La Cour Notre-Dame de Michery: a response to Constance Berman

Abstract

In a recent article in JMH, Constance Berman suggested that the thirteenth-century history of the Cistercian nuns of La Cour Notre-Dame de Michery in France has been distorted by scholars' reliance on the fifteenth-century cartulary of the house. This compilation, she argues, was meant to portray the nunnery as a failure and to justify its transformation into a male priory. The authors of the present article attempt to show that Berman's doubts about the reliability of the cartulary are unjustified and that the archeological evidence of the church of La Cour which she uses to infer La Cour's financial vigor in the thirteenth-century actually points strongly in the opposite direction.