Lettre Funèbre, Sur le decés de Tres-illustre Dame, Madame Louise Françoise de Longueil de Maisons, Tres-digne Abbesse de l'Abbaye de Nostre Dame de Meaux, Ordre de Saint Augustin, adressée aux Monasteres du méme Ordre, & autres Associez à ladite Abbaye. Par la Prieure & Communauté dudit lieu

About this book

4to. pp. 7. Unbound; showing traces of former stab-stitching. Extremely rare survival of an ephemeral newsletter intended to be circulated among Augustinian convents as an attempt to establish a network between religious communities yet to be fully explored by modern scholarship. The present example has been corrected by hand, probably before dispatch. It was printed in order to communicate the news of the death of the Abbess of Meaux – one of the more important chapters of the Augustinian Canonesses – and authored by her surviving congregation under the temporary direction of the Prioress. The text gives a brief relation of her life and her career in the convent, from her installment in 1702 and describes her heroic death from smallpox. The newsletter closes by requesting other Augustinian nuns to celebrate a Mass for the abbess, and is dated a little over a month after her death.