Gifts to the Sisters: Erudition and Material Culture in Family

Gifts to the Sisters: Erudition and Material Culture in Family

Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2009, vol. 4
Gifts to the Sisters: Erudition and Material Culture
in Family Donations to the Ursulines at Troyes
Caroline R. Sherman
W
hen Virginia Woolf began her Three Guineas by observing that
the “daughters of educated men” shared in the culture of education
but received none of the formal, expensive training that the sons of learned
men accepted as their due, she put the sacrifices expected of the sisters in
favor of their brothers in material terms: “the noble courts and quadrangles
of Oxford and Cambridge often appear to educated men’s daughters like
petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton, and the boat train starting for abroad while the guard slams the door in their faces.”1 As a daughter
(and cousin, wife, niece, and in-law) of educated men,2 Woolf perceived
that the material and educational neglect she had suffered outweighed the
advantages of her family upbringing amidst a dynasty of intellectuals.
But Virginia Woolf was writing after the ascendance of the university
education at the end of the nineteenth century.3 The daughters of educated
men who belonged to learned early modern families, by contrast, may
have suffered considerably fewer material and educational disparities even
though they, like Virginia Woolf, did not attend universities.4 This essay
considers one generation of daughters of a learned man—the three daughters (Denyse, Anne, and Louise-Catherine) of Théodore Godefroy, who
became nuns at an Ursuline monastery in Troyes during the seventeenth
century—and the evidence of their lives presented by the family’s gifts to
their convent.
The Godefroy dynasty was a preeminent example of scholarship
practiced in the context of the family household: the same papers and projects in history and law were passed from father to son in the family from
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the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.5 Although only the men
participated directly in the production of scholarship, they married women
from other learned families who were familiar with learned practices
and who sometimes owned considerable private libraries.6 All Godefroy
women were literate, had well trained handwriting, and were expected to
participate in the weekly exchange of letters among the extended family.7
Despite the considerable expense, the Godefroy daughters at times even
went with their brothers on their educational travels.8
The Troyes Ursuline convent was ideal for the family’s purposes.
It was close enough for the brothers to visit their sisters,9 the Ursulines
initially encouraged the maintenance of family ties rather than cloistering the sisters,10 the family had several learned connections to the city
of Troyes and used the daughters’ new convent networks to build new
relationships to the influential and erudite,11 and the order’s emphasis on
teaching allowed the Godefroy daughters (who apparently knew Latin and
were praised for their learning in their necrologies) to put their education
to good use by teaching the children in the Ursuline school.12 Indeed, the
Ursulines offered the Godefroy daughters the closest approximation to the
scholarly life that was available to seventeenth-century women.
Each year the convent received gifts from a variety of donors, who
ranged from Parisian nobility to the young students attending the convent school. These donors all attempted, according to their means, to give
presents that were both practical and delightful. The gifts displayed the
status of the giver—and thereby the status of the nun associated with the
giver—and also made a virtuous contribution to the welfare of the sisters.
For the families of the nuns, then, the presents had many functions. They
ensured the comfort and status of their relatives, gave variety and pleasure
to an otherwise austere monastic life, provided for the needs of the convent, demonstrated the family’s wealth, connected the family to the community of the convent and its donors, and, in religious terms, contributed
to the family’s collective salvation.
There seems to have been little concern over the extravagance of gifts:
the piety of the cause limited donors’ scruples over the appropriateness of
giving lavish gifts to women vowed to poverty, and the Ursulines’ focus on
activity rather than asceticism may also have been an excuse for worldly
Gifts to the Sisters
217
donations.13 Thus donors tended to avoid the purely utilitarian in favor
of gifts that would give enjoyment and flaunt their social standing: precious crucifixes, religious images, sugar, wine, exotic foods, meat, and other
luxuries were all popular. The Godefroy men (widowed father Théodore
and son Denys II—with a single exception of an offering made by the wife
of Denys II in 1650) gave presents across this spectrum, offering meat,
lemons, oranges, and alcohol from Grenada as comestible treats while at
other times presenting gifts such as pieces of gold, small diamonds, and 48
Faience teacups.14 They also gave devotional items, including two surplices,
religious images, and a silver reliquary along with a relic of Fra Angelico.
But although these gifts of food and ornament were for the entire
convent, others were clearly intended primarily or perhaps even exclusively
for the three Godefroy daughters, such as the bed with serge braiding,
mattress, and double cover given in 1639. It is likewise easy to imagine
the ultimate destination of the three pairs of boots offered in 1644. Since
Théodore tended to complain when he did not receive weekly letters from
all of his children, his gifts of paper and sealing wax in 1634 and 1635 were
obvious hints to his daughters. From some of these individualized gifts, we
can guess both the cultural aspirations of the family and—perhaps—the
interests and talents of the daughters. The daughters sang in the convent
choir and presumably used there the liturgical books provided by their
family; they must also have played music together on the double-keyboard
spinet and the three viols they received. The ability to read books and
music easily was essential for a Godefroy daughter: at least two of them
owned spectacles, as can be guessed from the two spectacle cases given in
1646.
Notably, the Godefroy gave more books to the convent than any
other family, suggesting the importance of books for both the men and
women of the learned family. These books included religious and liturgical texts (the lives of the saints, the life of the Virgin Mary, Latin-French
psalters, a missal, religious meditations, a book of canons for the mass, a
breviary, a book of rubrics, a book of Christian poetry, and the life of Saint
Bernard along with unidentified “books of devotion”) as well as books
intended to instruct and amuse (a book of illustrious women that was
presumably either Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames or
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Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris, a history of Barbary, a book on
agriculture, and a collection of soliloquies). When Théodore and Denys’s
masterwork La Cérémonial François came out in 1649, after thirty years of
labor, the family sent a presentation copy to the daughters in the convent.
These gifts, although acknowledging the daughters’ vocations, also served
to keep the sisters connected to their family’s work. Other evidence among
the family papers suggests that the women of the family were quite familiar
with the materials that the men used in their scholarship,15 and apparently
Théodore and Denys deemed that they would be an appreciative audience
for the final published product as well.
The gifts sent by the family to the Ursuline daughters give a glimpse
into the inner workings of the early modern scholarly family. Denyse,
Anne, and Louise-Catherine Godefroy were not central to the family’s
production of knowledge, but neither were they entirely excluded from the
work of the male scholars. Their training was less extensive—and, yes, less
expensive—than that of their brothers, but the objects they received from
the men of the family demonstrate not just care and concern, but also an
appreciation for the sisters’ intellectual vocation.
Notes
1938), 7.
1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
2. Virginia Woolf ’s family tree included Sir Leslie Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen, George Macaulay Trevelyan, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. On the intellectual and familial connections, see Jane Millgate, “Father and Son: Macaulay’s Edinburgh
Debut,” The Review of English Studies n.s. 21, no. 82 (1970): 159–67; Mary Moorman,
George Macaulay Trevelyan, a Memoir (London: H. Hamilton, 1980); George Macaulay
Trevelyan, An Autobiography and other Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1949); George
Otto Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green, 1876); Sir
Leslie Stephen, Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977).
3. On the rise of the university, the creation of professional history and the
corresponding decline of history practiced within the context of the familial household,
see Bonnie G. Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar
and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review
100 (1995): 1150–76, and The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The
Gifts to the Sisters
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Study of History in France, 1818–1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998); William Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of
the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); George
Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983); and George Peabody Gooch, History and Historians in the
Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1913). On professionalization in general, see Gerald L. Geison’s edited collection, Professions and the French State, 1700–1900
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).
4. On erudition in the familial household, see Gadi Algazi, “Scholars in
Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480–1550,” Science in Context 16 (2003):
9–42; Deborah L. Harkness, “Managing the Experimental Household: The Dees of
Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy,” Isis 88 (1997): 247–62; Sarah Ross,
“The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England” (PhD
diss., Northwestern University, 2006); Anthony D’Elia, The Renaissance of Marriage in
Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Powers-Beck,
Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1998); Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Family Circle (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the
English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988).
5. See Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political
Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005); Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory:
Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1980); Denis-Charles Godefroy-Ménilglaise, Les Savants Godefroy:
Mémoires d’une Famille Pendant les XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe Siècles (Paris: Didier et Co.,
1873).
6. Théodore’s wife, Anne Janvyer, who was connected to Chancellor Séguier,
had 166 volumes of history and jurisprudence in her private collection. See GodefroyMénilglaise, 118, and the inventory of her goods at the Lille Médiathèque Jean-Levy,
Godefroy MS 365, piece VI. The list of books (beginning on p. 19) includes such texts
as Plutarch’s Moralia, the Mémoires of Philippe de Commines, Jacques-Auguste de
Thou’s Historia sui temporis, a French Bible, books of maps, Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la
République, and a treatise on the liberty of the Gallican church.
7. For notes by Théodore Godefroy on writing and receiving letters from his
mother, sisters, and daughters, see: Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Godefroy Collection, ms.
67, fol. 43v; Institut, Godefroy, ms. 119, fol. 185; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
ms. fr. n. a. 5163, fols. 80, 86, and 88.
8. Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Godefroy, ms. 286, fol. 145 ff.
9. Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Godefroy, ms. 216, fol. 10, and Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, ms. Fr. n. a. 5163, fol. 52.
10. On the struggle over cloistering and the Ursuline’s apostolic vocation,
see Linda Lierheimer, “Female Eloquence and Maternal Ministry: The Apostolate of
Ursuline Nuns in Seventeenth-Century France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1994).
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11. Initially the family was tied to the historian Nicholas Camusat, who helped
the family research Ursuline establishments and find the daughters a place in the convent
(see Bibliothèque de Institut, Godefroy, ms. 284, fol. 253), and the Denyse family of
Troyes. The convent also helped the Godefroy develop a relationship with the famous
Parlementarian family, the Briçonnets, who were connected by marriage to the learned
Pithou family: see Archives Départementales de l’Aube, Troyes, D 135, fol. 2 for one
such transaction. Camusat was the author of Mélanges Historiques, ou Recueil de Plusieurs
Actes, Tractez, Lettres Missives et Autres Mémoires . . . Depuis L’An 1390 jusques à L’An
1580, first published in Troyes in 1619, among other works. A letter of his to Denys II in
1647 is reproduced by Louis Monmerquué in Le Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire,
Series 6, N˚ 13 ( J1844): 788–90. On learning in Troyes, see the special volume “Culture
Provinciale et Érudition: Troyes et Dijon au XVIIe Siècle” of La Vie en Champagne 30
(1982); and Jean-Paul Oddos and Pierre-E. Leroy, eds., La Vie à Troyes sous Louis XIII:
une ville de Province pendant la Première Moitié du XVIIe Siècle (Troyes: Centre Troyen de
Recherche et d’Études Pierre et Nicolas Pithou, 1984).
12. Godefroy-Ménilglaise, 149–53. On the school, which had twenty-six students in the year 1653, see Archives Départementales de l’Aube, Troyes, D 133.
13. Lierheimer, 41–4 and 74–9. Archives Départementales de l’Aube, Troyes, D
133 reports, in fact, that from the opening of the convent on April 14, 1628, to the end of
April in 1650 the convent managed to spend 962 livres and 14 sous on travel and postage,
a significant sum that suggests the nuns were hardly leading lives of silent isolation.
14. “Dons et aumônes reçu par la maison,” dossier 1, D 135, Archives
Départementales de l’Aube, Troyes: “En l’année 1628 Mr Godefroy a donné la vie des
Sts en deux tosmes avec les figures de la Ste Bible. [In 1628 Monsieur Godefroy gave
the lives of the saints in two volumes with images of the Holy Bible.] . . . En l’année 1634
Monsieur Godefroy deux Rames de papier de la Cire d’Espagne et le livre des Dame
Illustres en deux tosmes. [In 1634 Monsieur Godefroy two reams of paper, Spanish
wax, and the book of illustrious women in two volumes.] . . . En l’année 1635 Monsieur
Godefroy une Rame de Papier et de la Cire d’Espagne et deux livres de la vie de la BVM.
[In 1635 Monsieur Godefroy a ream of paper and Spanish wax and two books on the
life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.] . . . En l’année 1639 Monsieur Godefroy le Pere un lict
garny de serge ver Brun passemante avec le Mathelas et Double Couverture, deux petites
coupes d’Argent, pesant six onces une Epinette à double Clavie, deux violles un coffre de
Cuir bouillu et quatre psautiers latin et françois Monsieur Godefroy le fils une bague de
Diament. [In 1639 Monsieur Godefroy the father a bed lined with green-brown serge
braiding with the mattress and double cover, two small silver bowls weighing six ounces, a
spinet with two keyboards, two viols, a chest of boiled leather, and four Latin and French
psalters. Monsieur Godefroy the son a diamond ring.] . . . En l’année 1642 Monsieur
Godefroy un Messel couvert de maroquin rouge avec des fillets d’or et cinq livres des
meditations du pere Julien Villeneuve. [Monsieur Godefroy a missal covered in red
morocco with gold threads and five books of meditations of Father Julien Villeneuve.] . . .
En l’année 1643 Monsieur Godefroy l’histoire de Barbarie et un livre de la Griculture. [In
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1643 Monsieur Godefroy the history of Barbary and a book of agriculture.] . . . En l’année
1644 Monsieur Godefroy le fils quatre douzaine detasse de fayance quatre pieces dor
ou il y a quatorze petits diaments trois boüettees decorce de Citron. [In 1644 Monsieur
Godefroy the son four dozen Faience cups, four pieces of gold where there are forty small
diamonds, three boots decorated with lemon.] . . . En l’année 1645 Monsieur Godefroy
un grand canon pour la Ste Messe un psautier latin et françois et une Aube demye de
satin blanc. [In 1645 Monsieur Godefroy a big book of canons for the Holy Mass, a
Latin and French psalter, and a half alb of white satin.] . . . En l’année 1646 Messieurs
Godefroy une Violle des Cordes, un grand breviaire un Rubrique l’Esprit de Grenade les
solliloques deux estuys de lunettes demy aube de taffetas à fleurs six citrons et six oranges.
[In 1646 Messieurs Godefroy a string viol, a large breviary, a book of rubrics, spirits of
Grenada, soliloquies, two spectacle cases, a half alb of flowery taffeta, six lemons and six
oranges.] . . . En l’année 1647 Mr Godefroy un livre de pouesie chrestienne et en viande
environ trois livre. [In 1647 Monsieur Godefroy a book of Christian poetry and about
three pounds of meat.] . . . En l’année 1648 Monsieur Godefroy un livre de la vie de St
Bernard, trois tasses de fayence et en viande la valeur de trente sols. [In 1648 Monsieur
Godefroy a book of the life of Saint Bernard, three Faience cups and meat the value of
thirty sols.] . . . En l’année 1649 Monsieur Godefroy le Ceremonial de France en deux
Tosmes. [In 1649 Monsieur Godefroy the Cérémonial de France in two volumes.] . . . En
l’année 1650 Mme Godefroy et Mme Cosard une petite chasse dargent pesant [ ] et une
relique de St Beau Ange. [In 1650 Madame Godefroy and Madame Cosard reliquary of
silver weighing [left blank] and a relic of Fra Angelico.] . . . En l’année 1657 M. Godefroy
4 livres de devotion pr 9 livres. [In 1657 Monsieur Godefroy four books of devotion for
9 livres.] . . . En l’année 1661 Monsieur Godefroy plusieur livres de devotion et grandes
images pour 20 livres. [In 1661 Monsieur Godefroy many books of devotion and large
images for 20 livres.]” The manuscript breaks off and may not include all of the gifts from
the family, although there are other gifts listed in 1659, 1665, 1669, as well as special
donations by Denys II Godefroy of food in 1666 and 1668 in order to celebrate the vesture and profession of his oldest daughter in the convent. The book of meditations from
1642 is unknown, and the last name of the presumed author “Julien Villeneuve” is difficult
to read in the manuscript.
15. See the memoir written by Léon Godefroy for his sister Anne on his visit to
the Val abbey (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, ms. 4981, bundle 4), which uses extensive
learned citations and historical references in the expectation that his sister would easily follow his arguments over chronology, his references to scholarly handbooks like the
Gallia Christiana, and his allusions to other historians.