"Sine clausura": Unlocking the archive of the cloister of the Poor Clares St.-Elisabethsdal in Boxtel (1390-1719)

Abstract

The cloister of the Poor Clares St.-Elisabethsdal in Boxtel, in the present-day province of Brabant, the Netherlands, is one of the monasteries created during the new wave of Observant Clarissan monastic foundations in the Northern Low Countries between ca. 1460 and 1513. It was established after Wamel (1461), Haarlem (1471), Veere (1478), Delft (1475/1481), Brielle (1483), Gouda (1490) and Alkmaar (1492/1509).1 But it was not the first Clarissan settlement in what is currently the Netherlands. More than a century before, Willem van den Bossche, lord of Erp (situated in North-Brabant), enabled through his last will d.d. 28 augustus 1335 the foundation of a convent of Poor Clares in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch,2 only a few kilometers from Boxtel. He dedicated his castle in the Hinthamerstraat to the creation of a convent of St. Clara, and in addition furnished an annual rent for its upkeep.3 In the wake of the completion of the convent church in 1344, pope Clemens VI gave official authorization for the foundation of this cloister in ’s-Hertogenbosch. The first Clarissan nuns settled there in 1359.4 They would remain