Tart Abbey

It was located in the present commune of Tart-l'Abbaye in Burgundy (Côte-d'Or), near Genlis, on the banks of the River Ouche and only a few miles away from Cîteaux Abbey, the Cistercian mother house.

The founder was Arnoul Cornu, lord of Tart-le-Haut, and his wife Emeline, and their gift consisted of the land of Tart, the tithes of Rouvres and Tart-la-Ville and the grange of Marmot.

Its lands included several vineyards, and the sale of wine was a significant element in the abbey's economy: five hectares of the Vignoble de Bourgogne, others located at Beaune, Chambolle-Musigny, Morey-Saint-Denis, Chézeaux and Vosne-Romanée.

After that, however, a decline began to set in, brought about partly by deteriorating external conditions - wars, famine, pestilence, economic crisis and so on - but also by the tendency, which affected most if not all medieval women's religious foundations, for wealthy and influential families to use them as secure accommodation for their unmarried and widowed female relatives.

Eventually they decided that reform was impossible as long as the community remained in the abbey at Tart, and that the only way to bring it about was to transfer the nunnery to Dijon, on the basis that in a town it was far easier to maintain seclusion and the discipline of the spiritual life.

There were long delays in preparing suitable premises, made longer by the severe reduction in the income of the community in Dijon that resulted when in 1636 the troops of Matthias Gallas sacked and burnt the abbey buildings at Tart in the course of the Thirty Years' War, except for an isolated chapel.