The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth-Century Convent

288 Pages·2000·11.545 MB·English

by  Craig Harline

The Burdens of Sister Margaret
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The Burdens of Sister Margaret
INSIDE A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CONVENT
Abridged Edition
Craig Harline
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS [Jpj NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Yale Nota Bene
Revised and abridged edition first published as a
Yale Nota Bene book in 2000 by Yale University Press,
© Craig E. Marline, 2000.
All rights reserved.
An earlier version of this work was published in 1994 by
Doubleday, © Craig E. Marline, 1994.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Sonia Scanlon
Set in Minion type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marline, Craig E.
The burdens of Sister Margaret: inside a seventeenth-century convent /
Craig Marline. — Abridged ed., Rev. and abridged ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-08121-3
1. Smulders, Margaret, d. 1648.2. Franciscan sisters-
Belgium— Louvain—Biography. 3. Monastic and religious life of
women—History— 17th century, i. Title.
BX4705.S6628 H372 2000
271'.97304933-dc21
00-020784
A catalog record for this book is available from the
British Library.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications,
please contact:
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CONTENTS
To the Curious Reader vii
A Note on Usage xiii
Dramatis Personae xv
Prologue: Remembering I
BOOK ONE
How Just About Everyone Came to Loathe Sister Margaret
one Beginning 7
two Demons 20
three Confessors 28
four Despair 42
five The Specialist 53
six Pilgrim 66
seven Fulminations 78
eight No Balm in Bethlehem 87
BOOK TWO
How Margaret Sought Her Revenge and Became the
Watchdog of Reform All at Once
nine The Burden of Bethlehem 103
ten Favorites 111
eleven Almsgetting 127
twelve Worldly Ways 144
thirteen The Visitors 173
BOOK THREE
How Margaret's Hard-Won Triumphs Partly Fizzled Out
fourteen Justification 191
fifteen Capitulation 205
sixteen Finis 213
Epilogue 217
Bibliographical Notes 225
Acknowledgments 259
Index 261
Contents
VI
To THE CURIOUS READER
To outsiders the convent is a mystery. A Belgian television docu-
mentary of the 1950s articulated what many curious people have
wondered since the fourth century A.D.: "What are they doing there
behind those walls?"
The mystery could hardly be otherwise. The convent is by na-
ture private. The women who enter there reject the world most of
us love. Their dress ignores fashion. Their regime emphasizes re-
straint. Their walls declare separation. And their records, through
which we must try to know them, were long dominated by official
papers and corporate ideals, rather than individual sentiments and
actual experience. When we do know details of inner life, it is usu-
ally because of the exceptional—a scandal or a saint—since these
generated more documents and rumors around convents than did
"ordinary" nuns.
These truths were confirmed to me repeatedly over several
summers as I dug around, fall of hope, in the archives of convents
from the old Spanish Netherlands (roughly modern Belgium), try-
ing to find records that would divulge in some detail how these
women lived. Most of the time, I found only beautifully decorated
volumes containing the house rules, or towering stacks of tedi-
ous legal documents, or fat registers that recounted the wondrous
deeds of a potential saint. Rarely was there a personal, human letter.
vn
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when one day I miraculously saw-
not quite in vision—the blessedly revealing bundles of a convent
called Bethlehem, which stood centuries ago in the old university
town of Leuven. After five minutes of thumbing, I realized that here
was what I had been searching for.
It wasn't simply that these bundles were hundreds of years old,
for there were thousands of such papers in this archive. Neither was
it simply that the bundles were thick, for dozens of convents could
boast these, even from the Middle Ages. And it certainly wasn't
fame that drew me in, for Bethlehem was among the simplest of the
two dozen monastic institutions in and around Leuven. What ren-
dered the documents in these bundles unusual was that they con-
tained far more than official records: here was page after page
written by the sisters themselves.
Instead of documents that grudgingly surrendered the occa-
sional tidbit about the feelings of sisters, instead of sterile gener-
alities by official visitors about the spiritual state of the convent,
instead of the usual warm trail of prescriptions that led to the
familiar cold trail of practice, here was breathtaking detail and
passion. I marveled at the survival of these papers, their prolixity,
the noise of a convent sworn to regular periods of silence, and the
diverse points of view revealed. Also appealing was that most of the
documents had to do with decidedly routine aspects of conventual
life, more the "garden-variety" sort of nuns I had been looking
for—though as in any community or family the sensational sur-
faced in Bethlehem as well.
The records of Bethlehem were thickest for the years between
1600 and 1650, an especially dynamic time in European religious
history, right after the early Reformation. Besides Protestant ver-
sions of religious Reform, by Martin Luther, John Calvin, or even
King Henry VIII of England, there was of course a Catholic Refor-
mation, featuring Pope Paul III, Ignatius Loyola, the Most Catho-
lic King Philip II of Spain, or the monumental Council of Trent
(1545-63). But historians for long knew more about these giant
To the Reader
viii
landmarks on the religious scene than about the vast terrain of how
Reformations actually worked. What did Reform, in all its varieties,
mean to the ordinary clergy or laity of a particular time and place?
It's a question that obviously involves many groups, confessions,
individuals, and even centuries, but under scrutiny here are the
women of convents, or "female religious."
These women always constituted a minority of Catholic Eu-
rope, but they were an important minority, numerically and psy-
chologically. In places their total surpassed the male orders; by the
mid-sixteenth century there were perhaps ten thousand women
religious in all the Low Countries (roughly the modern Nether-
lands and Belgium), triple the number of males. And that ordinary
laypeople and ecclesiastical and municipal authorities expressed
such frequent opinion over how female religious ought to behave
hints that convents exerted an influence out of proportion to their
mere numbers. Thus when it became clear that the plain Francis-
can nuns of Bethlehem had confronted the major religious issues of
the day, in such recorded detail, I judged that their experience
might help illustrate in vibrant color an important part of the
Catholic panorama. More than what it told about this convent
alone, here was a lively example (in some ways typical and others
not) of that form of religious life which most in the Roman religion
still regarded as the ideal for women, and which like many institu-
tions during this age came under severe pressure to reform—in
other words to maintain cloister more strictly, sing more atten-
tively, pray more fervently, work more diligently, dress more mod-
estly, love more generously, and obey more speedily.
This up-close picture of conventual life in the Age of Reforma-
tions is admittedly set within a small space, includes a very few
people, and treats a mere handful of the many decades affected by
the famous Council of Trent. Yet as with most close studies, there
are connections to bigger themes and movements. Since these con-
nections are usually embedded in the narrative rather than made
explicit, I will state them briefly here.
To the Reader
ix