Ursuline Nun’s Jubilee Manuscript, Lille 1698
This beautiful manuscript, written and illustrated on a large parchment leaf, celebrates the demi-jubilee, or twenty-five-year anniversary, of Jeanne-Isabelle du Bois de Sainte-Rosalie, an Ursuline sister in Lille who had originally made her public vows in 1673. It seems likely that the present manuscript was prepared with the kinds of ludic exercises that Ursuline nuns, famous as educators of young girls, often employed in the classroom. These frequently included the imaginative composition and illustration of emblematic poetry, anagrammatic word play, and the careful selection of words containing letters that, in combination, could also spell out an occasional commemorative date in Roman numerals.
The Ursuline community in Lille was founded in 1638, nearly a century after the order’s formation in 1544, by a group of nuns exiled from the city of St. Omer in the Spanish Netherlands. Following the Ignatian model of education and contemplation most closely associated with the Jesuit order, the Ursulines’ spiritual and educational commitments sometimes earned them the epithet “female Jesuits.” The Jesuits—the great founders of Catholic colleges and universities across Europe and the world during the early modern period—remained an exclusively male post-Tridentine order, though even their numbers were for a time surpassed by the strength in numbers enjoyed by the Order of St. Ursula. By the middle of the eighteenth century, some ten thousand nuns of that order were living in 350 communities across France alone, where they were most prevalent (as also in New France).
An emphasis on education, particularly catechizing and moral instruction, as well as the commitment of the order to treating the poor and needy, also meant that most Ursuline communities were not restricted to the cloister. That freedom to live both within and beyond the walls of the cloister, and their dedication to an active apostolate of teaching and learning, may have served as strong inducements to many women interested in taking holy orders along with pursuing the life of the mind. Yet another more practical factor would also have contributed to their explosive growth: in many religious communities the requisite dowries for Ursuline nuns were significantly lower than for other more aristocratic female monastic orders. This had the effect of attracting many women from the rising ranks of the urban bourgeoisie, whose daughters they would invariably instruct and whose minds they would shape for generations.
The luxurious decoration of this particular manuscript befits a nun of the Ursuline order who, despite the required vow of poverty, did not uniformly shun special gifts of sugar, spices, meats, devotional objets d’art studded in semiprecious jewels and efficacious minerals—and, of course, books. The beauty of material objects such as this impressive manuscript would not have detracted from the pious devotions of the nuns. Rather, it bespeaks a bold spirit of sorority and public celebration; the latter is strongly affirmed, as well, by the presence of holes in each of the corners of the manuscript, which suggest it was tacked or nailed to a convent to memorialize the celebration.
Jeanne-Isabelle du Bois appears to have come from a noble family. Her father, François Lamoral Dubois, was a prominent lord in Lille and later in Bruges. Isabelle, who left the grandeur of the court to retire to the peace of the cloister (“quitta mes grandeurs de la Cour et se retira dans un couvent”), chose the religious name of Rosalie, drawing inspiration from Princess Rosalie of Sicily, a twelfth-century noblewoman whose family claimed direct descent from Charlemagne. Rosalie, too, had shunned the material comfort and pleasures of courtly life and, according to her hagiographical tradition, was led by angels to Mount Pellegrino where she lived out her days in asceticism, following the model of hermits from early Christianity.
This jubilee manuscript features two handsomely rendered emblematic illustrations whose iconographic meanings are expounded in verses placed below. The first depicts a sun and its reflection on a cloud. Just as the cloud receives the rays of the sun and reflects them back, making them one and the same, so do Sister Isabelle and Saint Rosalie unite as one person, basking together in the eternal light of God. The deep symbolism and ritual associated with renaming were among the most common tropes in occasional poems composed to celebrate a woman’s formal entry into a convent; so, too, it seems in the less-well-documented instances of long twenty-five-year jubilee anniversaries such as Isabelle’s.
This jubilee manuscript features two handsomely rendered emblematic illustrations whose iconographic meanings are expounded in verses placed below. The first depicts a sun and its reflection on a cloud. Just as the cloud receives the rays of the sun and reflects them back, making them one and the same, so do Sister Isabelle and Saint Rosalie unite as one person, basking together in the eternal light of God. The deep symbolism and ritual associated with renaming were among the most common tropes in occasional poems composed to celebrate a woman’s formal entry into a convent; so, too, it seems in the less-well-documented instances of long twenty-five-year jubilee anniversaries such as Isabelle’s.
Gaspar Baillieul, Plan De La Ville et Citadelle de Lille (Paris, ca. 1700)
The artistic conflation of Isabelle’s name with Saint Rosalie’s in this complex device—rather than supplanting her secular name entirely with her new religious name—reflects the enduring connection of social networks and family alliances of patronage and clientage that linked the fortunes of prominent families to particular convents and female monastic orders. These ties could often prove mutually beneficial in augmenting the spiritual wealth of patrons as well as prestige and social regard for the convent. Indeed, the Ursuline convent in Lille stood within blocks of other female religious houses—including the Rich Clares, Celestines, and Carmelites—several hospitals, and the prominent Collegiate Church of St. Peter, as this detail of a contemporary map of the city demonstrates.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Caroline Sherman, “Gifts to the Sisters: Erudition and Material Culture in Family Donations to the Ursulines at Troyes, Early Modern Women 4 (Fall 2009): 215–21; Abigail Brundin, “On the Convent Threshold: Poetry for New Nuns in Early Modern Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 65:4 (Winter 2012), 1125–65; Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 204–11; Sharon Strocchia, “Naming a Nun: Spiritual Exemplars and Corporate Identity in Florentine Convents, 1450–1530,” in William J. Connell (ed.), Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (University of California Press, 2002), 215–40; Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World. 1450–1650 (Yale University Press, 2016), esp. 425–27; Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal (Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 36–40.
