Dismantling the Medieval : Early Modern Perceptions of a Female Convent's Past

Abstract

Dismantling the Medieval studies the paradoxical relationship of the early modern canonesses of Bouxières with the medieval past of their institution. While various documentary, material, spatial, and immaterial legacies of that past remained a crucial presence in the convent’s narrative of self, the canonesses also used and manipulated them to pursue and justify drastic changes in their organization and lifestyle. Thanks to an unusually rich and varied body of evidence, we are able to reconstruct in unprecedented detail this elite convent’s highly flexible memory culture over a period of more than two centuries. Guiding the reader back through time, the book gradually reveals how and why the canonesses’ connection to the medieval past lived on throughout many crises and transformations, including even the abbey’s dissolution in 1971.