Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the various uses of history in the construction of a renascent Trinitarian community in the convent of Cerfroid, and in particular the role of nature and architectural relics in binding cognitive receptions of historical narrative to emotional perceptions of sacred territory.

Paper long abstract:

The convent of Cerfroid, in Northern France is the place of foundation (1198) of the Trinitarian Order. In the 1980s, a community of monks, nuns and lay people returned to the site, mostly abandoned since the French Revolution, and today leads a life of prayer and daily tasks in accordance with the Trinitarian mission. The binding element of this community is strongly related to the construction of a historical narrative based on sparse historical sources and founded in a physical experience of the site.

A variety of histories are used to build "Cerfroid". A restricted pool of artefacts and representations help construct a collective memory anchored in its territory, as a field of foundation, history and renewal. The same objects can incarnate alternately the figures of glory, traumatism and rebirth, three recurrent figures of Trinitarian history. The Ruins, for example are solicited as embodiments of all three figures. With little attention to true chronologies, guided visits and yearly processions compose narratives with these traces in order to transmit a collective memory.

Personal imagination interprets this collective imaginary according to different levels of knowledge and indulges in free associations. A series of transect walks undertaken in Cerfroid reveals how a shared but fragmented historical culture diffracts according to individual emotional and sensorial perceptions of the site which freely map transmitted narratives onto its territory.

In Cerfroid, the completion of historical narratives by an emotional adherence to a material place enables community to constitute itself on the grounds of a sacred territory between history and myth.