Moine, Claudine

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MOINE, CLAUDINE

French mystic; b. Scey-sur-Saône, in the Diocese of Besançon, Jan. 17, 1618; d. Paris, date unknown, but later than 1655. Of distinguished birth but impoverished by war, Claudine Moine was obliged to go to Paris in April 1642 to seek work. There she placed herself under the direction of a religious and was not long in achieving experience of a mystical kind. Her spiritual journey is described in her Relations Spirituelles, which was preserved in a seventeenth-century manuscript in the Archives of the Foreign Missions in Paris. Her experiences comprised six months of favors; three years of temptations; and three years of infused lights, transverberation, and mystical marriage, followed by a state of darkness lasting six years when she ceased writing. The quality of the experience recorded in the Relations, the clarity of analysis, and the precision of the style make this a valuable contribution to mystical literature.

Bibliography: j. guennou, La Couturière mystique de Paris (Paris 1959).

[j. guennou]