Margaret of Lorraine

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Margaret of Lorraine (born 1463 at the castle of Vaudémont, Lorraine; died at Argentan, Brittany, 2 November 1521) was Duchess d'Alençon, and a nun of the order of Poor Clares. She was beatified in 1921^[1].

[edit] Life

The daughter of Ferri de Vaudimont and of Yolande d'Anjou, Margaret became an orphan at an early age. She was brought up at Aix-en-Provence, by René of Anjou, her grandfather. The latter dying in 1480 she was sent back to Lorraine to her brother, René II, who gave her in marriage at Paris, in 1488, to the Duke d'Alençon.

Left a widow in 1492 she busied herself in the administration of her duchy and the education of her children. When she was relieved of the duties imposed upon her by her position she decided to renounce the world and retired to Mortagne, to a monastery of religious women who followed the rule of Saint Elizabeth. Later having brought with her to Argentan some of these nuns she founded there another monastery which she placed, with the authorization of the pope, under the rule of Saint Clare, modified by the Minor Observants.

She herself took the religious habit in this house and made her vows on 11 October, 1520. On 2 November, 1521, after having lived an austere life for a year in abaustere manner, she died in her modest cell, at the age of sixty-two. Her body, preserved in the monastery of the Poor Clares, was transferred when that monastery was suppressed to the church of St. Germain d'Argentan. In 1793 it was profaned and thrown into the common burying place.

The memory of Margaret of Lorraine is preserved in the "Martyrologium Franciscanum" and in the "Martyrologium gallicanum". After an invitation made by the bishop of Séez, Jacques Camus de Pontcarri, Louis XIII asked Pope Urban VIII to order a canonical inquiry into the virtues and the miracles of the Duchess.