Rewriting Music, Rethinking Identity: Observant Reform, Liturgy, and Oral Learning among Nuns in the Southern Low Countries
The reform of the Cistercian abbey of Beaupré in Grimminge in 1463 was a decisive moment in the history of the community still memorialized in archival documents approximately 250 years later. The particular movement that enveloped Beaupré and most other Cistercian women’s communities in the southern Low Countries during the fifteenth century spread from one community to another in a process that was overwhelmingly oral. No surviving sources describe what the reform of Beaupré entailed in practice. Nevertheless, subsequent revisions to the nuns’ liturgical books shed light on the religious values that motivated the reformers. Adherents of the so-called Observant movement believed that contemporary religious practice had drifted from the ideals and intentions of its founders and spiritual authorities expressed in key texts.
At Beaupré, reform of the liturgy first involved systematically excising any pages in their six-volume thirteenth-century antiphoner (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W. 759-762) that differed from the standard Cistercian chants approved and promoted by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. So convinced had the nuns become of the superiority of the Cistercian exemplar that they instituted Cistercian chant in the neighboring Benedictine women’s community of Ghislenghien and initiated a cascade of surrounding male and female Benedictine monasteries adopting standard Cistercian use. This talk explores the renewed and heightened attention paid to authoritative texts among reformers in central Belgium in the late fifteenth century at the expense of longstanding local tradition.
