Cardinal Guillaume Court and the Collège des Bernardins in Paris: New Data and Questions

Given in Greek, this paper by Michalis Olympios of the University of Cyprus, co-authored with medieval historian Chris Schabel, examines the fourteenth-century building history of the Collège des Bernardins in Paris and the patronage of the Cistercian cardinal Guillaume Court.

Founded in 1245 by Stephen of Lexington, abbot of Clairvaux, the college preserves its eastern range (the Bâtiment des Moines) and adjacent sacristy; its church, demolished in 1759, is known from drawings, fragments and Théodore Vacquer's 1886 excavations. Begun in 1338 under Pope Benedict XII, the basilica remained unfinished at his death in 1342. Work continued under his nephew, Cardinal Guillaume Court, whose arms appear in the sacristy, though historians have disagreed on whether his funding dated before 1355, before his death in 1361, or under Charles V.

Olympios and Schabel clarify this chronology using a newly published 1351 letter from Pierre Ceffons of Clairvaux urging Court to fund the unfinished church, which still lacked part of its choir pavement, sacristy, bell tower, dormitory stair and cloister entrance. In 1355 the Cistercian General Chapter instituted weekly masses for Court in return for 5,000 florins, and deeds from 1355 to 1359 record the college investing this sum in property around Paris and northern France for the church fabric and, by 1358, for candles and oil. Matching these records to the sacristy's mouldings and figural corbels, which parallel the donjon at Vincennes under John II the Good, Olympios dates the sacristy's completion to around 1360, before considering the location of the earlier chapel, graves beneath the sacristy including the 1306 tomb slab of Günther von Schwarzburg, and comparisons with the church of Saint-Séverin.