Dissenting Sons and the Construction of Female Authority in Fontevraud, 1627–43

Since its foundation in the year 1100, an abbess governed the double-order of Fontevraud, which during the Middle Ages grew to one of France’s largest monastic networks. During the 1620s-1640s, Fontevraud’s monks and their abbess, Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon, engaged in an intense dispute about abbatial authority. While one might suspect that the conflict originated with the monks discontent with serving an abbess, a close reading of the rich source material points to another cause. At the time, Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon attempted to do away with Fontevraud’s collegial tradition and to establish undivided abbatial authority over the entire order. The male Fontevraudines, fearing for their traditional role, vehemently opposed these changes. During this conflict, the abbess, with the help of a Jesuit priest, developed a political-theological theory justifying the introduction of abbatial absolutism, a theory that included the adaptation of Jean Bodin’s political thought to the particulars of Fontevraud.

This Fontevraudine conflict and the resulting theory are interesting in two regards. First, the participants’ roles in the conflict challenge modern expectations of ealry modern gender roles: in Fontevraud, the abbess successfully challenged the men’s traditional rights, rather than vice-versa. Second, more generally, this case sheds light on the close ties between the political thought of the ‘world’ and that of the ‘cloister’ along with its ‘gender-blindness’ that have received little scholarly attention.

In this paper, I will briefly outline the conflict and then focus on the abbatial arguments and the justification of undivided abbatial authority. In addition to the aforementioned 'political-theory’, the making of abbatial authority saw far-reaching manipulations of Fontevraudine documents in order to fabricate a history of abbatial absolutism.