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Abstract
Clairmarais was a monastery of Cistercian nuns at Reims, France from 1222 to 1460, after which it served as a priory of monks of Igny, and then of Clairvaux. Surviving in the departmental archives of Aube under reference number 3 H 3700 is its fifteenth-century cartulary—a compilation of selected documents, chiefly economic charters, copied from the monastic archives. The cartulary itself was commissioned by the abbot of Clairvaux in order to facilitate the management of the monastery's properties after he had removed the remaining nuns of the community and replaced them with monks. The suppression of the nuns is described in sixteen documents found in the cartulary after the much longer economic section.
The present study offers a transcription and critical commentary of the cartulary, which comprises 123 folios. Individual documents, mostly Latin, but a few in French, range in date from 1222 to 1476, and record some 146 economic and legal transactions of the nuns. These documents have been analyzed in a variety of ways: according to the gender and class-rank of the sellers and donors of goods to the monastery; according to the kind and geographical location of the goods acquired; according to the kind of transaction (sale, donation, confirmation, or legal suit) recorded. This information about the nuns' temporal domain is then evaluated and related to social and historical contexts including Clairmarais's place among the great number of female Cistercian communities founded in the early thirteenth century; the effect of environmental events such as the Great Famine of the early fourteenth century and the Black Death of the 1340s on the monastic economy; and the ravages suffered by the community when its monastic precinct was destroyed in 1359 during the English army's siege of Reims in the Hundred Years' War. Finally, the suppression of the female community of Clairmarais, as described in the documents of the last section of the cartulary, is discussed.
