Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century: Four Case Studies

Abstract

The Cistercian monastery La Trappe, Mme de Maintenon's school for girls at St Cyr, the schools at A. H. Francke's foundations at Halle and the community established within these foundations bring to the fore the dynamic between withdrawal and engagement and the medial expressions of this dynamic. But each case demonstrates a particular employment of architecture, texts, music and images in the service of withdrawal and engagement respectively. At La Trappe the liturgical life and the furnishing of the abbey church made manifest the appropriation of desert asceticism as well as the Cistercian origin. Meanwhile the ethos of isolation and devotional self-surrender was conveyed beyond the walls by means of treatises, letters, images and the reception of visitors. At St Cyr noble girls were taught to renounce the world. This aim went hand in hand with the disciplinary and educational profile of the school and the royal founders' ambition of to educate the wives and mothers of French noble households. Three paintings produced for the royal institution embody this aspiration in a particularly illuminating way. In the two cases related to Halle, the juxtaposition of theological texts and concepts such as Gelassenheit, musico-poetical culture as well as material and visual expressions of the Pietist reform movement and the employment of the eagle motif contributes to a multi-faceted understanding of the dynamic between withdrawal and engagement and the relation between the withdrawn locus and the society in which it was set.