Dismantling the Medieval

Did early modern people care about the medieval past? That’s the question prof. Steven Vanderputten, an expert of medieval social and cultural history at Ghent University, tackles in his latest book "Dismantling the Medieval. Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent's Past" (Brepols, 2021).

He does so via a case study of Bouxières abbey, a small elite convent situated on a remote hilltop in France’s eastern region of Lorraine. Today few visual reminders survive of the site’s premodern status as a major beacon of the region’s eventful medieval past. However, up to the end of the eighteenth century it harboured countless oral stories, documents, objects, images, buildings, and even landscapes that reminded its inhabitants and visitors of the abbey’s origins as a tenth-century foundation by Bishop Gozelin of Toul.

Using a reversed chronology that takes us from the 1830s to the mid-1500s, "Dismantling the Medieval" lays bare the ambiguous relationship the early modern canonesses of Bouxières had with these medieval legacies. On the one hand these aristocratic women, who lived a life of great comfort and exceptional personal freedom, felt that they had little in common with their distant predecessors, who as Benedictine nuns had lived a strictly regulated and cloistered life: over time they removed themselves, literally and metaphorically, from reminders of that former existence. But on the other hand, these women were also highly protective of stories, objects, and spaces that reminded them of the abbey’s prestigious origins and its connection to St Gozelin. These medieval memories, they had discovered, could be moulded to justify present experiences and expectations.

While these attitudes were not unique, Bouxières is unusual on account of the sheer variety of relevant testimonies by insiders and outsiders. An 1830s letter to Emperor Franz of Austria about the abbey’s mysteriously resurfaced foundation charter; official records that tell the story of the abbey’s end stage in the 1790s and the emergence of a new identity for one of the ex-canonesses; an enigmatic portrait of former Abbess de Messey; the protocols of the convent’s emotionally charged final chapter meetings; the very personal account by a nobleman of his visit to the abbey site in 1766; a late seventeenth-century painting that re-casts the abbey’s medieval foundation story as a dreamy fairy tale; Gozelin’s fabulous relic treasure; the remains of a disastrous attempt to save the abbey’s charter treasure: all these things and much more are featured in the book, each time carefully situated in the ladies’ memory culture.

But "Dismantling the Medieval" does more than that. It also links these and other testimonies to the personal experience of individual canonesses, how they saw themselves, and whether they saw any use in remembering their community’s medieval past. In doing all these things, the book shows that early modern perceptions of the Middle Ages were no less complex than twenty-first century ones. Below you can find a subtitled info clip in English that lifts a tip of the veil.

Below that, you can also find more videos by Brepols Publishers, based on an extended interview with the author. It was released in five parts. Part one deals with the canonesses' secret mission to save the original tenth-century foundation charter of Bouxières abbey just prior to being dissolved in 1791. The second video discusses the relic treasure and what happened to it in times of adversity, up to its final evacuation during the French Revolution. Parts three and four briefly examine the women's ambiguous relationship with their community's medieval past: the intentional neglect of the medieval site and buildings in Bouxières, and how the canonesses took control of the medieval past and reshaped it, e.g. in paintings, in order to construct and promote an identity of their choosing. Finally, part five wraps it up with a statement on the rationale behind the book: the importance of studying the early modern reception of "the medieval" in order to better understand how the latter was passed down to our own time.