The Cistercian nunnery of Clairfontaine (2009-2013)
Holy vows, worldly manners. Monastic space, consumption practices and social identity in the Cistercian nunnery of Clairfontaine, PhD research Davy Herremans
Research examines how the sisters in Clairefontaine interacted with their material and social environment in order to understand their position in Luxembourgian society. By using both documentary and material evidence we will demonstrate how the religious in Clairefontaine deliberately used patterns of display exhibited by Luxembourgian nobility to communicate their position in the world.
Medieval and early modern religious women are usually depicted as living in a remote reality, detached from the secular world. An ideal image persists of pious women choosing a disciplined and strictly regulated life of solitude and silent contemplation. A life characterized by alienation from worldly being. Religious communities were and often still are considered as highly regulated institutions, subject to a normative model designed to be universal, leaving little scope for deviant behaviour and individuality. According to this perspective, the choice for a religious life implicated a radical change in lifestyle for the women, chiefly upper-middle-class and aristocratic families entering the convent, forcing them to abandon all goods, worldly values and elite habits.
Findings at Clairefontaine are at odds with this traditional view on female monasticism. Both the documentary and the archaeological record demonstrate how architecture, objects and foodways abridged the physical and mental distance between the religious and the world to which they once belonged. It becomes clear that the sisters were children of their time, who were well aware of worldly pleasures and fashionable consumer practices among the medieval and early modern Luxembourgian elite.