Montreuil Abbey

In its early days the community occupied themselves not only in traditional women's tasks such as weaving and embroidery, but also in tilling the fields, clearing the forest, and weeding the soil.

A community this large was difficult to manage, and within a century of its foundation the abbey was forbidden by the Abbot of Clairvaux to take more novices until the number of nuns at Montreuil was reduced to one hundred, which figure was not in future to be exceeded.

The painting, apparently of Eastern origin and already ancient when it came into the hands of the nuns, bore an inscription that seemed undecipherable, baffling even Mabillon.

Subsequently, however, some Russian scholars asserted that the words were Slavonic, and read Obraz gospoden na-oubrouse (in Latin, Imago Domini in linteo): "the image of the Lord in a linen cloth".

[4] The term Holy Face of Jesus has, however, in recent years been more closely associated with the image obtained via the negative plate of the 1898 photograph taken by Secondo Pia of the Shroud of Turin.