Emotions and the social order of time : Constructing history at Louvain’s Carthusian House, 1486-1525

The first recorded moves to found a male Carthusian house in Louvain date from the late 1480s, with a purchase of land by Walter Waterlet, a member of the chapel of the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, provost of Maubeuse and scholaster of St Gudule’s in Brussels.1 In 1489, Charles’s widow, Margaret of York, laid the foundation stone of the new monastery, inaugurating an ambitious building programme that continued into the sixteenth century.
Yet the foundations of Louvain’s Carthusian monastery were not simply laid in stone. Along with the physical building works, the Carthusians constructed their monastic house through writing and reading history, liturgical and memorial practices, and architecture and images, including extensive stained glass windows. These practices constructed a community of memory, shaped through affective engagements with biblical narrative and the narrative of the monastery’s own history. For Louvain’s Carthusians, time was shot through with emotions; emotions that ordered the perception and experience of time.

Copyright © Susan Broomhall 2015.