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.<\/p>\n
Several recently identified women who died after caring for plague victims were all Benedictine nuns from the Sainte-Croix Abbey\u2019s chapter house near Poitiers, France.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Abbess [Mother Superior] of Sainte-Croix was known to be an extremely generous person who spent all of her life looking after the poor,\u201d lead author Raffaella Bianucci told Discovery News.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s poor, many of whom caught the plague from soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is evidence of food distribution to the people, and it seems that laymen had free access to the convent\u2019s infirmary,\u201d Bianucci said.<\/p>\n
Historical accounts suggest that nuns caring for the plague victims succumbed to the disease sometime between 1628 and 1632.<\/p>\n
The scientists also performed the test on priests buried near the altar of Saint-Nicolas\u2019 Church in La Chaize-le-Vicomte, in central France. The priests also tested positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[755,562,756,754,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}