Author Description

Excerpt from French Monasticism in 1503: An Abstract of the Plea for Reform Published in That Year by Guy Foueuneaur, Abbot of St. Sulpice De Bourges, Mainly in His Own Words, With an Introduction, and Supplementary Documents Jouenneaux was born about 1450, probably at or near Le Mans.' Like the two Femands, he acquired some distinction as a Latinist at Paris, and published a commentary upon Terence, several other classical books, and a French translation of the Benedictine Rule which has gone through ten editions (berliere, 348 He took the vows about 1492 at chezal-benoit, was elected Abbot of St. Sulpice at Bourges in 1497, and in 1500 was chosen by the Papal Commissary as his coadjutor to visit and reform the monasteries of Benedictine monks and nuns in France (ibid., p. He died in 1507. His reforming energies provoked not only passive resistance but active and public opposition: hence the booklet with which we here deal, the Defence of Monastic Reform. This was dedicated to the Parlement of Paris, and published in 1503, in answer, (as he himself tells us) to certain protests and attacks upon the reformers, which had been circulated by a champion of the unreformed monks. In order to meet these objections, Jouenneaux describes the state in which the majority of French monasteries then were; and it is this which makes his work so valuable. It describes from within, and with convincing directness, the same state of things which can be in ferred from official Visitation documents of the Middle Ages, but only by a laborious process of analysis and synthesis. We have here a vivid picture of French monasticism on the eve of the Reformation. Busch and Tritheim show us that the conditions were similar in many parts of Germany; Ambrogio Traversati has left us a similar picture for North Italy. English monasticism, (like English church life in general) was pretty certainly more regular than in these other countries; but in England also the conditions were essentially the