life and Letters, 52, 3, 1999, 271–80. Woodford, C., Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002. Worcester, T., ‘ “Neither Married nor Cloistered”: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 2, 1999, 457–72. Yandell, C., ‘ “L’Habit ne fait pas la nonne”: Controversy and Authority in Anne de Marquets’, Mediaevalia, 1999, 157–80. Zarri, G., Le sante vive: cultura e religiosita femminile nella prima eta moderna, Turin, Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. Zarri, G., ‘Gender, Religious Institutions and Social Discipline: The Reform of the Regulars’, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, (eds) J. C. Brown and R. C. Davis, Harlow, Longman, 1998, 193–212.

Index Abbatial elections 15–20 Abbatial nomination, royal 15–19 Abbatial resignation 16, 18, 28 Abjuration 27, 48, 88, 92, 98–9 Accounts, convents 9 Agen 15 Aigues-Mortes 41 Aix-en-Provence 25, 27, 107, 130, 133–4 Alain de Lille 76 Albi 79 Albon, Françoise de 63 Albret, Catherine de 121–2 Albret, Jeanne de 119–21, 126 Alençon, René de 56 Alexander VI 53 Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle 89 Allard, Jean 137 Almsgiving, female 115–17 Amboise, Catherine de 71–8 Amboise, Françoise de, St 12–13, 47–8, 71, 73 Amboise, Louis I and II de, archbishops of Albi 14–15 Amboise, Renée de 109–10 Amiens 101 Amoncourt, Louise de 112 Anne of Brittany 11, 52 Anne de France 52, 72, 88–9, 97, 119 Annonciade community of Albi 14–15 Annonciade community of Bourges 10, 24, 50, 56, 58, 140 Annonciade Order 10–15, 13, 45, 49–50, 53–4, 71, 79, 81 Arbaleste, Charlotte 41–3, 90–3, 105–6, 114, 128–9 Architecture, religious 109–10 Arcussia, Madeleine de 27 Arenal, Electa 5 Arles 21 Armagnac, Antoinette de 63–4 Armagnac, Georges de 120

Arnaude, Louise 105–7 Arpajon, Anne de 18 Art, devotional 108–15 Ashley, Kathleen 113 Attendance, religious gatherings, gender of 97–100 Aubigné, Agrippa de 91 Audebert, Anne 67 Augustine of Hippo, St 76 Auxerre 130 Aventigny, Louise de 15 Averly, François de 31–3, 37–8 Averly, Georges de 31–3, 37–8 Avignon 25, 64, 102 Ayme, Claire 88 Baernstein, P. Renée 5 Baillet, Louse 113 Baker, Joanne 18 Balbani, Cesare 91 Bassot, Thenette 129 Baudricourt, Marguerite de 109 Bayeux 104 Beauclerc, Marie de 35–8 Beaumont-lès-Tours, community of 17–18, 21–2, 26–7, 58–9, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 127, 133 Beaune 107 Beauvais 62 Bectone, Claude 79 Bédarrides 64 Belheulhe, Vidalle 128 Belle, Edmond 129 Bellemère, François 21 Bells, founding of 110–11 Benedict, Philip 102 Benoist, René 114 Bérault, Michel 41–2 Berland, Marie 16 Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne 72, 86, 123 Beza, Theodore 85, 89 Bilinkoff, Jodi 7

200

Index Blaisdell, Charmarie 22, 84 Blandine, Marguerite 10–11, 15 Bodin, Jean 65 Bodine, Marguerite 14–15 Boissonnot, Claude 106 Bolsec, Jérôme 114 Bonard, Jean 60–1 Bonnefoy, J.-F. 12 Books as gifts 112–14 Bordeaux 15, 132 Borgea, Magdelaine 138–9 Borne, Claude de 137–8 Bosquet, Georges 83, 114, 130 Bouchet, Jean 50–2, 72 Bourbon, Antoinette de 109 Bourbon, Catherine de, abbess of Soissons 63 Bourbon, Charles de 56 Bourbon, Eleanor de 56, 110 Bourbon, Gabrielle de 71–8 Bourbon, Isabelle de 16 Bourbon, Jeanne de 18 Bourbon, Louis de, Prince of Condé 132 Bourbon, Louise de, abbess of Fontevrault 27, 29, 110 Bourbon, Madeleine de 22, 132 Bourbon, Renée de, abbess of Chelles 48–9 Bourbon, Renée de, abbess of Fontevrault 25 Bourbon, Susanne de 72 Bourbon-Montpensier, Charlotte de 28–39 Bourbon-Montpensier, Jeanne de 103–4 Bourbon-Montpensier, Louis de, duke of Montpensier 29, 30, 1, 34, 38–9 Bourbon-Montpensier, Louise de, abbess of Faremoutiers 29 Bourdeille, Françoise de 28 Bourdeille, Jeanne de 28 Bourg, Anne du 85 Bourgeois, Louise 139–40 Bourges 11, 15, 23, 49–50, 54, 71, 81, 140 Bourgnes, Jeanne 61 Bourgnes, Pierre 59–61

201

Boursier, Isabeau 113 Brames, Marie de 140 Brederode, Yolande de, madame de Falais 84 Brette, Marie 33–4, 35–6, 38 Brie 104 Brochon, Kateline 112 Brossier, Marthe 62, 66 Bueil, Louise de 18 Burel, Jean 127–8, 138 Burial disputes 47, 106–9 Burlamacchi, Chiara 91 Burlamacchi, Michele 91 Burlamacchi, Renée 91–3 Bussi, Jacquette de 131–2 Cahource 109 Calais 112 Calandrini, Magdelaine 93 Caling, Nicole 79 Calvin, Jean 27, 43, 80–2, 84, 114 Calvinist church politics 90–1 Calvinist churches, institutions of 3, 8, 39–45, 66, 83, 99 Calvinist consistory courts 8, 39–45, 99 Canonisation 46, 49–50, 54, 57, 62 Carbonnier-Burkard, Marianne 85 Carcassonne 17, 23, 137 Carmelite Order 13, 47–8 Catherine de Medici 50, 52, 110, 119–20, 123–5, 134–6 Catholic Church courts 8, 39–44 Catholic Church, institution of 8, 9–40, 42, 44–5, 86–8 Catholic institutional reforms 3–5, 20, 78 Cazaude, Jehanne 57 Ceremonial roles, female 97 Ceremonies of childbirth 40; of death 105–8 Châlons 27, 104 Châlons, Hugues de 55 Châlons, Philippine de 56 Chantilly 62 Chapelle-Rainsoun 109 Charbonneau, Jacquine 116 Charitable practices, female 115–17, 145

202 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Charles V 51–2 Charles VI 52 Charles VII 52, 55 Charles VIII 119 Charles IX 51–2 Charlotte of Savoy 52 Charphaude, Jeanne 47 Chasteignier, Françoise de 81 Chasteignier, Henri-Louis de 81 Chasteignier, Louise de 28, 81 Chasteignier, Philippe de 27–8, 80–1 Châteauneuf 64 Chaumont-en-Bassigny 109 Chelles, female community of 48–9 Chenevière, Jeanne 97 Chevalier, Bernard 58 Chevreau, Anne 62 Chezal-Benoît abbey, reformers 22, 26 Childbirth 57 Chouchet, Claudine 129 Clarisses see Sainte Claire Clement VII 21 Clement VIII 17 Clermont, Jeanne de 19, 110 Clermont, Louis de 109 Coignard, Gabrielle de 86–7 Collombière, Françoise 82 Colloquy of Poissy 26, 86, 123 Compiègne 127 Concordat of Bologna 15 Confraternities 3, 96, 113, 127, 145 Confraternities, female involvement in 100–3 Convent exposure to Protestantism 27–39, 80–1 Convents 4–7, 9–11, 13, 14–24, 46–57, 62–3, 71, 73–4, 82, 102–5, 107–10, 112, 116, 123–7, 132–8, 140–1, 144–5 Convent, violence within 16, 23–5 Conversion to Protestantism 80–4 Coras, Jean de 131–2 Correspondence 9, 27, 80–2, 84, 92, 128–9, 131–4 Cossée, Jeanne de 19 Cottin, Marguerite 108 Couchman, Jane 39 Couhé, Jeanne de 16

Council of Trent 5, 16, 20–1, 24, 32, 62 Courts, secular 8 Coutances 98, 112 Coutras 40–1 Crawford, Patricia 4 Crespin, Jean 67–8, 85, 92, 106, 130 Crue, Cécile de 35, 38 Cullotte, Françoise 23 Cusset 140 Davis, Natalie Zemon 3, 5, 82, 100, 114 Delaruelle, Etienne 70 Delumeau, Jean 4, 6 Demonology 64–5 Des Roches, Catherine 119 Des Roches, Madeleine 119, 139 Despaigne, Florentine 130 Devotio moderna mariale 53, 71 Dickerman, Edmund H. 62 Diefendorf, Barbara B. 3, 98, 141 Dijon 97–9, 114, 129 Dinges, Martin 115 Dolan Claire 107, 133 Dominican Order 16 Donald, Donna 90 Dorée, Barbe 65 Doué 129 Doulcete, Françoise 88 Drèze, Jean-François 53, 71 Du Bec, Françoise 93 Du Gain, Françoise 19 Du Laurens, Jeanne 93–4 Du Verger, Madame 89–90 Du Verger, Philippe 89–90 Duplessis-Mornay Philippe 41, 43, 90–2, 128 Dynastic strategies 13, 17–18, 28, 34, 38, 56, 73, 80–1, 108–10, 144 Ebrard, Christophe de, abbot of Marcilhac 18 Education, female 28, 74, 79–85, 88–90, 94, 114–15 Elizabeth I 120 Enchantment 64–5

Index

203

Enclosure, convents 23–7, 47, 103, 132 England 4, 7, 42, 144 Entombments 108–10 Espence, Claude de 26, 86 Essai, chateau of 56 Estavayer, female community of 80 Este, Anne de 122 Evans, Joan 111 Exorcism 62–3, 65

Greengrass, Mark 128 Grenada, Louis de 88 Grevin, Martin 23 Grimaldi, Domenico, archbishop of Avignon 25 Groslée, Antoinette de 63–4 Guichard de Pairé, Jeanne 18 Guillotier, Renée 116 Guyard, Françoise 10–15, 49–54, 57, 81, 140

Family life, concepts of 3, 4, 14, 40, 90–4 Farel, Guillaume 55 Farge, Arlette 138 Fathon, Jean 80 Faucher, Denys 79 Feast-days and festivals 105 Ferguson, Gary 87 Ferrara 91 Filet de la Curée, Gilbert 122 Flaminio, Marco Antonio 86 Fleury, Antoine 120 Fontenay 130 Fontevrault, community of 16–17, 21, 25, 27, 36–7, 56, 79, 110 Fontevrault Order 12, 36–7 Fontevrault, reforms 36 Foucault, Claude 85 Foucault, Radegonde 85 Fougières, Antoinette de 22 Fournel, Jeanne 84, 105, 114 François I 78, 119 Frederick III, Elector 28 Funeral monuments 108–10 Funeral rituals 105–8

Hagiography 9–15, 23, 46–57 Harcourt, Agnès de 46 Hardouin, Gabrielle de 81 Hardy, Daniel W. 114 Harfleur 59 Harline, Craig 5 Harvillier, Jeanne 65 Haton, Claude 48–9, 83 Heidelberg 28 Henri III 19, 85, 119, 139 Henri IV 17–18, 48, 93, 120–2, 126–7, 129 Henry, Jehan 72, 79–80, 112 Heroic female behaviour, interpretations of 67 Historical writing by women 7, 9–15, 21–2, 27–8, 41, 49–56, 58–9, 87, 90–5, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 113, 120–1, 127, 131–41, 145 Holt, Mack P. 2 Holy women see also sanctity 12, 46, 49, 50, 56–7 Hospital services 116–17 Hôtel-Dieu de Paris 23–4 Humanism 77–9

Gaches, Jacques 130 Galpern, A.N. 6, 96, 100–1, 109 Ganges 100 Garelle, Marie 15 Gauvinelle, Catherine 13, 15 Geneva 81–2, 85, 91, 114, 129, 133 Gentilcore, David 58 Germany 4, 27, 32, 42, 104 Gilbert Nicolas (Gabriel-Maria) 10 Gilles, Nicole 50 Gontault, Jeanne de 118 Gosset, Claude 136

Isabelle de France 46–7 Italy 144 Jeanne d’Arc 52–4, 119 Jeanne de France 10–15, 23, 45, 49–58, 71–3, 79, 140 Jehanne, widow of Thomas Bemict 130 Johnson, Susan M. 4 Joinvelle 109 Jouarre 111 Jussie, Jeanne de 56, 133

204 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Kalas, Robert J. 118 Karant-Nunn, Susan 4 Kettering, Sharon 118 Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine 94, 121 L’Estoile, Pierre de 85, 119, 122 La Cour, Agnès de 113 La Cour, Catherine de 116–17 La Croix, Matthieu de 48 La Fougereuze, Madame de 19 La Haye, Françoise de 112 La Madeleine, community of, Orleans 27 La Motte, Pierre de 66 La Moyne, Blanche 59–61 La Rochefoucauld, Françoise I de 132 La Trémoille Charlotte de 17, 22, 111, 133 La Trémoille, Claude, Duke of Thouars 129 La Trémoille, Jean de 25 La Trinité, community of, Poitiers 18–19, 27 Laignes, Jacquelyne de 109 Lançon, Pierre 101–2 Langlois, Marguerite 40 Langlois, Thierrye 109, 115 Lannoy, Raoul de 108 Laon 65–6 Le Gall, Jean-Marie 20 Le Mans 111 Le Mas-Sainte-Puelles 130 Le Megnen, Guillemette 113 Le Megnen, Jehan 113 Le Megnen, Jehanne 113 Le Picart, François 82–3 Le Prevost, Marie 140 Le Puy 117, 126, 128, 138 Le Riche, Marguerite 85 Le Roy, Nicole 62–3 Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. 5 Leo X 47 Ligueux 28 Liniers, Françoise de 108 Lisle, Honor 112 Lobgeois, Catherine 112 Loiseux, Louise 115 Longchamp, community of 46–8

Longwy, Jacqueline de, duchess of Montpensier 30–4, 36, 38 Lorraine, Henry I de, 3rd duke of Guise 92, 122, 127 Lorraine, Jeanne de 17 Lorraine, Marguerite de 73 Louis IX, St 46, 51 Louis XI 11, 52–3 Louis XII 10–11, 16, 52–3 Louise de Savoie 12–13, 54–6, 73, 119 Low Counties 5, 11, 42, 140 Lowe, K. J. P. 7 Loyola, Ignatius de 88 Lucca, Italy 91 Luns, Philippe de 67–8, 85, 106 Luther, Martin 4 Lyons 63–4, 83, 114, 127, 136 Macek, Ellen 3 Mack, Phyllis 7 Magistri, Yves 56, 112 Mahiel, Jeanne 107 Mailloc, Susanne de 112 Malhète, Jeanne 82 Mansecal, Catherine de 86–7 Mansecal, Jane de 86–7 Margaritis, Machane de 130 Marguerite de Lorraine 12–13, 56–8 Marguerite de Navarre 21, 28, 56–7, 77–9 Marguerite de Valois 121 Marital roles 2, 4, 13, 43, 67–8, 73, 77, 87, 90–1, 93, 101, 108–9 Marot, Clément 114 Marquets, Anne de 26, 86–7, 123 Marrafin, Françoise de 17, 21–2 Marshall Wyntjes, Sherrin 3 Marshman, Michelle 63 Martin, Marie 64–5 Martyrdom 3, 46, 49, 66–8, 85, 92, 123, 130 Massacre, St Bartholomew’s 91–2 Maternal roles 3–4, 40, 68, 71–2, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 119–20 Matthews Grieco, Sara F. 89 Mazan, Sybille 102 Meaux intellectual circle 77

Index Meditative literature 70–9, 86–8, 95, 145 Melun, Artuse de 109 Mentzer, Raymond A. 3, 39–41, 44, 99, 115 Méry, Marie de 37–8 Messier, Robert 47 Michelot, Bénigne 105 Michelot, Laurent 105 Military conflict 8, 16, 48, 53, 118, 125–31 Millau 136 Milly, Adrien de 23 Minut, Charlotte de 20, 26, 123–5, 134–6 Minut, Gabriel de 123 Miracles 14, 23, 46–50, 54–7, 59–61, 63, 66–7, 80, 104 Missionaries 5 Monctsoreau, Helene de 112 Montalembert, Adrien de 63–4 Montargis 91 Montauban 41–3 Montay, Jean de 48 Montcausson, Guyonne de 137 Montcausson, Lionne de 137–8 Montélimar 82 Montenay, Georgette de 89–90 Montmorency, Jeanne de, duchess of Thouars 19, 129 Montmorency, Magdeleine 17 Montpellier 19, 98, 137 Montsaujon, Marie de 106 Morancé 136 Morel, Blanche 59–60 Morel, Camille 122 Morel, Louise 64 Morelle, Jehanne 59–60 Mortain 89 Mouhet, Françoise de 13–14 Moureau, Mathurin 116 Moureau, Thienette 116 Mousson, Jehanne 33 Moustier, Nicolas de 109 Munich 5 Mystic visions 54 Mysticism 47, 54, 71–2, 78–9, 144

205

Nantes 47–8 Nassau, Charlotte-Brabantine de, duchess of Thouars 128–9 Nassau, Elisabeth de, duchess of Bouillon 128–9 Navarre 119, 122 Necrologies 9 Nemours, Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, 3rd duke of 126, 138 Neufville le Roy 64 Neuschel, Kristen 118 Neuville, Dauphine de 19 Nicolas, Gilbert (Gabriel-Maria) 10–14, 53 Nîmes 40–1, 115 Nivette, Marguerite 82 Norberg, Kathryn 3 Nôtre-Dame d’Audecye, community of 27 Nôtre-Dame de Couëts, community of 47–8 Nôtre-Dame de Gargues, community of 79 Nôtre-Dame de Jouarre, community of 28–39, 111 Nôtre-Dame de la Couture, community of 111 Nôtre-Dame de Nantes, canons of 47–8 Nôtre-Dame de Nazareth d’Aix-enProvence, community of 25, 27 Nôtre-Dame de Prouille community of 17, 23 Nôtre-Dame de Rieunette community of 137 Nôtre-Dame de Saintes, community of 132 Nôtre-Dame de Soissons, community de 63 Nôtre-Dame, Parisian chapter of 23 Nozeroy 55 Nursing 116–17, 128 Obri, Nicole 65–6 Obry, Marguerite 62 Oliva, Marilyn 3 Orbe 133 Orleans 27, 67, 116

206 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Paraclet, community of 28, 32 Paradin, Guillaume 79 Pardieu, Marie de 112 Paris 22, 67, 85, 89, 91–2, 104, 106–7, 109, 113, 115–16, 119, 122, 139–40 Parlement, Grenoble 82 Parlement, Paris 24, 48 Parlement, Toulouse 23 Parthenay, Catherine de 121–2, 128–9 Patine, Catherine 23 Patronage of female monastic institutions 18, 25, 30–1, 37, 39, 47, 52, 56, 58, 107–8, 134 Patronage, women’s religious 5, 21, 49–52, 56–7, 109–10, 118, 126–8, 134 Paule, François de, St 57–8 Pellant, Marguerite 129 Penketh, Sandra 112 Perthuis, Catherine de 31–3, 36, 38 Petot, Pierre 107 Philiberte de Luxembourg 56 Pierre II, Duke of Brittany 47 Pierrepoint, Anne de 22 Pilgrimage 48, 57–8, 62, 104, 113 Pithou Nicolas 83, 89, 114 Pizan, Christine de 76 Poissy 26, 86, 123 Poitiers 16, 18–19, 22, 25, 27–8, 81, 103–4, 109, 116–17, 132, 139 Poix, Jeanne de 108 Polignanc, Anne de 109 Politics, female involvement in 118–25 Poor Clares see Sainte-Claire Poor relief 44, 115–16, 130, 138–9 Possession 7–8, 62–3, 65–6 Pot, Marie 57 Pot, Thomas 110 Pourcelle, Macée 13 Prayers 57–9, 65, 83, 102, 105–9, 124, 127, 134 Preachers, male 97, 112–14 Preaching, female 3, 81–5 Processions 26, 40, 59, 62, 82, 103–5

Propaganda and proselytising 81–6, 89, 94, 119–23 Purgatory 63 Raemond, Florimond de 84–5 Rasca, Gausida 23 Rationality 73, 76 Raymond, Vidal 40 Reading, female 66, 70–2, 75, 77, 78–9, 82–5, 89, 97, 112–15 Réalmont 131 Reform, convent 10, 16, 20–7, 31, 63–4, 79, 144 Regulation, moral 2, 39–44, 79, 99 Regulation, sumptuary 113–14 Reinburg, Virginia 113 Relics 47–9, 63, 103–4, 111 Renée de France 91 Restitution of goods 131 Rheims 104 Richemont, Catherine de 29–32, 36, 38 Roberts, Penny 107, 131, 139 Rochefort Pluvot, Edmé de 126 Rochefoucault, François de 109 Rodez 15 Roelker, Nancy L. 3, 126 Romans 82, 105–7 Ronceray d’Angers, community of 19 Roper, Lyndal 4, 7 Rouen 60, 100–2, 117 Rouergue 102 Roye, Eleanor de 92–3 Ruzé, Jean 29, 32, 35–6 Saint-Belin, Geuffroy de 109 Saint-Belin, Renée de 27 Saint-Césaire d’Arles, community of 21 Sainte-Catherine de Gilles de Montpellier, community of 19 Sainte-Catherine de Montpellier, community of 137–8 Sainte-Claire d’Aix-en-Provence, community of 133–4 Sainte-Claire d’Argentan, community of 56–7

Index Sainte-Claire d’Orbe, community of 54–6, 133 Sainte-Claire de Chambery, community of 56 Sainte-Claire de Genève, community of 56, 133 Sainte-Claire de Montpellier, community of 137 Sainte-Claire de Saint-Cyprien de Toulouse, community of 134 Sainte-Claire de Saint-Salin de Toulouse, community of 20, 26, 123, 134 Sainte-Claire de Vevey, community of 56 Sainte-Claire du Puy, community of 127 Sainte-Croix de Poitiers, community of 16, 18, 22, 25, 28, 103–4, 132 Sainte-Marie de l’Arpajonnie, community of 18, 136 Sainte-Marthe de Tarascon, community of 79 Sainte-Perrine de La Villette, community of 127 Saint-François de Laval, community of 56 Saint-Guilhen de Montpellier, community of 137–8 Saint-Honorat de Tarascon, community of 79 Saint-Jean-de-Bonneval-lès-Thouars, community of 19, 27, 80–1 Saint-Laurent d’Avignon, community of 25 Saint-Laurent de Bourges, community of 23, 63 Saint-Louis de Poissy, community of 26, 86, 123 Saint-Martin de Tours, community of 17, 22, 103 Saint-Maurice, Catherine de 55 Saint-Michel, Catherine de 21 Saint-Pierre des Nonnains, community of 63–4, 136 Saint-Pont, Claire de 126 Saint-Simon-Sandricourt, Agnès de 19

207

Saint-Sulpice, Jacques de 18, 136 Saint-Sulpice, Louise Ebrard de 18, 136 Saints 3, 7, 10–12, 46, 49, 66, 96, 111 Sampson Vera Tudela, Elisa 5 Sanctity 10–15, 47–54, 55–69, 87, 140 Sarret, Claire de 19 Sarrot, Radegonde de 34–8 Saulvageau, Jacqueline 108 Saulx, Catherine de 54–5 Saumur 91 Saunders, Alison M. 89 Sauzet 83 Saveuses, Anthoinette de 112 Schlau, Stacey 5 Sedan 28, 42 Senlis 65 Séverac, Jeanne de 23 Sexuality, female 83–4 Singing 114 Sixtus V 50, 123–5, 134–6 Sluhovsky, Moshe 63 Social status, impact of 11–15, 25, 30–1, 34, 38–9, 44–5, 48–9, 58, 62–3, 71, 81, 83, 98–100, 108–10, 113–14, 115–17, 118–19, 126, Soissons 62 Sorbonne 77–8 Spain 5, 122, 144 Spicer, Andrew 99 Spirits, diabolical 64–5 Strasser, Ulrike 5, 140–1 Superiors, convent interaction with 9, 11, 17, 22, 39, 103–4, 132 Supernatural beliefs 8, 46–69 Supernatural healing 48, 57, 65 Supply runners, female 130 Tarascon 79 Tavannes, Jean de 114 Taylor, Larissa J. 97, 112 Testamentary practices 43, 85, 105–9, 115 Theizé, Alis de 63–4 Thouars 80–1 Tongrelou, Jehanne de 116

208 Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France Toulouse 20, 23, 27, 83, 86, 114, 128–32, 134–6 Tours 13, 17, 21–2, 26–7, 57, 103–4, 107–8, 111, 116, 121–2, 127, 130, 133, 138–40 Troyes 40, 83–4, 89, 101, 105–6, 114, 130, 139 Umble, Jenifer 3 Ursuline Order 102 Valence 84 Vassetz, Jehanne 33 Vellèches, dependent priory of SainteCroix 22 Venard, Marc 25, 64, 102 Vendôme 48–9 Verbery 65 Vertueil 109 Vézélay 126 Viennot, Eliane 121 Vierzon 133 Villarzel, Catherine de 80 Villemur 43 Villiers 62 Violence, religious 5–6, 48–50, 81, 91–2, 109–11, 118–42, 145

Virgin Mary 11–12, 54, 63, 71–2, 74, 87, 96, 104, 108, 110 Vivonne, André de 16 Vivonne, Marguerite de 16 Vocation 12–14, 28–39, 55, 116–17, 123 Voisins d’Ambres, Antoinette de 17 Walker, Anita M. 62 Walker, Claire 5 Wanegffelen, Thierry 2 Watson, Timothy 83 Waudricourt, Ysabeau de 112 Weber, Alison 7 Widowhood 13, 56, 73, 77, 94, 99, 101, 109–10, 116–17, 126 Wiesner, Merry E. 3, 5–7 William of Orange 28 Winn, Colette H. 87 Witchcraft 7–8, 62, 64–5 Woodford, Charlotte 7 Work, women’s 97, 100–1, 140 Wrevin 65 Zarri, Gabriella 5 Zwickau 4

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