Maubeuge Abbey

Mauberge Abbey (French: Abbaye de Maubeuge) was a women's religious house at Maubeuge, in what is now northern France, close to the present border with Belgium. It is best known today as the abbey built by Saint Aldegonde, and the educational institution for the young Jan Gossaert, a renaissance painter known as Mabuse after the abbey.

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History

Initially founded as a double monastery, that is, a community of both men and women, this abbey was founded in 661 by the young Aldegonde,[1][2] who was abbess there until her death in 684, and was also buried there. She was succeeded as abbess by her two nieces, first Aldetrudis and then Madelberte.[3] The abbey soon became a Benedictine nunnery, which was later turned into a community of canonesses. Saint Amalberga of Maubeuge became a member of the community later in the eighth century.

Maubeuge was made a royal abbey in 864, under the Treaty of Meersen, which divided Lotharingia.[4] In the eleventh century the abbess was a powerful local figure.[5]

The abbey was dissolved during the French Revolution in 1791.

Abbesses

References

  1. ^ France Guide - Department du Nord : Maubeuge
  2. ^ Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (1981), p. 162.
  3. ^ Latin Saints of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Rome
  4. ^ Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (1996), p. 164.
  5. ^ Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (1994), p. 25.

Sources

External links