Constance of Le Ronceray
Overview
Biography
We know very little of Constance apart from her exchange of poems with Baudri of Bourgueil. She was probably a noblewoman who became a nun at Le Ronceray in Angers between 1090 and 1106. She was educated in Latin language and literature, able to draw on Ovid’s Heroides in her poetry and to answer Baudri’s poem with the same intensity of emotion and language and play at innocent eroticism. She is the only woman among the nuns who corresponded in poetry with Baudri and others from whom we have an answering poem. It is likely that she inspired Baudri's epitaph on the nun Constance:
Here she rests, a virgin, who unmarried was married to Christ,
the spouse of God, ignorant of a husband,
she shone with constant breast, Constance by name,
from illustrious family of noble fathers,
her breast enriched with letters
that you might believe [came] from the divine Sibyl.
Behold beneath this tomb the dead virgin turned to ashes,
that her spirit flying to the stars might inhabit the heights.
Hic pausat, virgo, quae scilicet innuba Christo
Nupsit, sponsa Dei, nescia conjugii,
Pectore constanti Constancia nomine fulsit,
Praeclaro patrum stemmate nobilium,
Ipsius pectus ditavit littera dives,
Ut potuit credi, dia Sibilla, tibi.
Ecce sub hoc tumulo cinerascit mortua virgo,
Ejus ad astra volans spiritus alta colat.
(Baudri de Bourgueil, Oeuvres Poétiques, ed. Phyllis Abraham [Paris: Champion, 1926, repr.Geneva: Slatkine, 1974], 80, # LXXXV).
Letters from Constance of Le Ronceray
A letter to Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil and archbishop of Dol (before 1107)Letters to Constance of Le Ronceray
A poem from BaudriA poem from Baudri