943J Varet, Alexandre-Louis (1632–1676).

The Nunns Complaint against the Fryars. Being the charge given in to the Court of France, by the Nunns of St. Katherine near Provins, against the Fathers Cordeliers their Confessours. Several times printed in French; and now faithfully done into English.

Cover page of 'The Nunns Complaint against the Fryars', a 1676 publication detailing charges made by nuns against their confessors.

London: Printed by E. H. [Edward Horton] for Robert Pawlett, at the Bible in Chancery-Lane near Fleet-street, 1676. Price: $3,200

Octavo x cm. Signatures: A⁸, a⁸, B-N⁸, O⁴ (O₃₄, advertisements) First Edition in English. A good copy in modern quarter calf and marble boards. Gilt titles and date to spine.

Alexandre-Louis Varet  was retained by the nuns of Sainte-Catherine-les-Provins in the 1660s to represent their grievances against their Franciscan confessors, known as the Fathers Cordeliers.  As a lay legal professional, he could articulate their grievances in the language of corporate rights, property law, and royal justice, rather than within the constrained idiom of spiritual obedience imposed by their Franciscan confessors.

A close-up view of a book's spine titled 'Varet's Nunns Complaint' with decorative marbled boards and the publication year '1676' embossed in gold on the bottom.

The charges levelled against the priests by members of the Poor Clare Order were not exclusively sexual but also took in the disorders committed by the Cordeliers in the temporal concerns of the Monastery of St Catherine a chapter that carries the running headline Riotous Wastes of the Revenue. This is the first English translation of Factum pour les religieuses de Sainte-Catherine-les-Provins, the explosive legal brief composed by Alexandre-Louis Varet on behalf of the Ursulines of Saint-Catherine-les-Provins during their prolonged litigation against the Cordelier confessors. Printer identified as Edward Horton by Wing. With the imprimatur on leaf O1v; final three leaves contain the table of contents and publisher’s advertisements.
First published in French in 1668, Varet’s Factum is among the most notorious examples of seventeenth-century convent scandal literature—a genre that exposed abuses of clerical authority while navigating the volatile politics of Gallicanism, monastic discipline, and female religious autonomy. This first English translation (issued only a year after Varet’s death) shows that the Provins affair resonated strongly beyond France, providing Protestant England with a rich example of Catholic disorder, fiscal mismanagement, and moral corruption.
The nuns’ accusations cut through the usual sensationalism and strike directly at the structural abuses of power within their convent. Their Factum documents a systematic takeover of Sainte-Catherine’s finances and governance: the Cordeliers, they argue, commandeered the strongroom, absorbed alms intended for the community, diverted endowments to their own uses, sold furnishings without consent, and drew freely on convent funds to support their private feasting and hospitality.
Chapters such as “Riotous Wastes of the Revenue” read as the nuns’ own audit of misrule—an itemized exposure of unauthorized expenditures and fiscal manipulation. The English translator amplifies this material not simply to scandalize, but to present a pointed example of clerical overreach at a moment when English readers were debating monastic property, ecclesiastical authority, and women’s legal standing.
In this framing, the nuns are not passive victims but forensic accountants of their own oppression, assembling evidence, defining charges, and challenging the friars’ misuse of corporate resources with striking confidence and precision.
While the text avoids direct accusations of sexual scandal, it circles them with rhetorical precision. The friars’ “familiarities,” “unchaste liberties,” and “private conferences” are described in language that deliberately invites the reader’s imagination to do the rest. These insinuations were powerful enough that the French authorities sought to suppress later printingsThe Nunns Complaint against the Fryars exceptional is not the friars’ misconduct—abuses of authority in convents were sadly not unusual—but the collective, coordinated, and legally literate response of the women themselves. In the seventeenth century, cloistered women were juridically constrained, economically dependent, and structurally silenced. Yet the nuns of Sainte-Catherine-les-Provins defied all expectations by acting as a corporate legal body, gathering testimony, documenting grievances, commissioning an advocate, and presenting a formal factum before a royal court.

Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), V110. ESTC No.R34691
https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R34691.

From Cloister to Court: Nuns and the Gendered Culture of Disputing in Early Modern France Leslie Tuttle © 2010 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 22 No. 2, 11–33.

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