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Saint Bruno and the Carthusians: silence in the mountains (1084-1816)

15 min read

From the arrival of Bruno and six companions in the desert of Chartreuse (June 1084) to the monks' return to the Grande Chartreuse (1816): Bruno's death in Calabria (1101), Guigo's Customs (1121-1128), first daughter houses (Portes 1115), nuns (c. 1145), charterhouses of popes and princes (Villeneuve 1356, Pierre-Châtel and Champmol 1383), fire and rebuilding (1676), elixir (1764), suppression (1790-1792)

In 1084, a schoolmaster of Reims, Bruno, leaves everything and receives from the bishop of Grenoble a high enclosed valley: the Chartreuse. He stays only six years, but the prior Guigo sets down in writing, around 1127, a life in which hermitage and cloister mingle, and charterhouses multiply, from the Bugey to Provence, from the nuns of Prébayon to the foundations of popes and dukes, down to the fires, the liqueur and the Revolution. The route links the Grande Chartreuse and its museum to the houses that remain, and untangles along the way the dream of the seven stars, the Paris doctor who spoke from his coffin and the order that is said to have wanted no saints.

A schoolmaster leaves Reims

Bruno is born in Cologne around 1030 and is first a canon there. He comes to study at Reims, whose cathedral school is then one of the most renowned in the West, and he stays: around 1056-1057, Archbishop Gervais entrusts him with its direction, which he keeps for some twenty years. Among his pupils passes Eudes de Châtillon, the future Pope Urban II. In 1075, he is also chancellor of the Church of Reims.