ABSTRACT
In 1385, Duke Philip the Bold and Duchess Margaret of Flanders, the founding couple of the powerful Valois house of Burgundy, established a new Carthusian Charterhouse, the Chartreuse de Champmol, as their dynastic mausoleum (Fig. 9.1). 2 ‘Two arrow shots’ from the city gates of Dijon, the Chartreuse was liminal to the city, both literally and figuratively. 3 As the city gates symbolically demarcated city from country, the Charterhouse walls demarcated monks from laity, sacred from secular, and, in a monastic order particularly insistent on forbidding contact with women, male from female. At Champmol, architecture successfully projected the illusion of an exclusive male preserve even while permitting women limited access. Architecturally negotiated interaction between monks and women officially ended only in 1506 when Pope Julius II barred women from entering the Charterhouse because what was ‘conceded for the good of the feminine sex can be scandalous for those dwelling there’. 4 Carthusian architecture defined a space of masculine privilege where monks practiced an élite kind of contemplative piety thought to be beyond the spiritual capabilities of women. 5 As this piety resembled the affective piety embraced by the female devout of the time, it may have been particularly important to the Carthusians to set themselves apart from their lay imitators. 6 Charterhouses, such as the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon, were the spaces where Carthusians staged their special status – architecture, the mechanism that literally structured their liminality.
