Nuns and priests sacrificed their own lives to provide medical care for the poor in Renaissance France, according to a new study that implicates exposure to contagious plague victims in the deaths of several religious order members.
Several recently identified women who died after caring for plague victims were all Benedictine nuns from the Sainte-Croix Abbey’s chapter house near Poitiers, France.
“The Abbess [Mother Superior] of Sainte-Croix was known to be an extremely generous person who spent all of her life looking after the poor,” lead author Raffaella Bianucci told Discovery News.
Bianucci, an anthropologist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at the University of Turin, added that the woman was the Countess Charlotte Flandrina of Nassau, the fourth daughter of Prince William I of Orange. When the countess became a Roman Catholic nun, she sold most of her valuables to pay for food and medical care for the region’s poor, many of whom caught the plague from soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War.
“There is evidence of food distribution to the people, and it seems that laymen had free access to the convent’s infirmary,” Bianucci said.
Historical accounts suggest that nuns caring for the plague victims succumbed to the disease sometime between 1628 and 1632.
The scientists also performed the test on priests buried near the altar of Saint-Nicolas’ Church in La Chaize-le-Vicomte, in central France. The priests also tested positive.