Saint-Maur · 1670-1710

Monasticon Gallicanum

dom Michel Germain · engraved in Paris for the Congregation, never published · printed at last by V. Palmé, 1870-1871

A history of the Benedictine houses of France that never reached print. What came down instead is its pictures: abbey after abbey seen from above, drawn and engraved between 1676 and 1710, in the decades when the Congregation of Saint-Maur was rebuilding them. For houses since pulled down, the plate is often the fullest image of the whole enclosure that survives.

The wreck of a book

The Monasticon Gallicanum never was one. The title dom Michel Germain projected for it announced abridged histories of the Benedictine monasteries reformed by the Congregation of Saint-Maur, with topographical plates of a hundred and eighty of them — about the number of houses the congregation then counted. He began around 1670, having a notice drawn up house by house. Born at Péronne on 28 August 1645 and professed at Saint-Remi de Reims in 1663, he had come about 1675 to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he worked beside Jean Mabillon and left with him for Italy in 1685, returning the following year.

Germain died on 23 January 1694, at forty-eight. Most of the notices were written by then; the engraving went on without him and stopped for good around 1710, the last sheet cut being a map of the congregation’s houses drawn by Frère François Le Chevallier and engraved by H. van Loon. The notices then travelled as loose quires, lent in the eighteenth century to Benedictines who did not always return them to the right portfolio. What remained went to the Bibliothèque nationale as Latin 11818 to 11821, in four volumes, two of text and two of plates, described by Léopold Delisle in 1865. The copper plates have never been traced.

Signed at the foot of the sheet

The plates are not anonymous. Many carry at the foot the name of the brother who drew them and of the engraver who cut the copper. The recurring draughtsman is the Maurist Frère Guillaume de la Tremblaye, whom the Bibliothèque nationale indexes as the collection’s dessinateur, active from 1677 to 1710; among the engravers named on the sheets are Toustain, Levesque, H. van Loon, Dassonneville and J. C. David. The years are engraved there too: Saint-Faron de Meaux 1676, Jumièges 1678, La Daurade 1680, Vendôme and Préaux 1683, Saint-Maurin 1688.

As printmaking they are not distinguished — the Bibliothèque nationale’s own notice says they were drawn with more zeal than talent and indifferently engraved. Their worth lies elsewhere. Pierre-Marie Sallé puts it exactly: they are neither imagined views nor archaeological records, but witnesses to the reforming work of the Maurists, each house as the congregation wished it seen, a new conventual range standing beside a church still largely medieval.

A dozen albums, and one edition

Few impressions were pulled, and no two albums are alike. Louis Courajod went through about a dozen of them for a study of twenty-eight folio pages published in May 1869. He found 138 plates in an album bearing the arms of Saint-Victor of Paris; 175 in the Mazarine’s copy from the Blancs-Manteaux, many of which, its describer notes, have nothing to do with the Monasticon; 183 unnumbered in a volume then with the bookseller Charles Porquet, of which only 146 really belong, the rest mostly taken from Mabillon’s Annales; and one at York Cathedral. Telling the genuine sheets from the intruders was the first editorial task.

That sorting fell to Achille Peigné-Delacourt (1797-1881), who had already issued, without a date on it, the set of plates for the abbeys of the ecclesiastical province of Reims. Victor Palmé then printed the whole at Paris in two folio volumes, 1870 and 1871 — the Bibliothèque nationale catalogues the set under 1871 — with a preface by Delisle: 168 plates at half the size of the originals, 147 monasteries, the two maps counted apart. How many plates were ever engraved is not settled: the edition announces 168, while Sallé counts 153 cut before the work stopped.

Why it is here

This abbey has its plate. Celebris abbatia S. Petri de Curte seu de Manso Garnerio, dated 1686, shows the house from above under the PAX of the congregation, with a lettered key naming the church, the cloister and the library among the rest. It is a claim as much as a record, and we read it as one: set against the walls that still stand, it is the first document put in front of anyone working in the archive, and the starting point of the survey shared by the research programme and the building workshops.

SourcesThe plate of this abbey reproduced at the head is a seventeenth-century impression bearing the stamp of the Bibliothèque impériale; the Jumièges and La Daurade plates are Bibliothèque nationale de France sheets published on Wikimedia Commons; all are in the public domain. The seventeenth-century material is BnF, Latin 11818 and 11819 for the text, 11820 and 11821 for the plates, described by Léopold Delisle, ‘Inventaire des manuscrits latins de Saint-Germain des Prés’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, t. 26, 1865, p. 185-214, the Monasticon volumes at p. 205-207. The counts of the albums are Louis Courajod’s, Études iconographiques sur la topographie ecclésiastique de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Liepmannssohn et Dufour, 1869; the modern assessment is Pierre-Marie Sallé in the Bulletin monumental, t. 180-4, 2022. The printed edition may be read at the Internet Archive and on Gallica.