Download PDF | David N. Bell - The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe_ A Study of its History from the Twelfth Century to the French Revolution, Brepols 2014.
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PREFACE
This study originated in 1996 when the late Fr Chrysogonus Waddell provided me with a microfilm of the 1752 catalogue of the library of La Trappe, and suggested that a study of its contents might prove profitable for those interested in the later history of the Cistercian Order and the reform of Rancé. He was, as usual, quite correct, and the result was “The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe in the Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey’, published in Citeaux — Commentarii cistercienses in 1998.' Most of that early article remains accurate, and those observations which are not have been corrected in this present volume. Since that time I have also published a detailed account of the manuscripts of the abbey? (a summary of the material appears in the first chapter of the Introduction to this edition) and a study of Rancé in the context of his times.* The second part of the latter contains what I hope is a comprehensive, annotated bibliography of Rancé’s writings, many of which were to be found on the shelves of the library of La Trappe in 1752.
This present edition would not have been possible without the generous help of Fr Chrysogonus and of the late Dom Marie-Gérard Dubois, formerly abbot of La Trappe and then archivist of the abbey. Dom Marie-Gérard provided me with a vast amount of material copied from the archives of the abbey and it is a pleasure to express my deep gratitude to the spirits of both of these monks, now (I trust) enjoying the reward of their labours, for their continual and unstinted assistance. This book would not have been possible without them.
THE FOUNDATION OF THE ABBEY AND THE MEDIEVAL LIBRARY
In 1119, at the Battle of Brémule, Henry I of England defeated Louis VI of [== and brought to an end a short but successful campaign. The king and his entourage then made preparations to return to England, the king in one vessel (arrangements had been made earlier) and his son, William the Aethling, in another, the White Ship. Prince William (Henry’s only legitimate son) was to be accompanied by about three hundred passengers, most of whom were noble, wealthy, and influential land-owners. They included William’s halfbrother, two of his cousins, the nephew of the German Emperor, and Matilda, countess of Perche, who was William’s half-sister and the wife of Rotrou III, count of Mortagne and lord of Nogent.
The White Ship was due to sail from Barfleur on 25 November 1120, but its scheduled day-time departure was delayed as a result of a riotous farewell party fuelled by cask upon cask of wine brought on board by the prince. It was twilight when the ship finally set sail, by which time both passengers and crew were, for the most part, manifestly drunk. The weather — contrary to some accounts — seems to have been calm and clear, but, as a consequence of the combination of a young prince who desired to overtake his compatriots (who had left earlier and were well on their way) and a drunken helmsman, the White Ship ran hard aground on a rock, the Coste raze, just outside Barfleur. The rock ripped a huge hole in the port side of the vessel and it immediately began to founder.
The prince himself was saved by his guards, who hurried him into a small boat and rowed away from the wreck. But William, hearing Matilda, his halfsister, crying out for help on the sinking ship, ordered the boat turned round and headed back to her assistance. His decision, though charitable, was disastrous: those struggling in the sea strove to clamber aboard the prince’s boat, the boat capsized, and both prince and boat vanished beneath the waters of the bay. According to tradition, only one person survived the wreck, a Rouen butcher named Bérold who had been on board trying to collect his debts from the drunken nobles.'
Thus, when Henry of England died on 1 December 1135, he had no surviving male heir and arranged for his daughter, Matilda, to succeed him. But his nephew, Stephen of Blois, seized the throne and thereby plunged the country into an intermittent, protracted, and brutal civil war. Stephen we might add, had also been on board the White Ship, but at the time he was suffering from diarrhoea and — perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because he thought it unwise to set sail with a drunken crew — had decided to leave the ship and embark for England at a later date.
Meanwhile, in Normandy, Rotrou, count of Mortagne, mourned the death of his wife, and also the deaths of about a dozen other members of his family who had perished at the same time. They included his two nephews, Gilbert and Geoffroy (the sons of his sister Julienne de L’Aigle) and his cousin, Richard II, earl of Chester. He then decided to build a memorial chapel for the repose of his wife’s soul, and chose as a location a site midway between his sister’s domain at L’Aigle and his own at Mortagne. The chapel, dedicated to Our Lady, appears to have been consecrated in 1122’ and, according to the Memoriale of the foundation of the abbey, dated 1385 — a document which is not always reliable — its roof took the form of an overturned boat so as always to commemorate the unhappy reason for its foundation.* Whether this was actually the case has been called into question’ — it may be simply pious after-wit — though in the eighteenth century the roof of the church certainly had the appearance of an overturned skiff.> The site of the chapel, on the western edge of the forest of the Perche, ‘in a deep valley, isolated, wild, in which there were many good-sized ponds;° was known as La Trappe, a term associated with the chase.”
Exactly how the chapel functioned in its earliest years is unknown — it was probably no more than a pilgrimage chapel offering basic hospitality to travellers — but some time later, Rotrou invited six monks from the Savigniac abbey of Breuil-Benoit, situated not far from the Perche in the valley of the Eure, to come to the site and transform it into a proper religious house. When Rotrou delivered his invitation is unknown, but it could not have been before 1137 (the date of the foundation of Breuil-Benoit), and the date usually cited for the foundation of the new abbey — the ‘monasterium sancte Marie Domus Dei in feodo, nomine Trapa’* — is 2 December 1140 when Rotrou made a formal donation of land to La Trappe.’ The exact amount is set forth in the Memoriale, and in 1189 Rotrou IV confirmed this donation and added further donations of his own.’° Rotrou’s donation of 1140, we might add, was less generous than it appears: the land was some of the worst in the Perche."!
By 1189, however, La Trappe was no longer a Savigniac house. In 1147 the Savigniac houses were amalgamated with the Order of Citeaux, and at that time La Trappe became a Cistercian abbey of the filiation of Clairvaux. The six monks from Breuil-Benoit had been joined by six others from the Savigniac abbey of Aulnay-sur-Odon in Calvados (founded in 1131), and under the governance of abbot Albold (who had been the first abbot of the first Savigniac community) La Trappe entered upon a period of flourishing expansion. Albold, whose name would seem to indicate an Anglo-Saxon heritage,” died in 1171 after an abbacy of more than thirty years,'? and the abbey continued to flourish under both his successors: Gervais Lambert (1171-89) and the devout and brilliant Adam Gauthier, who (according to tradition) governed the abbey for an astonishing fifty-four years, from 1189 to 1243."
During this period, La Trappe received numerous important donations, primarily in Normandy (one in particular was given by Henry II as reparation for the murder of Thomas Becket!*), and under abbot Adam Gauthier (a great builder) the monastery was considerably enlarged and a new or rebuilt church was dedicated to the Virgin by Robert II Le Baube, archbishop of Rouen, on 27 April 1214. The bishops of Evreux and Séez assisted at the ceremony, and it was attended by Thomas I, count of the Perche (and great-grandson of the founder), together with a host of dignitaries.’* During the same period, the abbey was taken under the protection of the Holy See by popes Eugenius II, Alexander III, Innocent III, and Honorius II,” and in September 1246 it was taken under the protection of King Louis LX who confirmed its possessions, rights, and privileges, and added others of his own.’*
Only one building survives from this period of expansion, and its use remains unclear. It is a two-storied structure with an attic stage and a fine timber-framed roof. On the ground floor are two rib-vaulted rooms. The first suggestion for its use, proposed by pére Marie-Bernard of La Trappe in the early twentieth century, was that it was a guest-house,”” but if it is, it is in the wrong place. More recently, and with greater cogency, Dr Terryl Kinder has suggested that The fact that it was built very near a mill race (now sealed off), and that a mill was functioning on this watercourse in the nineteenth century [...], strongly points to an industrial origin for the building. In addition, in exterior aspect it closely resembles the mill at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire.”
It seems that all was well at the abbey in January 1255, when Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen, made an episcopal visitation,” but the period of growth and good order was soon to come to an end. With the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337, Normandy was a focus of military operations, and apart from what we might call official enterprises, the countryside was regularly ravaged by armed bands intent on plunder and destruction. The abbey was pillaged in 1361 and the monks sought refuge in the nearby chateau of Bonsmoulins where they remained for two years.” But here, as we are told by the comte de Charencey, they continued to observe the practices of the penitential life just as scrupulously as they had done at La Trappe. Such an example of fidelity to the Rule may be contrasted with the laxity of many other Cistercian houses [at the time].”
After their enforced exile, the monks returned to the abbey during a temporary relaxation of hostilities under Charles V, but the period of comparative peace was not to last. In 1376, during the abbacy of Richard II, the abbey was again attacked by the English and much of it was burned. Almost all the charters were destroyed, and of all the major monastic buildings only the church and chapter house were spared.** There is no contemporary reference to the books in the library, but there is no reason to suppose that they fared significantly better than the charters.
There followed a period of relative calm (though the abbey was exceedingly poor and survived only with help from the bishop of Séez”>), but hostilities then broke out anew, and in 1417, two years after Agincourt, the monks were again forced to flee. When they returned in 1449 after the liberation of the Perche, they returned to ruined buildings, hardly habitable, and their attempts at reconstituting their livelihood — there is evidence for reforestation and ironore mining** — were not helped by the unstable conditions of the time. The abbey was vandalized yet again in about 1469 when both church and archives were pillaged. Yet again, a great number of charters and other documents were stolen or destroyed, and the threat (by Pope Paul II) of excommunication of those responsible appears to have had little effect.”
Robert II Lavolle, under whose abbacy this vandalism occurred, either resigned or was forced to resign in 1476 (he lived on as a simple monk for nine more years),** and his abdication was followed by an unseemly quarrel between the next abbot, Henri Hohart (or Hoart), formerly prior of Portemer, and a rival candidate for the abbacy, Auger de Brie, a canon of Le Mans and prothonotary apostolic.” It seems that Auger supported his case with a forged document, and used his illegitimate authority to alienate certain of the abbey properties to his own use and profit. His ‘criminelle audace’,*” however, proved unsuccessful, and on 28 May 1490 the Parlement of Paris issued a judgement which recognized the legitimacy of Henri Hoart, condemned and fined Auger, and sentenced a certain notary who had been his accomplice to a term in prison.*! Hoart himself was much occupied with rebuilding the structures which had been destroyed during the Hundred Years’ War, and eventually resigned the abbacy in 1518. He died two years later.
He was succeeded by Robert IV Ravey (1518-27), the former procurator of the abbey, who succeeded is regaining for La Trappe the properties alienated by Auger de Brie;* but after Robert’s resignation in April 1527 (by which time he was blind and infirm), the succession of regular abbots came to an end. In April 1527 the community of La Trappe elected Julien des Noés who, like his predecessor, had also been procurator of the abbey, but the king, Francis I, refused to ratify the election. The monks therefore re-elected Julien in May 1528 and the king again refused his consent.*? Instead he imposed on the unwilling monks the first of a series of commendatory abbots, in this case the humanist, poet, and diplomat Jean du Bellay, friend and counsellor of the king, bishop of Paris from 1532 to 1551, who received his cardinal’s hat from Pope Paul III on 21 May 1535.4
The commendatory system had its origins in the desire of the Avignon popes to establish greater control over ecclesiastical benefices.** Prior to this, monastic communities had normally elected their own abbot (though there was often outside interference), but henceforth, abbots would be appointed by the pope or secular ruler, and the abbots so appointed were usually secular prelates who received their abbacies as a reward for services rendered. Rarely did they live in their monasteries, and even if they wished to do so, their other duties rarely allowed it. Many commendatory abbots, therefore, were no more than absentee landlords whose main interest was the collection of a substantial portion of the monastic revenues.
The old tradition, however, that all commendatory abbots were bad, is untrue — in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries we find a surprising number who were deeply concerned about their communities — but there is no doubt that from its inception onwards, the commendatory system was, in general, a disaster for the Cistercian Order. In 1467 the Parlement of Paris informed Louis XI that in the monasteries all forms of regular discipline have disappeared; the divine services are performed improperly and without devotion [...] As the material establishments are being ruined, so are the spiritual ones. Such conditions are common among the monks who, for lack of discipline, lapse into lax life and often apostatize [...] Until the benefices return to regular abbots it remains impossible to reverse the ruinous trend.*°
In 1514 the Fifth Lateran Council called for the abolition of the system and so, too, did the Council of Trent (1545-63), but it was too deeply entrenched. The interested lobby groups were also very powerful and the royal government too refractory. The five great mother-abbeys of Citeaux, La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond were given the privilege of free abbatial election by the Ordonnance of Blois in 1579, but by the end of the sixteenth century the great majority of Cistercian abbeys in France were held in commendam.
One of the consequences of the system was a dramatic drop in monastic populations,*’ and with few religious, little income, sometimes little food, dilapidated buildings, no spiritual direction, and no esprit de corps, monastic morale was at its lowest. In all too many monasteries — La Trappe among them the monks were living in undisciplined squalor. We cannot always blame the commendatory abbots themselves for this unfortunate decline; it was often a deplorable corollary of the commendatory system itself.
At La Trappe, as we have seen, the first commendatory abbot was Jean du Bellay, and he was succeeded by about a dozen others, none of whom took any interest in the abbey.** In 1548 the monks tried one last time to elect their own regular abbot, but the king, now Henry I], again refused to ratify their choice, and imposed upon them a commendatory abbot of his own choosing.” And then, if we may quote the comte de Charencey, ‘from that time onwards, decadence followed its untroubled and uninterrupted course’. It was a lamentable period, but it began to draw to a close in 1636 when, at the age of eleven, Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé succeeded his brother, Francois-Denis, as commendatory abbot, and La Trappe and the Cistercian Order would never be the same again.
As we shall see in the next chapter, Rancé became regular abbot of La Trappe on 14 July 1664, and the abbey he took over was by now in wretched condition. More than twenty years later, in 1686, Dom Dominique Georges, the abbot of Val-Richer and the Strict Observance Visitor of the region in which La Trappe was located, submitted to the General Chapter a proces-verbal of the condition of the reformed abbey — he had made his visitation on 16 November 1685 — in which he contrasted the state of affairs under Rancé with that which had prevailed when the latter took up the regular abbacy. If Dom Dominique emphasized the negative aspects of the pre-Rancéan abbey, that is understandable, but he was too saintly a man to surrender himself to outright mendacity.
‘Time’ he tells us, ‘and the idleness of the monks, and the negligence of the commendatory abbots had reduced it to such a pitiful state that there was not a single place which was not ready to fall into ruin’ At that time, he goes on,
the doors [of the abbey] stayed open day and night and both women and men could enter the cloister without hindrance. The entrance hall was so black, so filthy, and so dark that it was more like a ghastly prison than a house of God. On one side you saw a deep wine-cellar; on the other a wine-press, with all the equipment used in such places. A ladder which was there fastened to the wall was the means of climbing up to the upper stories, but the floor-boards were so broken and rotten that you walked there only at your peril.
On entering the cloister you saw a ruined roof which, with the least amount of rain, filled [the cloister] with water. The columns which supported it had fallen to the ground. The parlours served as stables.
The refectory was a refectory in name only. Monks and seculars used to gather there to play bowls when the heat or bad weather prevented them from playing outside.
The dormitory was abandoned and uninhabited. It served only as a refuge for night-birds. It was exposed to hail, rain, snow, wind, and storms, and each of the brothers lodged wherever he wanted and wherever he could. The commendatory abbot’s bailiff, together with his whole family, lodged with the monks.
The muniments room (chambre de trésor) was completely empty. All you saw was dust and dirt. The title-deeds and papers which should have been carefully preserved as precious items were scattered over the floor and trampled under foot. Most of them, in fact, were dispersed throughout the province, and since they were now in the hands of the curés and peasants, the temporal holdings [of the abbey] had been devastated.
The church was in no better condition than the house. You saw only broken pavement, scattered stones, ruins, filth, cobwebs. The walls were threatening to collapse [...] and the bell-tower was ready to fall [...]
The monastery had no garden, and it was surrounded by unproductive soil, in which grew thorn-bushes, thickets, and trees.’
It is a dismal picture, and it seems that with the advent of the commendatory abbots, the monks at La Trappe, who, earlier, had often striven so valiantly to live the monastic life in the most adverse of circumstances, had just given up. At the time Rancé entered the abbey as its regular abbot there were just six monks and one lay-brother,® and after a period of opposition and threats of violence, five of the monks were dispersed to Common Observance houses, though one of them returned to La Trappe some time later. The necessary minimum for an abbey was made up by half-a-dozen monks from the Strict Observance house of Perseigne, just a few miles away, where Rancé had completed his year’s novitiate.
In none of the documents (so far as I can tell) do we find any mention of the library or book-collection of La Trappe. We know that the archives of the abbey were destroyed, scattered, or stolen, and we know that the abbey was pillaged, plundered, burned, or vandalized a number of times, but there is no specific mention of the books. That there was a library cannot be in doubt, but no medieval catalogue has survived. Manuscripts noted in later lists are, with few exceptions, post-medieval, and the evidence from surviving manuscripts is meagre.
In her invaluable répertoire of the Cistercian libraries of medieval France, Anne Bondéelle-Souchier records seven surviving manuscripts which once belonged to the library of La Trappe and ten manuscripts whose provenance was either questionable or required verification.* The manuscripts included in this second group are all to be found today in the municipal library of Alengon and, as Mme Bondéelle-Souchier says, ‘are attributed to La Trappe, without justification’ by Henri Omont in his 1888 catalogue of the Alengon manuscripts.** In my own study of the manuscripts of La Trappe,” I have shown that although one of the volumes attributed to La Trappe by Omont must be rejected, the others did indeed belong to the abbey, and further investigation enables us to add yet other survivors to this number. At present, the number of surviving manuscripts which certainly or almost certainly may be traced to the house stands at thirty-four, and I have no doubt that, in the course of time, this number will be increased.“
We must also note that although Mme Bondéelle-Souchier records the existence of two catalogues of the library of La Trappe,’ her list is not complete. There are, in fact, four main inventories of the abbey’s books (we shall examine them all in subsequent chapters); and contrary to her comment that in the 1752 catalogue, which is here our main concern, the presence of manuscripts is ‘non attestée,** this catalogue does, in fact, describe a considerable number of volumes as ‘manuscript’ in either French or Latin, and it reports anumber of others as being ‘old? ‘very old} or written in “Gothic script’. This is important, for a detailed investigation of all the available sources enables us to identify almost a hundred manuscripts which once formed part of the abbey’s collection.” It is true that the great majority of them are post-medieval, but, as we shall see in due course, these later manuscripts reveal much about the intellectual and devotional life at La Trappe in the hundred and twenty years or so between the accession of Armand-Jean de Rancé as regular abbot and the dissolution of the abbey in 1792.
Nevertheless, the preponderance of post-medieval manuscripts offers us very little evidence for the contents of the early library. As we have said, no early catalogue survives, and we have no idea of the size of the collection in the Middle Ages and little idea of its content. Of surviving manuscripts, eleven date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, but whether they formed part of the library in the twelfth to the fifteenth century is another question. They comprise a volume of the works of John Cassian, the Admonitiones ad monachos attributed (incorrectly) to Basil the Great (this manuscript also contains a complete copy of the De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius), Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri quatuor and the second part of his commentary on the Pauline Epistles, Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job and Regula pastoralis, the gloss on the Twelve Minor Prophets, a collection of vite sanctorum, a volume containing the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat together with biblical apocrypha and various sermons (two by the Cistercian Baldwin of Forde), a breviary ad usum Beate Marie de Trappa, and a fine copy of Appian of Alexandria.”
Eleven manuscripts bear an ex libris from the abbey,”! but only three of these inscriptions predate the eighteenth century: those in Bibliotheque d’Alencon MSS 8 (the works of Cassian), 17 (Barlaam and Josaphat), and 66 (Gregory’s Moralia in Job). The two earliest inscriptions, in MSS 17 and 66, date to the late twelfth or first half of the thirteenth century, and are almost identical in form: ‘Liber sancte marie de Trapa. Qui eum furatus fuerit uel celauerit; anathema sit’ (MS 17 adds ‘Amen’); the third, in MS 8, dates (as I judge) from the very beginning of the fifteenth century and reads ‘Iste liber est de trappa qui eum [furatus sup. lin.] fuerit anathema sit’. All but one of the other inscriptions are identical in form and hand, all date (I would suggest) from the early eighteenth century, and all read ‘Ex libris B*. Marie de Trappa. The only exception is Bibliothéque d’Alencon, MS 148 — Gregory’s Regula pastoralis — which abbreviates the inscription to ‘B*. Marie de Trappa’ in order to fit it into the width of a single column. But it is written in the same hand.”
It is therefore quite possible that some of these medieval manuscripts were given to the abbey long after they were actually produced. This was certainly the case with the fine fifteenth-century copy of Appian now preserved in the British Library as MS Additional 21,972. Most of the initials in the work contain the arms of Guillaume de Rochefort who died in 1492, the ex libris is that of Gabriel Brennot, ‘aedui senat. regij, and the only evidence for its being at La Trappe is the seventeenth-/eighteenth-century binding stamped with the arms of the abbey.” It is most probable that the book was given or bequeathed as a gift.
On the other hand, a ‘Breviarium antiquissimum’ now preserved as MS 131 in the Bibliothéque d’Alengon™ dates from the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth, and since it was written ad usum Beate Maria de Trappa, it was presumably produced at or for the abbey. The ex libris, however, is the usual early eighteenth-century “Ex libris B*. Marie de Trappa, but in this case, the volume must have belonged to La Trappe in the late Middle Ages. We cannot therefore assume that a late inscription necessarily means a late acquisition.
That there was a medieval scriptorium at La Trappe is not in doubt. Even without hard evidence we might have assumed this to be so, but the description of a‘Commentarii in Scripturam sacram’ in an inventory compiled in 1794/95” specifically describes the volume as ‘1 vol. in f°. manuscrit sur parch<emin>. fait 4 La Trappe. incom<plet>’°* What was this volume? ‘Commentarii in Scripturam sacram’ is vague in the extreme, but a little detective work enables us to identify it as Bibliotheque d’Alengon, MS 66, a truly superb example of the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great. We mentioned the book earlier. The script dates from the first half of the thirteenth century and the ex /ibris, which we have also mentioned above, is an integral part of the manuscript (it has not been added later) and is written in the same superb hand as the rest of the Moralia.”’ It seems to me, therefore, that the compilers of 1794/95 inventory were perfectly correct. The manuscript was indeed ‘fait 4 La Trappe’, and the same may also be true for Bibliothéque d’Alengon, MS 17, which contains the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat. Once again, the late twelfth- or early thirteenthcentury ex libris appears to be in the same hand as the rest of the volume, and I would suggest that this book, too, is a product of the La Trappe scriptorium.
Three other manuscripts may confidently be attributed to the medieval period, though none has been traced and, save for one, none can be dated with any confidence. There was a copy of the gospel of St Matthew with gloss and commentary, probably dating from the thirteenth century, an anonymous commentary on the Prophets, and a manuscript of the Historia Albigensis by the Cistercian Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay.** All were written on parchment or vellum, and all were in the library in 1752. It is eminently possible that these books also formed part of the medieval collection, but we cannot state that with certainty.
As we said above, the only medieval ex /ibris inscriptions are to be found in the copies of Gregory’s Moralia, the works of Cassian, and Barlaam et Josaphat, and although the other early manuscripts contain texts which would be unexceptional in any medieval monastic collection” — biblical glosses and commentaries, vite sanctorum, other works by Gregory the Great, Julianus Pomerius, ps.-Basil the Great, Peter Lombard, and Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay — that is insufficient reason for asserting categorically that they once constituted part of the library of La Trappe in the Middle Ages. In fact, the only thing we can say with absolute surety is that the medieval collection of the abbey contained at least four books: Gregory, Cassian, Barlaam, and the ‘Breviarium antiquissimum. It is certainly possible — perhaps probable — that most of the other early volumes also formed part of the medieval library, but that cannot be stated without qualification.
But even if this were true, and the books did indeed belong to the abbey in the Middle Ages, these fragmentary remains tell us nothing about the rest of the collection and nothing at all about its size. Nor do we know how many books were destroyed in the various incursions which the abbey suffered in the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion. We know that when the monks were forced to flee La Trappe and take refuge in the chateau of Bonsmoulins ‘they continued to observe the practices of the penitential life just as scrupulously as they had done at La Trappe’ and if this were so then they would have needed a certain number of books to assist them. It is therefore possible, though there is no way of proving it, that the medieval books which have survived from the abbey were those which the monks took with them on those occasions when they were forced to leave. But such hypotheses are of little use, and the nature, content, size, and dispersal of the medieval book-collection of La Trappe remains, for the most part, shrouded in obscurity.
It must also be remembered that after the advent of printing, French monasteries — indeed, most monasteries — had a fairly cavalier attitude towards their manuscripts. It is true that the impact of printing was, as Lawrence McCrank has said, evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” but it did not take long before printed editions were regarded as more accurate and more authoritative than their manuscript equivalents. Printed editions were normally cheaper, they were more convenient to use, they could be easier to read, they often contained more material, they were uniform, and — especially in the realm of law — the superior indexing and cross-referencing in the printed volumes led to the disuse and, in many cases. destruction of older manuscript compilations.” It is quite possible, therefore, that at La Trappe as at so many other houses, the medieval holdings were simply washed away, as it were, by the remorseless tide of print from the late fifteenth century onwards.
The commendatory system could only have exacerbated the situation, and it is, I think, significant that in his description of the abbey before the arrival of Rancé, Dom Dominique Georges mentions neither a library nor any books.” After the arrival of Rancé, however, the situation changed dramatically, and the library of La Trappe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the reconstituted library, founded (as we shall see) on the basis of Rancé’s own personal collection — was a very different matter. To the history of that library we shall now turn our attention.
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