ON B. JOAN THE RECLUSE
OF RIPATORIUM IN THE DIOCESE OF TROYES OF THE GAULS.
A.D. 1246
CommentaryJoan the recluse, of Ripatorium in the diocese of Troyes of the Gauls (B.)
[1] Ripatorium or Aripatorium, commonly l'Arrivoir, once a most celebrated monastery of the Cistercian Order, situated two leagues from the city of Troyes, Into the church of Ripatorium was begun in the year 1139 by monks led from Clairvaux, to whom by S. Bernard was given as first Abbot Alan a Belgian by country of Lille: as Gaspar Jongelinus more fully pursues, in his Notitia of the Abbeys of the Cistercian Order in the kingdom of Gaul, where he adjoins these things concerning B. Joan: In this monastery religiously in a wooden chest are preserved the bones of B. Joan, the body translated May 4, surnamed the Recluse: near which on a parchment slip these things are read.
[2] In the year of the Incarnation of the Lord 1246, in the month of May, the fourth of the Nones of that same month, the Epact being first, the Indiction fourth, the Concurrent seventh, the body of B. Joan was brought to us, who for twenty years and more was a recluse. But she was placed in this case in the same year; namely on the day of S. James the Apostle, brother of S. John the Evangelist. May she by her prayers protect us with God. Amen.
[3] These things there, which Nicholas Camuzat in the Promptuary of the sacred Antiquities of the diocese of Troyes folio 320 asserts he beheld, and these things subjoins: The Religious of the said monastery observe no celebration at all of the aforesaid B. Joan, nor with them any memory of her life exists: yet a custom held, that on the several years on the first day of May, the bells are rung in her honor. the bells of that monastery are rung with often repeated turns for many hours, in memory of the bringing into that same place of the sacred relics of that B. Joan herself. Thus Camuzat. Nicholas Des-Guerrois of the Saints of Troyes in the prefixed Kalendar celebrates the memory of B. Joan the Recluse on this IV day of May on account of the translation of the body, and exhibits the Acts of the translation already indicated at the said year 1246. The same B. Joan on this day relates Arthur du Monstier in the Sacred Gynaeceum, and adjoins most of the things already related.